hey beehaw team :) this is partly advice seeking and partly just wanting to share my experience and hopefully hear how others feel about he topic. i’m not sure if this is the right community for this either, but hopefully it is!

i’m a cis woman who’s always been a fair bit interested in both femininity and androgyny for my hair and clothing, but lately i’ve been feeling more of a pull than usual to present in a more masculine/butch leaning way. to the point where i’m even considering trying out binding, which i’ve never really thought about before.

i’m a bit conflicted though about all of this, because i do know i have some internalized misogyny regarding femininity being inferior to masculinity. i’m having difficulty telling if i’d like to present more masc because i think femininity is stupid/not cool, or if it’s something i actually want.

does anyone have any advice/thoughts to share about this? i don’t really have anyone irl i can talk to about this, so any input would be really appreciated <3

to be clear, i am not questioning my gender here. i like and use she/her pronouns and am not interested in any others.

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[–] hoyland 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Read Halberstam's Female Masculinity. He literally handwaves me out of existence in the introduction because I both break the book's thesis and the trans chapter (which you should skip, to be honest--I normally tell people who might be questioning their gender to skip it, but everyone should just skip it), but it's the only thing I've ever read that fit my experience into a larger arc of history.

You'd be hard pressed to find someone who'd tell you they mistook internalized misogyny for being butch or transmasculine. It's not really something that happens. However, we've probably all worried about it or been told that explicitly. The very reason reading Female Masculinity was so powerful for me was because society doesn't acknowledge masculinity in afab people of any gender, which also kind of rules out the internalised misogyny take--the fact that sexism often targets women for being "too" feminine doesn't mean that masculinity is rewarded--you just get hit differently.

[–] thumbtack 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

thank you for the rec, ik look into it!

The very reason reading Female Masculinity was so powerful for me was because society doesn’t acknowledge masculinity in afab people of any gender, which also kind of rules out the internalised misogyny take–the fact that sexism often targets women for being “too” feminine doesn’t mean that masculinity is rewarded–you just get hit differently

do you think you could clarify what you mean by this for me? i would have figured that masculinity gets rewarded in women, is that not the case?

[–] hoyland 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, let me take another attempt at that thought. I think it's still only half-formed.

All this comes with the caveat that I am not a reliable reporter of women's experiences--I functionally was never an adult woman. You're "rewarded" in the sense that there is sexism you get to bypass--I've never been catcalled, for example. You can get a certain ease of access in male-dominated spaces--I had a friend (who, for context, did not know I was identifying as trans at this point.) tell me how acutely exposed she felt when she wore a skirt in one of our courses and followed it up with "but of course it's different for you"--even if I was notionally the other woman in the course, I didn't stand out visually.

But conversely, what is panic about trans people in bathrooms actually about? Policing women's genders, whether they're cis or trans. People keep going "omg, I'm cis and got challenged in a public restroom" and it's like... duh, ask a butch about that. What's mildly interesting about this round of trans panic is that they're going after gender-conforming women.

There are all sorts of social norms that demand a certain level of gender conformity from women. Think about weddings--you certainly can get married wearing whatever you want, but there's sure as hell social pressure to wear a white dress. I have this deep appreciation for Angela Merkel (who I disagree with on, oh, every political issue) because it's really obvious (or I'm projecting) that she has a zillion copies of the same suit in different colors because it's sort of the bare minimum that's "allowed". (Let's be clear--Angela Merkel is plenty gender conforming, but also seems to be "playing the game" because she has to.)

It's worth noting that I'm really looking at gender conformity vs non-conformity. There's quite a large scope of gender presentation that is still "broadly gender conforming", and depending on your frame of reference, we may be talking about two completely different kinds of "masculine". People with ultra femme presentations are going to be outliers, too.