Having recently come out as a girl via groupchat to more people than I ever have before in my life, I have been thinking about gender again and if it's right for me or whatever. I know the trend is usually to do this sort of introspection before coming out on this scale, but I've already done so much and I was tired of waiting to have everything out. Anyway, while the consensus is still that I'm a trans girl, I can't help but miss being a boy.
It wouldn't be right to say that the current gender I claim to be to cis people "in the know" is constricting, but I really do wish I could be frank about the types of feelings I have without losing credibility. I just don't feel like there's space for girls who are also kind of boys, which makes it so hard to openly talk about my experience as that. Like, I could never make a joke about being a guy around cis folks without either them or me feeling uncomfortable, just because my "validity" as a trans woman in society is entirely dependent on only being a woman (with all that entails). I just feel so pressured to only be like a super unobtrusive feminine type in order to get acceptance as my gender, but I don't want to do that! My gender is so much more than girl, and my deadname is so much more than a deadname to me, and I want to be able to express that without fearing that people are going to start calling me a man using their 4D social chess tactics that they always pull out for us.
I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world, but being transfem is so exhausting. For as long as I've picked up on the world around me, I've felt the need to be hypervigilant about policing my own emotions and impulses and behaviours so people don't see me as a creepy predator. It's very telling that before I knew I was trans, I knew that I had to not express anything that could be perceived as attraction towards girls so people wouldn't think I was just another horny straight guy. Even now, I'm terrified of doing anything that a normal cis person would do to express attraction or their sexuality or whatever just in case people use it against me. I'm tired of feeling constricted by the very narrow bounds of what a trans girl is allowed to do or act like in public spaces, and I fear that I may never unlearn how to bury my authentic self beneath five layers of respectability.
I feel like when transphobia gets talked about, it's mostly in terms of universal experiences like misgendering or discrimination or whatever, but literally nobody will ever prepare a young transfem for the years of dealing with the transmisogyny ingrained into everyone, including their own self. Like it's so isolating to be freshly trans and have all these incredibly cogent thoughts about how people like you get treated like even more shit than all the other trans folks, but then have no framework for discussing it and then also none of the transmascs (who are 90% of the trans people you know) have ever had to experience it or get what you're talking about. And then you just have to live with all of it on your own; I don't think I even learned about and understood the word transmisogyny until like the end of 2020 (so like more than two years after realising I was trans). I feel so whiny for using a unique word to call out transmisogyny sometimes, but there's literally no other way to describe the shit that gets pulled on transfems and never anyone else. We're never allowed to be masculine and we're never allowed to be feminine and we have to be perfect all the time and it's annoying as hell.
In conclusion, being trans is so tiresome and sometimes I wish I only had to interact with other transfems because they're the only people who understand this. Nothing personal if you aren't transfem but you won't get it sowwy. Also I know I like to be a boy sometimes but if you call me one without my consent I'll fucking bite you.