boyhowdy

and I am a child, and often an adult.  I am an adult as I sign a lease with my partner for the first time and a child as I frown at the renter’s insurance website and try to puzzle through summing up the value of my possessions (less than $15k for everything I own? Truly? Not even a quarter of my student debt amount).

I am a child as I shop for rugs, and an adult as I browse bedside tables. A child when I look specifically for colorful furniture, an adult when I consider the quality of the rug, how easy it might be to clean, etc. 

I am a child wanting the cool sweater at the coffee shop that has a deer on the front. I am an adult sipping coffee (frozen (child)) and reading for a research project (on kink (which is incredibly silly and playful, for me (so, child, again))). I am an adult clicking over to my bank account to see if, on top of the other expenses that come with moving across the country, treating my partner well, and filling an apartment with furniture, I can afford the deer sweatshirt. 

I am an adult when I fulfill my responsibility of calling my mother, but a child while we talk to each other. An adult once again when she says, “For fucks sake, [deadname], you’re a therapist. Use your degree for a moment, would ya?” when asking my unwilling perspective on a family conflict matter. An adult who doesn’t pout and protest at being deadnamed, or maybe a quiet child who learned it won’t do any good to bother. 

I talk to my teenage cousin and realize, suddenly and harshly, that 26 is a long way from 16, and yes thank GOd I am an adult. You could not pay me to go back to that.

Linda is my grandmother. My mom’s mom. She’s the eldest of five children; her mother had her when she was twenty, and she had my mom when she was twenty, which is far too young to have a kid, if you ask me. I know she had a hard life-- a hard childhood before a hard adulthood. I know that she never wanted this. She’d wanted to join the navy instead of doing the husband and kid runaround, but she couldn’t bear disappointing and disobeying her parents, so she stayed. Married right out of high school. Had my mom. Had another one. 

My aunt died before she was even a full year old, and if you ask anyone in my family, that’s when things truly went to shit. She never recovered. Her and my grandpa divorced not long after, and my grandpa moved on. 

I wasn’t around for any of that, but my heart does break for the young woman my grandmother once was. She lived through hell. Followed the divorce and child loss with abusive boyfriends and heavy drug use and periods of homelessness and what I have to imagine was suitcases full of unhealed trauma. I wish that things had been easier for her. I wish that understanding her past was enough to get me over Our past, but I can’t sculpt my feelings entirely out of empathy. 

I don’t remember ever feeling safe around her, but I remember plenty of times feeling afraid of her. 

I was one of those kids who was nervous about everything, and when I was three became extremely nervous about goodbyes. Separation anxiety is totally developmentally appropriate at this age, but I remember what it felt like. I was certain for a while that any time I said goodbye to my parents might be the last time I ever saw them, and that sent me into a panic. Then, to try and cope with this, I came up with little rituals, and decided that Even If this goodbye was the last time I ever saw them, at least I could say goodbye and hug them and tell them I loved them before it happened. I wanted them to be certain of my love for them if they happened to die. 

This went on for a while. Any time I didn’t get a chance to do my ritual, I’d fall entirely to pieces.  I get how this was a hard thing to deal with. You need a lot of patience around small children, and the crying can get annoying. I remember Linda having very little patience for it, or for me in general. 

Once my mom was going out with her brother-- something she hardly ever did when I was young-- and she was leaving me with Linda. Going out at night was New, and as all kids know, the dark is more dangerous than the not-dark. I had a lot of trouble coping with this change in routine, with my mom going out somewhere dangerous with this strange tall man I didn’t know, leaving me alone with Linda. So I lost it. 

You know those grabber things old people use to reach things that are far away? I remember Linda standing over me, screaming, shaking one at me and threatening to beat me with it if I didn’t get a grip. 

I don’t remember if she did or not. Probably not. I can’t imagine my mom would have kept her cool if something like that happened. 

But there was a lot of that. A lot of explosive episodes in response to me crying, or laughing at the wrong time, or walking too loud, or playing in the wrong place, or being out of sight, or being in sight. It was hard to exist around Linda. 

Once when I was about four and too small to swim by myself, I was having one of my episodes because my father left for work and I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye.  I was out in the yard wandering around, contemplating what I was sure would be my dad’s death that afternoon, when Linda called me over. She was on the deck at the pool-- a simple above ground thing, four feet deep and taller than I was. She called me over, and I went, and she shoved me in. 

Took me a while to stop being afraid of swimming after that. 

It was hard to tell what would set Linda off, when I was a kid. “Tone” was always a big thing, and being gross or noisy or touching her things or not laughing at her jokes. She has real trouble when people don’t laugh at her jokes. I didn’t like being alone with her because I knew I would do something that made her mad. At the same time, she would play this game sometime where she would be extremely friendly, trying to play and be silly and shower me with affection. 

So smart. So clever. So pretty, so special. This child is a genius. 

That had always made my skin crawl, as young as I can remember. I never knew why. Always felt bad that I wasn’t appreciative. 

Sometimes she would pretend she was going to stab me. She’d be in the kitchen or on the porch chopping vegetables, and she’d turn to me with the knife, and I don’t remember what she would say but I remember being certain that she might actually do it. 

She would also hide in closets and jump out to scare me. I would scream and, when I was really young, cry. When I was older and had been taking martial arts classes, once I hit her on reflex when she did it. She was so mad. I thought she might never forgive me. 

Forgiveness was a big thing. 

Anytime an offense was made, I was forced to beg for forgiveness. An apology was never enough, and she would say she didn’t want to hear it. Would say all types of nasty things. Would sometimes go into the silent treatment. 

I didn’t mind the silent treatment, except it made my mom sad. I always ended up doing something to appease her. Writing lines, groveling, breaking down in tears to prove how truly sorry I was. It was a whole charade. I hated it. My parents never insisted on those things for themselves-- if we had any trouble, we would talk it out, and we would find a fix. I remember maybe five spankings at most in my childhood; my parents only had one of me, and were both near thirty when they did it, and they had more of a mind to have Conversations than just start swinging. 

Linda didn’t like conversations. She never liked anything I had to say, but boy would she get mad if I refused to talk.  She would go through these phases with things, where she’d want to go to a certain place and spend hours there days and days in a row for a couple months. The VFW bar, the department store at the mall, a flower shop, a thrift store. My mom would get into it, liked bonding with her mom, and I would get taken along. 

Kids have a hard time being bored in places anyways, but I remember times when we would go after school and stay till late evening, and I’d be so hungry I was nauseous from it.  Then, because of that, I would start getting nervous anytime we were out, because I MIGHT get nauseous, and that itself would make me nauseous anyways. It wouldn’t be too terrible if I was with my mom, because at least then I’d have someone to talk and play with, and she would take us home at a reasonable enough time. I hated being out with Linda all by ourselves. It’s hard being a kid and not having any control. 

When I was 10 or 11 there was an event, where I’d volunteered to go out with my mom and Linda. By this age I was being left home alone by myself not infrequently, which suited me just fine, but I missed my mom that evening. When my mom said she was actually going to go do something else and I would just go alone with Linda, I changed my mind, said I would rather stay home. 

Linda lost her entire mind. Screaming. Crying. I remember these terrible arguments when I was a child where she would demand “Why do you hate me!? What did I ever do to you!? Why does your daughter hate me? Why am I so terrible that my own granddaughter hates me??” 

I never answered her, though I wish I had. I wish I’d unleashed all of my prepubescent rage and told her the truth. I wish I’d bitten her. 

They left me at home, and I’d been so distraught that I’d made a banner out of that old printer paper that said “I’m sorry, I DO like you” and hung it on the wall. She accepted the apology. My mom was happy. My mom always just wanted to calm Linda down so we could all get along. 

Sometimes I was awful, of course. Everyone can be, and kids are learning to be people, so they definitely have their moments. The older I got, the more bitter I got, and the more resentful and disrespectful. Besides my own issues with Linda, there was a lot going on between her and my mom. 

They would get into these fights when I was a kid-- screaming, crying, suicide-threatening, throwing thing cage matches in the living room. Sometimes about something I’d done-- I’d committed some childish crime, and Linda had gone off, and my mom had stepped in. Anytime Linda tried to hit me, my mom would step in, and then they’d be off, and I knew in my childish mind that it was all my fault. 

They would get into screaming arguments, and sometimes my mom would storm off, and Linda would approach me almost too calmly and say “She shouldn’t get worked up like that. She has a bad heart. She’s going to have a heartattack and die.” And I knew that would be my fault, too. 

I stopped believing I deserved the blame as much sometime in middle school, but I remember an instance when I was eight. I don’t remember what happened the night before, but I was in the car with my dad on our way to church, and I told him I hated her. He said hate was a big feeling, and I agreed, but I knew it was true. He didn’t even try to talk me out of it. I think he hates her too, honestly. I would hate someone that tortured my wife like that. 

It was worse when she drank, which happened the most when work was stressful. Drunk Linda was meaner than sober Linda, and for a majority of my childhood Drunk Linda was the only Linda I knew. 

Once I accidentally flushed the toilet when she was in the shower, and when she came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, stringy dripping hair hanging over her face, she’d screamed and screamed that I was a demon, sent straight from hell, and the devil had me, and he’d sent me to torture her, and she hated me and I was a terrible, evil child. That one sits heavy with me, unlocks a tense, hot, flighty feeling every time I think about it. 

There were times she was happy though, too. Once when I was six she’d come home with a dozen pairs of children’s shoes that she’d impulsively bought that afternoon. My mom was upset, because she said my grandmother couldn’t afford it, and that Linda had some packrat tendencies and this was just more clutter. And I knew that I was supposed to be grateful. I kept a pair of the shoes; my mom returned all the others. I also knew that this weird shoe incident made my mom upset, and since the shoes were for Me, I knew this was kind of my fault. 

When I was in middle school something happened that I don’t remember, but I remember Linda gave me the silent treatment, and I decided to give it right back. Whatever had happened had been bad enough that my mom didn’t even try to stop me. It was one of the few moments of righteous indignation I got in my childhood; Linda actually apologizing to me. She tried to act like we were friends right after. It had made me want to scream. 

Linda also had some digestive issues that could get pretty bad, but the doctors said they were made worse with alcohol. She went on a pretty bad bender once when I was in middle school, and I remember the night she almost died. She collapsed in the bathroom and bled out and had to be carried out of the house by paramedics. She was in the hospital for weeks. I remember kind of hoping that this would be the end of it; it wasn’t. Sometimes on particularly strange nights she would go on and on that I was the one who saved her life, because I was the one who heard her fall and got my mom. 

She broke my door in elementary school. It had a lock on it, and she’d busted the door down. I didn’t put a new lock on it myself until the year I lived at home after college.  She threw a fit about that too. 

I wanted to kill myself in high school. I didn’t ever want to go through with it, because I knew it would break my mom’s heart, and I also knew that Linda was always threatening suicide, and I didn’t want to be anything like her.  Still, my mental health hit the absolute gutter my sophomore year of college, when my mom was similarly falling off the deep end, and Linda was getting meaner and meaner by the day. I ended up getting expelled from school, and Linda used to corner me in my bedroom at night and hiss that my parents no longer liked me, how could they? I was terrible. And that I was lucky they didn’t take a belt to me for all of this. That I would have deserved it. That I was lucky I was still alive. 

Even when she was being neutral instead of nasty, she wasn’t particularly pleasant. She didn’t like that I did martial arts, wanted me to do dance, was worried it would turn me into a dyke. Was always worried anything I did was too dangerous. Would take it personally any time I got hurt and go off on a guilt trip about how I was Trying to worry her to death, but not in a normal parent way. It was next level. Sometimes she threatened to kill herself. Sometimes she got black out drunk and said she had to, to deal with me. 

She did Karen shit at stores and restaurants that always drove me crazy, and she drove drunk a lot, and she was always so mean to my mom. I was in second or third grade when my mom started confiding in me, because my mom and I were very close, and I was a good listener who asked a lot of questions, and I was there to see all of there terrible fights while my dad was at work. She told me about her childhood abuse, about the homelessness, about the drugs, about how her mom would hurt her. Which made me hate Linda even more, and also instilled a good dose of fear of the woman. I knew what she was capable of, and I was always small and weak and sickly. I didn’t want to push my luck and have Linda really turn on me.

So I was my mom’s confidant, and sometimes I tried to be her protector, but I was also something that set Linda off constantly, which meant I was often the source of the terrible feelings my mom needed to vent about. It was a gross cycle, and wasn’t good for either of us. I wish my mom had had someone else to talk about. I wish she’d been mad enough to not let Linda live with us. I wish she’d been more hateful, like I am. Worse at forgiveness. 

Ever since a young age she would force me into showing Linda affection, to keep from hurting her feelings, because hurt feelings always meant either screaming or drinking or both. I hated it. I hate it now. I think I might stop getting bossed around like that. A 26 year old person shouldn’t have to hug anyone they don’t want to, but especially not their childhood abuser. 

In high school I started fighting back for a while. Screaming arguments. I’ve never screamed at anyone in my life except Linda, and I hate that I ever felt that desperate, cornered, and angry. I’m not a shouty type of person. I didn’t like myself during all of that. 

She would come into my room in the middle of the night to scream at me. She would go in during the evening and lay on the bed and refuse to move. She would get drunk and stumble into my room and collapse on the floor. 

Any efforts to get her to leave, pleads that I was tired, it was time for bed. Teen snappishness to “Get out of my room!” every so often. All of it was met with this demeanor shift that still haunts me. Like the life being drained from her face as her eyes hardened and her jaw clenched, the spat “Who the FUCK do you think you’re talking to!? I am your grandmother.” The way it truly looked like she might be ready to kill me. 

Sometimes I would slip out of the room and slam the door and let her scream through the whole house, locked out of my own bedroom at 2 in the morning. Sometimes I would crawl out the window. 

We got a dog when I was 11, right after I got a pretty serious head injury from playground nonsense, just some shit timing. He was a lovely dog, but an energetic puppy, and my family isn’t the best at training dogs. He did what puppies do-- chewed shit up, had accidents-- and it often sent Linda flying off the handle. Sometimes, calm and pleasant, she would tell me “You know, we only got this dog for you. It’s stressing everyone out. Maybe we should just return it.” 

She would say this was a joke. She thought it was just so funny and precious when I would volunteer that myself, when people were upset. Tearily say “We can take the dog back. We don’t have to keep him.” My parents never knew why on earth I would say that, worried I didn’t like the dog, and that would only make me feel even worse, because I worried they thought I was ungrateful. 

She would drive drunk with me in the car. As a high schooler I would have to pick her up drunk from the bar instead. She would pinch nasty bruises into my arm as a kid.  She criticized everything, or poured on lavish praise, and got upset when I didn’t accept it. 

When I was about twelve we were at the mall, and I was at the age that I was starting to worry about the other girls in my class liking boys, and trying to figure out what I was supposed to do about that. A chatted a bit with a boy, just some kid who was there with his mom. And when Linda came and took me away, she was spitting mad and told me to never do that again. That child was black. What the fuck was wrong with me. 

She was so mad when I would swear as an adult visiting home from college. She was even madder when I pointed out she was the one who taught me how to swear. 

It broke my mom’s heart when I came out as gay, and Linda didn’t let me forget it. She would remind me anytime we were alone. She would make comments openly about “faggots” and “the gays” and what God had to say about it and plenty of things about the AIDS crisis. But then, sometimes, when she was the right kind of drunk, she would tell me how she loved the gays, she had gay friends, it was disgusting but she thought they were so fun, those men. 

It’s therapeutic to write this, right now. She’s changed a bit as I’ve grown, got a bit less angry when she retired, which I get. Job stress can make a person miserable. She still has her moments, but she’s not as mean. She still drinks a lot, but it’s not as violent. Sometimes I’ll visit home and think she’s really changed, but before long there’s an explosion that has me feeling all of eight years old again, and rehardens my heart. I don’t know how to forgive her, and I don’t think I ever want to. 

She’s still terrible to my mom. She and my mom are tied together. My mom’s relationship to her isn’t something I’ll ever be able to understand, I don’t think, but that’s alright. It’s her mom. Moms are complicated. 

My mom tells me Linda is coming to my graduation for my master’s degree in a few weeks, and I’ve been tied in knots since she mentioned it. Seeing her at home is enough; I don’t want to see her here. She still introduces me to people as her granddaughter. Thinks this “whole thing I’m doing” is ridiculous. 

In February I casually mentioned my wife and she bit my head off, telling me not to talk about that shit in front of her. Later, in what wasn’t quite an apology, she told me “you know how I feel about those things. I just never want to think about any of that. Just don’t talk about it with me.” 

In a perfect world I would never talk to her about anything, but I’m not quite ready to break my mother’s heart like that. My mom said not too long ago that as long as she was still alive, Linda and I would just have to get along with each other. 

I wish she wouldn’t do that. I wish me hating my grandmother wasn’t my mother’s problem. I wish I didn’t, but I gave up imagining liking her nearly a decade and a half ago. Sometimes I worry I’m bad for feeling badly about this woman, but looking back and writing this has soothed that over. This rage is more than justifiable. I don’t think I’ll ever outgrow it, not while she’s still alive, at least. 

Content warning: this post discusses toxic masculinity, violence, misogyny, homophobia.

--

I saw a Tiktok where someone stated “A key component of boyhood (which is a complex and multifaceted thing) is violence. Specifically the violence that society deems to be necessary in order to make a boy into a man.” 

As I work a job teaching children about religion (which is very different than my most extensive experience with teaching children in martial arts), I’ve been reflecting a lot on the ways I was originally taught to keep a lesson structured.  Martial arts schools really buzz off on discipline, and in my experience, to teach children’s martial arts is to be expected to enforce a high standard of behavior.  It’s all very authoritarian, from the “sirs” and “maams” to the “listen don’t speak” to the physical punishments.  

I’ve been thinking of how these things shaped me-- in some ways good, in some ways enlightening, and in some ways bad.  I have a strong work ethic, am self-disciplined when necessary, know how to project my voice, and can throw a punch (I also get off on kneeling, have a high pain tolerance, and am good at following orders-- which are benefits I’m not sure my instructor had in mind back in the day.  I digress).  Teaching martial arts also enlightened me to how I don’t want to interact with children in the future; how the reason I was so good at building rapport with students wasn’t because I was “the fun instructor,” but because I was the patient and empathetic one.  It also embedded some toxic masculinity beliefs pretty deep under the skin, and sometimes I find a new one and have to pry it loose with a pocket knife and toss it in a jar with the others, to squint at every so often and rattle around, and sometimes when I get too scared or insecure, to pop in my mouth and gnaw on a bit.  Stretch it out until I can slide it on like armor, before remembering myself and balling it up and stuffing it back in the jar again. 

The thing is, while some aspects of my upbringing were very neutral, what I experienced was a girlhood.  I was raised with the expectation that I would turn into a woman, specifically a white, conservative, heterosexual, evangelical woman, and if not all of those things at least white, heterosexual, and christian. The adults around me treated me in a way that spoke of those expectations.  They encouraged behaviors that matched the timeline I was supposed to follow and got uncomfortable when I displayed others.  While boyhood may have described a lot of my experiences, the overarching one was girlhood.  They thought I was a girl. I thought I was supposed to be one.  

But there is one distinct way that I had a boyhood, and that was martial arts. 

While the American Taekwondo Association remains painfully misogynistic, some of the expectations remain the same across genders, especially in the old-fashioned school I was raised in.  Learn to hit and get hit.  Always anticipate danger.  Violence is often the answer.  When you fight, it’s like a strange game of tag: first it’s their turn, then it’s your turn, then it’s your turn, then it’s your turn, until they stop trying to get up.  If you think that hurt, just wait until you get hit harder. Learn to take it. Toughen up. No whining.  

The violence deemed necessary to turn a white belt into a black belt. 

Part of me still romanticizes this type of violence, and part of me genuinely believes there is some merit in it.  After all, I started when I was sensitive, anxious, skinny, bullied eight year child.  Who would I be without it?  Who would I have grown into?  They wouldn’t be better or worse, just different, and that’s always a bit of a scary thing.  

I can’t fully detatch from it because I was formed in it, the same way I can’t fully detatch from fundamentalist christianity, or My Chemical Romance, or growing up on a farm, or being a dyke, or even girlhood. 

I got the boyhood experience by learning violence, for better or worse, and just like everything else it’s now my responsibility and privilege to decide what to do with it. 

That being said, my mom expressed once that she worried martial arts is what turned me into a queer, and perhaps she was right.  Who’s to say what makes a person who they are anyways? Maybe the eight year old who didn’t do taekwondo is that conservative, heterosexual, evangelical woman everyone expected. 

Or maybe they were transmasc anyways, but they weren’t able to fight off those motherfuckers who jumped them at the gas station.

So imagine the butterflies when the older transmasc from my program, who boasts dangly earrings and cowboy boots and paints their face on the weekend, comments “cutie” on an instagram post-- just myself in jeans and a sweater. 

I need to emphasize how big of a deal that is.

Normal.

/Me/

For the first time ever.

My job puts me in contact with a bunch of people who are pretty similar to me. I'm interacting with a lot of trans mascs these days-- trans mascs and masculine women and gender non-conforming people of all shapes and sizes. And it's neat how everyone is doing it differently.

Some are fashionable and quirky and accessorize and others are all muscle shirts and backwards ball caps. Some are buttoned up businessmen, some have shaved heads and wide shoulders and flowey linen pants and cheugy scarves.

Some of them are women and lesbians and others are men and ex-lesbians, and most are neither and only-sort-of-lesbians-these-days.

Then I got back and saw myself in the hallway and.

Like. NOTHING to worry about kid. I am looking butcher than I could have ever imagined. Come and flirt at the raging bulldyke, boys, see how well that goes

and this one is gonna be controversial--

Sometimes it feels like it really doesn't matter with cishet people. Right? Ideally, in a perfect world, my pronouns are they/them. But if my parents use he/him instead of she/her that is Moving Mountains, my friends. I'm not gonna push the envelope, because baby it's not folding.

Two of my friends down here are a few decades older than me-- chefs from when we worked in kitchens together. They're either millennials or Gen X, but they have the Gen X mindset of "nothing matters and bullying is fun." You know the mindset. They're chill with me, and they're good people, fun friends, they feed me awesome food-- they think the gender-neutral thing is total bullshit. They were on board 100% when I came out to them as trans and they swapped pronouns to he/him and jumped right on board, but the they/them thing is bullshit. And it's... not worth it? To care? Because regardless of that, I value those friendships for what they are? And what they are just doesn't include any kind of queer competency. Because they're old, jaded, and heterosexual.

A bunch of people from my hometown will never get what I'm doing-- people I really care about, and yeah sometimes that fucking hurts and it's frustrating-- but honestly a lot of these people I wish I'd never bothered to come out to anyways. In their heads I'm just a hardass dyke who moved away to go do mysterious queer things somewhere else. Could have really leaned into the early 2000s girlpower I was raised on and kept that energy going, because they're never going to get it anyways.

Does any of this make sense? These things always dissolve into rambling. I start with one thought and then while I'm typing my brain starts wandering in several different directions.

Have you guys seen that post about the movie "By Hook or By Crook"? The butch/transmasc buddy comedy from the nineties? It talks about the characters who use he/him pronouns when referencing each other, but are referred to with she/her pronouns when out amongst strangers, and how it's not about wider society seeing them properly or knowing which words to use, it's that even if wider society used to correct words they would be doing it differently, seeing them differently. It would still be wrong.

That's how I feel about they/them pronouns.

I'm a binary trans guy in the way that I have a masculine name and masculine presentation and am read as masculine a lot of the time. For all intents and purposes, I'm just some guy. But I'm a nonbinary trans person in the way that I just don't fucking care, if there was an easier way to pick the neutral option I would, I'm not even sure how real I think gender is. Every relationship I'm in is queer. I just cannot and will not conceptualize myself in a heteronormative way.

So, pronouns-- Technically I use all pronouns. And by that I mean, the default is he/him these days. That's how people read me and address me, and they're right. The only people allowed to use she/her pronouns for me is my partner and my mom-- because my partner Gets It, and my mom is my mom. Anytime someone else uses she/her pronouns for me, it's informative. It's intentional. They're looking at me and making that decision and that teaches me something about the interactions we're going to have. It doesn't disrupt my sense of self or gender identity-- not anymore-- it's just data. A warning, sometimes.

And they/them pronouns are something I offer up selectively. They're in my email signature at work, but I don't enforce them, I don't really tell people. Sometimes in icebreakers I'll give they/them if the crowd feels right, sometimes I give he/him. If a child asks, I give they/them, because I need them to know that's an option.

The they/them are intentional, an announcement of queerness, a message. It's neat to see the people who pick them up from my email bio without a second thought, the friends who use they/them vs. he/him. It's a fun experiment of seeing who's paying attention to that stuff, who cares about that stuff, who Gets It. I don't want to give those pronouns to Everyone all of the time, they're mine, and I don't fight people on it. I know who and what I am, and that's so rock solid right now that I just want to see what other people do with it.

Like that movie, right? Even if I was louder and gave those pronouns everywhere and fought for it and enforced it, the way people would use them would be different than the way they are. An acquiesced, "yeah yeah whatever I'll do what the queer wants so she shuts up about it" and less "that's what you are and that's how I see you."

I used to play this game when I was younger too, of entertaining anyone who flirted with me just to feel it out and running away when it stopped being entertaining or swayed a bit too serious.

And honestly the best thing about it is that I don't know how to flirt? All this time being butch and I've never been the forward one, I don't know how to make a move. I just know how to make meaningful eye contact with someone and let them saunter over to me.

My partner knows about this game, and she thinks it's funny. She likes when I report back stories of things that have happened to me, and since I've been fluttering around the bar scene in New Orleans for a few years, I have some stories. The stories get funniest when it almost pushes too far, and I have to quick whip out the "wait I'm married!!" card. Innocent as ever because technically I didn't flirt with them, I just watched them flirt with me.

What I've noticed is a very different vibe to this game in queer spaces vs straight spaces. In queer spaces it doesn't matter who is flirting, it always feels safe. I've had men twice my size, leather daddies, dudes on military leave. I've had extremely tall women, I'm kind of used to people towering over me during this game, even though I'm not that little. As a pretty androgynous trans masc, the people I bait are all over the spectrum, and it doesn't really matter what they see Me as in these spaces, and it never feels dangerous. Chaotic, maybe, but not dangerous.

But in straight spaces it's so different. When men flirt with me they do it in a way that's feminizing and patronizing and just. Odd. And it feels bad. And it freaks me out. Something happened recently, and while he wasnt really Doing anything (especially compared to getting groped by a bear in the Phoenix) my alarms were going off and it felt malicious.

What's with that? Why the vibe?

And it's not a "men are dangerous" "men are gross" "men are trash" thing. I Love men. Ive fucked men. I've romanced men. Lovely gender all around, hell, I'm about 80% man.

i was young, and i felt odd about some things. my clothes. my voice. my hair. the conversations i had with other girls my age and the women in my life. i didn't know what this meant.

i saw people who fascinated me. people who may have been men or may have been women, but they were going about gender and masculinity in a way that ached in my chest, and i was drawn to them.

i started to search. "girls that look like boys." "cross-dressing." "women who dressed as men to join the military." and i found stories that continued to draw me in and continued to ache. i still didn't know what this meant.

i looked for people who looked like me, and i felt pretty lost when my search came up short. i'd been alone in my high school, and my hometown, and i still felt alone at my university.

i found people doing something that felt similar to my own thing. learned language. searched deeper with the new words i learned. "butch." "genderqueer." "FTM." some of it resonated, some of it didn't. i still didn't know what was up.

i tried things out. i slowly traded all of my girls' clothes for boys' clothes, went as far as swapping the underwear, the socks. i still bought women's shoes, thought there was something inherently different.

i had a dozen different horrible haircuts. i didn't know what to do with men's hair. i tried shaving it myself, found the most fun in that.

i bound my chest, and that ache turned to bubbling joy at the sight. a piece of the mystery was solved, but i wasn't sure what to think about it.

people assumed i was male, and that bubbled too. i was fooling them, and that was adventurous like the characters in those books i searched for when i was a kid. it was a game, and i was winning.

but when people guessed wrong-- or, right?-- and assumed i was female, the ache was back. where did that come from? that wasn't there before??

a friend made a comment about a group of us, but the way it sounded, he could have just been talking about me. i don't remember the comment, something mundane like "they're over there." but the THEY hit differently. i knew people were doing this thing with the pronouns, but it never made sense to me before. and then i heard it, and another piece of the mystery fell. i changed my pronouns, and the bubbling kept up, but the ache was growing.

some of the original ache had never gone away. my clothes didn't quite fit right, and when they did fit my body well, i didn't like the look of it. my voice-- who even was that? why did i sound like that??

i'd made changes, made huge leaps and bounds in the right direction, but just medicine and mental health and everything else-- when you heal the big things, you can start to feel the little things. you don't know you're nauseous when your leg is broken, but once the pain is dealt with you can feel your stomach rolling.

i looked for more stories, and found a lot of duds along the way. women who dove deep into masculinity but still felt deeply married to their womanhood. i wanted to throw my womanhood out the window and pretend it had never been given to me. i found stories about men who transitioned entirely, whose journeys resulted in masculinity shaped differently than mine, who called themselves straight because of the way they loved women and who would never be found out, ever, unless they went telling people. i squinted at the idea of heterosexuality the way one might squint at a wasp buzzing in the distant corner of a decent-sized room. don't get too close to me, and we'll be fine. i found women who loved being masculine and also loved dolling it up on occasion, found people who switched freely between very masculine and very feminine. i kept looking, knowing i couldn't be entirely alone.

but while i was looking, i aligned with the narratives that fit the closest. born as one thing, trying to turn into something else, might as well lean full masculine. being in the middle wasn't something anyone would take seriously, or so i thought.

so many of my online role models had "switched sides," the way i saw it. youtubers, illustrators, comics. their version of womanhood-- which was womanhood that totally rejected itself and morphed like a raccoon trying to claw its way out of a cardboard box-- had fit me so well, and they'd tossed it aside. i wasn't like that, was i?

worth a try.

what did people like me do?

they started testosterone.

fine, let's see.

i started T, i changed my name, i started binding my chest 90% of the time. this was the closest i'd ever felt to myself, and i bought full in.

but i was still searching, still reading, still hoping for a story that matched. i found ivan coyote and the mystery started to unravel.

it was three steps forwards, one step back. the more my body changed and my mind matured, the less scary this entire thing seemed to be. i could exist how i was, whatever that was, and i would be okay whether people respected it or not.

maybe it was the voice change that really built the confidence, or the way my eyebrows darkened, my profile carved out a bit firmer, my shoulders broadened, my body grew more hair in the places it was supposed to.

maybe it was that the more i started to recognize myself in the mirror, the less it mattered if other people recognized it too. maybe it was that fewer people were guessing wrong.

i had the room to be in the middle, now that i'd crossed sides.

so, how did i figure it out?

i read, and read, and read. i tried things over and over. i failed, a lot. i felt wildly uncomfortable. i forced myself into dresses and liked how the skirt twirled around me but hated being captured in photos. i thought i was ugly for years and years and years, because there was always something off. i found the guts to say, "you might as well try it, if you hate it we can figure that out later." and then i didn't hate it, and i kept changing, and i'm so impossibly grateful.

grateful for that eleven year old kid who shoved her hair into a baseball hat and smeared dirt on her face and pretended to be her own twin brother. grateful for the fifteen year old who didn't know how to ask for the haircut they wanted, didn't know they were allowed to. grateful for the seventeen year old who bought cargo shorts at goodwill and started wearing heavy boots and kissing girls and driving a truck. grateful for the eighteen year old who wore bowties, the nineteen year old who bought a binder, the twenty-one year old who threw away their last pair of panties, the twenty-three year old who threw caution to the wind and made some giant changes. grateful for the twenty-four year old who stubbornly and painfully clung to a relationship with his parents, and the twenty-five year old who wears words like daughter and grandson and brother and pretty boy and boyfriend and dyke, all at the same time and without contradicting anything.

==

so most of us are aware of the great homosexual revelation, right? if you don't know you're queer from an early age, there's that sort of lag period. the 'other people seem really into this, why am I not into this?' stage of your life followed by some great '...oh.'

and if this revelation happens when you're younger, maybe the lag period was about crushes or kisses or hand holding. if you're a bit older, maybe it's the 'oh, THAT's what attraction feels like???' or maybe it's the realization that, 'shit, wait a second, sex is actually good?'

I've had a few of those moments myself. middle school years spent puzzled over why my peers had any interest in boys with the revelation in high school of 'oh shit, that's what a crush feels like, and i've felt that before, and i know what this is, and wait a second... oh no.' Lots of internalized homophobia, but the message got through.

then later at 18 figuring out masturbation for the first time, something I'd never spent much energy on before because LORD wouldn't it be easier if I just had something to tug on down there, why did vaginas have to be so complicated??? the first time I put something that vibrated between my legs, and my vision whited out, and i was half convinced I was going to die of a heart attack, and suddenly a lot of what they preached about Desires of the Flesh made more sense.

my partner had her own moment when we were in college. she was someone who'd never spared much mind to her sexuality and never felt much attraction before. she figured it would happen when it happened, and if it hadn't happened yet, well she didn't have the time to really figure that out. and then she met a girl who looked like a boy (who is now a boy who looks a little bit like a girl, kind of) and the lightbulb went off, and she had the 'oh' moment. more of an 'oh shit' moment, because internalized homophobia really is a bitch and a half, but what are you gonna do.

but what I really want to talk about is that same revelation that happens with gender dysphoria and sex. because yeah, i had my homosexual awakening in my teens and figured out what romance was supposed to feel like, and the first time I made out with a girl or finally figured out how to get myself off something strange happened in the pit of my stomach that made things start to make sense.

but the first time I let someone else in between my legs was hardly revelatory. there was no 'oh' moment. the series of events went more like 'oh god oh my god this is finally happening oh god' to

'ow, wait, is it supposed to hurt like that, what the fuck?' to

'okay, i guess this isn't so bad, it might be kind of nice' to

'oh my god can he please hurry this up and get it over with?'

I had different interesting awakenings in the BDSM community, all of those mostly nonsexual, but none of them really Light Bulb instances. that was all more of knowing what i wanted, getting what i wanted, and being right in knowing. 'i think i like getting smacked around' to 'yep, that's definitely a proclivity of mine. noted.'

the first time the person topping me used the word 'boy' instead of 'girl' wasn't quite an 'oh' but it did set some gears turning. the day a good friend casually used they/them pronouns for me was a huge realization. but the first time i had sex without feeling like a woman about it? that. that was something.

I'd had sex before, and I'd dated before, and made out and held hands, but the cloud of 'you are a girl, they expect you to be a girl, they're treating you like a girl' was always looming. when i was with boys and men it was at its worst, but even when i was with girls there was an expectation. they'd chosen me because i was a certain type of girl, i was a butch, and i believed that had some expectations.

be dominant, be experienced, take charge, be the one wearing the strap or taking her jeans off first, be the one who knows what they're doing.

it didn't help that most of the girls who chose me were freshly out of the closet, and i was almost an experiment.

so the first time i had sex with my wife-- who had never done anything with anyone-- and we were working off of the understanding that 1) i wasn't a girl, 2) i honestly had absolutely no clue what to do with a vagina**, and 3) we were going to figure it out together-- it was like a hundred lightbulbs at once.

my nethers weren't as abhorrent to me if they weren't a symbol of my femininity. submission wasn't shameful if I wasn't playing into a stereotype (male= dominant, female= submissive) while also betraying my identity (masculine woman= dominant partner, and favoring submissiveness makes you a fraud). I could enjoy being touched, being penetrated, being talked to during it; and i could find ways of acting sexually that aligned with my natural inclinations. dominance isn't unattainable if it's from a place of service, submission isn't weak if you're being brave by looking your partner in the eye and asking for it.

sex isn't gross if you're both into it, into the ways your bodies respond, the things that happen.

lastly though, and the greatest revelation yet, was the comparison of sex before testosterone versus after. the change in attraction, in excitement. the libido no longer being something that had to be gently coaxed to the surface, but something that thrummed under my skin quiet and constant, yanked quickly to the surface with a single touch. the way that sex wasn't just something kind of nice, something I would do for someone else, something that every so often caught my fancy. it was something Interesting, something Exciting, something I thought about. It all finally made sense.

i was also FASCINATED by Frank Iero. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to be him. I wanted to crawl inside of his skin. I wanted his tattoos (I have a tattoo presently inspired by one of his tattoos). Fuck man, when I turned 18 I got a lip ring and we cannot pretend it's a coincidence.

what I'm saying here-- besides embarrassing myself-- is that since I was VERY vocal about all of this from the ages of 14-19, it should have come as NO SURPRISE when I came out as 1) a lesbian and later, 2) trans.

[my favorite essay of all time. i reread it several times a year, and every time i feel something new]

originally posted on autostraddle

--

Dear little sister, brother, sibling, or child,

Is today the day you are calling yourself butch for the first time? If so, this letter is for you. It’s also for you on the day when you’re not ready to give yourself a name, and on the day when you’ve been called butch by a boy who wanted to hurt you, and on the day when you kiss the girl who calls you a baby butch in her sheets. If the word makes you cry, this letter is for you. If the word makes you proud, this letter is for you, too.

Maybe you have said it to your mirror, or underlined it in the book that you’ve slid between pillow and mattress. Your cat knows the word because he heard you whispering it in the shower. Maybe you’ve known ‘butch’ for your whole life, or one whole year, or the single minute that made your head spin with all that resolution.

Did you know it only takes one thought to curl itself into the shape of a fist? Did you hear about the straw that broke the camel’s back? You are not the straw, or the camel. You, my baby butch, are the desert, and the rain that only needs to come once to nourish it all.

I know the street corner where you and the girl you loved without words once wrote your names using twigs and nails. When you peeled back the plastic and pressed your hand into the wet cement, did you know that someday you’d come back to the place and you’d smile at the memory? Did you know what the handprint said? It said ‘I am here, I am in love.’ It said ‘butch.’

Do you remember that nosebleed? The one that left red constellations across barstools and scattered like dice on the sidewalk? If you’d opened your palm for one second, you’d see that the lines in your palm that ran red were spelling out ‘butch,’ clear as day.

There was the night when you were drunk in the bathtub and the girl with the braid swung her legs over the side. You thought you could see Jesus in those legs the way people see Jesus in toast or wallpaper. She shaved your head while you laughed into a bottle of schnapps. Your hair was falling into your lap like a hundred promises coming true and each follicle was saying ‘butch, butch’ in a chorus. And the next day when they stared, when their eyes couldn’t meet yours, those gazes too were saying ‘butch’ and you remember what you did then? You took what they said and you sewed it into your shirt, right between the top button and the tie you learned how to tie on your own.

The switchblade your father left you? Butch. Your knuckles curling like poetry? Butch. The night you believed in God for three hours? Butch. The tattoo in Amsterdam that made you cry like a baby? Butch. The dent in your flask from the kid who knocked you into the wall with a kiss? Butch. And the stars, too; if you stare long enough, you’ll see how they’re spelling it out with each little wink and nod. You’ll never forget the night your mother laid in the grass with you and said that your grandfather was in the stars. He was up there, spelling out ‘butch’ with celestial Scrabble tiles.

But butch is in the other parts of you, too. You couldn’t see it and they’d never tell you, but there, in your favorite shade of pink thread, was ‘butch’ spelled along the ribbon of that dress. ‘Butch’ threaded through a ponytail, and scuffed into your Mary Janes. That nail polish says ‘butch’ just as well as that jackknife. You can keep both in your back pocket and know that they learned to spell just fine.

Are you out there? Is your name still hanging in the closet, or have you pinned it to your diaphragm so it swells with stubborn pride every time you take a breath? Swallow that mouthful of air and hold it for a few seconds longer — do you feel the power of that word pressing against your ribs? It’s been known to rip through guts thicker than yours or mine, but there’s a flush in your cheeks that I’ve seen in my mirror and I think we both know the risk is worth it.

It won’t be easy. Some days, it’s too heavy to carry down the street, and you’ll be struggling under its weight before you realize you forgot your shoes. You’ll think it’s a limp, or a dead dog on a leash, or a wound that’s gone rotten in your side before you ever think it’s a saving grace. And if you’re waiting for the world to smack you in the face — if it’s a fight you’re holding out for — you’ll get it. Collect your teeth from the boxing ring and you’ll see the way ‘butch’ is written into the enamel. You’ll get a mean left hook from how far you hurl it away from yourself, and when they sling it right back, you won’t think twice about standing in the way.

But you remember what they told you about foxfire. You think you’ve got yourself a swamp until you see the way it shines in the dark.

I have every faith in you, baby butch. I know you will be careful with this word and its legacy. It looks like a badge but it feels like a battleaxe, and I need you to know that it’s five times as difficult to earn and ten million times more dangerous. You weren’t awarded butch at the end of a great queer race. You cannot hang it in your living room or shine it on your mantle. You dug it up from the ground. You were on your knees, scraping at the soil with your short nails and your bloody hands. You found ‘butch’ in your own bones and you sucked out the marrow until your tongue knew the word by heart. And there are other names and other terms that were just as hard to find as yours, and you’re not to ever assume that the hole you made in the ground was deeper than anyone else’s. You had best promise me that right now.

Baby butch, you are beautiful. You are the most handsome motherfucker I’ve ever seen, and I’m the proudest elder sibling in the whole strange world. Don’t doubt the family you have — we’re right here cheering you on, elbowing you in the side, mussing your hair. You’re gonna be just fine.

All my lovin’,

Gender Failure by Rae Spoon & Ivan Coyote (collection of essays)

Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote (collection of essays)

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein (gender theory)

Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel M Lavery (collection of essays)

All About Love by Bell Hooks

Girl Mans Up by Girard (YA fiction)

You'll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein (memoir)

The Last Time I Wore a Dress by Dylan Scholinski (memoir) (may be under the name “Daphne Scholinski.”)

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo (WLW fiction, historical, coming of age, butch characters)

Love and Other Disasters by Anita Kelly (NBLW fiction, cooking competition, smut & romance)