What, You Knave!

cicada radio

They think I spent my life as a boy who spontaneously turned into a girl, rather than a girl, focused entirely on "not being found out" who gave up and dropped the boy mask.

So people get pissed when I talk about being a young girl, as if "the guy that I was" was a real person as opposed to a facsimile of a person created to hide me. As if my experiences of femininity aren't valid or applicable, as if as a woman, I know nothing of womanhood due simply to the descriptor of trans.

People ask me, let me rephrase, cis women ask me,"what men think of this and why men do that." And maybe they're ignorant, but there's still some trans mascs and several enbies around here, and yet, they ask me.

Even if they are ignorant, it's a little jab, a little poke, of "we don't think you're one of us." And they interact with enough trans people that ignorance is not a permissable excuse.

And the most bizarre thing, trans mascs will ask me. I don't know if it's you want me to validate your experience or if you've just swallowed the transphobe rhetoric of "fe/male socialisation" but you, as a man or someone who has a close relationship to masculinity, know more than me about how men think or feel.

So let me say it here.

I am not a lived experience authority on masculinity or being a man.