"Are the Straights Ok?"

In my younger days, this meme would have totally had me by its hooks. Now, being older and going through quite quite a journey regarding my gender, I can laugh at this meme and not take it personally. While this meme is certainly laughable, its also sad to think that there are a lot of people out there who take this meme seriously.

When I was a young lesbian I would often say, or have the thought, "If I wanted to date a man I'd date a man, not a girl who looks like a man." Silly, young, lesbian me. Since then, I have become comfortable with my gender, which is a non-binary transmasculine person. If you don't know what this means, in the simplest terms, it means that I don't identify as a man or a woman, and that I am taking steps to become more physically masculine. Some people can't wrap their heads around the fact that I want to be more masculine, but not a man. Its amazing to see how trained we've become to associate masculinity with men, and men with masculinity. Younger me complied to this association. It took awhile for me to accept that I wanted to be more masculine, as I feared that it meant I wanted to be a man. I've finally come to realize that men and masculinity are not mutually inclusive.

Being a butch women at the time, I was simultaneously discounting butch women. Butch women are the most wonderful example of the varying types of masculinity. Butch women push back against essentialist ideologies by simply existing. When a butch women is walking the streets, they are implementing a new, more realistic ideology, that masculinity and women are not mutually exclusive.