having difficulty with femininity and presentation (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by thumbtack@beehaw.org to c/lgbtq_plus@beehaw.org

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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@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

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.