My mother's son

My mother doesn't realize it, but she raised me to be gender subversive.

TLDR; Gender is fake so do what you want; our cultural hatred of men is harming our relationships to masculinity

When I was a kid, my mom was deeply invested in getting me interested in my femininity, in the right ways.
She encouraged me to like pink, forced me to wear dresses, let me read any age level book I wanted so long as it was a romance (preferably a christian romance). I would say she almost single-handedly pushed me towards an interest in boys but that would be giving her too much credit and our patriarchal culture too little credit.

As a child I was uninterested in her efforts. None of the examples of femininity she presented interested me. As a child I was so healthily and freely connected to my masculinity. Maybe too much for her comfort. Maybe that’s why she tried so hard to push me in a different direction.
I loved all of my brothers toys. I did play with barbies but my favorite games were the ones I played with my brother. We would invent whole world games—turning our yard into an ocean and the play set into our ship. Running around and racing and having nerf wars. It wasn’t until middle school that I begin to feel the disparity between myself and gender. As puberty hit and my body began to betray me (or at least I felt like it was) I began to feel not only my mother’s pressure but the social pressure to be “girl” no matter how bad at it I was.

There was a special mold for “girl” and the right ways to be that, and I tried to push myself into the mold until it was suffocating me and I still couldn’t fit in it.
All those years ago, trying every shape I could take as a girl and still finding that none of them fit me, it wasn’t until I freed myself of my girlhood that I could explore my connection to femininity freely. It took unraveling my gender to give myself the freedom to explore who I could become, what gender could mean to me.

…

I am wearing press on nails. They’re painted sage green and are almond shaped. I wear platform shoes everyday. My mustache needs a shave. My silk pillowcase is pink and my duvet cover is lavender.

I am man who crochets, knits, wears dresses and heels, paints my nails, grows my hair, and all manner of feminine things--just like my mom taught me to. I love chanel perfume and long acrylic nails. I love pink and lavender, and silk and chiffon. I love candles and china sets and pretty little outfits. And I am still a man.
I am a they/ them trans-man.

And I' ve spent a lot of time thinking about what that means to me. I thought if I was really a man then it should mean everything to be a man, the manly way. But really? It means nothing.

Being a man means nothing.
Because there is no one right way to be a man.

I am not a man because my dad taught me how to do basic car maintenance and self defense. I am not a man because I love transformers and action movies. I am not a man because of some arbitrary standard of manhood in the same way I am not a woman because of some arbitrary standard of womanhood. I am not a woman because I like to crochet and knit and sew. I am not a woman because my favorite colors are soft pastels. I am not a woman because I collect tea cups or wear makeup or have a seven step skincare routine. I am not a woman because of my hair or my body. And I am not a man because of those things either.

I am a man because right now, I want to be one. And I may not even be a man for very long. But for right now, I am a they them trans man.
Right now I want to explore what masculinity can feel like for me when I claim it. I want to explore gender fuckery. I want to experience the fullness of my transness. I want to be a little out of my comfort zone so that I can grow through new experiences.
I want to take my mustache out around town for a spin. I want to build big muscles that can lift heavy things. I want to drink lots of beer. I want to go for a run every morning to train for a marathon. I want to wear the same outfit every day like my grandpa and Steve Jobs. I want to write in my journal and work on my writing practice every morning. I want to feel my body get stronger and more resilient. I want my voice to be deep and to actually sound like I'm from Texas. I want to wear a suit. I want to wear sweatpants and sweaters and hiking boots with a balaclava I crocheted myself. I want to drink black coffee from a utilitarian mug, and I want to drink rose and lavender tea from a flower painted tea cup.
You can't pin me down; I resist classification.
I resist the impulse to label and classify my manhood for anyone, including myself.
I am not a man because I watch football (though I am gay because I like looking at handsome football players).
I am not a man because I have a girlfriend (though I am gay because I have a girlfriend).

I am a man, because I want to be. I am the arbiter of my own identity.
And I've struggled with that. I've wrestled with the fact that after railing against patriarchy and masculinity and manhood for so long, that perhaps in fact I desire to be a man. That perhaps I am in fact a man.

I’ve fallen prey to my own bitterness towards the long line of men who’ve harmed me.

I've struggled with the idea that no one is forcing me to be a man and being a man is “bad” so I shouldn't want it.

And then I realized that thinking that felt an awful lot like being a teenager in the closet again. Thinking that felt an awful lot like thinking I shouldn’t be gay when I was 17 because it was “wrong”.

…

In all this pondering I’ve been thinking a lot about Devon Price’s essay “The Beautiful Failure of Being a Man”. He touches on a line of thought that I’ve given a lot of attention lately, which is our current obsession with hating cis-men.

For me personally, falling into my own toxic trap of man-hatred only isolated me from my own masculinity and gender expression. My experiences of misogyny and patriarchy, the personal pain I experienced caused by men, gave me a thorough distrust of men. And that distrust can turn quickly into something ugly if you let it.
That distrust can turn into a generalization about a huge group of people. A generalization that hurts all trans people. If you believe all men are bad, what does that mean you think about trans women? About trans men? It comes uncomfortably close to the bio-essentialism that TERFs are so proud of. (like it’s some brilliant new theory in the realm of gender 🙄)

Devon writes:
“Gender liberation, in the end, is not a war between the good group and the bad. It is a collective struggle against the laws, cultural norms, social rules, and institutional policies that restrict all people, and uses rigid gendered categories to keep us so restricted. 
I think if we are going to be able to move forward in this fight, trans men must abandon the notion that other men are fundamentally the “bad” gender — and that we don’t belong to that category because of our transness. We must embrace manhood as a state of both strength and profound lostness, an immense liability as much as it is a source of gender euphoric joy, and see the frustrated wanderings of other marginalized masculine people as of a piece with our own.”

…

If there ever was something fundamentally wrong with being a man, the solution is certainly not to ostracize men and culturally abandon them because we believe they’re inherently incapable of redemption or change.

I don’t believe there is anything wrong with being a man; I believe we have to redefine manhood for ourselves and for future generations. We all must find our way back to healthy views and examples of masculinity—we have to heal our relationship with manhood, not only individually but as a culture. And I believe, like Devon, that the solution is to draw closer to one another, including the cis-men in our lives. We have to define for ourselves what manhood looks like.

Because there is no one right way to be a man, and there is also not a wrong way to be a man. Cis and trans alike, we are right now defining what the future will think about men. We are teaching whole generations right now how to feel and think about men and masculinity. Everyday that we walk through the world, we are teaching by showing who we are.

So I free myself from the expectations of manhood: good and bad and otherwise. From now on, to be a man is what I make it; I get to tell the story about my manhood.
So I better make it a good one, huh?

…

My mom may never acknowledge that I'm her son, but I'm the man she made me to be. I can cook and clean and sew and crochet and arrange flowers and bake bread and plan parties. I finally like pink (as she heavily encouraged me to). I am a voracious reader, a meticulous planner, a consistent journaler, and so many other things.

I am my mother's son.
and when I get to say that, even just to myself, being a man means everything.