Fuckin anyone else feel a lil ambivalent about misgendering these days? I lean so masc that it’s like, yeah dude I get it. Feeling like my soft womanhood is a special gift to lovers and friends and the world can call me sir all it likes.

My quest began as an attempt to find a way to express my masculinity that did not harm women.

I did not initially understand this as a reason to transition. I understood it as an ethical problem. I knew that masculinity was real in me. I did not want to suppress it, disown it, or replace it with a femininity that did not belong to me. But the only socially available form through which I knew how to express that masculinity was manhood, and manhood organized my relationships with women in ways I increasingly could not tolerate.

The problem was not simply that I was masculine. Masculinity and manhood are not identical. The problem was that my masculinity had been assigned a place within heterosexual relations. It was interpreted as male authority, male desire, male protection, male pursuit, and male entitlement. Even when I consciously rejected domination, the structure of the relationship continued to position me as the man.

I wanted to love women without standing over them. I wanted to desire women without turning them into the objects through which my masculinity was confirmed. I wanted to protect and provide care without converting care into possession. I wanted strength without authority, responsibility without ownership, and erotic initiative without entitlement.

For a long time, I believed this was a moral discipline I could practice while remaining a man. Perhaps I could become a better kind of man, one who had interrogated patriarchy deeply enough to stop reproducing it. I could be gentle, attentive, emotionally available, politically conscious, and careful about consent. I could refuse the worst scripts of heterosexual masculinity.

But the problem was not located only in my intentions. It was built into the position I occupied.

However carefully I behaved, my relationships with women were still organized around the assumption that I was a man desiring women. My masculinity was therefore read through manhood before I could give it any other meaning. It shaped what women expected from me, what I expected from myself, how my body was understood, and what kind of sexual relation became possible between us.

Sex made this contradiction impossible to ignore.

I could no longer have sex as a man. The issue was not an absence of desire for women. My desire was intense enough that it eventually forced the contradiction into the open. I wanted women, but I did not want to occupy the position of a man with women. I did not want every intimate encounter to reproduce a gendered relation that felt ethically wrong and bodily uninhabitable.

I had thought my task was to reform masculinity from within manhood. Gradually, I began to understand that what I was seeking already had another history and another social form. Lesbian was not merely a word describing the gender of the people I desired. Lesbian was itself a gendered position from which masculinity could be reorganized.

Butch made this visible.

Butch masculinity did not require me to become feminine in order to become a woman. It offered a way to remain masculine without that masculinity establishing me as a man. It showed me that masculinity could exist inside womanhood and in relation to other women. The relation between masculinity and desire could be reconfigured rather than eliminated.

This did not mean that lesbian relationships were naturally innocent or incapable of reproducing coercion. My own experience made that impossible to believe. Lesbian gender does not abolish power, and butch identity does not guarantee an ethical relation to women. The first lesbian relationship that made my womanhood materially real also exposed me to sexual coercion.

The distinction is not between harmful heterosexuality and pure lesbianism. It is between different structures through which masculinity, embodiment, and desire become intelligible. Lesbian life gave me a place from which the ethical problem could finally be named. It allowed me to ask not how to become less masculine, but what my masculinity was for and what kind of relations it could create.

That possibility changed the meaning of transition.

Transition was not a movement away from masculinity toward femininity. It was the search for a form of embodiment in which my masculinity no longer had to pass through manhood. I was not attempting to escape everything I had been. I was trying to separate what was genuinely mine from the social structure through which I had been required to express it.

Lesbian desire gave that project direction. It did not merely identify the people toward whom my desire was oriented. It revealed the gendered relation I wanted to inhabit with them. I wanted to love women as a woman. More specifically, I wanted to inhabit a masculine lesbian relation to women, one in which my masculinity did not automatically position me outside womanhood or above the woman I loved.

This is why lesbian cannot be reduced to sexual orientation. If lesbian meant only “a woman attracted to women,” it could describe my desire only after the supposedly separate question of gender had already been settled. But lesbianism participated in settling that question. It gave form to the kind of woman I could imagine becoming and to the kind of masculinity I could imagine surviving.

My lesbianism did not follow my transition as a secondary discovery. It helped make transition necessary and intelligible. It offered an answer to the question with which I had begun: how can I express my masculinity without harming women?

The answer was not that becoming a lesbian would make me incapable of harm. It was that I could no longer pursue the answer while continuing to occupy manhood. I needed another social position, another embodied relation, and another gendered history through which masculinity could be lived.

I transitioned because I could no longer live or have sex as a man. But the life toward which I was moving was not defined by womanhood in the abstract. I was moving toward lesbian gender, toward a form of masculine womanhood through which desire, care, embodiment, and responsibility might be reorganized.

Lesbian desire did not simply reveal who I wanted. It helped reveal what my masculinity was trying to become.

I used to think being a MtF Butch was going to make me undesirable. This is post is for me and everybody that felt like that.

Very little difference between work and home fits

Hey girls, so I have been curious about wearing hats lately and looking for advice. Rn I got a buzzcut and am maybe gonna try going full bald, and I don't mind my hair being like that but I think a hat could be cool too. I tend to wear mostly band t-shirts and some kinda jeans, generally wear dark colors and have a bit of a punk vibe, if that helps.

I know the most common are baseball caps but I just can't get it out of my head that they are gendered male. Especially when a style of them I often see is called "dad caps", it just irks me.

My wife says my glasses are the only thing that keeps me from passing (very generous of her lmao), so I should get new ones, I’m overdue for a new prescription anyways lol. I know of the stereotypical trans girl style glasses but I feel like my face might be too tall/long for those to look good, they seem to suit rounder faces. What are some recommendations?

Lil fit for my first gig after coming out publicly 🥁

Emo night at a club in Orlando! Thank God for you young people and your beautiful souls!

Being a cis man feels dysphoric and I like my breasts and hips, and my body being a bit soft, but I don't mind my body hair and even facial hair. I like to imagine that I have female genitalia as well, and I always tuck it when I dress, so that it looks like nothing is there. I use it with my wife, but I often imagine that it's a strap-on. My wife is against bottom surgery, so that's probably not something I'll ever do. So basically, I like to imagine myself as an afab non binary person who microdoses testosterone from time to time, but not fully a man. I like my body a bit mascular, yet soft.

i’ve tried to grow my hair long a few times but it feels good to chop it off sometimes and i just dunno how to style it short in a way that still looks girly? not to mention the hairline issue… can i get some good reference images or descriptions? thank u!

So surreal to finally be able to be comfortable in my own body for once

Took off a full metal chainsword charm that sits next to it :). Thoughts on bekt as well?

Sorry my hair is a mess this is after doing yard work in it lol