yall, it is in retrospect (and also after watching I Saw the TV Glow and thinking about what stories and characters i was fixated on as a child and teen) so unbelievably obvious that i am a queer man. i was fucking obsessed with anything that had a queer man or a queer actor in it. it flooded my brain with happy chemicals. fuck, i think i watched every episode of Will and Grace with my mom for at least its first season or 2. I was 6.
Queer masculinities are a whole ass thing that is sufficiently different from straight masculinity that the idea that i could "be a boy" never crossed my mind, bc boy= the straight male gender and that did not resonate with me. it did not spark joy. but when i watched representation of queer masculinity it was just slamming the THATS ME button in my brain.
and i felt so ashamed for it! i thought i was like, a bad person, a woman who was fetishizing and obsessing over gay men. like i was worried i was gonna appropriate something that wasnt mine. when i figured out i was non-binary that shame did not go away like you would think it would. i dont know why i treated my gender and body like a single slider from feminine to masculine, where the farther over i moved the slider towards the masculine side the farther away i felt from my self, but also i did not want the "female body" i had. i think i got some messaging somewhere at some point that medical transitioning as a transmasc required me to act "masc" on some level, and that, and this is extremely stupid so prepare yourself, not doing so was somehow taking something away from trans women???
This bullshit remained in my head long after i had met plenty of trans people who colored outside those lines, so to speak. I continued to fixate on queer men's stories, but still felt like i was getting away with something by doing it. I dont know what to tell you except that 2010s tumblr, and to an extent my college queer community, was a fucking dumpster fire of toxic gender policing discourse. Even stuff I consciously disagreed with obviously got lodged in my brain so thoroughly that it took 10 years to work itself out.
So now i am jumping out of my skin ready to start T again and im a little worried going too too fast will just wreck my singing voice entirely, but also i want to go as fast as possible i am so so SO over this era of trying to be content with my body and voice the way they are!!
