Femininity has nothing to do with my own experience of gender. I wasn’t feminine before I transitioned, I’m not feminine afterwards.

My very existence challenges gender stereotypes, and I wouldn’t have it any other way

Don’t you think transitioning reaffirms gender roles and stereotypes?

No, because transitioning at all requires massive amounts of gender transgression that trans people are often severely punished, or even killed for.

I also don’t think it’s correct to blame societal problems (like sexist gender roles and stereotypes) on individuals. If it’s the individual’s responsibility to dismantle gender roles and stereotypes every single day in the way they dress and interact with society, are you doing it? If not, why do trans people carry a higher burden than you?

This also presupposes that trans people all become gender conforming upon transition, when in fact many trans people are also queer and/or gender nonconforming on top of being trans.

I’m probably missing something, but why isn’t being a really effeminate man enough, that there’s the need to take hormones and change your pronouns?

I’m a trans man and not a trans woman, but let’s pretend that says butch woman instead of effeminate man. So why couldn’t I be a butch woman? Because I wasn’t one. Seriously, people did not know what sexuality box to put me in before I transitioned. I clearly wasn’t a straight woman (no makeup, a mix of teen boy clothes and some feminine tops) and I was too feminine to be a butch lesbian, but not feminine enough to be a lipstick lesbian. And I don’t say this to mean ‘nobody accepted me in the lesbian community and I had to transition to fix it,’ because I never got any shit from other queer people over it. (And I’m not attracted to women regardless.)

So, socially not transitioning wouldn’t have made me any less gender-confusing to other people. And on the personal level, I needed HRT because periods made me suicidal, all the effects of T make me happy, and it’s my body and I get to do what I want with it. Male pronouns also feel more natural to me than female, so I see no reason to not use them.

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Since middle school and throughout high school and college I got progressively more and more depressed due to repressed gender dysphoria, and starting HRT has almost immediately started reversing that. I had always been outspoken about how gender roles were stupid and never cared about using “women’s” things (like I shared my mom’s hair products and stuff), but none of that changed the fact that I was extremely uncomfortable in my body, and being perceived as a man was something to avoid as much as possible. If people made jokes like “that’s how you know you aren’t a woman haha” I would always fight back against that, but being compared to women felt like more of a compliment.

Plus imo anything a trans person does that could “reaffirm stereotypes” wouldn’t do that more than any cis person doing it. I’ve heard similar things from some cis feminists, where they felt that if they did something stereotypically “girly” it would be hypocritical of them, until realizing that the entire point was that you should be able to do those things if it makes you happy. Avoiding stereotypes can reinforce them just as much as doing them, since then it makes the people claiming the stereotypes as universally true seem like they have a view worth changing yourself for.

Gender =/= interests and personality. We all have a diverse range of those things and it’s never the reason we transitioned - our gender is something more core , abstract and personal than that. There are butch transfemmes, there are femboy transmascs. Many trans men I know were very feminine children (some are now very feminine men), I wasn’t, but we all had the same sense of wrongness in the way we were shaped and treated by people that all clicked into place when we tried to change that.

The reason trans folks may (but not always) cling to gender norms is often to pass better and stop other people gendering us wrongly. I love being a trans guy with long hair and nail varnish but it means that I get misgendered at my job constantly, which causes a conflict in myself because it doesn’t feel like who I am. Makes those things I love a bit less enjoyable :/

I basically believed this most of my life, and it was a big part of why I never transitioned. I felt it was offensive to women for me to claim to be one. Even once I transitioned, I had a really hard time using makeup because I felt like a traitor.

Ultimately, I found reading Julia Serano really helpful. I learned that my fear of embodying feminine stereotypes was more about not wanting to appear feminine (even as a woman), and that ultimately this was more about an entrenched anti-femininity perspective than anything like feminism. I learned that makeup is pragmatic and useful, a way for me to alleviate dysphoria, to help me cope, and that I am not a “traitor” for using it. Being pretty and feminine is important to me, as a woman, and it’s not surprising other women want to be pretty and feminine too. They shouldn’t feel bad for wanting to be that way, even if not everyone woman should feel obligated to only be one kind of hype-feminine woman.

Regarding being an effeminate man: I have had conservatives tell me this, that I need to just live as a really effeminate man. I just don’t know what to tell you, being a man is not right. When I first transitioned, I didn’t care as much about the social elements. It turned out testosterone was ruining my mental health - I had severe depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation - all of which cleared up quickly after blocking the production of testosterone and getting on estrogen. Estrogen consistently makes me feel high, it’s better than opiates. Not every trans person is this way, but a lot of us are. It’s called “biochemical dysphoria”. In a way, I would have been willing to settle for having an orchi and living as a eunuch with estrogen supplementation - it would be a lie to say I was a man, and I would know that, but if I could have estrogen and live without testosterone in my body, that is most important to me. Living as a woman has always been important to me, but I never thought I could - that was a dream too far, in a sense. It felt like how I should have been born, but since I wasn’t, I resigned myself to living as a man. That estrogen will make me look like a woman and i am able to live and be a woman now is like going to heaven, it’s a dream I never thought I would live.

So, tl;dr I have to take hormones because I was born with a condition where my brain can’t handle testosterone, and I would have probably killed myself, and generally I lived a very low quality of life before HRT. I was a burden to those around me, and I transitioned for my health and to be a functioning person in society.

I think we all live within the language of gender, and trans women who have lived as men and are insecure in their womanhood often lean heavily into feminine roles as a compensation. I did this even before I transitioned, but it didn’t feel like I was contributing to a stereotype of women as a man - I was “gender non-conforming” then. But as a woman the very same behaviors become stereotypical. I like to cook, sew, bake, etc. and those were comforts to me before I transitioned, but are also important to me now. If anything, once I transitioned I felt more freedom to stop clinging to more stereotypical roles, and the more I can validate my womanhood, the more freedom I feel within my womanhood. Either way, I tend to make an exception for myself when it comes to being stereotypical - I figured being trans is rough enough, I can’t solve patriarchy all by myself, and it’s not up to me as an individual to overcome such huge social and structural problems. I like being feminine, and I am lucky enough to enjoy it now, so I will. If anything, I’ve learned to stop judging other women for when they are feminine, as a whole I have become more embracing of women as a result of transition.