Bex Talks Sex Starting the Conversation
Nearly one year ago, on May 30th, 2017, I took my first shot of Testosterone, it was the beginning of my medical transition, though not the beginning of my complicated relationship with my gender. To celebrate my one year on HRT I’m going to be sharing a different post each week of May detailing the ways my identities, body, mental health, and sexuality have evolved over the past year, with the help of the testosterone and independent of it.
When I went to my first appointment at the trans health clinic, everything moved so fast. I was hesitant still, unsure of what I really wanted, and mostly interested in getting information, but by the end of the appointment my doctor was telling me that I could have the hormones in my hand within the week.1 I’m not great about change, and changing something so core to me was terrifying but I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the way the world saw me and I knew something needed to change. I craved androgyny, I liked the idea of people wondering about my gender and not knowing quite how to categorize me, looking back, androgyny would have never worked well for me. I think I viewed androgyny as a way of keeping the body I’ve lived in for over two decades, or at least staying close to it, and still not being called a girl.
Now that I’ve been on T for a year, I’ve been identifying in a more binary identity as a man and I’m increasingly less comfortable with people questioning my gender, the way they do when I present more androgynous. I’m using he/him pronouns, and masculine coded nouns and adjectives, and in most straight spaces I don’t bother to explain the nuance of my gender. When my transness was new, I was willing to engage in a lot more education that I am willing to do now, it’s only a year in, and I’m tired, and saying I’m a boy is simpler, but gender is never simple. I expect to always play with and subvert gender, but I’ve learned through socially transitioning that I feel most comfortable by doing that through a masculine framework.
What evolved the most over the past year was less my understanding of my own gender and more my understanding of masculinity as a whole. In the past masculinity always felt familiar to me I was always a “tomboy” or considered butch but what I didn’t realize was that I had only inhabited masculinity as a woman, and was taught (not entirely wrongly) to see the ways in which masculinity is harmful to women, the ways that it’s a threat. As part of my social and medical transition I’ve been given a new perspective of masculinity, and I’ve been able to recognize more nuance. While toxic masculinity is real and dangerous,2 not all masculinity is toxic and there are as many ways to be a man as there are to be a woman. I’m learning to build my version of masculinity and to integrate into it the pieces of me that I thought I had to let go of to be a man.
I thought that if I wanted to be a boy I’d need to get rid of my flamboyance and enthusiasm in exchange for stoicism and composure. It took me months to recognize that there are plenty of men who will bounce around to their favorite music, love hugs, and talk with their hands. I’m a boy when I wear my leather and flannel as much as I’m a boy when I wear my booty shorts and a crop top. I don’t need to sacrifice the pieces of femininity that I connected with, I can be a boy who does many of the same things.
I always understood, theoretically, the importance of representation, but as a young white girl, seeing myself represented in media was never really a struggle for me. Now that I’m crafting an image of masculinity nearly from scratch, media has been key in showing me all of the ways masculinity can look. When I watched Queer Eye for the first time I cried… well I cried a bunch, but one of the many things that made me cry was seeing all of the different ways gay men can look and act and recognizing myself in that. When I watch Supernatural I relate to Dean’s deflective humor, but I see all of the ways his stoicism hurts him. When I see Jack Harkness I see a model of how to flirt directly without making people feel unsafe. When I see Brendon Urie’s flamboyance and dramatic showmanship I’m reminded that those aren’t traits attributed exclusively to womanhood.
That said, there’s also the reality that when I’m trying my hardest to pass,3 for my own safety and comfort, there are plenty of things I realistically cannot do. I have to enforce these standards of traditional masculinity more than most cis men need to, just to have my gender recognized and respected. Brightly colored lipsticks? Over dramatic lip syncing? Coy, sultry flirting? Nah, boys don’t wear that, boys don’t do that, boys are charming and aggressive. If I’m lucky I get gendered correctly about 45% of the time, a way better number than before, but still low enough that I’m left stifling parts of myself to gain even a point in my favor and aching for the day when I don’t have to.
Transitioning is puberty 2.0.
I heard it all the time, and I still do, but I truly wasn’t prepared for how true it was until I started HRT for myself. Yea, sure, there’s the obvious ways in which my body is and will continue to change in similar ways to how a body that naturally produces these levels of testosterone would have, but there’s more to it than that. Like many teenagers, I went through an ugly duckling phase – acne popped up in new places, I started growing hair in new places, and I had NO IDEA how to style my hair and clothes. Some of that has changed, I have a cool acne creme from Lush, I own a razor, but I still have no idea what to do with my clothes. I’m sure I’ll get there.
What was harder for me was the social aspects of puberty. Just as 14 year old me was learning how to be an adult, 26 year old me is learning how to be a man. I have to learn how to engage and maintain friendships with other men as a man and I have to lean what it means to flirt and date as a bi dude – an experience that is entirely different from dating as a queer woman. I feel awkward and unsure all the time and I’m learning to navigate the world in an entirely new way, and that’s hard, but just like my first puberty, this one will end, hopefully with a clearer understanding of the man I want to be.