They vs. He

Driving to work this morning listening to music, I realized that my voice has dropped low enough that I cannot sing along to one of my favorite songs anymore (“Bitch” by Meredith Brooks). 

A little mustache is starting to shyly yet stubbornly make its appearance over my upper lip — and it’s blond! 

I’m starting to get really impatient for some more male attributes to become more visible and I cannot wait to get my masculinizing top-surgery. 

As I present more and more masculine or talk more openly and explicitly about how masculine I feel, I’m starting to be asked more and more often whether I think that at some point I’ll switch to “he” pronouns from my current “they” pronouns. 

For now, my answer is “No”. 

I’m thoroughly enjoying this delayed male puberty that I’m experiencing and I identify very strongly with being a “boy”. I love boys: I identify with them, I feel comfortable around them, I find them fun and endearing (at least most of the time); and I’m mostly attracted to men and I generally feel (& almost always have felt) more comfortable with, and similar to, men than I have with/to women. 

However, I was socialized as a woman and this is a big part of me & of my lived experience. 

In languages with a more gendering grammar than English, I have asked my closest friends to use the masculine for me. The reason I feel comfortable with that but still prefer using non-binary pronouns whenever possible, and envision myself using non-binary pronouns even if/when I present more masculine in the future, is precisely because of the parts of me & of my experiences as a woman. Even if/when I get to the point where I could “pass” as a man, I probably won’t want to be identified wholly as a “man” (unless my feelings shift a lot from the present). I don’t want to be seen from the outside wholly as a “man” — which in my case would be a white man — because I didn’t grow up, wasn’t socialized, with those experiences and those privileges. I experienced the joys and beauties but also and mainly the difficulties and hardships of being AFAB, and also of being a “woman in science”, or at least perceived as such. Those are marginalized experiences that are very different, and often in many ways harder, than those of a white man. 

Last night I found resonance with two persons on such topics. 

One was my new housemate who is a cis-woman, a very-out lesbian in her mid-fifties. She had just asked me the question about the “They vs. He” pronouns and I gave her my answer along the lines I just explained. And she shared a very interesting experience and perspective of her own, which really resonated with me. She told me about an interview in which the trans-woman Caitlyn Jenner said how nice if was for her to be able to wear nail-polish and “giggle with the girls” because these were things that really made her feel like a woman. While my housemate respects this viewpoint and we agreed that different things can make each one of us perceive our gender differently and uniquely, she also mentioned how she & many (cis-)women friends of hers felt very differently from Caitlyn Jenner, specifically that their shared perception of “womanhood” was more along the lines of their similar experiences of oppression, lack of privilege, and even fear. Which is basically similar to what I’m saying when I explain why I feel that “they” pronouns represent me & my experience better because I lived most of my life with the world around me “treating me as a woman”, which includes experiencing certain types of discrimination and fear that oftentimes (white cis-)men don’t experience. [All this being said, I am very well aware of the terrible discrimination that often trans-women experience which can be even worse than for cis-women — but this is beyond the scope of this post.]

The other was a maybe more light-heartedconversation with one of my closest AFAB trans-masculine/non-binary friends. They were telling me about some gay cis-men friends of theirs in their late-forties and fifties who are experiencing a “decline in their manhood”; while we, as trans-masculine persons doing HRT are experiencing a “peak of manhood” because of the testosterone giving us a sort of “delayed male puberty” on top of our “peaking female sexuality” as females who are finally comfortable in their bodies, comfortable with their own sexuality/sensuality and even with their own female genitals. So somehow we’re getting the “best of the two worlds” — and honestly, this feels great! As far as I’m concerned, while still leaning towards the masculine side of the spectrum and identifying more as a “boy”, I am non-binary in the sense that part of me is “female”. And some of those “specifically female” parts I enjoy and love very much. 

So for me sticking to “they” rather than “he” pronouns, at least for now, is both a recognition and honoring of the difficulties I experienced in being socialized as a woman as well as a celebration of those female parts of me that I love and enjoy.