Transitioning Both Into and Out of Masculinity

For me personally, learning who I am and what it means to be both transgender and non-binary has been a lengthy, ongoing process. Some days, it feels like I may never reach a point at which I feel I will truly have a grasp of a unified direction for or description of my own gender. Six years ago, I began truly exploring and testing the boundaries of my own gender identity and expression. I learned (and have since re-learned) what being transgender means through the words of trans persons rather than through the bias of uneducated cis people. I have reframed what gender means in my mind several times over at this point, learning to separate and unpack the concepts of gender, masculinity, femininity, neutrality, fluidity, and so forth both from one another and from the concept of biological determinism: that one's biology predisposes one to certain things that to be frank, are impossible to be biologically predisposed to because socially-constructed concepts hold no place in DNA.

In my re-education of what masculinity is (and is not), I experimented with my own, trying to figure out both what it means and how exactly it exists within me. The hardest part of this has been the notion that the presence of femininity negates one's masculinity. Many aspects of myself like stereotypically feminine things, and many facets of my personality are what could be considered "feminine". However, because of the masculinity I also have present in myself, part of me has felt shame when publicly expressing the more feminine parts of myself. People are so quick to misgender me as a woman that it is honestly frightening to act fully like myself around most people. That is partly because, being gendered as my assigned-at-birth gender is the hardest on my dysphoria, but it is also partly because with outwardly-expressed masculinity comes the rule that many people adhere to: they cannot be "masculine" if they present feminine characteristics. For some reason, femininity is treated like a curse in our cisciety, or like a contagious disease—if you have it, you're seen (and treated) as less than those who do not. In my own experiences, it has been used to deny me access to validation of my gender from those around me. While that does not mean I am not who I am, it does mean that people treat me differently (often poorly) because of it, and deny me my agency. I am made to feel unsafe as myself, and that I am lesser for being this way. All because masculinity is too weak to accept other ways of being; because masculinity is afraid of femininity.