Yesterday I had a wonderful day, a day full of euphoria, including gender euphoria (which is real, along with gender dysphoria!).
I went climbing outdoors with four guys (i.e. cis-gender males) — two new acquaintances and two of whom I had climbed with once a couple months ago. And spending the day with them brought back fun, comfortable feelings that were familiar to me from my past as well as new ones.
I value individual friendships very much and love spending time one-on-one with my friends. And when it comes to one-on-one friendships, I connect to persons of all genders/sexes, races, ages. But when it comes to “buddies”, to making friends in a group, to doing activities in a group, I have always gravitated towards groups of boys, felt spontaneously comfortable with men and alienated within groups of women. Whether it was the little groups of friends I hung out with in highschool or the engineers I met on my daily commute on the train in college or my physics companions in grad school or sailing friends or climbing buddies, it’s always been groups of boys/men with whom I’ve shared a passion or interest and with whom I’ve felt comfortable in a spontaneous, instinctive way. And not because I felt “special” or was treated differently, but precisely because I felt and acted and was treated just like them.
And yesterday was the same — I was fully in “boy” or “bro” mode and it was just so spontaneous for me, and quite spontaneous for them with/towards me. Not wholly for them, I think — and maybe even for me there is more awareness now of the small differences that are there and we have all been conditioned to notice. Like breasts.
It was very warm yesterday, especially when we got to the crag while it was still exposed in the sunshine. So everyone took their shirt off: and here they are, all four of them, heavenly bare-chested, while I have to keep my sports-bra on. I cannot go bare-chested (yet…!?) and I was painfully aware of that yesterday, which also made me much more self-conscious about being in my bra in a group of guys (who seemed mostly heterosexual) — something that had never happened to me in the past. In the past I felt “neutral” even being topless in a group of guy friends!
I realize that it’s mostly due to something that has shifted in me. Coming into myself (& out) as non-binary trans has also shifted my own perception of myself and made the female parts of my body less acceptable to me. On top of that, the recent (for me) discoveries of the medical changes I could actually make to my body to align it more to my gender identity are leading to a different way of not only how I perceive myself within the world but also how I look at males. I’ve always liked athletic male bodies, especially of the climber or swimmer type. But yesterday I observed my climbing buddies more with curiosity, almost scientific curiosity, thinking to myself: “Would I look like him if I got on testosterone and did top surgery?”. Now I find myself looking at guys at the climbing gym and wondering whether I would turn out looking like that and asking myself whether I would really like that for myself, or not. Questions that I had never asked myself explicitly (but that might have always been there in my subconscious…).
With these new questions and even interesting perspective come fear and pain, too, though. The fear of being “too late”. My whole life I have yearned and strived for a (young) male athlete’s body. Now I actually have the tools available to transform my body medically, if I choose to. But I’m not a kid anymore: if I decide to undergo HRT & surgery to get more male phenotypes in my early forties, what type of male body will I get? Will I get a “middle aged man’s body” and just miss the (young) male athlete’s body by a few years? Will I have spent my entire life chasing something that I’ll never be able to have, first because of circumstances and then because of “biological clock”?
The Little Prince and the Fox 