… And maybe be myself.
But who am I?
The boy (in) me is lost. I am struggling terribly with my gender-identity. I’ve been seeing all these masc folks (cis-men, trans-men, nonbinary transmasc persons) and they all seem so much more masculine that me — their looks, their voices.
I’m hating my voice. It sounds so “unmasculine”. To me it just sounds like a “low woman’s voice” and I hate it.
Maybe it’s my recent surgery that is considered a “GYN procedure” — “gyn” being the Greek prefix for “woman”.
I’m struggling to connect with my masculine side, I feel like I can’t find it, like it doesn’t even exist maybe… It feels gone, lost, invisible.
Yesterday afternoon one of my binary transguy friends visited me. We don’t see each other very often but he’s a true friend and a lovely, sensitive, and very intelligent person. Our gender-identities as adults now differ a bit in that I feel nonbinary transmasc while he defines himself more as a transman (we both define ourselves also as “transguys” but probably with slightly different meanings). As children, though, we had very similar feelings: we both felt that we were boys, we both knew that we were boys, and we both suffered when those boys were stifled and not allowed to be or to grow up. We talked about our gender-identities again during our visit yesterday afternoon and I repeated something I often say, i.e. that I feel I’m a “boy”, I can go as far as saying that I am a “guy”, but I cannot see or feel myself as a “man”. And my friend made a very insightful comment, along the following lines: from the youngest age, we knew we were boys, and that original knowledge is still within us, so even now as adults our perception of our own masculinity can go as far as embracing the “boy”; but then, as we grew up, we weren’t allowed to turn into a “man” and so now, as adults, it’s so hard for us to embrace that possibility.
I think he hit the nail on the head. I remember once this past summer I felt so deeply and intensely that I was a “man” that I even wrote about it here. I felt — & wrote — that I was “my own version of man”: a nonbinary trans man, but a “man” nonetheless — whatever “man” may mean.
For a fleeting moment, for a couple of days this summer, I was able to go that far, to allow myself to be “my own version of man”…
… Where is he now?
The Little Prince and the Fox 