#masculinity

undeadcorvid:

Others have said it better and more eloquently, but the LGBT community has a massive fear and disgust of masculinity it needs to reckon with in order to be whole. Bears, transmascs, masculine enbies, AMAB enbies, butch lesbians, masc intersex folk, drag kings, and those who find themselves in some fluid space between them or are masc in ways I’ve left out - they all needsupport from the LGBT community, they all have the same traumas from being queer, and all of them  that I’ve met have some horror story about hitting the ‘must be this femme to ride’ bar.

You can be gnc andmasculine. This needs to be embraced.

Masculine people are notthe enemy. The community needs to be as ready to embrace its brothers as it is its sisters. We are all queer.

Taken from, and funded by, my Patreon. Content warning: Contains some stories of homophobia.

Well. Writing this was hard.

I began writing it in so many ways, each time knowing I had no way to finish. I meandered through mirrors and hospitals and lip balm and nudes. I had to look at myself, which I’m very tired of doing.

I did indeed say nudes. More on those soon.

I tried to separate all the ideas I had. I tried to pull them apart and I found instead that they stretched like gum. They stuck to me. They stuck to one another. They were only functional as a lumpy, gooey whole, ugly and unappealing. Wet. Endlessly chewed but never reduced.

Imperfect.

I’ll begin with the run home.

—

In my childhood memories, we lived at the bottom of a hill. That’s a more than generous romanticisation. In reality, and with some online topographic maps, it’s easy to see that there’s a seven foot incline gradually leading down the road to my house. Still, that doesn’t change my experience and perspective as a five-year-old. We lived at the bottom of a hill.

The run home was down that hill. Giddy momentum took you past rows of identical houses, the cut-and-paste postwar terraced homes that were sprawled across our town, each fronted with some oversized car from the seventies or eighties. The run home was the conclusion of the walk back from school and I always lost. It didn’t matter who I was with, how I felt or what the weather was doing. I would come last and, to my great upset, I would never understand why. I would try my hardest, feet slapping on the uneven grey pavement, but it was pointless. I was the worst person at running and I always would be.

We were encouraged to run home because there is no age too young to encourage boys to compete, much as there is no shortage of things for them to find competition in. After all, in competition there is victory, in victory there is superiority and in superiority there is one of the cornerstones of Being A Man. To Be A Man, you’ve got to demonstrate skill and mastery somewhere, in something. At the very least.

I wasn’t off to a good start.

—

I have a memory from a year or two later where I’m looking at my mother’s jewelry. I’m looking at necklaces and rings, stones in particular, because the colours are fascinating. They are rich and bright, as exciting to me as fireworks or fairy lights, and I’m going to spend all my life loving beautiful colours in art and in nature. I’m also seeing which rings fit on my tiny fingers. None do, of course, because I’m small, but I stop because my father is furious. He’s furious because he’s worried that my trying on a woman’s jewelry will make me gay. He has also been furious that we’ve been doing needlework at school. He wants that to stop so that I don’t grow up to be a gay person, except he doesn’t use the phrase “gay person.”

These lessons are obvious. The worst thing I can be, worse even than a failure, is gay.

Nobody is gay in the nineteen-eighties. They are gay on TV or in the news or somewhere far away, abstract and unreal, but in our world nobody would dare be gay. It is an insult at school, where Section 28 prevents teachers from portraying it as acceptable, and it is a source of fear, with the spread of HIV/AIDS, which nobody understands. Camp characters are comic characters. LGBTQ people aren’t pushed to the margins of society, they are driven there, where they are kept, mocked and beaten.

If you want to feel part of a group, if you want to be seen as being on the right side of things, you can always join in with some public punishment.

My best friend is gay. We run home down the hill together. I don’t know this and will not know it for many, many years, long after we lose touch. I have no idea if he knew then, or when, but many friends now tell me they knew exactly who they were attracted to at a very young age.

I wonder how he felt. What he thought. Who he talked to.

I grow up attracted to girls. I don’t have to think much about sexuality and homophobia comes easy. There is a joke we have at school. It goes like this:

“Do you have AIDS?”

You say no.

“Are you positive?”

At the end of 1991 the singer in my favourite band declares that he has AIDS and then dies as a result of complications from the disease. It is a bold and blatant declaration from a very famous figure, pioneering, and it becomes one more excuse for school bullies to attack me. I’m at a new school in a new town and I’ve gone from feeling popular in classes full of people I know to having a single friend and no sense of belonging.

It’s all getting worse there. I’m not interested in the right things, I’m not good at handling bullies, I’m not strong and I’m not a brave person. I’m really failing at being a young man but, as I’m reminded several times, at least I’m not gay.

—

There is a camera going down my throat. My throat has been numbed and an IV in my hand is giving me a mixture of fentanyl and midazolam, which keeps me partly sedated. On a screen I can’t see, a doctor is looking at the inside of my duodenum and directing biopsies of the ulcers there. Each sample he takes feels like a tiny tug inside of me. A tap in a haze, a distraction in a dream.

It will be Christmas soon. There are bears painted on the hospital wall and hints of decoration in the halls.

We already expected that I had a duodenal ulcer, that it was leaking blood inside my guts. Now we know that I have three, because my body has decided to really be a drama prince. The specialist who looks at them has told me they have been brought about by a combination of stress, by a bug inside me called h. pylori and by the painkillers I have been taking to deal with frequent migraines. The migraines are a side-effect of the blood loss, so I guess that cycle is my body’s little joke.

The time is now. We’re here, in Vancouver, in Canada. There is no hill to run down. There is a mountain I used to occasionally hike, but the last time I tried my body struggled. That was a year and a half ago. It was one of the first clues.

I don’t recommend duodenal ulcers or leaking blood inside yourself. Your red blood cell count plummets and the resulting anemia gives you those migraines, plus a lack of focus, confusion, exhaustion, chest pains, digestive issues and a heart rate that rockets when you get off the sofa. Walking one block to the shop produced a thunderous pounding behind my rib cage. I used to box. I used to jog. I used to climb that mountain no problem. Now my heart goes crazy when I climb out of a chair.

I also don’t recommend h. pylori. Those ulcers cause me incredible pain when I eat or, sometimes, when I don’t. Curiously, I had some of the same symptoms of h. pylori back when I was a teenager, but they were never investigated. That’s in part because the behaviour of this bug wasn’t understood then and nobody tested for it. It seems there’s still no guarantee in England you’ll be tested for it even now. People are still studying and learning about it. In 2005, two men were awarded the Nobel Prize for their research into this bug.

I was tested for it here, in Canada, because my GP was concerned. We don’t know how long I’ve had it, or how many times. In one of the first conversations I had with this man, a stranger on the other end of a telephone, he very frankly told me first that it can cause cancer, second that we must eliminate it immediately.

I don’t usually have conversations like that. I didn’t know what to think.

The camera comes back out of my mouth. It brings with it tiny pieces of my insides, which will be taken away and tested. We destroyed the h. pylori, the tests will say, and I do not have cancer.

Although this is my own body, I don’t get to see inside it right now, but I do get to review the pictures a few weeks later. Most of the insides of this thing are a mystery to me and always have been. I don’t trust it. I don’t know what it’s doing, or why. I always feel uncertain about how it might respond to instructions that I give.

I still have the pictures of my insides. I have kept them. I have returned to only being able to view the rest of this thing from the outside.

—

I look at my body from the outside now. Here. Today. You look at my body, too, and you let me know what you think of it and in so many ways. Only some are explicit.

—

The first comments I got about my weight were that it was too low. There were amounts that young men were supposed to weigh and I had failed to reach those. I was in my early teens and PE classes had progressed from simple running to the sort of elaborate things that required capital E Equipment, like football shoes with studs. The list of things I couldn’t do had grown substantially since the run home and I was laughed at for not being able to jump hurdles, which I had never practiced before.

I developed a strange, private fantasy where I told myself that, as an adult, I would top out at over six feet and touch around two hundred pounds. Those seemed like cool numbers. Good metrics. We’re all about metrics with our bodies.

I knew by then where I stood in the pecking order. I had failed a lot of the tests, evidenced by my avoiding confrontations, my disinterest in sports and sports culture, and my consistently failing to find the right sorts of women attractive. I was being a boy all wrong.

Still, it didn’t matter quite so much if I was smart, if I was getting good grades and succeeding according to some other metric. As long as I could demonstrate capability in some way, I had validity as a young man. But that validity was not going to come from my body.

—

It occurs to me now that I had such a terrible haircut then. I spent far too much of my time trying to arrange or to manage it, hoping that might make me a little more acceptable. It didn’t, it just made me vain and geeky. I would look in the mirror and see only things I needed to fix.

Maintenance. Repairs.

—

I am writing this paragraph on April twenty-first, twenty twenty-one. I have had two days of constant illness. It’s not so bad, as I can still find ways to enjoy myself when I’m unwell, but the cramps and tiredness are unpredictable. Last year I nuked my insides with antibiotics to get rid of that h. pylori, which was a resounding success, but it also destroyed a great deal of other bacteria that lives in my digestive system. My GP advised me it could be many months or more before that returned to normal. My guess is it still hasn’t, and I’ve heard of some cases taking even longer. The anti-anxiety medication I’ve been taking since the start of the year also turns my guts (and even the world) sideways. It does, however, keep the brain inside this body functioning.

This is how things are lately. Sometimes I go for a walk in the evening and have to rush home because incredible cramps ripple through my insides. Sometimes a food that I was previously happy to eat makes my guts absolutely furious. Recovery is going to take time, but I remind myself that things are improving.

I have energy again. My red blood cell count, one of those vital metrics, has been climbing. The migraines have melted away. I have gone from struggling to walk up a hill to climbing all the stairs to my apartment, just like before. It’s ridiculous to me that so much disruption came from a microscopic bug and the tiny holes it formed.

I want to exercise more, but I’m not sure it’s time. I miss being fit.

One of the medications I am on is called a proton pump inhibitor, which reduces the amount of acid my stomach creates to help my ulcers heal and to prevent them from recurring. My GP suggests I may be on these for months, years, perhaps decades. The other is a drug for anxiety and panic known as escitaloprám. I have moved up from a dosage of five milligrams to ten and then fifteen. Twenty is the highest possible.

The proton pump inhibitor makes me burp a lot. I’m a real catch these days.

I write in short bursts right now. I am not very good at it. I conclude my writing on April twenty-first, twenty twenty-one by making an admission that both shames and scares me: I came back to Canada not as the man I used to be.

—

What man was I?

—

I grew up with two older half-sisters, with their peers, with a lot of older women in my extended family and with school friends who were both girls and boys. I didn’t think much about this until, a year or two after the bullying started, when a friend asked me a question.

“How do you talk to girls?”

He couldn’t ask his father because his father had moved out. He and his mother were telling everyone it was because he needed to live closer to his job, which was what his father had said and which they then all insisted was a very normal thing for anyone to do.

His father stopped talking to his mother and instead communicated with her by leaving notes around the house.

My friend started getting many more gifts and toys. He acted out a lot.

—

I’m glad my friend at least asked this question. It has never been more apparent to me than now, in twenty twenty-one, that many people still never have.

I would always say that I didn’t know, because there was no secret, no formula or no particular method. But we were made to believe that there was and this belief, this certainty that there was some trick, caused so many problems, so much stress and so much stupidity. It also caused so much harm. One of the most unsettling shocks you can experience as an adult man is the discovery that others of your gender, people you may have felt you knew and trusted, believe they knew full well how to talk to a particular kind of person, that they have placed into a particular kind of classification, before going on to perform something that falls somewhere between disastrously offensive and outright harmful.

It’s always the men who think they know.

—

By the time my schoolfriend came to me scrying for all the formulae, passphrases and occult codewords used for communicating with girls, I had long since opted out of the run home and so much that was like it. I didn’t play football, with its capital E Equipment like shoes with studs, and beyond that I didn’t understand the shared language of it, nor the cultural exchanges that developed around it. I couldn’t tell you what a wing-back was, or a cap, or explain the offside rule. I didn’t know which teams were winning or losing. I could barely control my own winning and losing.

One of the first lessons any loser learns is that you can’t lose if you don’t play. When you stop losing, you stop being deficient. You can pretend you never really cared, feel superior and then score your own kind of victory that way, regaining superiority and a sense of control. I think this is what happens to young men and boys who feel isolated or rejected by their peers. They can claim the game is rigged, the rules are unfair, the contest is stupid.

It helps dispel some of the shame you feel when you fail to adequately physically demonstrate yourself in public, or when talking to girls, when you show others how bad you are at being a boy or, worse, a young man. It was a philosophy that I and more than a few others bought into. It became our version of shared teenage cynicism as the school changing rooms became a dangerous place, full of those impatient to grow, brimming with ambition, frustration and aggression. The easiest way to exercise any of these is to punch down and I knew where my underweight body stood in the pecking order.

I had gained more than my fair share of strangeness. I no longer fitted in. I became morose and moody, which only made me stranger and made integrating even more difficult. I was awkward, oversensitive and weird in so many ways. I was out there talking to girls. I was being a young man all wrong.

—

I am writing this paragraph on May twenty-first, twenty twenty-one. My GP has recently referred me for some more surgery. It is unrelated to anything else I will write about here, but another issue that has been present for much of my life. I’m so surprised that I’m emotional. I’m not used to having medical care this responsive. I’m not used to being listened to.

A few years ago, my GP gave a talk in London about how important Britain’s free healthcare is, how overworked the country’s GPs are, how they take on extra work for free to support their colleagues and how other nations, including Canada, are poaching them with better salaries and working conditions.

Like me, my GP is British. And he is now here, in Canada, treating me in a way he might never have been able to in England.

And here I am, getting better.

More on that recovery soon.

—

First, here follows some stories about doctors.

I first saw a doctor about those strange, lifelong issues I’ve had with my guts some time in my mid teens. This began a series of appointments across my life that mostly involved conversations without examination. The conclusion was always that nothing in particular was wrong, that perhaps I needed to change my diet. And I would change my diet, my habits or something else, because all of these professionals were an expert in this body they saw in front of them. Time would pass. The only change was in how I adapted to and mitigated all my body’s behaviours.

Time passed and some of the problems worsened, while doctors continued to tell me the same things. Sometimes I was a different weight, or living in a different place, or eating different things. Booking an appointment to speak to someone felt like an increasingly pointless exercise and I put less and less effort into seeing doctors. The last doctor I spoke to in England gave me a generic diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome after ten minutes of conversation and sent me away with a leaflet about vegetables. It was exactly what I expected.

In my late twenties I went to see a doctor about my mental health. I remember a grey day in a grey year with no money and no direction and no ability to connect well enough with those around me. I was having a terrible time, was struggling financially, was feeling isolated and certainly wasn’t the most fun person to be with. I was being morose and moody again. No, let’s be fair: Some days I was being a shit.

The doctor talked to me for a few minutes, looked at this person he saw in front of him, and told me I seemed fine.

—

I put on weight in my late teens and early twenties. I went from being the person who cycled to school every day to an accounts clerk who ate McDonald’s for lunch. Neither of those things are necessarily good or bad, but this was a change I was so unhappy with, during yet another time where I found myself becoming moody and morose. One day, a colleague called me chubby, and it was the first time I’d been described as anything but weedy or insufficient.

I remember feeling stunned. I remember feeling a lot of things. None of them were good.

I was very lucky that I transitioned into adulthood with one of the most valuable and important assets any young man could have, which was healthy male friends. They were all more reasonable than me, more patient and more intelligent, and none of them ever asked me how to talk to girls. They never made comments on my body and they didn’t put me or anyone else in any kind of pecking order.

And we didn’t hate gay people.

None of them invested in the growing male cynicism that was subtly taking root around us, that I now believe has only grown and spread to even more young men. I didn’t hold on to those feelings and I’m ashamed now that I even entertained them.

While the feelings may have long faded, decades later those friends still remain.

—

From the run home, to PE classes, to how we socialised and expressed ourselves as young adults, we new men found new ways to compete. As the eighties faded, so did an image of beer-swilling hard men in suits, replaced instead with the cocky young lads of nineties England. Lads. To these young men and boys, sometimes play was just play, but other times it became another opportunity to assert yourself, to show dominance either physically, in your skills, or with your expertise. As I got to know more boys, there were these unspoken assessments of character where you waited to see if either of you were the competitive sort. A discussion about a favourite TV show could be an arena for sparring. A session of Dungeons & Dragons was a way to show off obscure knowledge. Was what you were doing, right now, a game, a conversation, or an attempt to assert something more? Was that assertion overt, or was it subtle, buried amongst hints and inference?

And as we grew, this competitive and sometimes controlling masculine energy leaked into everything. It leaked into the workplace, into social interactions, into hobbies. Even if we didn’t participate in it ourselves, it was impossible not to be marked by it, to recognise the stains, to smell it when it was close. There it was again, in the expertise of the male customer who knew best, overruling and overreaching, or expressed by another impatient driver roaring his engine with a flex of his ankle. There it was, woven within so many of the hobbies I began to enjoy, from the misogyny that could surface in rock music to the pomposity that manifested in philosophy. “We think with our blood,” wrote the Italian fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who described all the same impulsivity and urgency in nationalism and intolerance that men brought to everything else. What’s a war, if not another way to dominate and to win?

Even in the things I most enjoyed, this masculinity barged in with its tests of knowledge, its expressions of elite opinions. As trends changed, there were new and different ways for men to be competitive, in games as well as sports, in studying as well as dating. The world has continued to morph and, now that we’re all enlightened and progressive, I recognise a new competition to be the most enlightened, the most progressive, as these men are now caught in a woke version of the Hunger Games, knocking one another aside to win some nameless coveted title as they demonstrate the best possible and most authoritative takes on feminism, race and capitalist dystopia. All impatient to grow, brimming with ambition.

If you want to feel part of that group, if you want to be seen as being on the right side of things, you can always join in with some of their public punishment.

The point now isn’t to make the world better, it’s to win at making the world better.

—

I think it was bell hooks who wrote about the first violence men enact as they police one another. We grow up as arbiters of ourselves, keeping one another in check. Not at first, and then not a lot, but gradually. We warm up. Then, we punch in every direction, which can include upwards, but also sideways and also downwards. Downwards is easiest because it both allows you to make an example of someone, but also to pick a fight that’s easy to win. And if you’re punching downwards, that man already deserved it, so swing away.

And then, after a while, that becomes how you are. And how you deal with the world.

Most targets are downward when you’re a man, particularly a straight, Western, white man, so it’s a nice and easy position to be in. The punching is rarely literal and it doesn’t have to be. It’s whatever acts are necessary to ensure perpetuate the right kind of shared culture and ideas, just like with fascism. Those who have dared to be different could be gay, or feminine, or they could be just about anything else. Perhaps it doesn’t matter because, again as with fascism, the sense of unity and brotherhood has to come at the expense of something seen as an external threat.

You could, I suppose, see it as an act of maintenance. Community maintenance. Your masculine duty to keep things in line. To reinforce the pecking order. And whenever that pecking order changes, or whenever the rules around them alter, you get on with the new reinforcement.

Often, very often, these men think that they’re being good.

—

I can’t tell you how many ways we found to punch down and to exclude others as we were growing up. I can’t tell you because I honestly can’t remember and there are likely too many to keep count. I was still able to fit in sometimes, and this was one of the ways that I could, and it could feel so natural and normal that you never thought twice about what you were doing.

One day I was cross-legged on a school chair, watching other children play, when a friend offered a challenge I had no answer to:

“Why are you sitting like a woman?”

I uncrossed my legs.

—

In my teens, I watched a documentary about the singer from my favourite band and his male partner. It featured home movies of them clowning around, drinking champagne and sharing a bath. They looked like two of the happiest and most loving men I had ever seen and I resolved then to stop the homophobic jokes. I was ashamed of what I’d done. I still am.

I don’t want to punch down. I don’t want to punch sideways. I don’t care much for public punishment. We tend to swing first and only calculate the damage much, much later. We think with our blood.

—

I don’t have a terrible haircut these days, but when I look in the mirror, it is still an act of maintenance. It’s akin to someone looking over a car. I’m searching for faults and I’m ready to make repairs. There are surprises to be on the lookout for. There is skin to check. There is new hair to be removed.

That’s why I stand there and that’s what I see. Something that always needs to be fixed. Am I policing myself?

One of my favourite compliments I ever received was from a friend helping me prepare for a nude charity photoshoot. They said I had perhaps the best maintained eyebrows they had ever seen on a man.

It was one of the few times I’d felt proud of that maintenance. Men aren’t supposed to care much about their eyebrows, so I was clearly being a man all wrong.

I don’t usually feel pride in the maintenance. I only feel that it is endlessly necessary.

Like I said before, more on those nudes soon.

—

I’d like to think that, most of the time, I am long past taking assessments of my own image and body. I have been on display to many people for a long time and they have let me know what they think and how they feel in so many ways. Only some are explicit.

Many men let me know by the space they make for me, or do not, as I walk down the street, or how they greet me when we first meet. The internet has let me know with each comment it has left, by the responses to an expression in a picture, even by suggestions that I should smile. A former colleague let me know with the statement “Now that we’re hitting the big time, we’ve got to fix your teeth.” Thanks, everyone, I sure know everything that’s wrong with me now.

I have a relationship to my body that is very similar to my relationship to my gender, which I suppose figures, as they feel inseparably intertwined. Both were given to me by other people, both have been defined by other people and both have, from the start, robbed me of a sense of agency and freedom.

And I trust neither.

Neither entirely makes sense to me, both have let me down many times and both, like many of the circumstances thrust upon us in our lives, I don’t particularly want.

As you can imagine, this poses a few problems.

My problem with not wanting a body is that this is incompatible with many (some might even say most) of the conditions of human existence, which include occupying three-dimensional space, shopping for cereals, arguing about podcasts and looking at dogs. Bodies are compulsory, but so too are our judgements about how they are presented and how they are used. We’ve made it impossible to have one without the other.

And so it is too with our genders.

My problem with not particularly wanting this gender is that I don’t want any of the other ones, either. Like a collection of poorly-cobbled shoes, none of them fit well enough and I suppose I have already worn in that which I’m using. I’m also in a very fortunate position as being a man has given me all sorts of advantages, which I have to admit I don’t want to lose. I may look sideways at my gender and I roll my eyes at so many of its conventions, but I cannot deny all its privileges. I want to keep those while losing everything else.

I don’t want to be anything else, but don’t want to be this, either.

I have a theory, but it’s ridiculous, presumptive, arrogant and untenable: Maybe very many of us are being men wrong.

—

It is June first, twenty twenty-one as I write this paragraph and I was hoping to finally finish this work today, after months of writing. Perhaps I shall. My anxiety medication has been further adjusted and I can work a little better. Recovery is going to take time, but things are improving.

It’s a warm day and I am sat in my shorts, thinking about how my body has lost both tone and stamina over the last three years. In two days I will have some minor surgery to correct another problem with it and, after a couple of weeks of recovery, my hope is that I can exercise normally again. That it can start behaving the way that it used to. That I can get back to that regular maintenance.

I’m not looking forward to the pain. I also resent the inconvenience.

When I came to Canada six years ago I began exercising more, more than I ever had in my entire life. It was thanks to Valkyrie WMAA that I began to use my body in new, healthy and exciting ways. Valkyrie is a martial arts school that has an extremely diverse student makeup and which openly appeals to the queer community. One of its coaches, Kaja Sadowski, wrote a book on better and more inclusive training techniques and we talked about some of these on a podcast recently. In an environment where I didn’t feel judgement or expectation, I was able to learn things I had never even tried before, not least because nobody expected me to clear a hurdle after never practising.

Not only did I try these things, I became better at them and, for the first time in my life, I saw my body change and improve. I was no longer doing maintenance, I was performing upgrades. I only wish I had started many years sooner.

At the very end of my first period of living in Canada, Valkyrie invited students and coaches to take part in a nude fundraising photoshoot. I joined in, got to be explicit, and I felt about as good about the results as I ever have about any photos of me. I struggle to like photos of me.

It was as we prepared that Kaja gave me that compliment about eyebrows. I was very pleased to hear that. I felt not like I was being a man all wrong, but that I was being me all right.

It seems obvious to me that the way we encourage people to view, to enjoy and to make use of their bodies is directly related to how they will feel about those bodies and how much they will want to celebrate and to take care of them. We are all of us their mirrors and, while self-help gurus can preach all they like about self-love and self-knowledge and self-identity, the self is always outnumbered.

And men, in particular, still like to be experts in the bodies they see in front of them.

—

I don’t take very many pictures of myself lately and I don’t feel great about the ones that I do. My relationship to my body right now is that of a passenger inside something which seems off-course. My brain is wonky. I must constantly add those daily doses of drugs to repair mental and physical damage done and I don’t presently have the freedom to do many of the things I used to. I don’t see the person I want to be when I look in the mirror, only the things that are wrong. I am caught inside a spindly and stalky biological machine that brings me confusion and discomfort. What is it going to do next, I wonder. I don’t feel connected to that reflection.

And I must admit I also dislike that body because, in spite of all the derision I might throw toward so much of masculinity, I am still disappointed in that body for failing to meet many masculine standards. I’m not strong and I’m not a brave person. I feel disqualified.

Yet I know I’m lucky, too. I have never suffered a serious injury, the problems I do have with my body have not stopped me enjoying so many of the things that I want to and, most of all, access to free quality healthcare is helping me so much. Here I am, in Canada, getting better, attending more medical appointments over the last year than I’ve had in the last fifteen. I get to tell my doctors what my body is doing, not the other way around.

Men, who are experts in being men, may continue to label me a man and bless me with so much of the accordant lenience and privilege. I am content to fake my way through this when it suits me, navigating their whims, picking out the best among their gender and discarding the rest. One of my greatest blessings continues to be the presence of so many good men who serve as such fine examples of what masculinity could be, with compassion and consideration, not judgement and public punishment. With them, and with people of many other genders, I get to love beautiful colours in art and in nature, to fulfill my desire to meet every animal, to play games and to gush out my overwrought emotions.

I leave men to rev their engines, to drive their oversized trucks, to corner people in kitchens at parties and explain things to them, to buy gendered water and wear lip balm that was modelled next to a knife and a gun.

Yeah, I’m definitely being a man wrong. You caught me. While I was supposed to grow up looking down on feminine values, I don’t find myself frustrated, disappointed or even disgusted by those in the way I am by so many masculine ones.

And so I find myself adrift. I feel both that I am a man and that I am not. That I’m participating in some kind of illusion. I’ve pulled a trick on you all and I’m so sorry. My true gender is Fraud.

—

I am finishing this on June second. I will go to hospital tomorrow and take another step toward getting better. In a medical context, everything about me will define me as a man and this is fine, I guess, because all I can do is shrug and fail to suggest anything better.

I look forward to not only getting better again, but to feeling better about myself again.

In time, I did end up learning about football, and all its capital E Equipment, capital R Rules and capital T Tactics. I found my own way to enjoy it, most of all for its teamwork, and I like to watch the women’s tournaments. Sometimes I also like old cars or war movies or well-fitted suits. But those suits are for everyone.

Sometimes I think about the run home. And everything else around it, including what we encourage our children to be and what secrets this forces them to keep.

I find homogeneity uncomfortable. I try to appreciate variety and learn about things that are different. I am sceptical about what we are made to believe and more interested in what we can discover for ourselves. I’m still not strong or brave, but I try to push myself and not worry about embarrassment or vulnerability. Or imperfection. I don’t claim to have all the answers. I don’t really have any.

Sorry about that. I hope you didn’t expect to get to the end of this and find all the tricks to gender and to good health and to Being A Man, the secret, the formula, the particular method. The last few years have only left me more alienated from both my gender and my body. Is it possible, alongside an out-of-body experience, to have an out-of-gender one also?

I’ll be sure to let you know, though, when I’ve worked out quite who or what I am.

Thank you for reading.

Listen, I’m 22 years old.. 23 in December and I’ve been open with my friends about my gender identity since I was 16. I’m a trans man, that uses he/him pronouns only.

I spent so long getting comfortable with my gender identity that my sexuality was pushed to the wayside. I didn’t figure out I was solely MLM until I was one and a half years into a relationship with my now best friend. Our friends had shipped us together in school and we both thought like we /had/ to be together, which in turn confused both of us. I’m happily MLM and in 2018 a year after we broke up she told me she’d solely WLW. Shipping real people isn’t a good idea but that’s not the point of this post.

The point of my post is that it’s taken me a very long time to wrestle with what I’m comfortable with gender wise as a man. And I’m at the point where I’m comfortable with myself, (other than the fact I’m not on T and I haven’t had too surgery but those are future plans bc unsafe environment atm). I like flamboyant 70’s fashion and how my mullet looks after I put my hair in rollers. My hair, is at the longest length it’s been since I had it all cut off when I was 16.

The point here is that if any younger transmascs are struggling with figuring out ‘what they’re allowed to do in order to be a man’ I just want to point out that you can do whatever you damn well please. You’re your own man. If you want to wear a skirt, you go ahead and fucking rock that skirt. If you want to wear make up, do the best damn eye shadow the world has seen. If you want to wear pastel colours and flower crowns don’t let anyone stop you, serve us a complete look. I used to feel guilty about buying Lush products and taking bubble baths, but let me tell you now that shit is delightful and if I had endless amounts of money it would be a daily occurrence. So, if you want to take a bubble bath, take that damn bubble bath!

I’m telling all the transmasc kids this because I wish someone had told me when I was younger that doing certain things doesn’t make me any less of a man. If I can stop some kiddos thinking it’s wrong to like what they like because they’re supposed to be a man, then I’m gonna try.

Take this as a message from your Internet big bro ✌

theothersarshi:

hasufin:

cookie-sheet-toboggan:

skaldish:

skaldish:

skaldish:

skaldish:

skaldish:

Still bothered by the US cultural idea that men can only be non-romantically intimate with one another in war-like or competitive circumstances.

I’m pretty quiet about the fact I’m a transman usually, but holy shit I need to tell you about the culture shock I’m going through because it’s blindsidingme.

There’s a huge sense of social isolation that comes with being perceived as male, because now people are subconsciously treating me as a potential predator. Allstrangers, no matter their gender, keep their guard up around me.

It made me realize that there is no inherent camaraderie in male socialization as there is in female socialization—unless, of course, it’s in very specific environments. And the fact I don’t amnbiently experience this mutual kinship in basic exchanges anymore is an insanely lonely feeling.

You know how badly this would have fucked my mind up if I had grown up with this?

It is 4:30am and I’m mourning the loss of a privilege I didn’t even know I had.

Anyway, I’m going to figure out how to navigate this. Don’t know how yet, but I’m gonna.

Absolutely, because it’s an extremely sticky issue.

Frankly, this is something I would’ve never understood without living the experience.

It’s now blatantly clear to me that most cis men probably experience chronic emotional malnutrition.They’re deprived of social connection just enough for it to seriously fuck with their psyches, but not enough for them to realize that it’s happening and what’s causing it.

It’s like they’re starving, but don’t know this because they’ve always been served 3 meals…except those meals have never been big enough.

This deprivation comes from all sides of aisle, by the way.

In the case of women: When I’m out in public and interact with women, all of them come off as incredibly aloof, cold, and mirthless. I have never experienced this before even though I know exactly what this composure is—the armor that keeps away creepy-ass men.

As someone who used to wear it myself, I know this armor is 100% impersonal. Nobody likes wearing it, and I can say with absolute certainty that women would dump the armor in favor of unconditional companionship with men if doing this didn’t run the risk of actual assault. (Trust me when I say women aren’t just being needlessly guarded.)

But I only have a complete understanding of this context because I’ve experienced female socialization. If I hadn’t, I would’ve thought this coldness was a conspiracy against me devised by roughly half of the human population. Even now, with all that I know about navigating the world as a woman, I’m failing to convince my monkey-brain that this armor isn’t social rejection.

And as for male socialization? Again, it seems taboo for a man to be platonically intimate with men for reasons I have yet to fully understand, but I think it boils down to a) the fact society teaches boys that it’s not okay to be soft with each other, and b) garden-variety homophobia. Our media only shows men being intimate with one another when they’re teamed up against a dire situation, and I’d bet real money it’s a huge reason why men gravitate toward activities that simulate being teamed up against an opposing force.

But men are not machines of war. Yes, testosterone absolutely gives you Dumb Bastard Brain, but that just makes you want to skateboard a wagon down a hill or duct-tape your friend to the wall, not kill someone.

The human species looks so much colder standing from this side.

I can see how men might convince themselves that their feelings of emotional desperation is personal weakness as opposed to a symptom they’re all experiencing from White Imperialism. Because this human connection, this frith, is as essential for our wellbeing as water is.

So sick. How sick. I want to destroy this garbage.

ContraPoints talks about this in her “Men” video, if anyone’s interested

So, there’s a lot to go into, and… look, I don’t have the time even if I did have the skill.

A thing I’d like to start with is, every single time I see a product marketed to men, I see a huge number of people deriding it for toxic masculinity. As if the idea of a laundry detergent that isn’t floral-scented is a threat to femininity; as if yogurt is dangerous (I mean, okay, I’m lactose-intolerant so it is for me). Or, gods - sometimes I carry a bag around - tablet computer won’t fit in a pocket, you know? And some joker just has to call it a “murse”. Because “bag” has too many syllables, I guess.

A lot of it comes to, yes, gender is generally a part of our identity. Maybe these are just cultural, maybe they aren’t - they’re inextricable from us as individuals anyway. And, well, there aren’t very many safe spaces for masculinity. At least, not, y’know, the non-toxic type that is supposedly desirable. Your options are kinda… cultivated coldness or aggressive mockery. (And no, before anyone starts I’m not saying this is the SAME THING or on the same axis as physical assault; but it sure as hell isn’t going to encourage emotional openness). If your immediate response to overt but harmless masculinity is derision or annoyance, consider closely the alternatives: I assure you that it will not turn men into women.

Which, well, pretty much agrees with what she said above, or at least doesn’t disagree. (It, um, does bother me that an awful lot of the male experience gets ignored until a trans person says it, which ties pretty well into the “invisible or threat” issue, but that’s a topic for another time.) Anyway, Point is, there needs to be space for, and acknowledgement of, non-toxic masculinity. The knee-jerk response to overt masculinity has to stop. We need to find - and allow - men to be comfortable in their gender identity. If they’re not, they’re not going to abandon their gender, but they will seek spaces where they’re made comfortable. Which, as we’ve seen, can certainly lead down some awful paths.

Just and addition: nobody is responsible for how stuff is marketed towards them. If you see something like a shower gel saying “washes away dirt, leaves manliness intact”, as if washing normally scrubbed away manliness (lol), that’s on the marketing department. It doesn’t mean the actual customers think that, any more than I think that I’m going to make cows happy by buying a certain type of chocolate.

Feel like this is kind of fitting:

The solution to an oppressive system that puts people into pink and blue boxes is not to create more boxes. The solution is to tear down the boxes altogether.

- Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, Gender is not a spectrum

Western culture is founded on the notion of sexual difference: the idea that there is an essential difference between men and women, expressed in the behaviors of masculinity and femininity and their attendant practices. It is so dominant and all pervasive, that the idea that women can positively “choose” the practices which express this difference makes little sense. 

-  Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny

intoxicating-masculinity:

Grrrrrrr. Da thickness!

Instagram: Rod_FLL

Instagram: Rod_FLL

Instagram: Rod_FLL

Instagram: rod_fll

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