I also relate to transfemininity as someone cafab. I assume it has to do with the degendering experience that comes with the association of blackness with masculinity and my fatness and that being at odds with being recognised as afab. I was always very envious of the groups of girls I saw at school. They were close enough to what everyone thought a girl should look like. I wanted to hang out with them but I just knew something was different about how I was to them, so I stuck with the boys because I didn't feel as great a disconnect and maybe that's because of the masculinisation of blackness and male-defaultness. I rejected girly things because i was afraid i wouldn't be seen as a girl even if i tried. I had already experienced as a child (7-9, i can't remember exactly), something negative related to blackness and girlhood, when I cosplayed Hermione Granger for a school thing (fuck JK Rowling) and I got told that I was the wrong skin colour to be her by my white female classmate who had also previously been microaggressive to me when we were 5. I think she like straight up said that Hermione was white so I couldn't be her and i was like it's just a book dude :(. And growing up fat, I wasn't conventionally attractive, and was like viewed as a failure, or diseased, so I couldn't achieve womanhood that way either because I wasn't seen as desirable. Which makes realise that the womanhood I saw is.. like.. eugenic-y. The politics of desirability are always on my mind a bit which is probably why I got into ugly liberation (which i learned about from a Rowan Ellis video). Even though I was technically "a girl" i felt like i wanted to be a girl, because i didn't feel like a girl, and now that i seem to be intersex I'm aggressively made out to be a girl, and the more that happens the less i want it now. i don't want to be a girl if it's not my choice to make.
this is misogynoir and internoirism.
I hear you, anon. Thank you for sharing your experience, it resonates with me and many other black intersex people. People rarely understand the intersection of gender and race, and i love that we can have those conversations now.
