Just The Home Of An Awkward Gay Nerd

My wife is a trans woman. I've identified as trans for about thirty years. For her, it's less than five. She's going through a lot of the things trans people go through when their egg cracks. She's finding her place in the queer community. She's engaging with discourse. She's reading trans women authors and watching trans women media. She's going through her second adolescence. That's fun. It's a blast to live with as a fifty-four year-old who just wants a quiet evening in every night forever.

She is also very attached to both labels and binaries. Everything has a pigeon hole, and that pigeon hole is on either this or that side of the arbitrary line. Her politics aren't like that. She's happy to let people identify however they want, and she believes those identities are valid. But I think that, in her heart of hearts, binaries are comfortable and make sense. She sees herself as a woman. 100%. There is rarely -- very rarely -- a glimmer of boy mode every once in awhile, but 99% of the time, she is a girl's girlie girl.

And that's fine. I want her to be happy, and this makes her happy, so I am all for it. I, personally, don't get it, but I don't have to. The great thing about being people is we're all different, and that diversity broadens our collective intellect and consciousness.

Also, no shade to my wife. She's an amazing person. She's compassionate, she's caring. She's my biggest cheerleader. I'm disabled, and she assists me and advocates for me when I can't do it myself. She's my best friend. She isn't perfect. Neither am I. But when I weigh the pros versus the cons, she comes out on top every time. Even when she's got me so aggravated I want to tear my skin off, I still love her and am glad I'm with her.

It's just that, as soon as I came out as a trans man, a few things happened. First, she was thrilled. She never really treated me like I was a trans person who understood what it was like to be trans, even though I've been an out trans person three decades longer than she has. But the moment I picked a side of the line, suddenly I was for real trans, and we had that in common. I'm like, uh, okay. Sure.

Another thing that happened was that suddenly everything I did, things I had always done, got commented on for being boy stuff. She was thrilled, mind you. It wasn't criticism, but suddenly, I'd do something I've done since I was a kid, and she'd be like 'you're such a man.' I admit, sometimes I would do the same thing. I would do something, then pause to think about it, then say wow that is really man-coded, haha, there were signs, am I right?

But another thing that happened -- and this is what did me in -- is that suddenly, everything I did, I did as a man, and that had connotations. What broke me was, one day we were having a disagreement, and I admit, I raise my voice when I'm frustrated. It's something I try to control, because I don't like it when people do it to me, and I try not to be a hypocrite. But sometimes I get really frustrated, and I raise my voice, and even though I'm not saying any personal attacks, what I am saying, I'm saying loudly.

This has been a lifelong problem. My dad was a yeller, and I hated it, and I hate that i do it. Like I said, I'm working on it. Sometimes I can throttle it, sometimes i can't. It's a process. But my point is, it isn't new behavior. It's not something I just started doing. Nothing about me has fundamentally changed. I just became a trans man.

And she curled in on herself, which she doesn't usually do, and said in a small voice, "I don't know how I feel about living with a man who yells."

Okay. A few things.

Again, I do not like the yelling either, and I apologized for the yelling, because we both know it's something I struggle with, but that doesn't excuse it. I dropped the ball, and that was my bad. I own that.

However, this woman has seven inches on me, and my disabled ass couldn't take a tween in a fight. So what, pray tell, is my darling bride so afraid of all of a sudden?

A word. She's afraid of a word. The m-word and everything that goes along with it. I was no longer her spouse of thirty years who has stuck with her through thick and thin and has never -- ever -- raised a hand to her nor threatened to. I wasn't a flawed person whose father installed software that I cannot seem to delete though I've spent my entire life trying. No. I was a man. I scary, violent, evil man, and my raised voice was nothing short of abuse.

And I felt unsafe. Unsafe in my home, unsafe in the relationship. I felt like I couldn't be me anymore. I would always be this thing that was wicked and bad and had to be restrained and not have messy emotions or else I was the villain, and we all know how the world treats villains. I found myself scrutinizing every interaction for signs that I had done a bad thing. It was breaking my mental health.

The culmination of all this is that I was never allowed to explore what masculinity felt like for me. I wasn't asked about my manhood, I was told. And, again, no shade to my wife. I love her to pieces. But she lives in a binary world, and in her world, women do this and men do that. Women are this, and men are that. I don't think she would ever consciously stifle me, but the stifling happened.

I do intend to talk to her about it when I have ordered my thoughts. Part of why I'm writing this is to do just that. I want to be able to talk about it from a place of perspective and calm. My goal isn't to express anger. I'm not angry about it. I'm frustrated, and I'm sad, but I do understand that she would never knowingly hurt me. It's just the way things have shaken out. We're two imperfect people doing our best.

And it wasn't just her. Like I said before, the main reason I went back to being nonbinary is that trying to define what is masculine and what is feminine came with all these rules that I can't wrap my head around. Like. If you identify as a man and you wear a dress, you're not wearing women's clothes. They're your clothes. You own them. They are, by definition, a man's clothes. Why do we have to gatekeep dresses? They're not my thing, but if you want to wear one, wear one. Yeah, society is going to see you a certain kind of way, but we can't change society by reinforcing the roles society gives us. Challenge them. Deny them. Tear them down. Build something better. A world where men, women, and others can do whatever the fuck they want so long as they're not hurting anyone, and it's no one's business but theirs.

Also there was the discourse. Back in my day, we called it wank, but now it's the discourse. I tried to get involved, but I'm going to level with you kids. I'm old. I am not so old yet that I'm on death's door, but I have more years behind me than before me, and that time went by fast. I understand now that time is precious, and you only have so much before it's gone, and you have to choose how you spend it wisely, because there are no refunds. And I just can't, in good conscience, spend what little time I have left engaging with a bunch of idiots about stupid stuff that barely matters in the real world. It's wank. It's all wank.

I don't know these people. I wish them well because I want us all to make it, but outside of that vague existential love, these people mean nothing to me. Their opinions don't affect me in any way. It is so much navel-gazing and picking at belly button lint about a bunch of nonsense. I'm not claiming that the bigotry in the trans community isn't real. It is real, and it does affect me. But bickering about it with someone I'll never meet, who will never see it from my perspective, is taking away time I could spend doing literally anything else. So don't engage with it very much. If it crosses my dash, and I think it's interesting or valuable information, I will reblog it. But that's it.

How this relates to my being a trans man is that you get shoved into so many boxes, and your words are given such a different weight, when literally nothing else has changed about you, and suddenly you're not just yourself anymore. You're a representative of 'your people' and every word you say is a reflection on them. That shit never happened when I identified as nonbinary. I don't think the binary people know what to do with us. I like it that way. Please continue to be confused and offput by my slippery nature. I will be over here under my rock judging the hell out of you from a distance as nature intended.

If you had to nail me down in terms our society might come close to understanding, I am a transmasc nonbinary person. If you tally up my personality traits and shuffled them into little boxes on either side of the imaginary gender line, far more of them land on the masculine side than the feminine side. It's always been that way. I cosplayed as a girly girl in my teens and early twenties, and it had its happy moments, but I was happy to shed the disguise when I realized it was too much of a burden to maintain 24/7.

I like to cook. I really enjoy feeding people. It's something that makes me genuinely happy. I am a nurturer. I love animals, cats in particular, and even though I have had trouble doing so in the past, I like making plants thrive. I like tender things. I also do the laundry, and, when I was able-bodied, I kept the home tidy. My favorite color is purple. I like pink. I like making jewelry and perfume. I write gay erotica.

And, damn it, those are masculine traits. They're feminine traits, too, but femininity doesn't own them. If a man does them, they are, by definition, a man's activities. When I do the laundry, I am not in girl mode. I'm me as I have always been trying to fold a fitted sheet and failing miserably because the only people who can do fitted sheets correctly are witches, and they are to be feared.

So yeah. I am still the exact same person who transitioned into being a man. I still have the same feelings, the same desire to be seen, but only if I'm also respected. It's just that, as soon as I called myself something else, people backed the fuck off, and now I can explore masculinity at my own pace, in my own way, without having to answer for every cis man and trans man and their real or imagined crimes.