i don't even own a wii u

I went to my GIP (gender identity physician) yesterday for a check-up and had a good old chat about how things were getting along, how my transition was going, etc.

Before I left to go home, I offhandedly mentioned to her that I’d been called transphobic on multiple occasions and she just gave me this awestruck look as if to say, “What, you? Transphobic? Why?”

When I elaborated that it’s because I had the complete and utter gall to say that you need dysphoria to be trans, she then proceeded to tell that she once misdiagnosed someone who claimed to not be their birth gender (she didn’t say “ claimed to have gender dysphoria”). She told me of how they bullshitted their way through the assessments and questionnaires and everything related to the process, complaining that they weren’t conforming to gender roles thus didn’t want to be seen as their birth gender. (She also mentioned that the kid said to her that they were “an agender boy” a couple times.)

…I visit a women’s college. I am surrounded by new women and we feel instantly comfortable around each other. I attend a lecture. The speaker yells “who gets to be a woman?” and a crowd of cis women responds “anyone who wants to be!” The sentiment is nice, but I think about the years I spent staring out the window at the stars and I feel suddenly uncomfortable.

Later during this trip I am speaking with my new friends about femininity. I am told by one of them, angrily, that I am not allowed to talk about femininity because I am a straight cis boy. It is not my place and it is not my territory. I should shut up and listen. Are these my people?

I don’t correct her. I never correct anyone.

I am told there is just something special — something ineffable — about Female Friendship. I am told that I could not understand or experience this. They said anyone is a woman who wants to be—is it true? What does this say about my friendships with girls? I think about my childhood and adolescence—how my experiences with boys deviated from what I was taught to expect—and I spend a semester writing about non-gay-identifying male femininity—from Jack Benny to Jonathan Ames. Eventually, as a love/hate letter to Judd Apatow and coming-of-age films of the 80’s, 90’s and early 00’s, I write my thesis on homosociality in American males and its representation in television & film. One piece of feedback is “I am so sick of boys writing about boys.”

…

I am in a gender studies class. I am still bewildered that the subject I have been fixated on, reading about, and studying obsessively since my life began is now a thing my friends want to take classes on.

I am told that masculinity exists in opposition to femininity and that it is unequivocally toxic. I think about my angry, retributive father. I think about the football player’s roving knuckle, and hundreds and hundreds of other things.

I think also about my kind, self-sacrificing father. And I think about the boys I stayed up late telling stories with. And the boys I kissed. And boys who supported me. And boys I supported. And hundreds and hundreds of other things. And I think about me.

I raise my hand and disagree.

My professor rolls her eyes. The rest of the class are ciswomen; they laugh. The good things I’m talking about are actually femininity. One of the students tells me that I can’t be objective about masculinity because I am a straight cis male, and that I should shut up and listen. Are these my people?

…

I can’t, like so many others do, pretend to believe that Beyoncés anthems to beauty, flawlessness, and Waking Up Like This, are about me or for me.

…

Misandry humor is peaking and it is dripping with cissexism. Down cascade the gleeful tweets from ciswomen about how women are more beautiful than men — how graceful the female body is, how utilitarian the male. How awesome boobs are. How bad boys’ taste in clothing is. How incompetent they are emotionally. How they’re too weak to handle childbirth and periods.

They can believe deep down their feelings on who is smart & strong & reasonable and who is dumb & weak & dangerous are within their control, are controlled exaggerations and self-aware and performed, are well-examined. If they saw me nude and wigless and wet, would I not be subject to their funny opinions on penises? On neckbeards? On maleness? On who has a right to talk about femininity? They will read this and tell themselves “No!”

…

These are not discursive problems that only apply to an “undercover” transwoman, these are discursive problems that are seemingly only visible to an “undercover” transwoman forced to carry multiple perspectives like bactrian humps.

…

Because I am not a boy, but I am a woman who had a boyhood. I was, and am, made to live as a boy and I cannot suspend the perspective that gave me and join in when it’s time to fluster one of those clueless fuckers into anger by calling him a fuckboi and then tell him his anger proves he’s a fuckboi, or to humiliate one with an OKCupid screenshot because we’ve willfully conflated the clumsy ones with the threatening ones so we can grab those solidarity faves. It’s fucked up. It has metastasized.

Several transwomen have told me, privately, they they are uncomfortable with these things, but are afraid that speaking up about it would cause ciswomen to like and trust them less. “I play along,” one of them told me, “because in the queer community the only people who defend cisboys are cisboys. I don’t want to give up finally being read as a girl.”

…

Because I am interested in complicating your definition of maleness and of boyhood. I was born into that shitty town, maleness, full of broken ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it. And I don’t feel okay just moving out and saying “fuck y’all — bootstrap your way out or die out, I was never one of you.” I want to make it a better, healthier place—not spend all my time talking about how shitty it is and how anyone who would choose to live there deserves it. And to me that means considering them with charity, even when they make it difficult to.

Because it’s not a small deal that the words “not all men” have become entwined inextricably with male fragility and whininess. It makes it awfully easy to insulate the (largely cis-)female perspective on what males are.To begin a statement with those words—“Not All Men”—is to give grounds to anyone who wants to laugh at the rest of it. But here is the truth: not all men are what you think they are. Man does not mean what you think it means. Generalizing harshly and broadly but implying “you know which ones I mean” is an intellectual and rhetorical laziness that is not allowed to pass anywhere else in these communities. Because we don’t get to choose who our words and behavior affect, we are obligated to choose them carefully.

Because I have been reduced to my appearance — to the way I present for my own well-being — by cisfeminists so often that I feel a fucked up Stockholm syndrome attachment to being misgendered. My dysmorphia is as entwined in my identity as anything else. I have lived with it for decades as a girl pretending to be a boy. And the nearer I get to something I’ve wanted my whole life, the more it feels like playing into the aesthetic politics of a group of people who reject me because of the associations they have with my body—a body which I cannot, ultimately, change very much. These people who will only be comfortable when I dilute those associations with femme signifiers.\

better: riko reveals herself as biggest muse fan, having feigned ignorance this whole time