I've never been terribly concerned with being feminine. By which I mean, it just happens. It takes care of itself. It's not something I have to work to perform even though I've occasionally been expected to, such as to obtain HRT.
As a young trans girl, my biggest frustration beyond not literally being female was that my femininity was interpreted as "gay," "weird," or incomprehensible because I wasn't perceived as female by others.
Which is where blockers and HRT would have been a godsend.
Like most people, though, I'm not defined by exclusively or stereotypically feminine personality traits or interests.
I wanted to be a superhero! I wanted to be a scientist! I also wanted to be a mom. All of these were subordinate to being female as far as I was concerned. Because women can be anything we want, right?
One of the big problems with the old gatekeeping model was you could girl your heart out trying to obtain hormones and be denied because some guy didn't think you were attractive enough.
And if you were a butch trans woman, you would likely get nowhere at all without putting on this very stilted performance for the doctor's sake.
Because the whole thing was sexist as hell and as trans women, we were extremely vulnerable over the ways in which we are perceived.
And obviously, the reverse is also true: socially, being feminine is almost required to be perceived as female.
But these things are all made up.
"Masculine" and "feminine" are labels for clusters of traits everyone has to some extent. How you're perceived is largely about which traits are salient and to what degree; a lot like sex hormones, actually.
Whether this perception is positive or negative frequently comes down to how congruent it is with your actual, perceived, or desired sex.
Drag queens have demonstrated for years how perceptions can be gamed.
But once you realize it's all perceptual, you see what a messy business sex and gender really are, how fraught gatekeeping is, and how easily preconceptions weigh on the process.
This is especially true with trans children, who have to navigate a medical system using their parents as proxies or intermediaries, if they can even access it at all, meaning their parents have veto power over every step of the process.
If you asked me as a teen or preteen, I would have said give me any surgery, any hormones, anything to make me, if not biologically female, physically indistinguishable from it.
I would still say that.
And I didn't need any coaching! I didn't know anything about trans people, drag culture, queer culture, anything. I didn't even know hormonal and surgical treatments were an option or I would have been INSUFFERABLE.
But you know how doctors and parents would react to that.
And you know, I'm the cliche. I'm the kid who always knew.
But most kids who come out as trans at that age are in a similar boat.
They know who they are.
They know what they want.
And at that age, let me tell you, the weird societal expectations seem -- well, weird? I wanted to be Rogue from the X-Men for a while. Stop trains with super strength! While looking fabulous!
I didn't think that diminished my femininity or my femaleness one bit.
It's always weird when people insist Biden has no power in a foreign policy situation, the one area where -- unfortunately -- the president has virtually unlimited authority.
The obvious pain points here are the cost of living which makes working more important than attending classes and a cohort that went to school with COVID accommodations and know in-person classes aren't required or even particularly useful half the time.
"'I see little point': UK university students on why attendance has plummeted"
And of course, young people have realized a college degree doesn't necessarily mean jack when it comes to the job market and whether they'll get a living wage even if they do land a job. And I assume the cost of university has gone way up in the UK just like in the US.
There's a legitimacy crisis brewing at all levels of society as people do the math and realize systems are consistently gamed against them for the benefit of a wealthy few. When governments aren't responsive, they're setting the stage for a breakdown of some kind and probably a populist / fascist takeover as people lose faith in democracy's ability to fix it.
"Infinity Has Your Phone Number," my third short story collection connecting my "Navigator" novels and the wider, weirder universes of my short fiction, is now available as a Kindle ebook and should soon be available in an impressively thick paperback edition as well.
Come see what the imaginary people in my head have been up to lately and shake a fist with them at all the horrible bullshit they have to endure!
The reasons the US unequivocally supports Israel have nothing to do with the safety and well being of the Israeli people. Or the American people, really. Or Jewish people in general. And certainly not the Palestinians who suffer because of it. It is almost entirely to do with imperial power projection in the region, racism, and religious mania. The difference between the parties on Israel is which rationale dominates their thinking.
James Baldwin: "You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
White people don't generally bother learning about Black people's lived reality but feel comfortable dictating the terms of their identities and experiences anyway. Men don't learn about women. Cis people don't learn about trans people. Americans don't learn how our "foreign policy" affects others.
Part of "Navigator" is me explaining how many different (potential?) versions of me there are in my head. Sometimes I'm one, sometimes I'm another. Sometimes we argue. But we all agree there's something deeply broken about people and existence itself is out to get us.
Further, I think everybody is like this, only they each have their own One Big Thing they're about.
As a trans person, I'm well aware socially imposed expectations don't make a person except as we allow ourselves to be bullied, manipulated, and broken trying to avoid even worse abuse. So there is something, someone inside screaming to get out.