I found this video really interesting. Firstly, I am a straight, white man, 23, (cis-man I guess, I dunno much about this space I won’t lie) and I came into this video not really knowing what to expect, a part of me assuming that, now that you’d transitioned, you realised that being a man, is really hard sometimes, and you’d had regrets, but the way you described it, was unexpected and I’m glad you enjoy being a man, I’m not part of that bro-culture you described, I don’t really fit in there either, I have friends who are, and they are all very nice people, you may not want to be friends with them, and that’s understandable, but you’d be treated with more respect than I think you may realise, but I don’t know your history, and I can’t really relate to a lot of your experiences, so maybe I’m biased in a lot of ways. This is the first time I’ve even been on this side of RUclips, and to hear that some Trans-man are annoyed at other trans-men enjoying being a ‘man’ and not a trans-man, is quite confusing to me, please excuse my ignorance, and I’d be interested to hear some other opinions on that. Because if you felt like you didn’t fit in as a woman, you felt more like a man, so transitioned to a man, but now you don’t want to be called a man, I dunno, there is only one trans person in my town (that I’m aware of) and they seem like a nice person, we don’t really have any mutual friends, but I know that if I spoke to them I wouldn’t make any judgements about them before speaking to them, as I hope they wouldn’t about me, but I am also interested in their experience, but I don’t want to offend them by asking them questions about it, because i understand that talking about it to someone of my profile might be daunting, I don’t want to offend anyone with this comment, I hope I haven’t, I think as a society, if the ultimate goal is to be accepted by one another, we need to be educated, which is all I am looking for, and if my ignorance is upsetting well I can’t really help that without education, which is what I’m after so, yeah, thanks
Arthur you have no idea how much your videos and your channel is helping me.This video, the one about the fear of being unattractive on t, the sex info, the transition thoughts, all your videos make me feel seen, heard and not alone. I'm really grateful for your channel, your positive impact on my life and my confdence is something i will never forget, thank you.
VERY educational, thank you! To add to this, many queer cis guys such as myself do not feel comfortable in the world of men, either. We can feel othered and less than, even when it is not being done by others. Most of my friends are women for this exact reason. Being a trans man obviously throws an extra wrench in the works. I can only imagine.
I am a trans woman and I feel really weird about being a woman sometimes. Like, it is objectively true. I am full of estrogen, I look like a woman, I get perceived as a woman even in a transphobic society, I feel perfectly fine and natural with the she/her pronouns. But at the same time I absolutely do not fit in with "the girls", I feel really uncomfortable around this whole constant implication of "gotta have a husband and babies someday" that seems in almost every conversation with a neurotypical cis straight woman. I only really feel comfortable and understood by queer neurodivergent women, and we share the plight of "not really feeling like women" in society. We share just seeing it as a base biological and sociological fact, but not a true identity to build a personality around for ourselves. I feel like it'll take me a while though to find women who are like me and who I can fully identify with. I am a blue collar factory worker with techbro ambitions. There are very few women around this field for me to be professionaly friends with. So for now I only get the non-TERFy queers.
I was in this so long and it helped me to truly take my time not to wait but to accept myself fully either way, male or female or other, accept myself unconditionally and make all options okay. And then the answer was clear. The answer will never be the chatter, it will be a quiet peaceful but persistent knowing.
at first when i saw this video i was thinking trans men that aren’t comfortable being men? how does that work? but when you explained it its just so me. i’m pre-t and i always feel like im in limbo, in an inbetween. i’m a trans dude, a guy, a boy. but never a man. im not friends with cis guys, mostly girls. and i do really feel ostracised and different. didnt think anyone else though this way, thanks!
Yeah I think it's taboo bc we really want everyone to respect our genders, but taking time to feel comfortable being a man seems like a *very* common experience
When I first came out, changed my pronouns, changed my name, it absolutely felt like some elaborate form of cosplay, not because my gender isn't real but because you're trying to undo years of living as another gender, you've got this new name, new pronouns, and especially when I was pre-/newly on T, it felt ridiculous to say, "I'm a Man," because... well, c'mon. I wasn't fooling anyone, or so it felt at the time. And how am I going to feel like a man when I'm getting carded trying to buy beer at 40, because the (20-year-old) cashier thinks I'm 15? The longer I've been on T and the more time I've spent around other men, though (and honestly, the more I've started passing), the better my own self perception has become. People really should talk about this more, because I think it's really common and normal.
@Soothsayer-ll6pm Maybe that’s your life, but that’s not everyone’s experience. Whether you like the term or not, you are cis if you’re a biological male that is still male. Same concept as being straight. It just means not gay, like cis means not trans. Also not every man wants to find a woman. Not every man settles down and has kids. There isn’t one way to be a man.
As an early trans man, I used to (and sometimes still do) feel like an impostor among men. But after watching quite a few HealthyGamer interviews with (typically cis) men about mental health and identity, I’ve come to the conclusion that not feeling like a “real man” is the most archetypally male thing in the world.
The trick is realising that as you are a man, what a man is is defined by you. Should usually happen no later than 30 or so. And yes of course we're scary. So are rollercoasters yet people don't run away in terror.
I'm a man and never felt I'm not a real man, even though I'm far from the stereotype. Never heard this from any of my male friends either. It isn't a thing. Stop making stuff up to validate yourself.
I'm cis and straight passing, but I am neither. I'm proud to be trans, because of all the things I have had to overcome and how I have managed to heal myself, but I still tend to think of my transness as a medical and mental health thing that isn't other people's business unless I know them well. I say this because I hope queer people think about that if they are uncomfortable with cishet men they might end up excluding binary trans men or bisexual men, who are also just trying to find community.
I'm a cis gay man and I can actually really relate to some of this. I've always been fine with being called a guy or a boy, but until recently would get weirded out by being called a man, so much so that I went through a period of questioning if I might be non-binary. I eventually realised that I'm cis, and that it was the connotations and societal pressure attached to the word "man", as well as my own limited view of what a man is, that was making me uncomfortable identifying with the term. What helped me was realising that there are only two necessary criteria for being a man - being an adult who identifies as male. Beyond that basic definition, I'm free to define what being a man means to me. I've often felt out of place in all-male groups, but surrounding myself with more like-minded men would probably help with this, as it has done for you. I think I need to start hanging out with more trans men because you guys seem to be more on my wavelength!
Omg i thought I'm not transgender because although I'm extremely uncomfortable with my female body and want to medically change my feminine features im not comfortable with the idea of "being a man". Now im confused lol
oh my god i thought it was just me. i tried typing up a comment like twice now but they went on for much too long; i'll just say, thank you for talking about this! its comforting to hear i'm not the only one who struggled with the idea of being a man because of those things.
This is a great video. As a cis queer guy who has dated trans guys in the past, I am not surprised to hear this and have encountered it before. I don’t want to speak out of turn (as I’m not trans) but I feel as though a lot of it also comes down to the “assimilationist” vs “liberationist” dichotomy of queer identity. Contrapoints did a podcast with someone a few months ago (can’t remember their name tho) and she was talking about trans “pick me’s” like Blair White and how some LGBTI people are so desperate to be accepted and are so convinced by the (completely valid, though nuanced) assimilationist argument that they’re willing to debase both themselves other queer people in an effort to feel any semblance of belonging in broader society. I think maybe trans guys not wanting to feel like or be compared to cis guys might be a symptom of the flip side of that dichotomy; that trans/gay/bi/ace people are not cis, straight or allosexual, and that any assimilationist rhetoric or attempt is both useless and worse, harmful, because it undermines trans identity, and ignores the struggles that trans people have to deal with that cis people do not. I personally do not distinguish between cis guys and trans guys in my dating life, and I’ve encountered trans guys who’ve been really receptive to that and find it very gender affirming, and others who dislike it, because they feel like they have traits that differentiate them from cis guys, and my indifference towards that (romantically/sexually at least) triggers a different kind of dysphoria. And that’s a totally valid feeling and I get why some trans guys might feel that way. I’m sure there is a similar phenomenon with gay men. I know that some gay men wish that the adjective of “gay” was no more relevant than “brown haired”, and wish to only be categorized as a man, while other gay guys feel like their identity as gay makes them fundamentally different from straight men in a way that cannot be ignored socially/societally. Both of those viewpoints are completely valid in my estimation and have real logic behind them.
Wow thank you so much for talking about this. I've recently gotten an official diagnosis for gd and am on the verge of starting to transition to male in a military setting, which has a very binary format and at times toxic masculinity, which intimidates me, despite the fact that I lean much more towards trans man than nonbinary. I've lived with the lesbians on my boat and been treated badly by some of the cis men. In life the same thing, and yet the same discomfort with but unending longing to be a guy has never stopped so I know I just gotta do it. This reminds me to think about all the guys I've met in the military who just aren't like that, who are good people and so often gender nonconforming, sometimes because being in the military has helped them to feel more secure or to just not give a fuck. I feel like this video said so many things that described me where I'm at and where I've been, it really gives me hope that I could end up as happy, well-spoken, "gay and chaotic" and good a man as you :) Thanks Arthur!
Reminds me of how the other day I was hanging out with my art school friends and I had a great time, and when I was coming home I had this thought like "damn, I had such a great time I didn't even realize I was hanging out with only cis people" 😂 The cis straight men were artsy enough to get along, many are probably neurodivergent, and the preppy straight catholic cis girl is actually adorable. (There many trans ppl but that day it was mostly the cis friends)
Thank you for deconstructing what “men” are outside of just football lol. Broey Masculinity ™️ is truly such a narrow tiny window for all mens personalities to have to try to fit into. It’s impossible, and I would actually argue that the Bro Dude Giga Chad is the tiny minority, not every other diverse type of man. Even Steve Irwin was like this “weird off brand” style of a “macho dude”. It’s just so absurd that football jock could be seen as the only option.
I watched this video yesterday and it's been in my head ever since. I know I commented already, but I kept coming back to what you said about types of men. It really got to me. I started to realize that even the cis men I know in my life struggle to fit into the ideal image of a man. I know a bunch of nerdy men who play D&D or watch anime. Skinny, short, tall, fat. All kinds. I have never once questioned if any of them are men. They just are. Thanks for this wonderful video. I'll be back to watch it again some time.
this video is full of so much good information and perspectives, i don’t even know what to comment on because i love all of it. as a non-binary trans guy, i approve of this message:) edit: i’m not sure if you have a video on this yet, but i would love to see you talk about how you deal with misogynistic cis men as a trans man. the further along i get in my transition, the more cis men feel comfortable expressing unhinged opinions about women, and i have no idea how to respond to it lol. like what makes you think i’d hate women?? i lived as a woman for 23 years. i know what it’s like. edit 2: the “boyhood” framing that you mentioned at the end is really helpful, thank you:)
A little late to this, but I really appreciate the nuanced and compassionate way you approach this topic. The idea that early transition is a kind of boyhood makes so much sense to me - often I find that when I'm with cis men of my own age I don't feel like a woman, but I do feel like a boy among men. It's not help by the fact I look much younger than I am, but it goes beyond appearance - I guess its the product of not yet having time to grow into manhood
Hi Arthur! Thank you so much for posting this video. I have had this feeling that I was forcing myself to be trans for months. But the thoughts I had (wanting a flat chest, wanting people to call me by he/him pronouns) were always there. This made me feel very confused and angry at myself. Listening to your experience makes me feel understood and I never thought someone else had the same feelings as me. So once again thank you!
Not only transmen feel this way! Lots of cis male people are uncomfortable with certain aspects of cultural 'masculinity' and aren't sure how they fit in until they find their own group of like-minded people. Like you said, this is especially true in the gay community! But I also have straight cis friends who feel this way too.
as someone in early transition, i feel extremely seen. this is the exact thing that made me feel stupidly alien this whole time and you gave me hope and strength to keep moving forward
Social roles, social expectations, and familiarity with different settings and people are all very hard to get accustomed to changing. It's sort of like going to a foreign land and culture.
Great presentation Arthur. Certainly cis men contemplate the question “What is a real man”. Queries online lead to various viewpoints, predominantly founded on virtues. Some of those virtues may lead to so called “toxic masculinity”. For me, the definition of “what is a real man” is founded on my father’s premiss: “Be nice” to yourself and to others. Subsequently, the ideal focus should be “what is a real person” 😉 Evidently, humanity has not even figured that one out yet 🧐
This video is seriously so important to me, I've been questioning my gender for a while now and I've been cought up in exactly the same worries - not wanting to be seen as a man, being able to fit into male social circles etc. It definetly feels less lonely to know that I'm not the only person who had/ is having these thoughts.
"it's not that you never will, it's just that right now, you're in your boyhood" holy shit that really hit me 🥹 I'm 35 and 4 days on T (🥳) so it's been really weird balancing the dual identities of "I'm a grown ass adult" but also "I'm a baby trans" haha 😂 and for me my only (still intense) trepidation has definitely been the social transition part. I'm still very comfortable with more traditionally "feminine roles" like childcare and home keeping, being a safety worry-wart, LOL, but just like, in a man's body please 🤷♂️ 😂
I didn't feel uncomfortable being a man at first because I had a very narrow/limited view of what being a man was, I came to realise though that for me it was mostly the type of men I had experience with and once I had more experience with different kinds of men and found some that I had more in common with I felt a lot more comfortable. I still feel uncomfortable around certain kinds of men but I think that's mostly a trauma thing rather than insecurity around my own manhood as such. I went through a short spell of identifying as a butch lesbian before transitioning and it took time to adjust from that and being part of those spaces to being perceived as a man and the expectations surrounding that. The thing was how differently people treated myself and my then partner, we were treated so much better as a "straight" appearing couple than we ever were as a lesbian couple. A big worry of mine was if I became single would I be able to find another partner, as I was in a long-term relationship when I transitioned (we separated after 13 years together), especially as a lot of people were saying that cis-gay men wouldn't even give me a chance. Those fears were largely unfounded, I had very little trouble finding people who were attracted to me both as a trans person but also as a disabled person. It then took another adjustment when I got into a gay relationship and how people largely treated us as a cis-gay couple. I'm happy to report that I'm now in a 6.5 year relationship with a wonderful cis-gay man and being trans isn't really an issue there. For myself as a person who passes 100% of the time, I often get looks of puzzlement or complete shock when I come out to people and that's from cis and trans people. I'm 18 years on T and almost 20 years transitioning and largely stealth in my real life, not through actively trying to be stealth it just doesn't come up all that often/isn't relevant a lot of the time.
This sort of reminds me how I've heard a lot of cis men saying that they're also scared of other cis men. My cis partner has told me how he crosses the street when he sees a group of men, and the experiences of being bullied by other men because of not being masculine enough etc. I always remind myself of this when I feel like this, because its not exactly weird for me as a man to be scared of other men. My friends are mainly cis men and they aren't these hyper masculine cis men, and have all had problems with other men, and experiences of being threatened and scared by them. A lot of them take the piss out of these kind of cultural forces as you say, because a lot of them time these forces negatively affect them and also they want to be good people.
This poem was printed in "Trans Homo ... GASP: Gay FTM and Cis Men on Sx and Love" Kissing you then, touching the scars where your breasts had once been, I wondered if You knew those men, too. I wondered if your desire was anything like mine. Those men frightened me, yet I longed to give them my body, [very spicy line lol] ... You are not that man now. Nor am I. We explore - our parts somewhat different. Our chromosomes only have one x in common. Yet our histories, I suspect, are similar. The poem in its entirety is very beautiful. I strongly recommend the whole book!
Thank you, Arthur ❤ I've been watching your videos and I strongly relate to your experiences. Every video I see after another is like I get some weight lifted, it really helps me to hear your perspective about some things I'm struggling with since it's really easy to get lost in your own thoughts sometimes, specially when you're a very anxious person and doubt yourself like me. Here I feel particularly called out too, since this one fear is what sometimes holds me back from transitioning and it's nice seeing your perspective about it, knowing it will be fine when I give it time, that I'm not that type of man I'm afraid of and that I have to fight against toxic masculinity and misogyny, but not myself.
It's always irked me talking to trans men who purposely view and apply a differentiation between cis men and trans men. I never understood it and I never related to it. For me, I am a man, always have been, and the whole point of my transition is to aline that. I do not see myself as any different from a cis man and that I had to transition is such an inconsequentially minute detail about my existence. I really appreciate the nuance and compassion you had when explaining all this. It causes me to reflect on mt anger and my view of it as projected internalized transphobia to a different lived exerpience than my own. I never really lived as a woman and will therefor never really understand the fear or trauma cis men have caused women and other trans men. It is important to listen other people's perspectives and instead of seeing it as an attack on my identity, instead assess it as a reflection on their life story. Your videos are always so thought provoking and intentionally written.
@@ayeright320 ok flat brain, let me put this simple so that you can understand: when you have gender dysphoria your entire life you cannot experience your life the same way others people of your birth sex do.
Thinking of social transition as the months/years-long process of gradually finding your place in male society is the best transition advice I've ever heard. This video describes me perfectly. My physical transition is basically done -- I've been out and on T for two years, have a full beard, and even had top surgery three days ago, but I've spent so little time in male spaces throughout my life that I still feel like there's a huge gulf between me and cis men. It doesn't help that almost everyone I interact with in my daily life (friends, family, coworkers) knew me pre-transition, so the way I'm treated day-to-day hasn't really changed much. On the rare occasion I find myself in a group of cis men, I can't get out of my own head and end up making myself dysphoric. But you're right, the best way to reconcile these feelings is to confront them head-on. Thank you so much for making this video.
This makes me feel so much better about experiencing this. Even 5 years on T i still dont feel like a man, always a dude or guy or trans man. And I feel like an imposter being called a man. And ive felt drawn to nb identities.
this video helped me so much. I'm very early in my transition (only just about to start therapy) and I was so worried I was the only one who felt this way and that that somehow meant I couldn't be trans enough or something. because well, I want to be a man, so I should be able to feel like a man all the time and enjoy feeling like a man and all that, right? hearing this explanation finally helped me understand some of these feelings better. thank you so much for this
i really appreciate this video. im in a weird place w my transition and its like i align a lot with gay male sexuality and culture, but i am a very androgynous transmasc person a few yrs on T with top surgery. sometimes i feel like i dont belong in those spaces because of my androgyny and gender non conformity. i present rather effeminate at times. the insane toxic masculinity has been smth i experienced over fruity alcohol definitely like you describe, like unhinged but socially acceptable for some reason.
Wow it’s so interesting to know that some people feel this way😮 I am a trans man but almost all of my friends now & a lot of my friends before I transitioned are cis men but even before I was officially out all I really ever wanted was to just be seen as one of the guys. Also even before I was out I considered myself a men’s rights advocate. So, can’t really say I personally relate to the feelings you’re talking about; not that anyone else is necessarily wrong for feeling that way, though I do find it a bit sad that someone would feel that way and I find it rather interesting because I hadn’t even really realised that that was a thing🤷🏻♂️
Personally, when I was younger, I had identified as non binary, partly because the LGBT community, I felt, did not really allow me to be a boy for a number of reasons. Part of it was my gender presentation (I was and continue to be comfortable in dresses, makeup, and with long hair), which confused a lot of people when I expressed a desire to go on testosterone and get top surgery, and sometimes even just to use he/him pronouns, but the other side to it was that I had had many bad experiences with men in the past and couldn’t fully accept myself as part of that group. It didn’t help that all of my exposure to the LGBT community did reinforce than idea that masculinity is scary, dirty, and dangerous. A few years ago, upon getting into the visual kei scene, that was the first time I saw that men could be gentle, beautiful, and not necessarily something to be feared. Before that point, I couldn’t even accept my attraction to men. I think that alone has helped my growth exponentially, and from that moment onward I knew I’d be a man, at least, one day, when I got older. Now I’m fifteen, I’m on testosterone, and I have my top surgery consult in February. I’ve noticed a toxic idea of masculinity being very prevalent in queer spaces, and it really hurts me, because I know that it kept me from transitioning and accepting myself and my sexuality (I’m gay, lol) Sorry for this essay of a comment but the ideas presented in this video do really resonate with me
God I am so dang excited to be a man. I'm not sure if I entirely identify as a binary man, since I haven't experienced it fully. That said, I'm so excited to fulfill being the male version of myself that I wanted to see in this world.
I haven't fully watched the video yet but I think that's why I identify as masc-non-binary instead of a trans guy because I don't really feel like a "man"...
Finally someone said the words. Thank you so much for this video, i wish more younger trans guys could see this and realise that not every man is evil, and that being a masculine man can be positive and awesome (if they want to be masculine of course). Im just tired of being excluded from cis men.
What kind of helped me was basically “studying” to be a man. I’m a feminist and I really care about that but I had no idea how to be a feminist as man. I’m still learning but I read some Bell Hooks (whose work I love dearly) and it helped me understand the issues cis men have and why they act the way they do. For me that was super important for being comfortable as man, because I had to be a “good man”.
So yesterday I came out to my mom, and she said some hurtful things that made me doubt myself in my own identity. Your video put all my thoughts properly into words and if anything, I'm even more confident in the fact that I want to move forward in my transition. And that I want to be 'a good man'.
Im 4,5 years on T and 1,5 years post op, and now that I have been passing for a long while it feels WEIRD. I kinda only realised recently that I've been keeping my appearance deliberately androgynous. I didn't have the background you describe, but I definitely relate to being cautious (?) about ones own masculinity - I still hide my "scary" hobbies like heavy metal and martial arts. And also, I'm not a super macho guy either - I onyl really get on with other queer goths. Thanks for articulating this! :)
i am sometimes embarrassed that a twenty something person is teaching me so much about life, but he has insight that I have never had at his age and I am always so happy that he voices exactly my questions and thoughts. i am approaching forty and still cannot decide if I want to transition so i think if i was meant to transition it wouldn't have been such a difficult decision for me to make. so it seems like I am not really made to do that and have to somehow play my cards the best I can with the body i have. social aspect is also similarly concerning to me. i don't have any problem with "cis men", on the contrary i feel like people are people, and depending on their character they end up being good or bad, not based on their gender. but i struggle to make friends anyway and end up feeling more comfortable with women eventhough i don't actually like to hang out with women because i feel like i somehow lose my masculinity when i am in a big group of women and am being seen as one of them. and at the same time hanging out with men makes me feel very emasculated because they are obviously masculine and i am not in comparison, so i stand out like a sore thumb. so i end up not feeling like i fit in in any of the groups and on top of it i don't fit with any type of lgbt community of any sort because i am just so incredibly different from them it seems like we have absolutely nothing in common. and this social isolation would just get worse i think if i was to transition. so i dont think transition is for me.
Deciding whether or not to transition was one of the most difficult parts towards easing into my identity. I figured that if my dysphoria wasn't that bad, and that I was uncertain, that I could just 'accept' being a woman. But that eventually became too difficult once I realized the option to be a man was truly wide open for me (barring social circumstances). Pay attention to how much you described yourself as 'masculine' and 'emasculated'. Either way, whether you end up identifying as a man or not, therapy (specifically gender therapy) would be beneficial to help you sort out these feelings.
hey, so I completely identify with what you're expressing. First off, I'm not telling you any of this as a way to convince you of anything, I'm just telling you so you know you aren't the only person who has felt like this. I'm 35, started transitioning at 33. It took a long time for me to decide that was the right thing for me, and even for some time after I started I still wasn't sure because I felt all the same things you're expressing here. What helped me make the decision was realizing a few things, first that I could stop any time, second was that the idea of being the grossest most lonely man on the planet was more appealing to me than continuing to be a (somewhat) attractive and still lonely woman. I got a breast reduction in 2020 in the hopes that if my chest was at least smaller I could feel okay being a woman. I even "joked" with my surgeon that if he oopsie daisy took my whole breasts off I would sill be pleased. The only thing I regretted about that was not having the courage to actually tell him I wanted NO BOOBS AT ALL. I also wanted more than anything to not hear a little girl when I talked, I thought if I could just take testosterone for long enough to get a bit of a deeper voice I could then reevaluate at that point and decide if I wanted to keep going. What ended up happening was I started testosterone and every change I thought I would hate I actually LOVED (being conditioned to believe you hate your own body hair is harmful, turns out). I feel like after a couple of weeks of being unsure I started to feel incredibly good. After a while I started lifting weights and seeing just how easy it is to gain muscle with a testosterone dominant body. What was really odd was my face started to look like a 15 year old boy rather than a 30 something woman, eventually I started looking my age but clearly a man, facial hair, better jawline, eyebrows filled in, hairline masculinized, and on top of that my weight lifting was masculinizing my body. Looking in the mirror stopped being something I had to do to make myself presentable and started being something I liked to do. Looking at a (somewhat) handsome man and realizing that is ME healed something in me. I'm not going to pretend the social isolation is going to improve automatically, or that you're gonna suddenly start having stuff in common with 20 something queer people. I like queer people, but I don't find I have too terribly much in common with those I find in LGBT groups, though that might be due to living in a college town so the groups are filled with college agee people. Social isolation is self made, mostly, it's difficult making friends with people if you don't know if they'd hate you if they knew, and feeling that if they did know they'd treat you differently. It takes serious dedication and intention to overcome hurdles like that, something that I will admit I have not yet committed to. What makes it worth it to me is that I'm finally safe with myself. Me and the guy in my head are much better friends, if you know what I mean. Anyway I just thought it might be helpful to hear a perspective from someone who isn't an extroverted 20 something, who transitioned late, who suffers socially.
This is really the magic of the Internet! Allowing people of all different ages and backgrounds to share insights and connect. Wishing you luck on your journey ❤️
I mean, you could be non binary or some other type of identity. Either way, transition begins socially at the first step. So you could try that out and see how it makes you feel. Talk to a gender therapist. Make a second social media account and try interacting with people online as a man. That's one way to test the waters. Tbh it sounds like you're pre-rejecting all your possible options before you even try it out. That could just be the fear of losing what you already have, even though you say that what you already have is not fulfilling to you. Ask yourself if your life were to end tomorrow, what would you regret, what would you change about yourself if you could
Thank you everyone for replying and sharing your experience and advice I didn't expect anyone to even see the comment. Let me expand a little bit on my story. I have felt like I would feel much more comfortable if I was seen as male socially from the earliest age I can remember, probably around 5. But I was always fully aware I was a girl but I knew I would be vetter off as a boy, it was always pretty conscious. But feelings were always there. Then lets fast forward to my late twenties, when I finally went to a gender therapist to figure out whats happening. She was good and helped me figure out a lot of things, i saw her for about 2 or 3 years, can'tremember exactly. Then I went the official route and got diagnosed, which included over a year of appointments with a therapist and a psychiatrist at a hospital and then another psychatrist and then a whole comittee of doctors that approve the final diagnoses. I never felt this was too much even though many of you and maybe many of young people would think so, but to me it seemed very necessary since we are talking about a major huge change to your body and your entire life. By the end of this process covid hit and I wasn't really feeling comfortable in hospitals (in my country the whole process takes place in state hospitals bc we have a social based free healthcare here in europe, so there are no separate clinics, it all goes through the regular system). During covid I had a lot of time to think and be with my thoughts and started to reevaluate transition and the actual reality of it. After covid slowed down a bit I went to talk with the endocrinologist who basically said that elevated testosterone is not uncommon in women with many other conditions and that it isn't dangerous and that we could start with low dose and see from there. I had a long list of very specific questions because I enjoy reading science articles about subjects that interest me so I had quite serious questions and she kept downplaying the risks and was very surprised I am taking the whole thing quite seriously. But I have one body and one life and I am not going experiment with things that are potentially going to make me a lifelong patient, because all sorts of metabolic and hormonal disbalances are a realistic risk. Anyway I had the talk with her, went home, did more research on my own and decided it is too overwhelming and took a break for a few years, because I couldn't take the whole thing anymore, I was obsessing for years about it and I couldn't do it anymore. And now several years after that I still can't find the courage to risk so much by taking hormones. It just seems it isn't researched enough for me to trust any of the articles. It all seems very biases and also there is no long term studies. For a while I was frantically searching for anyone who is on hormones for longer than 10 years and could only find one person in a brirish tv show which title I forgot. So that is my situation. Maybe my disphoria is not strong enough to make those risks worth taking, maybe my character wouldn't be able to take those risks, maybe I am right and hormone therapy needs more research maybe I am just not brave enough and prefer the discomfort I know over discomfort I don't know. So in the end I don't know. I definitely identify as a man, I would socially take on a male role of a aman if I was to transition, but at the same time I know my body is biologically female and will always be and all the changes I do to it would only help me take the social role better and alleviate the dysphoria. I am realistic in my expectations, I don't think all problems will go away, but even with realistic expectation I still can't make a decision to go through wirh transition. Sorry if this was all over the place and thank you if anyone read the whole thing :)
I also think that another factor in this is that a lot of the time, when people talk about our transition as trans men, it's often negative and it gets shit on a lot. I've seen people say that trans men get bald,sweaty and other hurtful things. Like people will act like being on T will make you gross, while that is true to some extent cause puberty in general is gross no matter if its a female or male puberty, people often take it too far with trans men. When I saw people talk about how gross trans men's transitions are, i felt so ashamed to want to go on T. Luckily I got over it and now 8 months on T, but I had to deal with the shame I felt for wanting to became something that is seen as gross.
To be quite honest, a lot of this is due to the deeply-entrenched radical feminism in queer spaces. The transphobia is not an accident, it is the logical conclusion of treating Men™️ and Women™️ as entirely separate species, where Men™️ are inherently evil, oppressive, and all-around bad, and where Women™️ are innocent, perfect, morally superior, always oppressed, and considered incapable of doing any kind of harm. This leads to the attitude that any kind of femininity is safer and morally superior to any kind of masculinity, and therefore anyone aligning themselves with femininity is better and inherently more morally pure than anyone aligning themselves with masculinity. This most directly affects trans men, who may spend years in the closet IN TRANS COMMUNITIES, feeling like they will lose all their social “support” for being men. This also affects transmasc people, amab non-binary people, gender-fluid people, and butch lesbians who lean more transmasc. Generally we (trans men) experience the horrifying paradox of being supported for being trans, but not for being MEN, which is what MAKES US TRANS. You’re allowed to be transmasc, non-binary, gender-fluid, even a demi-boy, as long as you don’t dare identify as a man. Then you become tainted, and evil, and everyone suddenly blames you for the patriarchy which doesn’t even ACCEPT TRANS MEN!!!! It’s absolutely infuriating, and it’s no wonder that trans men feel discomfort in identifying as something they know will cause them to lose their social support system and be hated by online trans people. Almost every other trans man I know stayed in denial for a long time, not necessarily because of cis people, but because of TRANS people who made them feel like shit for being men. It’s disgusting behavior and queer and non-trans men as a whole need to do better.
The fun part about being a young trans man less than a year on testosterone is that people will look at me and call me ma’am, or girl, or whatever, but I start talking with my deepened voice and they correct themselves, or get very confused and look at my chest to see if I have boobs, but they can’t tell because I wear baggy hoodies. I can just see the whole thought process, and I find it funny. For a while, like the first year of being out and open as trans, all I wanted to do was assimilate. My school (staff and teachers) was very respectful of my trans identity, so if there was anything divided by gender, I could go with the boys. It made me uncomfortable because this was like middle school, and there’s me who is just admitting to a room full of boys that I am trans, and it’s like I could feel their gaze scrutinizing my identity. But I felt like I had something to prove, that even if they don’t see me as a boy, that I am in fact transgender. I felt like my transgender identity was fake, so I’d do things to prove how I felt, even if this made my anxiety worse. Because I just wanted to assimilate. I wanted people to stop staring, I didn’t want any of the attention, it made me physically nauseous. I had, and still have a lot of social anxiety. But I’m stubborn and determined, so the more stares and weird looks and questions I got, the more I dug into my identity. It got to the point where I stopped caring all together who thought I was valid, and who didn’t. I didn’t care if I was misgendered, or thrown a disgusted look, the only opinion I cared about was my own. Even with my social anxiety, I have a lot of self respect, and would never make myself lesser for other people’s comfort and sake. Someone could beat the crap out of me for being trans and I’d still refuse to call myself a woman. But I certainly had that sense that cis men would never see me as one of them so there’s no point in trying to appease them, and that no matter what, I’d always be different. That I’d never be part of their culture. I didn’t consider myself a girl, and surprisingly even transphobic girls didn’t treat me like one. It was like I belonged with neither gender, and was in a constant battle with the world, my inner support versus the world’s disgust for me. And no amount of self love and confidence will fix how isolating and lonely it is to go through that. And then I made friends with a guy and started testosterone. He’s very masculine. Likes guns, wrestles, talks a lot about masculinity, hanging out with his guy friends, is very into mental health awareness for men, is straight, religious, has similar values to me but slightly different beliefs politically. Everyone had called me a “trans boy”. I called myself a trans boy. He called me a man, and was the first person to ever do so. And in referring to me, said “a good man.” I met his friends, now most of my friends and acquaintances or cis guys. I suppose this marks the end of my “trans boyhood”, I’m just glad I got to live all of my teenage years as a boy even if it put me under constant scrutiny. For other young trans boys struggling with feelings of not fitting in, being stared at, or being on edge around cis boys, find the ones that respect you. Even if you already have good inner validation like I do, it will make you feel a lot less alone and a lot less alien. I promise you that you have allies, even if you haven’t met them. That there are cis men and women that will go to protests and march with trans people, and want us to be happy.
I am sorry if this sound harsh, but I feel like someone has to say that: Arthur, you, as an individual, has to stop generalizing trying to fit your existence into either a "the best" box or a "the worst" box. We gotta start a change first within our individual selves, specially if we want to change a community with a tendency of generalizing trying to fit all trans guys also in either a "the best" or a "the worst" box. That is wrong because that erases the particular different nuances that makes us be who we are in special. No one is always good or always bad, that is also why not everyone in a group is good or bad, that is what means that no group is a monolith, because they are made of individuals that are different, even throughout a lifetime. What also leads to the community of trans men in particular having different understandings of themselves, leading to conflicting opinions. There are trans guys who preach that trans guys are just like cis guys, while there are trans guys who preach that trans guys are different from cis guys. Oh, and there are also people who alternate between both positions as long as they are convenient.
It's a nuanced conversation about large concepts and experiences that he has pulled from his life and some people in his life. He isn't speaking for everyone. Generalization is going to happen in any kind of conversation and he talks about how it's nuanced. Honestly what are you even on about? This was really helpful for me to hear because I can relate to this perspective but it's not like I'm walking away assuming all trans men or all cis men look, feel or act this way or that any non-binary/GNC person isn't real because of doubts. It sounds like you are the one over simplifying what he said.
I love this. I am AMAB and I have long struggled with a lot of this stuff. Manhood has been expressed around me in multitudes of dogmatic and normative ways which threw me off and made me feel super uncomfortable with being a man myself. I didn't always have good ways of talking about it but for as long as I can remember, I have been pushing back, expresing my discomfort, getting mad at people for representing my exclusion and humiliation. And I have also felt that discomfort about being gay, and even about being nerdy/geek. But I have learned to handle it better and to be selective about who I'm around and what pressures I allow to be out on me. I still don't super feel like a man, but I have internalized a sense of queer freedom that allows me to picture being a different kind of man than the kind others would push on me.
This is why I think I thought I was nonbinary for a couple years because I just didn't feel like a cis man. My upbringing was not that of a man, I experienced misogyny, so it felt different. But no, I am a man. And the further I get into my transition the more I feel like one.
The farther I get into my transition, the more I realize that I've always been a man. Until pretty recently I've been describing myself as a "nonbinary man" because there was something that felt off about only calling myself a "man." Or I wanted people to understand that my gender was more complex than how they imagine men. Now, I'm even tired of calling myself a trans man (like I have to reduce my gender to only that and explain my manhood before someone points out that I'm different) and I feel really dysphoric when anyone assumes I'm nonbinary and misgenders me by repeatedly calling me "they." Accepting that I'm a man has been hard because until recently I haven't been accepted as a man. I've experienced gendered violence and was taught as a young "girl" that I had a certain place in the world. Finding myself through that was difficult. But I also don't feel accepted as a man by my own community. It's most often other trans people, especially nonbinary people, who misgender me these days. It really hurts that nonbinary people can't see my gender and struggle with my pronouns, and then turn around and talk about how binary trans people are so out of touch. As if our experiences and struggles and joys aren't incredibly similar in some respects. I really hate when people use the term "binary trans person" to position us as closer aligned to cis people when our visions for the future are actually more similar. (Which is to say, there is more diversity among nonbinary people and "binary" trans people than between those communities). More often than not, I feel very estranged from other trans people these days, and like I live in the trenches between "gay man's land" and "transsexual land" without a place to come home to. I think it's also difficult to accept because I don't feel like I'm fully where I need to be with my transition. It's felt really heartbreaking that it's taken so long to begin to pass and I still don't feel like I fully pass. My dysphoria has gotten worse in some ways because now it feels hopeless. When I was dysphoric about my chest, at least I had surgery to look forward to. T isn't going to change my face or voice anymore at this point. I don't think I'll get FMS. I think I have to find a way to live with what I've got and keep in perspective that there are changes that await me through age, etc, but that's fucking hard. I keep wondering: do I not want this enough to have it? But I want it so badly. Can I be a man if I struggle to see one in the mirror everyday? I know I am a man regardless of what I look like, but those body image issues can really fuck with your sense of identity when the whole world treats aesthetics as more important than self-determination. Thank you so much for this video. I really appreciate your perspective and I feel like you create a space to talk about nuances and difficult intracommunity discussions. I certainly don't have all the answers, and no one can get there alone. We need to be able to talk about how our community talks about and understands masculinity in a complex way. So many of us have been taught by feminists, which is great and essential in how trans men navigate coming into manhood, but a lot of those theories are not directly applicable to intracommunity politics if they were written by cis women about a certain type of cis man. I'm planning on picking up bell hook's A Will to Change and I think I'm on a journey to find some masculine role models in my life. You talked about spending more time with men as friends and how that impacted your social transition, and maybe that's what I need to do now. Find my men. I spend time with a lot of gay men at work and in hokup spaces, but I think I need more close masculine relationships outside of work and sx.
As a cis guy who is in the process of questioning his gender, I feel like how I view my own gender has a big impact on how I view my sexuality because of how I perceive gender relationship dynamics. To explain what I mean: I am some version of bi/pansexual, but I identify as gay because something about being the "man" in a straight relationship is just very unappealing to me. However I feel like if I were to transition then I would be more comfortable pursuing relationships with women. I still have no idea what's going on with my gender personally, maybe cis, maybe nb, maybe trans, maybe my gender just defaults to whatever's gayer at any given moment idk. I know this is very different from what is described in the video, but I feel like the discomfort with identifying as a man is there. I doubt many people reading this have a similar experience but if you do I'd love to hear about it or some advice or anything. (Btw Is it weird as a cis guy to be watching both transfem and transmasc advice videos like what does that even say about me.)
about the last point, im a cis woman and i do the same lol, i dont think it says anything about me or my identity . the way i think about these things is i dont think of my behaviour as "revealing a truer self/identity", Identity is an illusion, i understand these things as a set of pragmatic decisions guided by comfort level and or dispositions
This video could not have come at a better time for me. This is precisely what I have been struggling with recently. I have found the medical aspects of my transition to be so much easier than the social part but until now I haven't been able to articulate why. It was so easy for me to accept that I wanted to be physically male but I never wanted to even allow myself to think about becoming a man. I always find your perspective refreshing and reassuring but in this case it is particularly so. Thank you so much.
I didn't allow myself to identify as male until i was like 3 or 4 months on T and even then I'm over 2 years on T now and i still struggle with my identity because I'm viewed as a teen boy and not the 24 year old man I am. I'm in college so I pass well in that setting as a young college student but outside of college I still get misgendered occasionally. And recently a professor misgendered me in front of the whole class, and not because she's transphobic, but because she saw me as a women. I swear I'm getting misgendered more now than i did my first year on T. I'm short and feminine so thats really doesn't help. All the men on both sides of my family are very feminine so its not in my genes to look masculine, other than my excessive body hair and receding hair line 😭. I would love to live stealth and just be seen as a man by everyone who meets me. I hope I'm just being impatient and that with more beard growth, some time spent gaining muscle, and doing voice training I'll be able to live like a cis man does.
Several of my trans male friends really struggle with being read as younger than their age and so I get how frustrating it can be. But many of us are also having our beards only start to come in at 3+ years on T and so I'm hopeful (for all of us, including you) that those later T changes will continue to help us be read as adult men. ❤️
Damn ok random 24yr old cis guy, idk if its just cos i'm ambiguously "on the spectrum" but the getting infantilised thing does happen a fair bit, being treated/perceived as a teen boy and all that. Being a man is weird as hell, and mostly aspirational. Like every single 24 year old guy i know (bar like one, who is a dad) still feels like a teenager on some level. I know we are approaching manhood from different angles but please don't feel alone in that. I dont want to make it seem like this ought to be happening or even WILL happen that often in the future, but, idk if this is gonna make any sense, but sometimes, being treated like a teenager, is almost a good sign? It is not at all incongruent with my experience of cishet masculinity. I wish you the best, just hoping to share that we cis dudes also often feel like this, and feeling like you aren't a proper man yet is like, 90% of the 24 year old man experience, so try not to let that spiral you. I like to think we all got this. So far, for me, feeling like a grown man is kinda like happiness I guess? in the sense that it is a kind of nebulous mist which descends upon you out of the blue, which you want control over desperately, but aren't wise enough to grasp fully yet. Apologies if this isn't helpful in any way, I just know that it is hard *hard* *HARD* to balance insecurity within the framework of masculine identity, but the struggle doesn't make you (or i) any less of a man.
@@graboidgang9077 I don't think I can even express how much I appreciate this response. Thank you so much, it's so helpful to know I'm not alone, and that even cis guys deal with this.
Thoroughly enjoyed this perspective. Being a trans woman and growing up around all kinds of men, I've realized that traumatic experiences with shitty men are also experienced BY cis het men, even very masculine ones, when they don't meet these often harsh and unreasonable gendered expectations. Often, cis-het expressions of hyper-masculinity involve a trauma-informed defense mechanism that leads cis-het men to being in their own version of a closet, ironically enough. It's sad, but good to know for combatting impostor syndrome, that fear of men can be a very male experience to have :' )
Im in my late teens and I'm 8 months on T and I havn't been able to call myself a man, probably partly because, I'm not an adult but also I feel like I am nervous to identify with the word when I do become an adult. I am passing now, but I get so nervous with socializing with guys, I really want to, I'm a teen, and want to live these years as a guy and have a guy friend group but I just freeze up, my friends are all girls or nonbinary, or I have a few trans guy friends but there does seem to be a differation with cis guys, I wish there weren't tho. Idk where I was going but kinda rambled?
Right now I consider myself to be a nonbinary trans guy. I don’t use the term “man” because I don’t feel comfortable with it. But maybe with time I will. Or I won’t. But it feels like all the time I’m moving further away from the label “nonbinary” and towards just “trans”; possibly because being seen as nonbinary is often being seen as just your birth gender, but the lite version, but possibly for other reasons, as well. Maybe I don’t feel comfortable with the term “man” because 1) I’m still very early in my medical transition, so I don’t look very masculine at all, so I don’t feel very comfortable labeling myself as something I don’t even look like (even though a man can look like anyone, masculine or feminine), and 2) I don’t tend to hang out with men a whole lot. In fact, I remember that whenever I would hang out with men at university, it would be with several people who weren’t men as well (not necessarily women, but not men, either). So there was a bit of a barrier between me and the men in the friend group. Tho to be honest, I’m a bit afraid of hanging out with men alone, no matter what their looks or personalities are. I guess I’m just not that used to male attention? And I find women and non-men much easier to hang out with. One thing I’m scared about with my transition is eventually having to use men’s public restrooms. I’m pretty short (like, 5’2” short) and I fear that my height will immediately give me away. I also hear that men’s restrooms are not as clean as women’s, but that’s a whole other issue. But anyway, if anyone has some words of wisdom they would be greatly appreciated 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵
I find it confusing like you feel like a man/woman the same way as other people... Like I am cis I am a woman idk if other women trans or cis feel like a woman in the same way... Like it's both individual and not because we are a group but it's a diverse group different cultures look at it differently etc.
It's wild; every time I see a video title of yours I feel this deep fear like a hot coal in my stomach. Something in me feels brave and I tap - I take a leap of faith and decide to listen even if every fiber in my body is screaming to run away and close my eyes, cover my ears and forget I even saw the title in the first place. But as soon as I'm a minute or more into the video, I feel a strange sense of calm. Like my head is being held to someone's chest and I can hear their beating heart. I can breathe again and I can be still. And by the end of the video, I can look in the mirror with more clarity than before. I first found you through your "How Can You Tell if You're Trans or Not" video (I don't remember the exact title, but I remember that being the general idea). I remember staring at the thumbnail for a few minutes, kind of stuck in a daze. There was this paralyzing feeling of "I want to listen to this, I want to try this out and see if it answers the turbulent questions I keep having. But what if I don't like the answer?" It's the kind of feeling I always get with the majority of your videos that pop up on my timeline. I want to be more knowledgeable, but what if it ends with more pain and confusion than before? Thank you for always proving my fears wrong, and instead making life feel calmer and clearer every time. I find your content to be so important.
I literally commented on your last video like five minutes ago identifying as “gender-fluid but leaning towards man” or something like that I THINK IM LITERALLY JUST A MAN AND IM NOT COMFORTABLE WITH IT AND THATS WHATS BEEN BOTHERING ME JESUS CHRIST THANK YOU
"Good man." Best two words (among other best words) in this presentation! Cis here, but not "ciiiiiisss". Finding "good men" to hang out with is sometimes a real crap shoot. Other times, not so hard. Arthur, quite enjoyable.
This is so real. There was a strong feeling, for me at least, that by transitioning, I might be somehow letting the (women's) side down. It took me a long time to work through that: both my tendency to want to people please and worry about what others would think and also my own hangups about men, the idea of being perceived as a Man™(and as a cis man), and there was definitely rhetoric within the LGBT community that contributed to how conflicted I felt. And then, when I actually started transitioning, it took having top surgery for me to be able to fully envision myself as a guy and realize that I wasn't NB, or just really super butch, or whatever, but a binary trans man, that I needed to go on T, the whole thing. Even then, I'm six months on T (six months today, actually, which has flown by), have just started discovering that I actually pass (sooner than I expected to, which has been good but weird, like going through the looking glass), and getting comfortable with saying that I'm a man is a work in progress. Hanging out in all-male spaces has helped a lot: I went to an all-male club night that was fantastic (and way outside the kind of stuff I would usually do), and I'm in a GBT men's outdoor/camping group, and being in those kinds of environments and accepted as a man by other men totally outside a trans context has really been what started shifting my own perception of myself as someone who is a man and not just, like, LARPing as one.
Thanks for the trans hope, the part celebrating our trans boyhood honestly made me tear up, I've never heard it out that way before. For so long I've just wanted to skip that part and come out on the other end the shining epitome of masculinity. Im now at the stage where I've recently started passing but am still finding who I am as a man internally, and I've been struggling a lot with it. I appreciate the insights in this video a lot
Somehow you always post exactly what I need when I need it, Arthur. Thank you for this one, it’s possibly my favorite video. This is something I struggle with a lot and (being 2 weeks on T) my biggest concern has been the shifting social role. Existing in female/lesbian spaces for so long makes cis men feel like aliens sometimes. Time to change my thinking and see the people under the labels.
Arthur I wish I could sit and talk with you for an hr or two. I am 47 amab and have worked construction for 30 years. I have been around a lot of toxic “Bro” mentality. I started my very slow MTF transition last year and was instantly met with all the same things that made me hide my femininity when I was young. The difference is now I (for the most part) don’t care what other people are saying. What’s been most interesting in the last year is how cis women interact with me. They probably assume I am gay but definitely interact differently then when I presented as masculine cis Male.
This video meant a lot to me actually. That gap feeling is really frustrating and invalidating and I’ve been struggling a lot with it lately. I love framing it as trans boyhood, though. I feel so much more positively about it now. Sometimes it can feel like I don’t even have a hope of integrating into male society successfully because of my transness and hearing about your journey and experiences always fills me with a lot of hope and optimism. It can be really easy to hear transphobic sentiments, especially from cis gay men, and let it live inside me. It’s nice to be reminded that not all cis men are the same or think the same and that being trans doesn’t have to mean being irreconcilably different from other men. :) thanks Arthur
Thank you for this video. I'm struggling to get into lifting weights because I've never been a gym bro, I go there and see muscular men who know what they're doing and that's just not me. But I'm also a nerd, I wear alternative clothing - there are other men like me who might feel the same way! I think that when we as a community 'other' men and treat them like a monolithic oppressor class, it creates such a toxic environment for trans men who are trying to figure themselves out. When you realise that men can look like anything, it's really freeing.
Maybe you are struggling with weight lifting bc you are a girl. Also being a man or woman is not just a feeling, it's a fact. You are either a man or a woman. Men can never become women and women can never become men. It's not possible. So maybe just try to do things that are possible. Like learning how to fly a plane or learning how to cook.
You talk about how there are different kinds of men, but what if you are not transman and just different kind of woman?) There are also different kinds of women, you know)
I wish I was accepted into the Trans-men circles, I don't even know where they are located. Even though I am an older 59 gay short guy, I love the concept that people are daring to be the people they feel more associated with. I think many trans-men I've watched on RUclips and seen on other online sites are very handsome. I've shown pictures of gay trans porn stars (above the waist) to straight associates and asked them, which bathroom you think this guy belongs to, then I show them the full nude picture and aske them you want to explain to your daughter why a fully clothed man like him is going into the female bathroom which is the bathroom of his gender at birth? You'd be amazed how many homophobe/transphones realize how ignorant they are acting.
This was fantastic and exactly what I needed right now, to the point that I think I was having a conversation about this exact thing right around the hour it was uploaded. Thank you.
One thing i also fear about starting transition that kind of relates to this is, that I'm really passionate about female solidarity. Stuff like when I see a girl in a club feeling uncomfortable I'm able to just step up, pretend to be her friend, get her away from the situation and in most cases she'd feel safe with me. When I'm passing as male I'd be scared, that women won't feel as save around me. And that makes me really sad somehow :/
It is a sad thing for sure- Being seen as a man (and therefore as a danger,) is honestly really isolating It's something I've really noticed since transitioning- people will feel less safe around you, with extend you less empathy, and will be more likely to interpret your actions or words as aggression And regardless of the reasons people have to feel that way, it's not an enjoyable experience to be viewed that way But transitioning is still worth it imo if you are trans, simply being comfortable in your body is an amazing thing.
Yes I really relate to this, I've been thinking about it a lot lately. There's a responsibility and a burden to passing as a man, especially when it comes to how we conduct ourselves around women. It's sad to be seen as a threat, even while understanding why
ohhhhh my goodness this was so incredibly enlightening i cant even begin to thank you enough. i'm just over 2 years into medical transition & am post top-surgery, but i've still clung very tightly to the label of "transmasc enby" as a way of differentiating myself from men i think in the exact same way you discussed here. your points have challenged me in really fantastic ways, i'm so grateful. i have a lot of unpacking & processing to do, but your perspectice and insight has alleviated a lot of anxiety and has given me a great deal of courage. thank you, arthur!!
That is the same with women. I call it a deep woman, when you no longer see the shoreline of your transitioning, but sail in the open sea of everything female.
Thank you for this. I feel like I'm transitioning in reverse in a way: I've always fit into male spaces, and I'm socially transitioning with male friendships already established. Never a lesbian. Never connected with women. Physical differences have become more painful as I sustain these male friendships which feel even easier for me with T in my brain, but more awkward as I approach 6 months on T and my face is a mess. I resent that my 30 and 40 something male friends are witnessing my adult "boyhood" in my mid 30s. They see me change as a baritone at queer choir and at Crossfit. When I don't feel masculine enough, I think of the Vlogbrothers. That's my goal. Nerds are great and I'm married to a nerdy bear I love. It's just hard to already have these friends and be so public. I'm lucky to have so many cis and trans men to support me and see me in my masculinity. But I just want to hibernate until this is over sometimes.
i genuinely can't explain how important your content is to me! i've had a lot of similar experiences to you and the way you explain everything so accurately makes me feel so emotionally seen. i'm still pre t but your videos help me so much to feel like what i'm going through is an experience others have had before. you're one of the most thoughtful and intelligent people i've come across, online or not. i wish you the best of luck on your journey :)
Appreciate you being able to make people aware that the perspective that is arrived at through transitioning can turn into a blind spot that perpetuates the same types or shapes of attitudes that hurt people in the first place. I really appreciate your voice, and your perspective on how age isn't the only factor in experiencing certain phases in life.
I dunno if you ever watched Dylan (boyform)'s videos on the transmasc relationship to toxic masculinity, but I've been thinking about exactly this problem in myself ever since those videos and then there was never really anybody I found offering a solution. I guess it's really not that complicated. I will say, though, it's a little hard to have an uncomplicated relationship with manhood as a trans guy when 98% of the cis guys you've ever seen yourself in are trans now. Changes the way I look at any cis guys I really click with now even when I don't want it to.
Based on complicated experiences in my life and being intersex, I can say there's a part of me that would in a utopia just simply say I'm a man, thats it, but I've frankly faced too much from mostly cis men, people still emulating cis men, queer pickmes who still see cis men as the "best", and cis women who are pickmes for a cis man, to feel like I'm in the same, category? Socially in the US/south anyway, there are exceptions at times, but usually the cis men in question who are those exceptions also doesn't vibe with other cis men the same way(s) and turn out to be ND or similar. It's to where, even though I've been stealth before I feel like my own sense of masculinity and "maleness" is more internal, as externally what I face the most struggles with societally and intra-community wise (even from other trans people, especially if they're perisex and white, never have faced this from a black or fellow intersex trans person) is relating to my assigned and presumed agab (afab), even when I dated a trans woman and started to pass, she was aggressively misgendering me (i never, ever misgendered her) and was boiling me down to genitals in just about every way 🤷♂️ (needless to say she was white, perisex and pseudo rich). So, I'm still trans, I still vibe with being called a man more than a woman, and hate all childlike terminology "girl/boy", but I would better say I am some form of agender and transsexual, I work with and alter my form accordingly where I can, to simplify things I just tell people to consider me a guy, but I don't feel like I'm in the same category (transness aside) as cis men or cis women, and now form relationships (platonic ones and did this with my long term partner) based on how much humanity they give me and on whether or not they truly respect boundaries rather to only/simply performatively validating my "manness" initially/publicly etc
I found this video really interesting. Firstly, I am a straight, white man, 23, (cis-man I guess, I dunno much about this space I won’t lie) and I came into this video not really knowing what to expect, a part of me assuming that, now that you’d transitioned, you realised that being a man, is really hard sometimes, and you’d had regrets, but the way you described it, was unexpected and I’m glad you enjoy being a man, I’m not part of that bro-culture you described, I don’t really fit in there either, I have friends who are, and they are all very nice people, you may not want to be friends with them, and that’s understandable, but you’d be treated with more respect than I think you may realise, but I don’t know your history, and I can’t really relate to a lot of your experiences, so maybe I’m biased in a lot of ways. This is the first time I’ve even been on this side of RUclips, and to hear that some Trans-man are annoyed at other trans-men enjoying being a ‘man’ and not a trans-man, is quite confusing to me, please excuse my ignorance, and I’d be interested to hear some other opinions on that. Because if you felt like you didn’t fit in as a woman, you felt more like a man, so transitioned to a man, but now you don’t want to be called a man, I dunno, there is only one trans person in my town (that I’m aware of) and they seem like a nice person, we don’t really have any mutual friends, but I know that if I spoke to them I wouldn’t make any judgements about them before speaking to them, as I hope they wouldn’t about me, but I am also interested in their experience, but I don’t want to offend them by asking them questions about it, because i understand that talking about it to someone of my profile might be daunting, I don’t want to offend anyone with this comment, I hope I haven’t, I think as a society, if the ultimate goal is to be accepted by one another, we need to be educated, which is all I am looking for, and if my ignorance is upsetting well I can’t really help that without education, which is what I’m after so, yeah, thanks
Its really great that you are taking the time to educate yourself on this!
Arthur you have no idea how much your videos and your channel is helping me.This video, the one about the fear of being unattractive on t, the sex info, the transition thoughts, all your videos make me feel seen, heard and not alone. I'm really grateful for your channel, your positive impact on my life and my confdence is something i will never forget, thank you.
Awww this comment really made my day! I'm really honored 🥺
VERY educational, thank you!
To add to this, many queer cis guys such as myself do not feel comfortable in the world of men, either. We can feel othered and less than, even when it is not being done by others. Most of my friends are women for this exact reason.
Being a trans man obviously throws an extra wrench in the works. I can only imagine.
I mean, you're gay. Men like women. You don't. Not a real man.
I am a trans woman and I feel really weird about being a woman sometimes.
Like, it is objectively true. I am full of estrogen, I look like a woman, I get perceived as a woman even in a transphobic society, I feel perfectly fine and natural with the she/her pronouns.
But at the same time I absolutely do not fit in with "the girls", I feel really uncomfortable around this whole constant implication of "gotta have a husband and babies someday" that seems in almost every conversation with a neurotypical cis straight woman. I only really feel comfortable and understood by queer neurodivergent women, and we share the plight of "not really feeling like women" in society. We share just seeing it as a base biological and sociological fact, but not a true identity to build a personality around for ourselves.
I feel like it'll take me a while though to find women who are like me and who I can fully identify with. I am a blue collar factory worker with techbro ambitions. There are very few women around this field for me to be professionaly friends with. So for now I only get the non-TERFy queers.
That's because you are actually a man.
I am quite entrenched in the "doubt" period of my transition. Waiting to start testosterone and contemplating if I am an imposter.
I was in this so long and it helped me to truly take my time not to wait but to accept myself fully either way, male or female or other, accept myself unconditionally and make all options okay. And then the answer was clear. The answer will never be the chatter, it will be a quiet peaceful but persistent knowing.
Ive been HUNGERING for this kind of discussion. Thank you!
at first when i saw this video i was thinking trans men that aren’t comfortable being men? how does that work? but when you explained it its just so me. i’m pre-t and i always feel like im in limbo, in an inbetween. i’m a trans dude, a guy, a boy. but never a man. im not friends with cis guys, mostly girls. and i do really feel ostracised and different. didnt think anyone else though this way, thanks!
Yeah I think it's taboo bc we really want everyone to respect our genders, but taking time to feel comfortable being a man seems like a *very* common experience
When I first came out, changed my pronouns, changed my name, it absolutely felt like some elaborate form of cosplay, not because my gender isn't real but because you're trying to undo years of living as another gender, you've got this new name, new pronouns, and especially when I was pre-/newly on T, it felt ridiculous to say, "I'm a Man," because... well, c'mon. I wasn't fooling anyone, or so it felt at the time. And how am I going to feel like a man when I'm getting carded trying to buy beer at 40, because the (20-year-old) cashier thinks I'm 15? The longer I've been on T and the more time I've spent around other men, though (and honestly, the more I've started passing), the better my own self perception has become. People really should talk about this more, because I think it's really common and normal.
@Soothsayer-ll6pm Maybe that’s your life, but that’s not everyone’s experience. Whether you like the term or not, you are cis if you’re a biological male that is still male. Same concept as being straight. It just means not gay, like cis means not trans.
Also not every man wants to find a woman. Not every man settles down and has kids. There isn’t one way to be a man.
As an early trans man, I used to (and sometimes still do) feel like an impostor among men. But after watching quite a few HealthyGamer interviews with (typically cis) men about mental health and identity, I’ve come to the conclusion that not feeling like a “real man” is the most archetypally male thing in the world.
The trick is realising that as you are a man, what a man is is defined by you. Should usually happen no later than 30 or so. And yes of course we're scary. So are rollercoasters yet people don't run away in terror.
Whaaaaat. You mean yall ladies didn’t know how to be men? Shocking
Gamers aren't men.
@@AliciaTheTroonSlayer youre a little sheep riding that hate train, keep festering and seething in your echo chamber😂
I'm a man and never felt I'm not a real man, even though I'm far from the stereotype. Never heard this from any of my male friends either. It isn't a thing. Stop making stuff up to validate yourself.
I'm cis and straight passing, but I am neither. I'm proud to be trans, because of all the things I have had to overcome and how I have managed to heal myself, but I still tend to think of my transness as a medical and mental health thing that isn't other people's business unless I know them well. I say this because I hope queer people think about that if they are uncomfortable with cishet men they might end up excluding binary trans men or bisexual men, who are also just trying to find community.
Finally- someone GETS it. I’ve struggled with finding trans media that really delves into the nuance. I finally feel seen. Thank you.
Awww 🥰 delving into the nuance is exactly what I'm going for!
LOVE the idea of trans boyhood! 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈
Im not sure how i feel or what I am, but this addresses a lot of questions and fears I've had in a very productive way. Thank you for this.
I'm a cis gay man and I can actually really relate to some of this. I've always been fine with being called a guy or a boy, but until recently would get weirded out by being called a man, so much so that I went through a period of questioning if I might be non-binary.
I eventually realised that I'm cis, and that it was the connotations and societal pressure attached to the word "man", as well as my own limited view of what a man is, that was making me uncomfortable identifying with the term.
What helped me was realising that there are only two necessary criteria for being a man - being an adult who identifies as male. Beyond that basic definition, I'm free to define what being a man means to me.
I've often felt out of place in all-male groups, but surrounding myself with more like-minded men would probably help with this, as it has done for you. I think I need to start hanging out with more trans men because you guys seem to be more on my wavelength!
I don't think you're non-binary. I think you're just gay. Gay men aren't "real men". Men like women. Gay men don't. So clearly not the same thing.
that's really interesting! thank you for sharing :)
Omg i thought I'm not transgender because although I'm extremely uncomfortable with my female body and want to medically change my feminine features im not comfortable with the idea of "being a man". Now im confused lol
oh my god i thought it was just me. i tried typing up a comment like twice now but they went on for much too long; i'll just say, thank you for talking about this! its comforting to hear i'm not the only one who struggled with the idea of being a man because of those things.
This is a great video. As a cis queer guy who has dated trans guys in the past, I am not surprised to hear this and have encountered it before. I don’t want to speak out of turn (as I’m not trans) but I feel as though a lot of it also comes down to the “assimilationist” vs “liberationist” dichotomy of queer identity. Contrapoints did a podcast with someone a few months ago (can’t remember their name tho) and she was talking about trans “pick me’s” like Blair White and how some LGBTI people are so desperate to be accepted and are so convinced by the (completely valid, though nuanced) assimilationist argument that they’re willing to debase both themselves other queer people in an effort to feel any semblance of belonging in broader society. I think maybe trans guys not wanting to feel like or be compared to cis guys might be a symptom of the flip side of that dichotomy; that trans/gay/bi/ace people are not cis, straight or allosexual, and that any assimilationist rhetoric or attempt is both useless and worse, harmful, because it undermines trans identity, and ignores the struggles that trans people have to deal with that cis people do not.
I personally do not distinguish between cis guys and trans guys in my dating life, and I’ve encountered trans guys who’ve been really receptive to that and find it very gender affirming, and others who dislike it, because they feel like they have traits that differentiate them from cis guys, and my indifference towards that (romantically/sexually at least) triggers a different kind of dysphoria. And that’s a totally valid feeling and I get why some trans guys might feel that way.
I’m sure there is a similar phenomenon with gay men. I know that some gay men wish that the adjective of “gay” was no more relevant than “brown haired”, and wish to only be categorized as a man, while other gay guys feel like their identity as gay makes them fundamentally different from straight men in a way that cannot be ignored socially/societally. Both of those viewpoints are completely valid in my estimation and have real logic behind them.
I'll raise your last paragraph; I find that difference sufficiently huge between gay and bi, let alone gay and straight.
Love this. There are so many different lenses to see the world through
@@seto749 what do you say?
Wow thank you so much for talking about this. I've recently gotten an official diagnosis for gd and am on the verge of starting to transition to male in a military setting, which has a very binary format and at times toxic masculinity, which intimidates me, despite the fact that I lean much more towards trans man than nonbinary. I've lived with the lesbians on my boat and been treated badly by some of the cis men. In life the same thing, and yet the same discomfort with but unending longing to be a guy has never stopped so I know I just gotta do it. This reminds me to think about all the guys I've met in the military who just aren't like that, who are good people and so often gender nonconforming, sometimes because being in the military has helped them to feel more secure or to just not give a fuck. I feel like this video said so many things that described me where I'm at and where I've been, it really gives me hope that I could end up as happy, well-spoken, "gay and chaotic" and good a man as you :)
Thanks Arthur!
Reminds me of how the other day I was hanging out with my art school friends and I had a great time, and when I was coming home I had this thought like "damn, I had such a great time I didn't even realize I was hanging out with only cis people" 😂 The cis straight men were artsy enough to get along, many are probably neurodivergent, and the preppy straight catholic cis girl is actually adorable. (There many trans ppl but that day it was mostly the cis friends)
@@JoHap-wo1bc uh.. no why?
Thank you for deconstructing what “men” are outside of just football lol. Broey Masculinity ™️ is truly such a narrow tiny window for all mens personalities to have to try to fit into.
It’s impossible, and I would actually argue that the Bro Dude Giga Chad is the tiny minority, not every other diverse type of man. Even Steve Irwin was like this “weird off brand” style of a “macho dude”.
It’s just so absurd that football jock could be seen as the only option.
This is exactly what I've been experiencing and thinking about myself, thanks for showing I'm not alone! Very important topic.
I LOVE HOW YOU ALWAYS BRING THE PERFECT MISSING PIECES ❤❤🎉
I watched this video yesterday and it's been in my head ever since. I know I commented already, but I kept coming back to what you said about types of men. It really got to me. I started to realize that even the cis men I know in my life struggle to fit into the ideal image of a man. I know a bunch of nerdy men who play D&D or watch anime. Skinny, short, tall, fat. All kinds. I have never once questioned if any of them are men. They just are. Thanks for this wonderful video. I'll be back to watch it again some time.
this video is full of so much good information and perspectives, i don’t even know what to comment on because i love all of it. as a non-binary trans guy, i approve of this message:)
edit: i’m not sure if you have a video on this yet, but i would love to see you talk about how you deal with misogynistic cis men as a trans man. the further along i get in my transition, the more cis men feel comfortable expressing unhinged opinions about women, and i have no idea how to respond to it lol. like what makes you think i’d hate women?? i lived as a woman for 23 years. i know what it’s like.
edit 2: the “boyhood” framing that you mentioned at the end is really helpful, thank you:)
A little late to this, but I really appreciate the nuanced and compassionate way you approach this topic. The idea that early transition is a kind of boyhood makes so much sense to me - often I find that when I'm with cis men of my own age I don't feel like a woman, but I do feel like a boy among men. It's not help by the fact I look much younger than I am, but it goes beyond appearance - I guess its the product of not yet having time to grow into manhood
Hi Arthur! Thank you so much for posting this video. I have had this feeling that I was forcing myself to be trans for months. But the thoughts I had (wanting a flat chest, wanting people to call me by he/him pronouns) were always there. This made me feel very confused and angry at myself. Listening to your experience makes me feel understood and I never thought someone else had the same feelings as me. So once again thank you!
Not only transmen feel this way! Lots of cis male people are uncomfortable with certain aspects of cultural 'masculinity' and aren't sure how they fit in until they find their own group of like-minded people. Like you said, this is especially true in the gay community! But I also have straight cis friends who feel this way too.
as someone in early transition, i feel extremely seen. this is the exact thing that made me feel stupidly alien this whole time and you gave me hope and strength to keep moving forward
Social roles, social expectations, and familiarity with different settings and people are all very hard to get accustomed to changing. It's sort of like going to a foreign land and culture.
Your channel has been the most helpful for me, thank you so so much! I haven't seen other trans creators talking about these unobvious issues.
Great presentation Arthur. Certainly cis men contemplate the question “What is a real man”. Queries online lead to various viewpoints, predominantly founded on virtues. Some of those virtues may lead to so called “toxic masculinity”. For me, the definition of “what is a real man” is founded on my father’s premiss: “Be nice” to yourself and to others. Subsequently, the ideal focus should be “what is a real person” 😉 Evidently, humanity has not even figured that one out yet 🧐
This video is seriously so important to me, I've been questioning my gender for a while now and I've been cought up in exactly the same worries - not wanting to be seen as a man, being able to fit into male social circles etc. It definetly feels less lonely to know that I'm not the only person who had/ is having these thoughts.
"it's not that you never will, it's just that right now, you're in your boyhood" holy shit that really hit me 🥹 I'm 35 and 4 days on T (🥳) so it's been really weird balancing the dual identities of "I'm a grown ass adult" but also "I'm a baby trans" haha 😂 and for me my only (still intense) trepidation has definitely been the social transition part. I'm still very comfortable with more traditionally "feminine roles" like childcare and home keeping, being a safety worry-wart, LOL, but just like, in a man's body please 🤷♂️ 😂
I didn't feel uncomfortable being a man at first because I had a very narrow/limited view of what being a man was, I came to realise though that for me it was mostly the type of men I had experience with and once I had more experience with different kinds of men and found some that I had more in common with I felt a lot more comfortable. I still feel uncomfortable around certain kinds of men but I think that's mostly a trauma thing rather than insecurity around my own manhood as such. I went through a short spell of identifying as a butch lesbian before transitioning and it took time to adjust from that and being part of those spaces to being perceived as a man and the expectations surrounding that.
The thing was how differently people treated myself and my then partner, we were treated so much better as a "straight" appearing couple than we ever were as a lesbian couple. A big worry of mine was if I became single would I be able to find another partner, as I was in a long-term relationship when I transitioned (we separated after 13 years together), especially as a lot of people were saying that cis-gay men wouldn't even give me a chance. Those fears were largely unfounded, I had very little trouble finding people who were attracted to me both as a trans person but also as a disabled person. It then took another adjustment when I got into a gay relationship and how people largely treated us as a cis-gay couple. I'm happy to report that I'm now in a 6.5 year relationship with a wonderful cis-gay man and being trans isn't really an issue there.
For myself as a person who passes 100% of the time, I often get looks of puzzlement or complete shock when I come out to people and that's from cis and trans people. I'm 18 years on T and almost 20 years transitioning and largely stealth in my real life, not through actively trying to be stealth it just doesn't come up all that often/isn't relevant a lot of the time.
This sort of reminds me how I've heard a lot of cis men saying that they're also scared of other cis men. My cis partner has told me how he crosses the street when he sees a group of men, and the experiences of being bullied by other men because of not being masculine enough etc. I always remind myself of this when I feel like this, because its not exactly weird for me as a man to be scared of other men. My friends are mainly cis men and they aren't these hyper masculine cis men, and have all had problems with other men, and experiences of being threatened and scared by them. A lot of them take the piss out of these kind of cultural forces as you say, because a lot of them time these forces negatively affect them and also they want to be good people.
This poem was printed in "Trans Homo ... GASP: Gay FTM and Cis Men on Sx and Love"
Kissing you then, touching the scars where your breasts
had once been, I wondered if
You knew those men, too. I wondered if your desire was anything like mine.
Those men frightened me, yet I longed to give them my body,
[very spicy line lol]
...
You are not that man now. Nor am I.
We explore - our parts
somewhat different.
Our chromosomes only have one x in common.
Yet our histories, I suspect, are similar.
The poem in its entirety is very beautiful. I strongly recommend the whole book!
@dyscophushoppercry about your surgeries, transgenda 👰🏻♂️
@dyscophushopper sure, surgical project sista
Thank you, Arthur ❤ I've been watching your videos and I strongly relate to your experiences. Every video I see after another is like I get some weight lifted, it really helps me to hear your perspective about some things I'm struggling with since it's really easy to get lost in your own thoughts sometimes, specially when you're a very anxious person and doubt yourself like me. Here I feel particularly called out too, since this one fear is what sometimes holds me back from transitioning and it's nice seeing your perspective about it, knowing it will be fine when I give it time, that I'm not that type of man I'm afraid of and that I have to fight against toxic masculinity and misogyny, but not myself.
this is a super interesting take, thanks for expanding my mind! Definitely something for me to contemplate.
It's always irked me talking to trans men who purposely view and apply a differentiation between cis men and trans men. I never understood it and I never related to it. For me, I am a man, always have been, and the whole point of my transition is to aline that. I do not see myself as any different from a cis man and that I had to transition is such an inconsequentially minute detail about my existence. I really appreciate the nuance and compassion you had when explaining all this. It causes me to reflect on mt anger and my view of it as projected internalized transphobia to a different lived exerpience than my own. I never really lived as a woman and will therefor never really understand the fear or trauma cis men have caused women and other trans men. It is important to listen other people's perspectives and instead of seeing it as an attack on my identity, instead assess it as a reflection on their life story. Your videos are always so thought provoking and intentionally written.
I relate to this a lot, I've always felt too different to women. In evry sense. I have never had a true female experience
@@ayeright320 ok flat brain, let me put this simple so that you can understand: when you have gender dysphoria your entire life you cannot experience your life the same way others people of your birth sex do.
Well she’s a woman
Thinking of social transition as the months/years-long process of gradually finding your place in male society is the best transition advice I've ever heard.
This video describes me perfectly. My physical transition is basically done -- I've been out and on T for two years, have a full beard, and even had top surgery three days ago, but I've spent so little time in male spaces throughout my life that I still feel like there's a huge gulf between me and cis men. It doesn't help that almost everyone I interact with in my daily life (friends, family, coworkers) knew me pre-transition, so the way I'm treated day-to-day hasn't really changed much. On the rare occasion I find myself in a group of cis men, I can't get out of my own head and end up making myself dysphoric.
But you're right, the best way to reconcile these feelings is to confront them head-on. Thank you so much for making this video.
congrats on the top surgery btw!! And I feel what you are saying in this comment
This makes me feel so much better about experiencing this. Even 5 years on T i still dont feel like a man, always a dude or guy or trans man. And I feel like an imposter being called a man. And ive felt drawn to nb identities.
This is an amazing video!
this video helped me so much. I'm very early in my transition (only just about to start therapy) and I was so worried I was the only one who felt this way and that that somehow meant I couldn't be trans enough or something. because well, I want to be a man, so I should be able to feel like a man all the time and enjoy feeling like a man and all that, right? hearing this explanation finally helped me understand some of these feelings better. thank you so much for this
Arthur you have the most beautiful and kind eyes! Keep giving your view to others looking for guidance and understanding.
Gary
i really appreciate this video. im in a weird place w my transition and its like i align a lot with gay male sexuality and culture, but i am a very androgynous transmasc person a few yrs on T with top surgery. sometimes i feel like i dont belong in those spaces because of my androgyny and gender non conformity. i present rather effeminate at times. the insane toxic masculinity has been smth i experienced over fruity alcohol definitely like you describe, like unhinged but socially acceptable for some reason.
I am gay man. I feel comfortable being a man. I am still happy that who I am. I love my male body! 👍🏻
Wow it’s so interesting to know that some people feel this way😮 I am a trans man but almost all of my friends now & a lot of my friends before I transitioned are cis men but even before I was officially out all I really ever wanted was to just be seen as one of the guys. Also even before I was out I considered myself a men’s rights advocate. So, can’t really say I personally relate to the feelings you’re talking about; not that anyone else is necessarily wrong for feeling that way, though I do find it a bit sad that someone would feel that way and I find it rather interesting because I hadn’t even really realised that that was a thing🤷🏻♂️
Great video, thank you!!
Positive role models can be so important :)
Personally, when I was younger, I had identified as non binary, partly because the LGBT community, I felt, did not really allow me to be a boy for a number of reasons. Part of it was my gender presentation (I was and continue to be comfortable in dresses, makeup, and with long hair), which confused a lot of people when I expressed a desire to go on testosterone and get top surgery, and sometimes even just to use he/him pronouns, but the other side to it was that I had had many bad experiences with men in the past and couldn’t fully accept myself as part of that group. It didn’t help that all of my exposure to the LGBT community did reinforce than idea that masculinity is scary, dirty, and dangerous.
A few years ago, upon getting into the visual kei scene, that was the first time I saw that men could be gentle, beautiful, and not necessarily something to be feared. Before that point, I couldn’t even accept my attraction to men. I think that alone has helped my growth exponentially, and from that moment onward I knew I’d be a man, at least, one day, when I got older. Now I’m fifteen, I’m on testosterone, and I have my top surgery consult in February. I’ve noticed a toxic idea of masculinity being very prevalent in queer spaces, and it really hurts me, because I know that it kept me from transitioning and accepting myself and my sexuality (I’m gay, lol)
Sorry for this essay of a comment but the ideas presented in this video do really resonate with me
...and people wonder why so many Gs want out of the "community"...
im a 24 year old transmasc, but have gone thru similar feelings to you.
Congrats on starting t and your surgery consult. Best of luck!
@@fr33f4l4st1ne thank you!!
i relate to this so much although i currently identify as a non binary trans guy
This is an excellent video, Arthur! Thank you so much, man!
I love watching genderqueer videos like yours, or for example Noah Finnce's
Good jon, keep up the great work
Could you explain more about the gender journal? I can only find studies and articles, but I feel like journaling would be a big help for me.
God I am so dang excited to be a man. I'm not sure if I entirely identify as a binary man, since I haven't experienced it fully.
That said, I'm so excited to fulfill being the male version of myself that I wanted to see in this world.
I'm excited on your behalf!!
Nothing like a white woman jumping to the top of social hierarchy by saying they're a man, hey?
I haven't fully watched the video yet but I think that's why I identify as masc-non-binary instead of a trans guy because I don't really feel like a "man"...
Finally someone said the words. Thank you so much for this video, i wish more younger trans guys could see this and realise that not every man is evil, and that being a masculine man can be positive and awesome (if they want to be masculine of course). Im just tired of being excluded from cis men.
What kind of helped me was basically “studying” to be a man. I’m a feminist and I really care about that but I had no idea how to be a feminist as man. I’m still learning but I read some Bell Hooks (whose work I love dearly) and it helped me understand the issues cis men have and why they act the way they do. For me that was super important for being comfortable as man, because I had to be a “good man”.
So yesterday I came out to my mom, and she said some hurtful things that made me doubt myself in my own identity. Your video put all my thoughts properly into words and if anything, I'm even more confident in the fact that I want to move forward in my transition. And that I want to be 'a good man'.
But you're a woman. You can't be a man bc you are a woman. Maybe get a hobby. Don't try to be something you can never be.
Im 4,5 years on T and 1,5 years post op, and now that I have been passing for a long while it feels WEIRD. I kinda only realised recently that I've been keeping my appearance deliberately androgynous. I didn't have the background you describe, but I definitely relate to being cautious (?) about ones own masculinity - I still hide my "scary" hobbies like heavy metal and martial arts. And also, I'm not a super macho guy either - I onyl really get on with other queer goths. Thanks for articulating this! :)
i am sometimes embarrassed that a twenty something person is teaching me so much about life, but he has insight that I have never had at his age and I am always so happy that he voices exactly my questions and thoughts. i am approaching forty and still cannot decide if I want to transition so i think if i was meant to transition it wouldn't have been such a difficult decision for me to make. so it seems like I am not really made to do that and have to somehow play my cards the best I can with the body i have. social aspect is also similarly concerning to me. i don't have any problem with "cis men", on the contrary i feel like people are people, and depending on their character they end up being good or bad, not based on their gender. but i struggle to make friends anyway and end up feeling more comfortable with women eventhough i don't actually like to hang out with women because i feel like i somehow lose my masculinity when i am in a big group of women and am being seen as one of them. and at the same time hanging out with men makes me feel very emasculated because they are obviously masculine and i am not in comparison, so i stand out like a sore thumb. so i end up not feeling like i fit in in any of the groups and on top of it i don't fit with any type of lgbt community of any sort because i am just so incredibly different from them it seems like we have absolutely nothing in common. and this social isolation would just get worse i think if i was to transition. so i dont think transition is for me.
Deciding whether or not to transition was one of the most difficult parts towards easing into my identity. I figured that if my dysphoria wasn't that bad, and that I was uncertain, that I could just 'accept' being a woman. But that eventually became too difficult once I realized the option to be a man was truly wide open for me (barring social circumstances). Pay attention to how much you described yourself as 'masculine' and 'emasculated'. Either way, whether you end up identifying as a man or not, therapy (specifically gender therapy) would be beneficial to help you sort out these feelings.
hey, so I completely identify with what you're expressing. First off, I'm not telling you any of this as a way to convince you of anything, I'm just telling you so you know you aren't the only person who has felt like this. I'm 35, started transitioning at 33. It took a long time for me to decide that was the right thing for me, and even for some time after I started I still wasn't sure because I felt all the same things you're expressing here. What helped me make the decision was realizing a few things, first that I could stop any time, second was that the idea of being the grossest most lonely man on the planet was more appealing to me than continuing to be a (somewhat) attractive and still lonely woman. I got a breast reduction in 2020 in the hopes that if my chest was at least smaller I could feel okay being a woman. I even "joked" with my surgeon that if he oopsie daisy took my whole breasts off I would sill be pleased. The only thing I regretted about that was not having the courage to actually tell him I wanted NO BOOBS AT ALL. I also wanted more than anything to not hear a little girl when I talked, I thought if I could just take testosterone for long enough to get a bit of a deeper voice I could then reevaluate at that point and decide if I wanted to keep going. What ended up happening was I started testosterone and every change I thought I would hate I actually LOVED (being conditioned to believe you hate your own body hair is harmful, turns out). I feel like after a couple of weeks of being unsure I started to feel incredibly good. After a while I started lifting weights and seeing just how easy it is to gain muscle with a testosterone dominant body. What was really odd was my face started to look like a 15 year old boy rather than a 30 something woman, eventually I started looking my age but clearly a man, facial hair, better jawline, eyebrows filled in, hairline masculinized, and on top of that my weight lifting was masculinizing my body. Looking in the mirror stopped being something I had to do to make myself presentable and started being something I liked to do. Looking at a (somewhat) handsome man and realizing that is ME healed something in me.
I'm not going to pretend the social isolation is going to improve automatically, or that you're gonna suddenly start having stuff in common with 20 something queer people. I like queer people, but I don't find I have too terribly much in common with those I find in LGBT groups, though that might be due to living in a college town so the groups are filled with college agee people. Social isolation is self made, mostly, it's difficult making friends with people if you don't know if they'd hate you if they knew, and feeling that if they did know they'd treat you differently. It takes serious dedication and intention to overcome hurdles like that, something that I will admit I have not yet committed to. What makes it worth it to me is that I'm finally safe with myself. Me and the guy in my head are much better friends, if you know what I mean.
Anyway I just thought it might be helpful to hear a perspective from someone who isn't an extroverted 20 something, who transitioned late, who suffers socially.
This is really the magic of the Internet! Allowing people of all different ages and backgrounds to share insights and connect. Wishing you luck on your journey ❤️
I mean, you could be non binary or some other type of identity. Either way, transition begins socially at the first step. So you could try that out and see how it makes you feel. Talk to a gender therapist. Make a second social media account and try interacting with people online as a man. That's one way to test the waters. Tbh it sounds like you're pre-rejecting all your possible options before you even try it out. That could just be the fear of losing what you already have, even though you say that what you already have is not fulfilling to you. Ask yourself if your life were to end tomorrow, what would you regret, what would you change about yourself if you could
Thank you everyone for replying and sharing your experience and advice I didn't expect anyone to even see the comment. Let me expand a little bit on my story. I have felt like I would feel much more comfortable if I was seen as male socially from the earliest age I can remember, probably around 5. But I was always fully aware I was a girl but I knew I would be vetter off as a boy, it was always pretty conscious. But feelings were always there. Then lets fast forward to my late twenties, when I finally went to a gender therapist to figure out whats happening. She was good and helped me figure out a lot of things, i saw her for about 2 or 3 years, can'tremember exactly. Then I went the official route and got diagnosed, which included over a year of appointments with a therapist and a psychiatrist at a hospital and then another psychatrist and then a whole comittee of doctors that approve the final diagnoses. I never felt this was too much even though many of you and maybe many of young people would think so, but to me it seemed very necessary since we are talking about a major huge change to your body and your entire life. By the end of this process covid hit and I wasn't really feeling comfortable in hospitals (in my country the whole process takes place in state hospitals bc we have a social based free healthcare here in europe, so there are no separate clinics, it all goes through the regular system). During covid I had a lot of time to think and be with my thoughts and started to reevaluate transition and the actual reality of it. After covid slowed down a bit I went to talk with the endocrinologist who basically said that elevated testosterone is not uncommon in women with many other conditions and that it isn't dangerous and that we could start with low dose and see from there. I had a long list of very specific questions because I enjoy reading science articles about subjects that interest me so I had quite serious questions and she kept downplaying the risks and was very surprised I am taking the whole thing quite seriously. But I have one body and one life and I am not going experiment with things that are potentially going to make me a lifelong patient, because all sorts of metabolic and hormonal disbalances are a realistic risk. Anyway I had the talk with her, went home, did more research on my own and decided it is too overwhelming and took a break for a few years, because I couldn't take the whole thing anymore, I was obsessing for years about it and I couldn't do it anymore. And now several years after that I still can't find the courage to risk so much by taking hormones. It just seems it isn't researched enough for me to trust any of the articles. It all seems very biases and also there is no long term studies. For a while I was frantically searching for anyone who is on hormones for longer than 10 years and could only find one person in a brirish tv show which title I forgot. So that is my situation. Maybe my disphoria is not strong enough to make those risks worth taking, maybe my character wouldn't be able to take those risks, maybe I am right and hormone therapy needs more research maybe I am just not brave enough and prefer the discomfort I know over discomfort I don't know. So in the end I don't know. I definitely identify as a man, I would socially take on a male role of a aman if I was to transition, but at the same time I know my body is biologically female and will always be and all the changes I do to it would only help me take the social role better and alleviate the dysphoria. I am realistic in my expectations, I don't think all problems will go away, but even with realistic expectation I still can't make a decision to go through wirh transition. Sorry if this was all over the place and thank you if anyone read the whole thing :)
I also think that another factor in this is that a lot of the time, when people talk about our transition as trans men, it's often negative and it gets shit on a lot. I've seen people say that trans men get bald,sweaty and other hurtful things. Like people will act like being on T will make you gross, while that is true to some extent cause puberty in general is gross no matter if its a female or male puberty, people often take it too far with trans men. When I saw people talk about how gross trans men's transitions are, i felt so ashamed to want to go on T. Luckily I got over it and now 8 months on T, but I had to deal with the shame I felt for wanting to became something that is seen as gross.
To be quite honest, a lot of this is due to the deeply-entrenched radical feminism in queer spaces. The transphobia is not an accident, it is the logical conclusion of treating Men™️ and Women™️ as entirely separate species, where Men™️ are inherently evil, oppressive, and all-around bad, and where Women™️ are innocent, perfect, morally superior, always oppressed, and considered incapable of doing any kind of harm. This leads to the attitude that any kind of femininity is safer and morally superior to any kind of masculinity, and therefore anyone aligning themselves with femininity is better and inherently more morally pure than anyone aligning themselves with masculinity. This most directly affects trans men, who may spend years in the closet IN TRANS COMMUNITIES, feeling like they will lose all their social “support” for being men. This also affects transmasc people, amab non-binary people, gender-fluid people, and butch lesbians who lean more transmasc. Generally we (trans men) experience the horrifying paradox of being supported for being trans, but not for being MEN, which is what MAKES US TRANS. You’re allowed to be transmasc, non-binary, gender-fluid, even a demi-boy, as long as you don’t dare identify as a man. Then you become tainted, and evil, and everyone suddenly blames you for the patriarchy which doesn’t even ACCEPT TRANS MEN!!!! It’s absolutely infuriating, and it’s no wonder that trans men feel discomfort in identifying as something they know will cause them to lose their social support system and be hated by online trans people. Almost every other trans man I know stayed in denial for a long time, not necessarily because of cis people, but because of TRANS people who made them feel like shit for being men. It’s disgusting behavior and queer and non-trans men as a whole need to do better.
Your last sentence doesn't seem to fit the paragraph; perhaps you meant "q**** and trans non-men" rather then "q**** and non-trans men"?
The fun part about being a young trans man less than a year on testosterone is that people will look at me and call me ma’am, or girl, or whatever, but I start talking with my deepened voice and they correct themselves, or get very confused and look at my chest to see if I have boobs, but they can’t tell because I wear baggy hoodies. I can just see the whole thought process, and I find it funny.
For a while, like the first year of being out and open as trans, all I wanted to do was assimilate. My school (staff and teachers) was very respectful of my trans identity, so if there was anything divided by gender, I could go with the boys. It made me uncomfortable because this was like middle school, and there’s me who is just admitting to a room full of boys that I am trans, and it’s like I could feel their gaze scrutinizing my identity. But I felt like I had something to prove, that even if they don’t see me as a boy, that I am in fact transgender. I felt like my transgender identity was fake, so I’d do things to prove how I felt, even if this made my anxiety worse. Because I just wanted to assimilate. I wanted people to stop staring, I didn’t want any of the attention, it made me physically nauseous. I had, and still have a lot of social anxiety. But I’m stubborn and determined, so the more stares and weird looks and questions I got, the more I dug into my identity. It got to the point where I stopped caring all together who thought I was valid, and who didn’t. I didn’t care if I was misgendered, or thrown a disgusted look, the only opinion I cared about was my own. Even with my social anxiety, I have a lot of self respect, and would never make myself lesser for other people’s comfort and sake. Someone could beat the crap out of me for being trans and I’d still refuse to call myself a woman. But I certainly had that sense that cis men would never see me as one of them so there’s no point in trying to appease them, and that no matter what, I’d always be different. That I’d never be part of their culture. I didn’t consider myself a girl, and surprisingly even transphobic girls didn’t treat me like one. It was like I belonged with neither gender, and was in a constant battle with the world, my inner support versus the world’s disgust for me. And no amount of self love and confidence will fix how isolating and lonely it is to go through that.
And then I made friends with a guy and started testosterone. He’s very masculine. Likes guns, wrestles, talks a lot about masculinity, hanging out with his guy friends, is very into mental health awareness for men, is straight, religious, has similar values to me but slightly different beliefs politically. Everyone had called me a “trans boy”. I called myself a trans boy. He called me a man, and was the first person to ever do so. And in referring to me, said “a good man.” I met his friends, now most of my friends and acquaintances or cis guys. I suppose this marks the end of my “trans boyhood”, I’m just glad I got to live all of my teenage years as a boy even if it put me under constant scrutiny. For other young trans boys struggling with feelings of not fitting in, being stared at, or being on edge around cis boys, find the ones that respect you. Even if you already have good inner validation like I do, it will make you feel a lot less alone and a lot less alien. I promise you that you have allies, even if you haven’t met them. That there are cis men and women that will go to protests and march with trans people, and want us to be happy.
I am sorry if this sound harsh, but I feel like someone has to say that:
Arthur, you, as an individual, has to stop generalizing trying to fit your existence into either a "the best" box or a "the worst" box.
We gotta start a change first within our individual selves, specially if we want to change a community with a tendency of generalizing trying to fit all trans guys also in either a "the best" or a "the worst" box.
That is wrong because that erases the particular different nuances that makes us be who we are in special.
No one is always good or always bad, that is also why not everyone in a group is good or bad, that is what means that no group is a monolith, because they are made of individuals that are different, even throughout a lifetime.
What also leads to the community of trans men in particular having different understandings of themselves, leading to conflicting opinions.
There are trans guys who preach that trans guys are just like cis guys, while there are trans guys who preach that trans guys are different from cis guys.
Oh, and there are also people who alternate between both positions as long as they are convenient.
It's a nuanced conversation about large concepts and experiences that he has pulled from his life and some people in his life. He isn't speaking for everyone. Generalization is going to happen in any kind of conversation and he talks about how it's nuanced. Honestly what are you even on about? This was really helpful for me to hear because I can relate to this perspective but it's not like I'm walking away assuming all trans men or all cis men look, feel or act this way or that any non-binary/GNC person isn't real because of doubts.
It sounds like you are the one over simplifying what he said.
I love this. I am AMAB and I have long struggled with a lot of this stuff. Manhood has been expressed around me in multitudes of dogmatic and normative ways which threw me off and made me feel super uncomfortable with being a man myself. I didn't always have good ways of talking about it but for as long as I can remember, I have been pushing back, expresing my discomfort, getting mad at people for representing my exclusion and humiliation. And I have also felt that discomfort about being gay, and even about being nerdy/geek. But I have learned to handle it better and to be selective about who I'm around and what pressures I allow to be out on me. I still don't super feel like a man, but I have internalized a sense of queer freedom that allows me to picture being a different kind of man than the kind others would push on me.
Please explain what feeling like a man means? How do you know how 'cis' men feel?
So am I in my trans girlhood?
This is why I think I thought I was nonbinary for a couple years because I just didn't feel like a cis man. My upbringing was not that of a man, I experienced misogyny, so it felt different. But no, I am a man. And the further I get into my transition the more I feel like one.
The farther I get into my transition, the more I realize that I've always been a man. Until pretty recently I've been describing myself as a "nonbinary man" because there was something that felt off about only calling myself a "man." Or I wanted people to understand that my gender was more complex than how they imagine men. Now, I'm even tired of calling myself a trans man (like I have to reduce my gender to only that and explain my manhood before someone points out that I'm different) and I feel really dysphoric when anyone assumes I'm nonbinary and misgenders me by repeatedly calling me "they." Accepting that I'm a man has been hard because until recently I haven't been accepted as a man. I've experienced gendered violence and was taught as a young "girl" that I had a certain place in the world. Finding myself through that was difficult. But I also don't feel accepted as a man by my own community. It's most often other trans people, especially nonbinary people, who misgender me these days. It really hurts that nonbinary people can't see my gender and struggle with my pronouns, and then turn around and talk about how binary trans people are so out of touch. As if our experiences and struggles and joys aren't incredibly similar in some respects. I really hate when people use the term "binary trans person" to position us as closer aligned to cis people when our visions for the future are actually more similar. (Which is to say, there is more diversity among nonbinary people and "binary" trans people than between those communities). More often than not, I feel very estranged from other trans people these days, and like I live in the trenches between "gay man's land" and "transsexual land" without a place to come home to.
I think it's also difficult to accept because I don't feel like I'm fully where I need to be with my transition. It's felt really heartbreaking that it's taken so long to begin to pass and I still don't feel like I fully pass. My dysphoria has gotten worse in some ways because now it feels hopeless. When I was dysphoric about my chest, at least I had surgery to look forward to. T isn't going to change my face or voice anymore at this point. I don't think I'll get FMS. I think I have to find a way to live with what I've got and keep in perspective that there are changes that await me through age, etc, but that's fucking hard. I keep wondering: do I not want this enough to have it? But I want it so badly. Can I be a man if I struggle to see one in the mirror everyday? I know I am a man regardless of what I look like, but those body image issues can really fuck with your sense of identity when the whole world treats aesthetics as more important than self-determination.
Thank you so much for this video. I really appreciate your perspective and I feel like you create a space to talk about nuances and difficult intracommunity discussions. I certainly don't have all the answers, and no one can get there alone. We need to be able to talk about how our community talks about and understands masculinity in a complex way. So many of us have been taught by feminists, which is great and essential in how trans men navigate coming into manhood, but a lot of those theories are not directly applicable to intracommunity politics if they were written by cis women about a certain type of cis man. I'm planning on picking up bell hook's A Will to Change and I think I'm on a journey to find some masculine role models in my life. You talked about spending more time with men as friends and how that impacted your social transition, and maybe that's what I need to do now. Find my men. I spend time with a lot of gay men at work and in hokup spaces, but I think I need more close masculine relationships outside of work and sx.
As a cis guy who is in the process of questioning his gender, I feel like how I view my own gender has a big impact on how I view my sexuality because of how I perceive gender relationship dynamics.
To explain what I mean: I am some version of bi/pansexual, but I identify as gay because something about being the "man" in a straight relationship is just very unappealing to me. However I feel like if I were to transition then I would be more comfortable pursuing relationships with women.
I still have no idea what's going on with my gender personally, maybe cis, maybe nb, maybe trans, maybe my gender just defaults to whatever's gayer at any given moment idk. I know this is very different from what is described in the video, but I feel like the discomfort with identifying as a man is there. I doubt many people reading this have a similar experience but if you do I'd love to hear about it or some advice or anything.
(Btw Is it weird as a cis guy to be watching both transfem and transmasc advice videos like what does that even say about me.)
about the last point, im a cis woman and i do the same lol, i dont think it says anything about me or my identity . the way i think about these things is i dont think of my behaviour as "revealing a truer self/identity", Identity is an illusion, i understand these things as a set of pragmatic decisions guided by comfort level and or dispositions
This video could not have come at a better time for me. This is precisely what I have been struggling with recently. I have found the medical aspects of my transition to be so much easier than the social part but until now I haven't been able to articulate why. It was so easy for me to accept that I wanted to be physically male but I never wanted to even allow myself to think about becoming a man. I always find your perspective refreshing and reassuring but in this case it is particularly so. Thank you so much.
I didn't allow myself to identify as male until i was like 3 or 4 months on T and even then I'm over 2 years on T now and i still struggle with my identity because I'm viewed as a teen boy and not the 24 year old man I am. I'm in college so I pass well in that setting as a young college student but outside of college I still get misgendered occasionally. And recently a professor misgendered me in front of the whole class, and not because she's transphobic, but because she saw me as a women. I swear I'm getting misgendered more now than i did my first year on T. I'm short and feminine so thats really doesn't help. All the men on both sides of my family are very feminine so its not in my genes to look masculine, other than my excessive body hair and receding hair line 😭. I would love to live stealth and just be seen as a man by everyone who meets me. I hope I'm just being impatient and that with more beard growth, some time spent gaining muscle, and doing voice training I'll be able to live like a cis man does.
Several of my trans male friends really struggle with being read as younger than their age and so I get how frustrating it can be. But many of us are also having our beards only start to come in at 3+ years on T and so I'm hopeful (for all of us, including you) that those later T changes will continue to help us be read as adult men. ❤️
Damn ok random 24yr old cis guy, idk if its just cos i'm ambiguously "on the spectrum" but the getting infantilised thing does happen a fair bit, being treated/perceived as a teen boy and all that.
Being a man is weird as hell, and mostly aspirational. Like every single 24 year old guy i know (bar like one, who is a dad) still feels like a teenager on some level. I know we are approaching manhood from different angles but please don't feel alone in that.
I dont want to make it seem like this ought to be happening or even WILL happen that often in the future, but, idk if this is gonna make any sense, but sometimes, being treated like a teenager, is almost a good sign? It is not at all incongruent with my experience of cishet masculinity.
I wish you the best, just hoping to share that we cis dudes also often feel like this, and feeling like you aren't a proper man yet is like, 90% of the 24 year old man experience, so try not to let that spiral you. I like to think we all got this.
So far, for me, feeling like a grown man is kinda like happiness I guess? in the sense that it is a kind of nebulous mist which descends upon you out of the blue, which you want control over desperately, but aren't wise enough to grasp fully yet.
Apologies if this isn't helpful in any way, I just know that it is hard *hard* *HARD* to balance insecurity within the framework of masculine identity, but the struggle doesn't make you (or i) any less of a man.
@@graboidgang9077 I don't think I can even express how much I appreciate this response. Thank you so much, it's so helpful to know I'm not alone, and that even cis guys deal with this.
We got this
Thoroughly enjoyed this perspective.
Being a trans woman and growing up around all kinds of men, I've realized that traumatic experiences with shitty men are also experienced BY cis het men, even very masculine ones, when they don't meet these often harsh and unreasonable gendered expectations.
Often, cis-het expressions of hyper-masculinity involve a trauma-informed defense mechanism that leads cis-het men to being in their own version of a closet, ironically enough. It's sad, but good to know for combatting impostor syndrome, that fear of men can be a very male experience to have :' )
Im in my late teens and I'm 8 months on T and I havn't been able to call myself a man, probably partly because, I'm not an adult but also I feel like I am nervous to identify with the word when I do become an adult. I am passing now, but I get so nervous with socializing with guys, I really want to, I'm a teen, and want to live these years as a guy and have a guy friend group but I just freeze up, my friends are all girls or nonbinary, or I have a few trans guy friends but there does seem to be a differation with cis guys, I wish there weren't tho. Idk where I was going but kinda rambled?
You’re female
@@ruckusbeblack i notice how there wasnt any hate like this really on RUclips until all that anti trans bullshit got popular, sheep
Right now I consider myself to be a nonbinary trans guy. I don’t use the term “man” because I don’t feel comfortable with it. But maybe with time I will. Or I won’t. But it feels like all the time I’m moving further away from the label “nonbinary” and towards just “trans”; possibly because being seen as nonbinary is often being seen as just your birth gender, but the lite version, but possibly for other reasons, as well. Maybe I don’t feel comfortable with the term “man” because 1) I’m still very early in my medical transition, so I don’t look very masculine at all, so I don’t feel very comfortable labeling myself as something I don’t even look like (even though a man can look like anyone, masculine or feminine), and 2) I don’t tend to hang out with men a whole lot. In fact, I remember that whenever I would hang out with men at university, it would be with several people who weren’t men as well (not necessarily women, but not men, either). So there was a bit of a barrier between me and the men in the friend group. Tho to be honest, I’m a bit afraid of hanging out with men alone, no matter what their looks or personalities are. I guess I’m just not that used to male attention? And I find women and non-men much easier to hang out with. One thing I’m scared about with my transition is eventually having to use men’s public restrooms. I’m pretty short (like, 5’2” short) and I fear that my height will immediately give me away. I also hear that men’s restrooms are not as clean as women’s, but that’s a whole other issue.
But anyway, if anyone has some words of wisdom they would be greatly appreciated 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵
I find it confusing like you feel like a man/woman the same way as other people... Like I am cis I am a woman idk if other women trans or cis feel like a woman in the same way... Like it's both individual and not because we are a group but it's a diverse group different cultures look at it differently etc.
It's wild; every time I see a video title of yours I feel this deep fear like a hot coal in my stomach. Something in me feels brave and I tap - I take a leap of faith and decide to listen even if every fiber in my body is screaming to run away and close my eyes, cover my ears and forget I even saw the title in the first place.
But as soon as I'm a minute or more into the video, I feel a strange sense of calm. Like my head is being held to someone's chest and I can hear their beating heart. I can breathe again and I can be still. And by the end of the video, I can look in the mirror with more clarity than before. I first found you through your "How Can You Tell if You're Trans or Not" video (I don't remember the exact title, but I remember that being the general idea). I remember staring at the thumbnail for a few minutes, kind of stuck in a daze. There was this paralyzing feeling of "I want to listen to this, I want to try this out and see if it answers the turbulent questions I keep having. But what if I don't like the answer?" It's the kind of feeling I always get with the majority of your videos that pop up on my timeline. I want to be more knowledgeable, but what if it ends with more pain and confusion than before?
Thank you for always proving my fears wrong, and instead making life feel calmer and clearer every time. I find your content to be so important.
I literally commented on your last video like five minutes ago identifying as “gender-fluid but leaning towards man” or something like that I THINK IM LITERALLY JUST A MAN AND IM NOT COMFORTABLE WITH IT AND THATS WHATS BEEN BOTHERING ME JESUS CHRIST THANK YOU
eek!Scary 😵💫😵💫😵
"Good man."
Best two words (among other best words) in this presentation!
Cis here, but not "ciiiiiisss". Finding "good men" to hang out with is sometimes a real crap shoot. Other times, not so hard.
Arthur, quite enjoyable.
Aww thank you! Here's to us all finding our "good men"!
As a transfem, this experience around manhood is awfully familiar. We support you, eventhough it's a difficult conversation to have.
This is so real. There was a strong feeling, for me at least, that by transitioning, I might be somehow letting the (women's) side down. It took me a long time to work through that: both my tendency to want to people please and worry about what others would think and also my own hangups about men, the idea of being perceived as a Man™(and as a cis man), and there was definitely rhetoric within the LGBT community that contributed to how conflicted I felt.
And then, when I actually started transitioning, it took having top surgery for me to be able to fully envision myself as a guy and realize that I wasn't NB, or just really super butch, or whatever, but a binary trans man, that I needed to go on T, the whole thing. Even then, I'm six months on T (six months today, actually, which has flown by), have just started discovering that I actually pass (sooner than I expected to, which has been good but weird, like going through the looking glass), and getting comfortable with saying that I'm a man is a work in progress. Hanging out in all-male spaces has helped a lot: I went to an all-male club night that was fantastic (and way outside the kind of stuff I would usually do), and I'm in a GBT men's outdoor/camping group, and being in those kinds of environments and accepted as a man by other men totally outside a trans context has really been what started shifting my own perception of myself as someone who is a man and not just, like, LARPing as one.
Thanks for the trans hope, the part celebrating our trans boyhood honestly made me tear up, I've never heard it out that way before. For so long I've just wanted to skip that part and come out on the other end the shining epitome of masculinity. Im now at the stage where I've recently started passing but am still finding who I am as a man internally, and I've been struggling a lot with it. I appreciate the insights in this video a lot
I really needed that video. You put my thoughts, that were all over the place, into words that actually make sense. Thank you.
Somehow you always post exactly what I need when I need it, Arthur. Thank you for this one, it’s possibly my favorite video. This is something I struggle with a lot and (being 2 weeks on T) my biggest concern has been the shifting social role. Existing in female/lesbian spaces for so long makes cis men feel like aliens sometimes. Time to change my thinking and see the people under the labels.
Cis men in female/ lesbian spaces feel like aliens for a reason. Imagine how lesbians feel having males in THEIR spaces.
Arthur I wish I could sit and talk with you for an hr or two. I am 47 amab and have worked construction for 30 years. I have been around a lot of toxic “Bro” mentality. I started my very slow MTF transition last year and was instantly met with all the same things that made me hide my femininity when I was young. The difference is now I (for the most part) don’t care what other people are saying. What’s been most interesting in the last year is how cis women interact with me. They probably assume I am gay but definitely interact differently then when I presented as masculine cis Male.
This video meant a lot to me actually. That gap feeling is really frustrating and invalidating and I’ve been struggling a lot with it lately. I love framing it as trans boyhood, though. I feel so much more positively about it now. Sometimes it can feel like I don’t even have a hope of integrating into male society successfully because of my transness and hearing about your journey and experiences always fills me with a lot of hope and optimism. It can be really easy to hear transphobic sentiments, especially from cis gay men, and let it live inside me. It’s nice to be reminded that not all cis men are the same or think the same and that being trans doesn’t have to mean being irreconcilably different from other men. :) thanks Arthur
Thank you for this video. I'm struggling to get into lifting weights because I've never been a gym bro, I go there and see muscular men who know what they're doing and that's just not me. But I'm also a nerd, I wear alternative clothing - there are other men like me who might feel the same way!
I think that when we as a community 'other' men and treat them like a monolithic oppressor class, it creates such a toxic environment for trans men who are trying to figure themselves out.
When you realise that men can look like anything, it's really freeing.
Maybe you are struggling with weight lifting bc you are a girl. Also being a man or woman is not just a feeling, it's a fact. You are either a man or a woman. Men can never become women and women can never become men. It's not possible. So maybe just try to do things that are possible. Like learning how to fly a plane or learning how to cook.
@@victoriawhitaker3486 sexist freak
I'm a trans male and I would never transition 🤷🏽♂️ I like my baby face
You talk about how there are different kinds of men, but what if you are not transman and just different kind of woman?) There are also different kinds of women, you know)
I wish I was accepted into the Trans-men circles, I don't even know where they are located. Even though I am an older 59 gay short guy, I love the concept that people are daring to be the people they feel more associated with. I think many trans-men I've watched on RUclips and seen on other online sites are very handsome. I've shown pictures of gay trans porn stars (above the waist) to straight associates and asked them, which bathroom you think this guy belongs to, then I show them the full nude picture and aske them you want to explain to your daughter why a fully clothed man like him is going into the female bathroom which is the bathroom of his gender at birth? You'd be amazed how many homophobe/transphones realize how ignorant they are acting.
This was fantastic and exactly what I needed right now, to the point that I think I was having a conversation about this exact thing right around the hour it was uploaded. Thank you.
One thing i also fear about starting transition that kind of relates to this is, that I'm really passionate about female solidarity. Stuff like when I see a girl in a club feeling uncomfortable I'm able to just step up, pretend to be her friend, get her away from the situation and in most cases she'd feel safe with me. When I'm passing as male I'd be scared, that women won't feel as save around me. And that makes me really sad somehow :/
Honestly, same.
It is a sad thing for sure-
Being seen as a man (and therefore as a danger,) is honestly really isolating
It's something I've really noticed since transitioning- people will feel less safe around you, with extend you less empathy, and will be more likely to interpret your actions or words as aggression
And regardless of the reasons people have to feel that way, it's not an enjoyable experience to be viewed that way
But transitioning is still worth it imo if you are trans, simply being comfortable in your body is an amazing thing.
Don’t worry about it ma’am, we can tell it’s a costume
Yes I really relate to this, I've been thinking about it a lot lately. There's a responsibility and a burden to passing as a man, especially when it comes to how we conduct ourselves around women. It's sad to be seen as a threat, even while understanding why
ohhhhh my goodness this was so incredibly enlightening i cant even begin to thank you enough. i'm just over 2 years into medical transition & am post top-surgery, but i've still clung very tightly to the label of "transmasc enby" as a way of differentiating myself from men i think in the exact same way you discussed here. your points have challenged me in really fantastic ways, i'm so grateful. i have a lot of unpacking & processing to do, but your perspectice and insight has alleviated a lot of anxiety and has given me a great deal of courage. thank you, arthur!!
That is the same with women. I call it a deep woman, when you no longer see the shoreline of your transitioning, but sail in the open sea of everything female.
That's a fantastic description.
Thank you so much for sharing this, really, really needed it. Bless!
Thank you for this. I feel like I'm transitioning in reverse in a way: I've always fit into male spaces, and I'm socially transitioning with male friendships already established. Never a lesbian. Never connected with women. Physical differences have become more painful as I sustain these male friendships which feel even easier for me with T in my brain, but more awkward as I approach 6 months on T and my face is a mess. I resent that my 30 and 40 something male friends are witnessing my adult "boyhood" in my mid 30s. They see me change as a baritone at queer choir and at Crossfit. When I don't feel masculine enough, I think of the Vlogbrothers. That's my goal. Nerds are great and I'm married to a nerdy bear I love. It's just hard to already have these friends and be so public.
I'm lucky to have so many cis and trans men to support me and see me in my masculinity. But I just want to hibernate until this is over sometimes.
i genuinely can't explain how important your content is to me! i've had a lot of similar experiences to you and the way you explain everything so accurately makes me feel so emotionally seen. i'm still pre t but your videos help me so much to feel like what i'm going through is an experience others have had before. you're one of the most thoughtful and intelligent people i've come across, online or not. i wish you the best of luck on your journey :)
Appreciate you being able to make people aware that the perspective that is arrived at through transitioning can turn into a blind spot that perpetuates the same types or shapes of attitudes that hurt people in the first place. I really appreciate your voice, and your perspective on how age isn't the only factor in experiencing certain phases in life.
“It excites them to be a man”? You have AAP my dear.
I dunno if you ever watched Dylan (boyform)'s videos on the transmasc relationship to toxic masculinity, but I've been thinking about exactly this problem in myself ever since those videos and then there was never really anybody I found offering a solution. I guess it's really not that complicated.
I will say, though, it's a little hard to have an uncomplicated relationship with manhood as a trans guy when 98% of the cis guys you've ever seen yourself in are trans now. Changes the way I look at any cis guys I really click with now even when I don't want it to.
great video, thank you 😊
Based on complicated experiences in my life and being intersex, I can say there's a part of me that would in a utopia just simply say I'm a man, thats it, but I've frankly faced too much from mostly cis men, people still emulating cis men, queer pickmes who still see cis men as the "best", and cis women who are pickmes for a cis man, to feel like I'm in the same, category? Socially in the US/south anyway, there are exceptions at times, but usually the cis men in question who are those exceptions also doesn't vibe with other cis men the same way(s) and turn out to be ND or similar. It's to where, even though I've been stealth before I feel like my own sense of masculinity and "maleness" is more internal, as externally what I face the most struggles with societally and intra-community wise (even from other trans people, especially if they're perisex and white, never have faced this from a black or fellow intersex trans person) is relating to my assigned and presumed agab (afab), even when I dated a trans woman and started to pass, she was aggressively misgendering me (i never, ever misgendered her) and was boiling me down to genitals in just about every way 🤷♂️ (needless to say she was white, perisex and pseudo rich).
So, I'm still trans, I still vibe with being called a man more than a woman, and hate all childlike terminology "girl/boy", but I would better say I am some form of agender and transsexual, I work with and alter my form accordingly where I can, to simplify things I just tell people to consider me a guy, but I don't feel like I'm in the same category (transness aside) as cis men or cis women, and now form relationships (platonic ones and did this with my long term partner) based on how much humanity they give me and on whether or not they truly respect boundaries rather to only/simply performatively validating my "manness" initially/publicly etc