Thinking about how a combination of the level of transphobia in the world and modern, Western relatively-mainstream conceptualisation of gender (“trans women are women” etc) forces many transfems to forsake any notion of masculinity or maleness and cram themselves into a neat lil’ gender-box for the sake of survival and validation. Obviously there are many transfems for whom “woman” fits naturally, but there are just as many whose inner lives extend outside of that box but who feel scared to admit that due to those societal pressures.
I fit into the political category of trans woman, and have considered myself a girl* for a while now (and generally find being seen as a woman in public preferable to the other options), but I’m also a boy as well - one who has carried that as a part of them for years but with intense denial for fear that it would invalidate me in people’s eyes or make life harder, one who considers their childhood to have been a boyhood albeit one that has an element of gender-weird queerness to it - and to deny that would, for me, be forsaking a part of myself and my history.
I like my voice, untrained and “male” as it might be, and after a decade of wanting to feminise it I’m no longer willing to deny it as a part of me, but I also love dresses and femininity and being read as a woman. I love how femininity and masculinity both inform my sexuality, sometimes at the same time as each other. I love that I have so much more history than one or the other, that all this can exist in beautiful synchronicity, and I’m excited to grow more comfortable with embracing this in my own time, at my own pace.