i remember being at a trans group where I felt super out of place because I was the only trans dude that wasn’t straight. They were all taling about their girlfriends and all the things that bring them dysphoria – like wearing V-necks, something I myself do sometimes and had never felt dysphoric over until that very moment – and I remember getting so anxious I went outside to have a cigarette, feeling isolated and alone and like I wasn’t “trans enough.”
Not long after, one of the trans women that was there came out specifically to see if I was okay, because she’d recognized the look I had on my face. I remember telling her why I felt so out of place, and she told me she understood how I felt.
She then started to talk about her own experience as a trans woman who was, and afaik still is (i stopped going to the group for a variety of reasons), super into motorcycles – leather jacket and everything. She was, in her own words, a “badass biker babe” – but because her interest in motorcycles started before she realized she was trans and didn’t suddenly disappear the moment she started HRT, she often felt disconnected from other trans women with more traditionally feminine hobbies. She even told me about how at one point she’d expressed frutration with the transmisogyny she was experiencing in biker circles to another trans woman, who had basically responded with, “well, what did you expect?”
It felt like such victim-blaming to me. Like, just because it was a traditionally masculine hobby, she was being constantly told that she “should have known better,” when all she wanted was to be able to get excited about motorcycles with other people that got excited about motorcycles.
And this interaction always stuck with me – a big part of it because of her kindness, but also because it just seemed like a great example of how trans women just can’t fucking win. Have too many feminine hobbies, you’re seen as playing into stereotypes. Have too many masculine hobbies, and you get invalidated and victim-blamed.
I almost worry sometimes that the reason this isn’t talked about – at least not here on tumblr – is because of what Tumblr itself sees as acceptable and unacceptable hobbies. Any hobby that’s masculine is often automatically (but not necessarily incorrectly!) assumed to be toxic, and that only toxic men have toxic hobbies. Meanwhile, girl hobbies are cute and soft and safe and completely and utterly unproblematic! (/s) So it’s okay to tell a trans man he can have feminine hobbies, because feminine hobbies are allowed; but it’s not okay to tell trans women they can have masculine hobbies, because masculine hobbies are Bad and Evil and NOT ALLOWED, and a REAL woman wouldn’t want anything to do with them!
An incredibly black-and-white, un-nuanced take, but… this is tumblr, after all. black-and-white, un-nuanced takes are almost part of the job description.
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