I borrowed this idea from Ada, who made a great post on c/MTF about this. The discussion was very interesting and I wanted to bring it to a wider range of perspectives across the spectrum.
They mean I’m confused 🫠.
Femininity is confusing to me. I understand it conceptually, but I don’t “feel” it the way many trans fem folk seem to. It doesn’t relate to my sense of who I am, and it never played a part in my self understanding. So I don’t know what it means to me :)
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I mean, I didn’t escape that. I feel performative femininity as a pressure, but I felt that as a negative. As something I had to do, because the societal norms told me that’s what I have to do.
But that isn’t the sole experience of femininity for most trans fem folk. By and large, other trans fem folk find empowerment in it too, they want to reclaim it and express it on their own terms. They find that understanding their relationship with femininity can help them understand more about themselves…
And it’s those bits I’m really talking about. Not the external pressure of femininity, but the internal relationship we so often have with it.
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I don’t even think men know what masculinity is half the time. I’m a Dad so I think I get a free pass to make it up anyways and the only other Dads that complain seem to be the ones that are not on speaking terms with their kids.
Same boat as you pretty much. Had our son about 2 years ago and really started thinking “if I were to teach him how to be a man, what would that entail?” I couldn’t really think of anything that was a quality exclusive to men. In terms of masculinity and femininity, I think there are physical traits that I would classify as closer to one or the other, but I think the distinction from a personality standpoint is useless as a way to classify other people. At the end of the day, I’d rather teach him to be an empathetic and kind person as opposed to teaching him to be a man.
I’m a cis woman and I still don’t really know how to relate to those terms. For example, I enjoy weightlifting - both the feeling of strength and how my body looks when muscled. I don’t know whether to think of myself as a woman (who is generally quite feminine) who enjoys embodying certain masculine traits, or whether it might be low-key harmful to consider things like this “masculine”. I think the short of it is that womanhood doesn’t mean lots of femininity, nor the lack of masculinity. But then we’re back at your question, about what do those words even mean.
Something I do feel is important to say though is that my understanding of these traits and how I relate to them has been vastly enhanced by the perspectives of various trans people in my life. I’m especially appreciative of my transfeminine friends, because their joy has helped me to realise that cisgender people can experience gender euphoria.
Queer spaces in general have been essential for me in figuring out what I want out of my gender - shout out to everyone who bends gender in some way, because y’all have helped me see that man, woman, masculine, feminine — they’re not immutable categories, but terms that may or may not be useful in some situations.
They’re words that have been having less and less meaning to me over the last couple years.
To me, they’re the extremes of what society says are the inconsistent rules. I have been increasingly drawn to queerness, and the refusal to align with a single of these in favor of being one’s self.
I have been more in touch with aspects of both since transitioning. Same for shedding a lot of the toxic expectations of both. And that has only highlighted that it’s a socially enforced binary.
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Thanks very insightful, thank you! Even though you’re not trans, it sounds like you’ve faced a lot of similar treatment because of who you are.
