“Practicing being a dude”

When I was hanging out with one of my good non-binary/trans-masculine friends here on Saturday, they made a very insightful comment about one of the important aspects in the relationships among us in our gender-expansive group and particularly between those of us who feel similarly a little more trans-masculine — namely, that we can safely and comfortably “practice being dudes”. 

I think my friend is right. I have been instinctively appreciating this aspect of our friendship without fully seeing it explicitly. And after yesterday’s outing with one of my closest (cis-male) climbing buddies here, I see why this lovely aspect of “practicing being a dude” has been mostly implicit for me: because, to a certain extent, I have had the fortune to practice it for most of my life thanks to the people I’ve encountered. 

I definitely had many — too many — people who were close and important to me treat me like a girl, and then eventually like a woman, and try to force me into those “roles” in a very harmful way: my whole family of origin (not only my nuclear family, but also most of my enlarged family on both sides); the (cis-male) partner with whom I was together for a while at the end of grad school and for many years afterwards; several professional environments.

These experiences and environments have been very harmful and toxic for me, but I have also had the fortune to encounter many people and environments who didn’t (mis)gender me at all. For most of my life I have had the tendency to hang out with boys as friends and despite some crushes here and there I’ve often been able to have very good friendships with them, being seen and treated just as myself, as a person, as a buddy, and I’ve thus felt like “just one of them” very often. Many of my hobbies and interests have also been conducive to being around boys/men and most of the time I’ve had the fortune to not be treated any differently, to not feel any different from them. I’ve had boyfriends and romantic/sexual partners who didn’t (mis)gender me — I tend to instinctively go for guys who will see and treat me like a “boy” in the ways that feel good & appropriate to me. In grad school, despite being definitely in the minority as an AFAB person, I felt and was treated as “gender-neutral” in a good sense, in the sense that we were all just physicists, colleagues, buddies. 

I think the worst experiences of being (mis)gendered were while I was growing up and thus dependent on my family and then, as an adult, with that one partner and in several professional environments. I remember the shock of leaving grad school and “entering the real world”: I felt so uncomfortable, missing so many aspects of grad school, but I couldn’t really place or explain a lot of it… Now I see that one aspect I was missing so intensely was the comfortable, safe “gender-neutral” feeling from grad school vs. the constant (mis)gendering that came afterwards (and had come before). I find it quite ironic that one of the professional environments where I felt the most (mis)gendering and where I got most of the unwanted attention was in the open-minded, liberal, “we-accept-everyone-just-as-they-are” academic world in California…  

But as my friend said on Saturday, now we have comfortable, safe environments where we can “practice being dudes”, and fortunately I’m able to do so, once again, with many persons and in several settings here, including my climbing buddies, which feels really nice. It’s something I’ve experienced before, but hadn’t had in a long time, so it’s particularly refreshing, albeit also weird, to be able to experience it again. It feels a bit like a finding a treasured object that one had lost and almost given up — when one finds it again, one is even more afraid of losing it a second time…