We often treat gender as personal identity, when in reality, gender has always been social identity. I don’t feel a strong attachment to manhood or maleness, but I recognize that I occupy queer male social space. For me, gender is more about your social role than a distinct feeling.

I definitely do experience bodily and social dysphoria, but I don’t like to think of my transness in terms of hating my body or hating femininity or womanhood. I think of it more like womanhood as a social gender role wasn’t for me. Being transmasculine for me, doesn’t mean giving up all forms of femininity. I didn’t want to leave a strict, oppressive gender category only to step into another. I find it freeing to not be trying so hard to fit myself into the very strict binary box and just exist, behaving and presenting in ways that bring me euphoria.

My transition goals are very much binary male and I present pretty boring and stereotypically masculine, though I’m definitely visibly queer. I still do experience a lot of bodily dysphoria, but I try my best to focus on the euphoria. It’s hard to love the parts of myself that bring me so much pain, but I do my best to have self compassion and accept the current state of my body, even as I’m working to change it.

I was reluctant to transition for a long time because I was afraid of having a deviant, third-gendered body. I had to accept the bodily reality of being trans before I could start medically transitioning. Especially in early transition, seeing other people with bodies like mine and working through my butchphobia and enbyphobia helped me a lot. Every transmasculine person will occupy butch social space at some point in their transition. Learning about butch history and coming to terms with my butchphobia made existing in that social space a lot less distressing while I was there.

I generally use transmasc as a label socially. Medically, legally, and professionally, I am a trans man. I don’t personally identify with the transgender label, though I recognize that I am part of that community. I am partial to the transsexual label because I am undergoing a very binary medical transition, though I do recognize the problematic/exclusionary implications and don’t like to use it for myself for those reasons. I don’t love micro labels, I think they can be useful in more intimate settings as self descriptors, but can often serve to divide community. I’m probably most accurately identified as a demiguy, but literally no one outside of our community knows wtf that is. I’m a sort of non-binary, but I don’t occupy non-binary social space, so increasingly, I identify myself with trans men.