Escaping Masculinity
By Anonymous
I learned to associate everything negative in this world with men and masculinity. Women were associated with love, peace, and safety, while men were associated with hatred, war, and violence of every kind.
Unlike my father and his father before him, I learned about feminism at a young age. I had absorbed the idea that “women can be anything,” but I never really believed that men could be anything. Mostly, I was given a lot of messages about what men couldn’t be. Be tough, don’t be girly. Don’t let them see your weakness.
I dressed myself in a very limited range of colors. Blues, grays, earth tones—these colors are acceptable for a man. It seems to me now that this muted color palette reflects the limited emotional palette that men are allowed in our culture.
When I was in the eighth grade, there was a certain group of girls at my school who were friends, and I saw how close they were with each other. I saw the physical affection that they showed each other. I assumed that they were lesbian or bisexual. They were my image of intimacy, of pure love, and vulnerability, free from the pressures of masculinity and the demands and judgments placed on boys and men. I decided at that moment that I wanted to be like them. No, not just like them—I wanted to be them.
Because “women can be anything,” right? If I were a woman, I reasoned, I would get to keep everything that I valued about myself—my intelligence, my creativity, my vulnerability—while letting go of the social restrictions placed on me.
I think that much has been written about females who take testosterone in order to try to escape the harsh demands and expectations placed on women in a patriarchal society. Much less attention is paid to males who take estrogen for the same reasons. It is commonly assumed that males who transition are different from females who transition, and there is much less sympathy for them when they detransition.
I “opted out” of the male gender role, only to find myself confined by the patriarchy in different ways. Instead of feeling the male social pressure to achieve in a certain way, I found myself feeling pressured to look a certain way, to perform femininity in certain ways. I thought that it would help me be my “true self,” but I came to see that my new gender was just another costume, just another performance. I came to see that in spite of my changed appearance, I was still the same person underneath it all—still the same sad, scared, effeminate boy that I had been from the beginning. I was able to get a kind of love, acceptance, and closeness during my transition, but it seemed to me that that love was based on a lie—the lie that I was female. I could not trade honesty for love. I had to accept the truth that I was, and always would be, male.
There is a lot of handwringing and speculation about people’s reasons for transitioning, but I suspect that the reasons are never really as complicated as people make them out to be. People are motivated to transition for the same reasons that anybody does anything—the desire for love, a sense of personal identity, acceptance, belonging, security, a place in the world. I learned the hard way that the hope for a better life on the other side of transition was a lie.
Now I don’t know what to believe about the remaining people in my life who medically transition. I find myself thinking, Is she the rare person who actually seems to benefit from transition? Or will she wake up one day and realize that she was sold a false promise? Either way, I try to have compassion for the trans-identified people in my life and remind myself that I am not so different from them. I want to believe that we are all doing the best that we can to find peace and serenity in this world.
Photo by 🇻🇪 Jose G. Ortega Castro 🇲🇽 on Unsplash