#masculinity

Curious about the LEG-acy of the early modern suit? You've stumbled on the right post. 🦵

This new article in JSTOR Daily explains how fitted breeches and visible calves played an important role in shaping ideas about masculinity, class, and social belonging. The early modern suit developed alongside seventeenth- and eighteenth-century expectations about how men should appear in public, including how much of the body could be seen and how that body should be read by others.

Visible legs were closely tied to ideals of strength and grace. Well-shaped calves suggested physical capability and skill in dancing, both of which carried social implications. Pale, smooth silhouettes echoed classical art and reinforced ideas about refinement that were deeply shaped by race and empire.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: as a transfeminine butch it took viewing my masculinity from a transmasculine perspective to emotionally divorce myself from the toxic notions of societal normativity.

I was never an effeminate kid but I was SEEN as one. My masculinity was butchness even going that far back and all my peers did look at me and said "that kid's a sissy". I wore a suit and tie to school the first couple years of primary and I wrote cringy poetry for girls that I had crushes on and all my peers would look at me and say "that kid's a faggot".

And when I then came out and began transitioning, it was like shedding falser skin that never was me to begin with. But then the idea that I was now to conform to normative notions of "womanhood" hit me like a stack of bricks.

And it took trans men. It took transmasculinity. It took seeing the biggest, butchest dykes, it took looking at women, men and nonbinary people so UNLIKE EVERYTHING society broadly views as attractive who looked similar to me to learn to LOVE ME.

To learn to love the soft fur on my body, the coarse hair on my legs and arms and hands. The pits, the rolls, the bulging stomach, the small boobs, bigger upper pubic area. The stubble on my face, the way my nose hooks just so slightly. The shadow cast by hair upon my face, the way I smell when I do exercise.

It took being around people, LOVING people to whom all these things I was conditioned to believe to be fundamentally at odds with my closeness to womanhood were DESIRED traits that they STRUGGLED for. It took surrounding myself with people to whom the way I was and wanted to be wasn't things to be erased.

I'm butch. I love my body hair, I love my masculinity. I love all that. I'm not on estrogen to be less of me, myself. I'm on estrogen to be MORE of me, myself. Surrounding myself with people who love their masculinity, who STRIVE for masculinity. To whom testosterone is NOT a poison. To whom the way I am is not a state that's to be shunned or overcome.

It brought me peace. It brought self love. It brought serenity. I feel more at ease inside this body I inhibit and I have now to thank for that: trans men, transmasculine people, transmasculinity. Manhood.

I have to thank for all the love that I have found for my own self.