Being “one of the guys”

I’m still reeling from the flood of emotions from this ice-climbing trip. 

I’m feeling like a bucket of water full to the brim, so full of different emotions that I cannot take one single more drop in. I’m going to overflow, I’m going to explode. 

What got activated on my group ice-climbing trip this past week is a baffling mix of old and new: situations and emotions similar to what I experienced in high school & grad school when I had similar situations/dynamics with groups of cis-guys; but also very different dynamics in that now I am “actually one of the boys” instead of being “the boyish girl” who can be partly (but never wholly) integrated into the boys’ group/clan.

This is one of the things I had been yearning for years, throughout my childhood & teens & young adulthood, until I eventually gave it up at the end of grad school when life situations left me without a supportive/inclusive group of cis-male buddies who would take me as (almost) one of them. 

Moving to California eight years ago and, especially, getting out of & never getting back into a (monogamous) cis-hetero-normative romantic (& sexual) partnership was key to my liberation really opening up my path of self-discovery & gender-affirmation. But although I have been connecting closely with several cis-men who’ve been very affirming of my “special masculinity” since moving to the U.S. and especially during the past two years here in Colorado, until this past week of group ice-climbing I hadn’t experienced & been included into that “male group dynamics” for decades — and never wholly. I had it, partially, in high school. Then, it’s as if the world split in two and I was forced into the “girls’ lane”, despite (or maybe especially because of) being in the cis-male-dominated STEM world. Then somehow in grad school I again found a welcoming & inclusive group of cis-guys to which I belonged: for a few years, I was “allowed to switch lanes” again. But there was always (both in high school and in grad school) the underlying inescapable “truth” that I was a “girl”, a somewhat “special or different girl” but still a “female”, and now & then there would be the inevitable crush or fling with one of the cis-guys. 

So the experience I had with this ice-climbing group was baffling and powerful in several different ways: on the one hand, I was reliving experiences & dynamics similar to those I had with groups of cis-guys in high school & grad school, from 15 or 25 years ago, stirring & bringing up deep, old memories and feelings, which was baffling per se; on the other hand, this time there was the additional & new fact that I was actually being treated (if not “seen”) as “one of the guys” rather than as a “special, masculine girl”, with all the typical “hey, man”, fist-bumping and “he” pronouns just as among the cis-guys themselves. And there was absolutely no sexual interest towards me nor any flirting or hitting on me (such a liberation!). I was “just one of the guys”. 

At least on the surface. 

This is so baffling and in many ways still confusing and overwhelming for me that I’m not even going to attempt going to all the other, deeper, layers & facets of this situation — the entrenched binary vision/dynamics; the irritating cis stereotypes; the heteronormativities; the washing out of gender nuances. 

For now, with this group of people I’m “one of the guys”: I’ll do the fist-bumping and let them “hey, man” & “he/him” me. 

They probably realized I’m trans when we finally went to the hot spring all together at the end of the week, but it changed nothing (at least on the surface of things) and for now I’ll leave it at that. I’ll just put that aspect aside with this specific group of people for now. Or maybe I’ll always just be “my boy/guy self” with this group of people, let the boy in me just be & express himself with them while letting the other parts/sides of me come out and/or express themselves in other situations or with other persons. 

One step at a time.

Just take this in for now, soak it all in — baffling and in some ways irritating (e.g. the binary cis vision) and wonderful and confusing and scary (I’m always afraid of “being discovered” as trans) and affirming.  

Soak it all in — including the fact that at the hot spring I wasn’t just “one of the guys”: I was “the hottest guy” there!