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.
*the downvote makes me think someone read this as like an angry or defensive response or something "like what even IS femininity" but actually this comment is just attempting to explain ideas and feelings i am confused about and discuss the train of thought that has let me to where i am over the course of my life. If the downvote is instead someone feeling upset by anything i said in here, then please tell me what upset you, help me understand your felings, and if it's a terminology thing tell me how to fix it.
**edited to make some wordings a little more precise
i'm not sure i even understand what femininity is
i think i have a developed enough view to see it as something other than "vulnerability" or "wanting to be fucked" or some categorical thing like "whatever cishet men are told not to feel but cishet women are allowed to feel." inevitably there's a lot of patriarchal baggage hanging around in my head, but i think i've made decent progress sifting through some of it and processing it. i don't really feel like i understand anything yet, and maybe i never will, but i can at least say that i'm always introspecting about it and striving to become incrementally less patriarchal and cisheteronormative.
i find it really hard to explain what it is in me that feels "feminine" to me, or why it feels feminine, let alone judge whether this perception matches some broader definition of femininity that other people experience. but on some gut emotional level, i feel feminine. i also feel masculine. being male is "just ok" to me but imagining myself as female is also "just ok" to me, which is actually very frustrating because i really struggle to imagine any way of being that wouldn't be "just ok." one of the reasons i wrote this post was to attempt to make progress figuring that out.
i think maybe i'm non-binary, which in itself is not a very specific epiphany and doesn't really offer me much relief, but it's a starting place.
sometimes i want to be a woman, and sometimes i feel like a swingin' dick dude walking around doing dick things and living a dick life,. sometimes i feel like i want to be a ghost who slips in and out of other people's bodies and lives, and experiences their existences and their relationships with others, and then slips out again, rather than live my own life and form my own relationships.
tbh i wish i was a shapeshifter and could switch my form at will
also, as to sub or switch, i feel like i'm a "switch" but that it's somehow deeper and more fundamental than a bdsm alignment (though i have no authority to speak about bdsm or what it means to anyone). i wish i could say something that makes more sense than that but, like you suggested, i think i still have a lot to think about and i'm very much "in the thick of it."
being male is "just okay" but being female is also "just okay"
:cat-vibing: big mood
welcome to the nyanbinary club, here are your complimentary cat ears and thigh highs
you can be a woman and have a dick
ah yeah sorry about the dick thing. some women have dicks. i just have this caricature of men in my head and it involves their little boy fascination with their dicks, and idk men are just funny to me and i wasn't thinking when i brought up that caricature. i didn't mean to attach unwarranted meaning to genitalia.
non-binary can very much be whatever you feel like you are
this is helpful to hear, because tbh i don't have a very good sense of the distribution of gender identities human beings have, or how weird or common mine is (amorphous and still-being-explored though it might be). like i have no idea what "non-binary" usually means, or even if there's something it usually means.
just sit down and imagine what you want to be
this has always been hard for me, because it changes, but i think that changeability is it. if i could be anything, i would legit be a shapeshifter. I like being a big strong dude sometimes, and parts of me line up with this body sometimes, and i like how safe and small and soft this body can make other people feel. but sometimes i want to be that small, soft person
i think "gender fluid" is probably a useful way to describe what i probably am
even while i've been in this thread, i've felt sometimes like a woman and sometimes like a man. i've never been as acutely aware of this switching back and forth as i've been since posting this thread and talking to you all. i think before today it was just a vague, dull confusion in the background.
when i use little diagnostic thought experiments to judge where i'm at, like "how do i feel about wearing makeup" or "does imagining myself in a woman's body feel right" my feelings legit go from "fuck yeah" to "fuck no," and it's actually kinda rapid, like on the scale of hours, sometimes even minutes.
i still feel like i'm a long ways away from knowing what to do with myself, but today felt like a big step
yeah, i'd like to hear from them
i haven't been observing myself in this way for that long. i don't know what's transient and what's inherent to me, and more generally i just don't know what to make of any of this. having some context would be nice.
i never responded to this, but thanks for talking to me. i dm'd flirty fawn and it was really helpful.
Cis people don’t “feel okay but” with their gender, they feel great about it.
Not to argue with you but I consider my self Cis male, but if some one asked me how i felt about it I think my answer would be "eh fine, I don't really care." I've always just considered my self some one who gives zero fucks about gender rolls, I paint my nails and wear dresses because i want to not because they make me feel fem. IDK maybe non binary would be a more accurate description of how I see my self, but I've always felt comfortable being male so...fuck I really don't know.
What you've written here and below sounds a hell of a lot like the self-searching I went through earlier this year. I managed to hold both the desire to be a large, strong man who works with his hands and enjoys violent play (roughhousing, hurling large objects, and yeah, sex stuff) and the desire to be a sweet, clever, captivating woman who cooks and decorates and loves flowers and flowing garments and all that. My split desire is absolutely also reflected in what I pursue in personal relationships and sexual fulfillment. I guess my breakthrough came in understanding that, in fact, my desires weren't contradictory or even really split. They weren't a mishmash of masculine and feminine identifiers, I wasn't "cross-classing" masc and femme gender expression . . . They're just my desires and my individual expression of identity, so I've moved forward just accepting that I contain multitudes and that what I like is what I like and if it changes day to day, that's just engaging in the very normal, human desire to explore all there is in the rich world of being a thing.
Maybe it sounds facile, and I'm sure this doesn't apply to everyone, but I'm just kind of at a point where I don't really worry about putting my identity or expressed or felt gender into a category defined by anyone else. There are obviously social pressures and norms I have to conform to in a lot of contexts that don't always align with what I'd like, but it's been pretty easy to find at least some space to explore facets of who I am without fear of reaction. Indeed, what was holding me back from living in a manner authentic to who I am was less external pressure and more private feelings that I had to find a "coherent" identity so that some source could explain for me how to be. This may not apply to others though, I've always been pretty comfortable code-switching and having a public/private barrier for who I was.
So to translate this into maybe a more useful insight: You don't have to define your identity before living it - to some degree I think all people are in a perpetual process of understanding and creating who they are through their experiences and behavior. For some this might consist of their relationship to religious or ethical values, how they see themselves fitting into a cooperative organism, or what it means to be sapient at all. It might also consist of learning their relationship to others and themselves through the process of finding differences and similarities between themselves and persons both distant and intimate to themselves. Having all of this mediated by constructed and gendered roles and suites of characteristics or expressions might be helpful for you to some extent or for some period of time, to give direction or constraints to refine this self-exploration, but we must be careful to understand that, like any categorization, these are just tools and sometimes-useful shorthand that can never fully explain any real thing, let alone a human being. After all of it, you're still just you.
And you are a thing that is as correct and valid as any other.
I hope some of that makes sense and that any of it is helpful.
I managed to hold both the desire to be a large, strong man who works with his hands and enjoys violent play (roughhousing, hurling large objects, and yeah, sex stuff) and the desire to be a sweet, clever, captivating woman who cooks and decorates and loves flowers and flowing garments and all that. My split desire is absolutely also reflected in what I pursue in personal relationships and sexual fulfillment. I guess my breakthrough came in understanding that, in fact, my desires weren’t contradictory or even really split. They weren’t a mishmash of masculine and feminine identifiers, I wasn’t “cross-classing” masc and femme gender expression . . . They’re just my desires and my individual expression of identity, so I’ve moved forward just accepting that I contain multitudes and that what I like is what I like and if it changes day to day, that’s just engaging in the very normal, human desire to explore all there is in the rich world of being a thing.
Yeah, i relate to this. Thanks for putting this into words.
They weren’t a mishmash of masculine and feminine identifiers, I wasn’t “cross-classing” masc and femme gender expression . . . They’re just my desires and my individual expression of identity
especially this part. This is the step i'm wrestling with right now, learning to understand myself in this way.
feelings that i had to find a "coherent" identity
i've been stuck on this for a long time, but in a way expecting biological bodies and brains to be coherent in the first place is kinda weird. it's more consistent with how i view shit to not expect any of this to make sense. we're globs of molecules that make more of ourselves lol, it's just an accident that we're here at all. there's only like 20,000 genes to encode a person with and "make most humans have coherent sexualities" is competing with a bunch of other priorities lol
to some degree i think all people are in a perpetual process of understanding and creating who they are through their experiences and behavior
i have nothing to say this was just really eloquent
tools and sometimes-useful shorthand that can never fully explain any real thing, let alone a human being
in my case it doesn't even seem that useful, in fact all these "constructed and gendered roles and suites of characteristics or expressions" are just confusing the shit out of me haha.
I hope some of that makes sense and that any of it is helpful
it was, thanks for writing it <3
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.
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
great thread y'all :Care-Comrade:
really glad we have a community where we can talk about this stuff
