10/27/25

"How are you two girls doing today?" An older woman asked my sister and I as she passed by us waiting for our grandmother in the lobby of her Church. She was maybe 60, with a shaggy grey bob and round turtle shell glasses, though based on her most recent assumption, they could've stood to be a step stronger. My sister and I shared a look of shock, though somewhere in her face was something more like pain, as though she personally was insulted that her dear baby brother could be mistaken for a girl of all things. I looked within myself to find that same level of hurt; some kind of offense to take at the insinuation that the length of my hair - which, at the time, had reached the cusp of my shoulder - or impish young freckled face would imply the lack of male genitalia. It was nowhere to be found. 

I couldn't pretend to care. In all my years as the kind of little boy nobody wants to assume things about but can't find it in themselves not to jump to conclusions, I had already experienced my fair share of exposure to how different I was. By the time I was six, I already knew I played with girl toys, I ran, threw, and cried like a girl, and never cared to play in the same way the other little boys around me wanted to. I didn't like playing in the mud without a change of clothes and a shower, I didn't care to win the sports I pretended to know how to play, and whenever we played superheroes, I always wanted to be Black Widow. However, this interaction was different. This wasn't a comment made to dig under the toughest layer of skin, or an insult made to make me feel lesser than the other boys, this was an astute observation. I wasn't "like a girl" - I was a girl. 

My relationship to gender has always been one of tension - a never ending battle within myself trying to find out which side of the field I best applied to. In many ways, I think that moment was healing in a way. I had felt such a strong disconnect, not only from masculinity, but from men themselves. I remember, even at that age, feeling pangs of annoyance at the sheer volume of which boys my age conducted themselves. So if nothing else, this small moment between myself and a stranger permitted me to be who I would one day become - a sudden realization that, just because I was a man, didn't mean I needed to seem like one. 

The realization of what energy I was putting out into the world raised many questions, most of which were much too complicated for my little brain to comprehend at the time. I didn't feel hurt nor insulted, but deeply and thoroughly introspective - I couldn't help but go inward and attempt to find the most important answers. Why did that woman think I was a girl? Do I look like a girl? Should I look like a girl? Why was my sister so offended? Should I be as well? Why wasn't I? Why can't I stop smiling just thinking about it?

It would take time, and a good amount of bed-side prayer to a being I didn't believe in, begging to make me normal before I came to this conclusion on my own, but eventually I did grow to appreciate my femininity. I liked the friendships I earned from it, the connections I made out of my differences, the attachment to both the masculine and feminine sides of myself allowing the freedom to connect with others who went through life in a similar manner - as themselves, rather than a predefined existence determined by their bodies or who they slept with. Me and my people. But slowly, this relationship once again became one of strife. For so long I had tried to accept these parts of me, and my ability to live with both of them as things that benefitted me, rather than held me back. I grew accustomed to being "different", undefinable, one day hopefully even interesting. But now it became such an important aspect of my life that when those things did not come through, when people saw me as a 5'7" gay man with a lack of body hair and nasally voice, it hit me like a truck. My body didn't grow in the way I wanted it to. When I worked out, I didn't get lanky and toned, I felt clunky, and too big for my own skin. My leg hair grew back faster than my female friends, my waistline dropped lower than theirs. I wasn't a girl, I was a man trying desperately to feel like one without the knowhow or even the confidence to do so more overtly. 

In my first year of college, I realized one of the key aspects of my own feminine experience that made me relate so deeply to the women I surrounded myself with - men. As much as I truly hate to relate femininity to men, as if one cannot exist without men to define it, they do carry a lot of the weight when it comes to unilateral experiences most women have and share. We were dating the same men. Mine were gayer, and theirs were in more frats, but we came home to share the same stories. They told us their exes were better, that their type tended to be skinnier. We got ghosted at the same time and those same boys would reach out to both of us two months later - like clockwork. But as they vented to me about the way these boys made them feel, their responses and their takeaways - often leaning more toward rightfully placed confidence, as if they wished to not even register that they had been offended - I began to have my next epiphany; we had very separate problems. The treatment we received was the same, and our responses to them overlapped, but where they decided the best way to move past it was to remind themselves of who they were and what they offered, I felt trapped. Who I was was not what I offered, and hardly what enticed these men to buy the ticket to ride. My hips were confined to my skeletal structure, my waist was stagnantly low. The men we dated were the same because mine also preferred women - and no amount of old women confusing me for one would solve the fact that I was stuck to a life of water bottles and lube in my bedside table rather than a chic tray of condoms. 

If you look up the word "dysmorphia", two major definitions are most likely to appear first - body, and gender. The word suggest an altered perception, ones mind twisting their reality to almost exclusively focus on the parts of themselves that appear most undesirable. Most people, I would argue, are no stranger to either, whether or not they see it themselves. The gym bros that never see their own progress, constantly teetering between bulking and cutting, the plus sized woman who spends every waking moment making sure she's hit her step count that day, the supermodel who says her favorite hobby is eating, yet is never caught eating anything more than water. Gyno surgery and hair transplants, waist trainers and lifestyle coaches, every single person sees an unresolved version of themselves that only they can put in the work to realize. Much of this dilemma is encouraged by the things we see around us, but recently, good work has been done to counteract such voices. Conversations consistently occur about the damage of social media - the constant onslaught of people of all shapes and sizes being shoved before our beady eyes for consumption. Yet when you combine the two, gender and body, it elevates an issue that even the most woke amongst us have yet to learn how to mediate. 

You can spend your life reminding yourself that the bodies we see on TikTok or Instagram are not attainable, but when they truly aren't, when there is a physiological difference in your structure, when there are no workouts or diets or self love that will close the gap between you and them, it becomes a totally different beast. When I started - and finished - going through puberty is when my relationship to femininity fully changed. It was no longer defined exclusively by the friendships it yielded, the connections I made within it, or the hobby's I was able to share with the women in my life that the men never seemed to want to care about - it became about sex. My relationship to femininity quickly became male oriented, dominated by how female I looked, how softly my stomach curved, how prettily my lips parted. Men transformed my femininity from something beautiful that had yielded the best moments and memories of my youth into something I could never truly be. 

16 years later and I still have not been able to answer the questions that woman arose - and furthermore, a plethora of additional questions have been added to the roster. What did she see in me that was so girly? Where has it gone now? Why is it that, for most of my life, I have repeatedly met people that view me as too girly? Too flamboyant, too feminine, too deeply attached to the women I have met, yet, once I get to a point where I not only accept this way of life as a positive aspect I possess, it all goes away. I notice the veins in my hands, the size of my feet. Why is that once I'm finally in a position where I want the ridicule, the judgement of being "too" girly, the only judgement I receive is from myself for not being girly enough? And now enough time has past that I don't think these questions will ever face resolution. 

I know what I am, I know who I am, and I know what and who I want to be. I've grown fond of my ability to balance both, the height of masculinity and the depth of femininity. When I look around the world I have cultivated for myself, populated by people who toe each and every boundary they can, I know that I have found a place for myself - one where no matter what or who I am, I will belong to some degree. But when I look back at 6 year old me, grinning from ear to ear about being thought of as a girl just for a moment, I find myself wondering when that place will be found within me.