i'm AMAB, and i look and dress masc - im tall, kinda broad, i have conventionally handsome features - and i feel ok presenting masc (tho when i try to imagine the body and appearance that most suits me i see someone tall but much more slender, long-necked, with much more androgynous facial features, i guess kinda elfin) - but internally i'm very soft and sensitive and i have a subby side, and i get that "feeling of wanting to be fucked" sometimes (though the thought of literally being penetrated makes me squeamish), and idk what to do with it sometimes. tbh it's fluid whether i get the "wanting to be fucked" or "wanting to fuck" feeling.

i've fooled around with both boys and girls, but i find that the people i'm most attracted to romantically are lesbians (which is unfortunate lol), because i'm attracted to their attraction to women because it seems to fit aspects of myself that feel femme and want to be the subject of that kind of attraction, while physically i'm attracted to women's bodies more than men's (though i'm attracted to both (though until shown otherwise i tend to subconsciously view cishet men as inherently reactionary and it's a turnoff lol))

as confused as this all might sound, even getting to this level of insight has been difficult because all these aspects of myself are kinda fluid, and i basically have to shoot for the average when i describe myself lol. at one end of the range i inhabit, i almost feel like your garden variety cishet man. at another end i feel straight up dysphoric and start to wonder if i'm trans. (it's a multidimensional range, there's more than two ends)

anyway i don't know what the fuck to do with myself lol

when i've fooled around with boys i've usually been the one pursued, and then i almost feel like i'm in a woman's position in a cishet romance ( or what i imagine that position to be), having to dictate the pace of things, control how close the man gets and how fast, etc, while they're pulled along by their physical attraction to me - though in the end they still expect me to be the dominant one lol. when i've fooled around with girls, tbh even then i've usually been the one pursued, but girls pursue me because they're interested in being pursued by me, it's less of that aggressive attraction to my body and more wanting their smaller body to be enveloped by mine.

(maybe my outward personality is more dominant than i realize, or maybe people project it onto me because of my appearance. if my personality is more dominant than i realize, then maybe i feel subconsciously pressured to conform to my physical appearance because some part of me senses that people expect someone who looks like me to be trying to be dominant (at least in some sense of dominance), and that therefore if i am not dominant it is because i am not able to be dominant, maybe because i am somehow not smart enough or whatever patriarchal bullshit people have in mind. maybe a little of both - both projection onto my appearance and me feeling pressured to conform to the projection. i don't know, i don't yet have that kind of self insight, or if i do it's too buried for me to feel ok digging it up and posting it.)

even though i'm a soft and sensitive person on the inside, and sometimes i'm subby, and sometimes i have this feeling of wanting to be fucked, other parts of my personality - i guess the parts that are attracting all these people who want to be dominated by me - must be tugging in opposite directions, because no matter what direction i try to act on my sexuality in i feel unnatural and false. i think i need a more developed, better-integrated self concept, and more functional self-awareness in the moment, so i can view myself as a complex being possessing these multiple contradictions instead of trying to fit myself into one box or another.

sorry if i've misused terms in here anywhere, especially if by doing so i have made anyone feel invalidated or unseen. i'm kinda new to the nuances of transenby terminology.

  • wantonviolins [they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I feel like I could have written the OP and several of the replies here. It’s good to know I’m not the only person struggling with identity and expression and having to sort through what we’ve been told are contradictory impulses and desires. It wasn’t until very recently that I took a look at the litany of jokes made by/about me (“You’re the only male lesbian I know”, etc.), the trans memes I identified with (“egg wardrobe: everything you own is floral print or gray and baggy, no inbetween”), my dissatisfaction with how I present and am perceived (and my inability to imagine how I would like to present or be perceived as) and the extreme fluctuations in what I am attracted to at any given moment and realized that I might not be cis. I’ve known I wasn’t het for a long time, but I rarely bother to correct anyone’s assumptions about that because life as a cishet male is extremely easy and I don’t like revealing personal details to anyone but my absolute closest friends. I give a fake name at Taco Bell, why would I tell anyone my actual sexuality?

    The shapeshifter comment really hit home, though. Let me be everything. One day we’ll have something like that with VR, trying on dozens of different bodies, features, and styles until we find the one(s) that fit and feel fulfilling. Won’t be perfect but the Proteus Effect is a hell of a thing.

    • no_cumsky [he/him,any]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      some day, if the human race survives long enough, we'll all be shapeshifting transhumans. imagining stuff like that makes me want to fight harder for the future lol