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The Man I’m Not Allowed to Be

If manhood is defined by cis masculinity, then I am never a man. And more often than not, people want to define masculinity by cis masculinity. To tell us that being a man means we are obligated to see our experiences through the lens of cis masculinity and relate to our body and others through cis masculinity.

And even in trans circles, when there’s acknowledgement that trans men aren’t always exactly like cis men, there’s still a lot of conversations of what trans men experience. To say you experience otherwise is a lie, or a stealing from womanhood, something nefarious, duplicitous, or ignorant. This is a thing that comes so much from other trans men; things like “trans men cannot experience misogyny or else they’re misgendering themselves” become the boundaries by which masculinity is defined.

People don’t seem to understand how much they’re policing gender when they say these things. They think that they’re explaining to you *what* you experience, but that’s not something they can do. If you say, “if you’re a trans man, these are your experiences as a man” that doesn’t make a trans man say “ohhh, you’re right, *that’s* actually the correct language and perspective.” It makes him say, “well that’s not what I experience, so I must not be a man.” So “man” and “woman” become categories with binary definitions, rules, structures by which only those who can see themselves within those definitions are allowed to fit.

I do think I am non-binary, I am not questioning that. But I also don’t ever feel like I get much of a choice. If you’re telling me that manhood is defined first and foremost by cis masculinity, then I will never be one. When trans men put their experiences as the border of masculinity, I often feel the most lost. Okay, I think, reading these men tell me how men live in the world and see themselves, okay, I’m not a man. I’m not a man, I’m not a woman, I’m not either. Except that I am, away from them.

People seem to have forgotten that the origin of non-binary people calling themselves “man aligned” or “woman aligned” was one of policing. There’s nothing wrong with this language in and of itself, but originally, people demanded that you tell them which you were. It was part of the big push all those years ago to tell people you were obligated to list *what* you were, so they knew what you had a right to say. To experience. To talk about. “Man aligned” people couldn’t say they experienced misogyny. And even at the time, I wrote, “This is immediately going to veer straight from ‘man aligned’ means you can’t experience misogyny, therefore if you DO experience misogyny, you’re not a man.’ But even when that *isn’t* what’s being said, that’s the only conclusion.

My life, my experiences, my embodiment, the sexual abuse I lived through, and the ways that misogyny fueled it *all* matter far more to me than any name I give myself. But it did mean that I spent a decade refusing to acknowledge the masculinity in me, or that I wanted to go on testosterone, because it felt like it would be giving up some fundamental part of myself. Transition felt like I was losing, and honestly, dysphoria isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever been through. The abuse was. The misogyny was. So sure, I’ll be non-binary if it means that I still have a right to be -me-. But everyone, cis and trans, seems to be telling me that gender is a world of loss, a place where I am required to sacrifice something in order to have what I want. And for a long time, transition was that sacrifice.

I don’t believe in the binary at all. In any context, not in transness, but also not in cis womanhood vs. cis manhood. I don’t believe there is such a thing as an ‘opposite’ in people, and I don’t believe there is such a thing as a gendered experience exclusively experienced.

People forget how recent it is that the sentence, “this man’s pregnancy” doesn’t sound like gibberish *to trans ears.* I read Original Plumbing: A Decade of the Best in Trans Male Culture this year, and seeing an interview with a man who had gotten pregnant describing how much the trans community turned on him: men don’t get pregnant, ergo, you’re not -really- a man.

And isn’t that what we’re always replicating? Men don’t experience misogyny, men were never girls, men aren’t ever women, men can’t ever relate to women—we keep desperately needing to draw a boundary thinking that we’re defining what being a man is, rather than defining those that we keep out. But with even stronger boundaries than cis masculinity. If a cis man said, “I feel like I relate more to women,” we might ask him if he’s actually a cis man, but if he said he was, we wouldn’t tell him he’s misgendering himself. We don’t even have language for telling cis people—with whatever their complicated gender feelings might be—that if they break the rules, they’re misgendering themselves.

It’s why I miss when the term was ‘genderqueer’ and not ‘non-binary.’ (People also seem to re forget that some of that hard shift was in part due to the big pushback against ‘queer.’ “Don’t make a slur your identity” was a huge, huge thing (see: the pushback against the word ‘queerplatonic’ as well) and thus a wonderful community term was annihilated and ‘non-binary’ was the safe, less offensive word.)

I relate to a lot of different gendered experiences. And when I was first wondering ‘am I genderqueer?’ loooong before I ever identified as such, all the way back in 2009 and 2010, before the word ‘transtrender’ existed, before ‘genderspecial’ before anyone knew what we were or how to build boundaries around us, it was fine. I could be a not-woman, a not-man but also kind of like one.

I figured out I was non-binary because of Kate Bornstein’s “Gender Outlaw,” a book that said: gender can be play. It can be fun. It can be a thing you can try on.

I won’t delve too much more into all of this because a lot of this is stuff that’s already going to go into my zine series, “Puddletown Masc” but I think my conclusion to all of this is to admit that, much like I would never tell a trans man who seems himself as no different than a cis man that he’s wrong, if we can’t bridge the divide, to agree that ‘man’ can contain a multitude of experiences that don’t allow us to make easy off-the-cuff tweets about how we all interact with the world, then that’s not my community.

My community has always been the genderweirds, the ones that play, the ones whose identity shifts and changes because no one can give a coherent name for what man and woman mean within patriarchy, let alone within transness. We make do with broken language.

But sometimes, when I dream, when someone only sees my name in an email and calls me ‘he’, when someone looks at me and all I can think is “please, please, please just see me as a man” that’s all I am. Because that’s all man means to me in this context: not a set of specific experiences or interactions in the world, just, call me a man.

It’s only when someone tells me that that means something -more- about my life, my body, my experiences, about how I should relate to others, only then do I get confused and turned around and think, okay then I must not be a man. Only then.

I am a man by myself a lot of the time. But I never seem to be a man around most other men, and rarely around most other trans people.

Then I am both, or sometimes, neither.

But since others are keen to rip my language and experiences away from me, since others are keen to decide that gender is a sacrifice that requires you give something up, I will always give up the part of myself that visibly claims the word “man.”

So that I don’t have to sacrifice anything else about myself.

But it sucks that people, both cis *and* trans, expect me to.