Transfemininity / Dreaming / Boyhood
I think I’ve always connected with the experience of transfemininity than transmasculinity. It’s strange, I think, because a large part of it is because I have long accepted being a man, and everything else about me exists with that pretext.
I don’t know if it’s right of me to feel one way or another—I don’t have the standard trans experience, I think, being socially read more often as a transwoman than a transman, although it is not my intention. Masculinity is a prison and no one knows it better than I who spent years within my own mind, killing that girl-child over and over again in hopes my boyhood would rise from the carcass. I hold my boyhood dear but it wraps around my throat like thorns: boyhood is sacrifice, to hide everything you have loved that is feminine because you will be mocked for it. In order to be a real man you have to shave at yourself until nothing remains except what is acceptable (then they will tell you that you are not full enough). Boyhood is suicide, slowly.
It’s ironic: I am not a woman yet I’m not good enough to be a man. I’m not a woman yet this does not mean I get admission to boyhood as I am. Boyhood is tightly kept behind picketed fences, and I’ll forever stand outside hoping someone would let me slip in unnoticed. Femininity, then, became an escape. There is a ritual to it: when I put on my makeup in the morning I put a face together for the world. It’s strange, I think, having at least mentally transitioned young—I know little about being a woman, mostly through what my parents and the world have told that girl-child. I know womanhood only through the fisheye lens of criticism and oppression. To claim femininity, then, is to invent my own version of it the same as I did masculinity: such is the work.
Sometimes, in my most private moments, I envy my trans sisters. Is it alright for me to feel this way? Am I appropriating a set of experiences I do not feel? I’m not sure, I don’t know. I do know that I want my femininity to be seen as inherently trans, the same way theirs is. I want it to be subversive, because it is—the kind of femininity I’ve allowed myself is far away from cisfemininity, my femininity is forever different from that of a cis woman because it flowed from my boyhood in abundance, that my femininity comes from being expected masculinity. I wish to not be seen as less trans because of my femininity but perhaps more so. I want to be beautiful, I think, to be allowed to be, the same way my sisters are beautiful.
Don’t get me wrong, I know of the irony, I know of the self hatred inherent to identifying with a different group more than one’s own. Yet it does not stop me from dreaming when I lay alone. It returns to the experience of being socially read as a transwoman at queer gatherings: for a moment, a stranger celebrates my femininity as liberation, as subversion and as my transition. For the briefest moment I’m allowed to be beautiful. But when the veil lifts, it is inevitable that they would ask when I will start my journey instead of seeing it as an end point—to once again be expected masculinity.
I may never be a girl, I think, not in this life. Still, when I dream alone, dream forevermore of transwomanhood.