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Prescriptive gender is a prison. Rather than gender being a form of self-expression, gender is treated as a pass/fail test for how well you can conform to cultural expectations. Since I was young, I remember feeling a great deal of pressure to conform to these expectations around what “men” are meant to be. You like sports, cars, womanizing, aggression, and not having feelings. I felt so distant from this ideal. I was sensitive and shy, and I preferred spending my time being creative in some way For a long time, I felt like I was failing at “being a man.” In many ways I was! Because I didn’t need to bea man. All I needed to be was myself. It’s taken me a long time to separate myself from prescriptive gender, sharpening in on which aspects of masculine energy I identify with and which I don’t. I’m not done yet. Maybe I will never fully be. The self continues to evolve over time, and I suspect aspects of my gender will too.

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As a trans man, my gender expression has continued to change years after I started my transition. If you told 16 yo me i’d have long hair again and occasionally dare to wear a skirt he’d have never believed you. But the truth is, I was only able to enjoy those things after becoming comfortable with my identity as a man. Testosterone and top surgery allowed me to finally breathe and begin exploring what a happy life could look like for me. Now I can fully embrace feminine things in a way that would’ve made me dysphoric as a teenager. I’ve had to break out of conformity multiple times in my life, but I’m finally closer to being myself than ever before. It’s worth the effort. Gender isn’t real but I sure do like mine.
19h ago
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@CHARLESRAVENBLACK Thanks for sharing your experience! It’s always meaningful to me to read about each person’s road to where they are now, how they identify, and how they express themselves.
19h ago
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@ZENLIKEME I’m glad. I wish you all the luck with your journey! Things are difficult right now, but you’re not alone. Just keep being you
18h ago
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gender is a scam
1d ago
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this is such a lovely and true perspective, it had me tearing up. thank you for sharing
1d ago
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omg i feel the same, i feel like the elisasue monster close to pretty girls, they're so delicate, so gorgeus and i am a monster, a big ass masculine monster, i just feel like i don't belong in the binary espectrum :3
1d ago
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its honestly very funny to have deconstructed my entire gender and body and decided its actually chill in the binary just on the other side of it
1d ago
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if this shit is a test then im going valedictorian
1d ago
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"I'm not done yet. Maybe I will never fully be." Nothing more true than that. To offer another perspective, I'm a girl but somehow grew up in a house where femininity was seen as bad, at the same time a very conservative home where if I tried to be anything too far from a girl I was just insulted. I can't really give a good conclusion on what that kind of balancing act does to a person growing up, but I still deal with a crazy amount of shame any time I want to partake in something 'girly' and my self expression as a whole was not something I started discovering until late high school. Though I still have a lot of growth to do, I am very proud to say presenting as someone I want to be rather than someone my family wants me to be feels better than anything ever has.
1d ago
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@GRANDFATHER Those are some confusing messages! I can see how that has taken you some time to redefine what presentation feels right to you. Glad you’ve found better ways to be!
1d ago
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yeeeeesss! Happy travels through the universe of ever changing identity and stuff, it’s a beautiful place. So glad youre out here being you!! 🌸⭐️
1d ago
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@CAOLOO Thank you! 🫶
1d ago

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and I feel lucky about that; it made me who I am today! But as an adult woman I can definitely relate and I imagine what it would be like to feel that sense of freedom from being perceived as a woman and the societal expectations that come with that. Sylvia Plath said it best in her journals: “Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...” I do think though that it’s fruitless to fixate on these things, imagining the grass to be greener on the other side and essentially wishing you could have grown up and lived as another person, because 1 it’s not possible 2 the life you imagine has so many downsides to it too that you can’t even imagine not having experienced itself and 3 if you were a different person then the You you are now wouldn’t exist, and that would be a shame! I also think men are having a tough time now and many of them are probably just as neurotic, inhibited, and fearful as women. Obviously people are free to reject these notions and live life as whoever they want, and I respect and appreciate those who choose to do this, but I’m not interested in doing that for myself. Instead, I challenge the boundaries of what it means to be a woman in the ways that I can, which feels like the right choice for me!
Jun 28, 2024
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i really also think about how much boys are taught ways to perform masculinity & how it is legitimised through tangible things like building a career etc but with women i find that from a young age our identity, behaviours, & thoughts are always spoken about in relation to other people/things — gender roles within the family, how we’re perceived by men, our friendships with other women, our relationships with material things etc etc — and this shows up in the labels that women are often given too! so and so is someone’s daughter, girlfriend, wife, mother etc etc. i envy the freedom of boyhood so much, the freedom to just be (this is not to discount the toxicity of traditional masculinity, i just think that boys are still afforded more “play” and therefore have more opportunities to develop their sense of self). maybe i am also biased because of how i’ve grown up & whatnot but i never really understood what it meant to quote unquote be a woman or perform femininity. i only saw this modelled within my nurturing friendships with women as i’ve gotten older but when i was younger, in church it was always “ok well don’t do this or that because x y z will happen to men if you do” or within my extended family it was often “are you seeing anyone? when are you having kids”. damn what happened to asking about how i’m doing or what my dreams are!!! long rant sorry !! but that’s my long winded way of saying “i feel you” haha
Jun 28, 2024
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Not sure if this is too niche, but the other day I met with my professor and we talked about how women tend to express themselves hesitantly, softly. Men tend to be assertive, often bordering on arrogant, when they write. I mean, that’s probably cause women - fem people - have traditionally been socialized in a certain passive manner. Makes me sad sometimes. But not always.
Feb 14, 2025

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