The last few months have been kind of crazy for me. I have really started to figure out my gender identity. As I have done this I went and looked at different forms of expression and styles. I have found that while I identify as male I am very feminine. I dress like a it and feel like a guy and am a guy but I feel like when I started hitting puberty I closed off the feminine parts of myself because I was so different than all the girls that I was supposed to feel like. I found myself feeling different then then and because of this I closed off the parts of myself that were feminine. As o explored gender I also explored expression and found myself to be really feminine. I love to paint my nails which I haven't done in years. I like to use feminine accessories like my earrings and flower crowns and cat ears. I love these aspects of myself I hadn't explored before. It's weird explaining to people that while I was discovering that I'm a man I also discovered that I am extremely feminine.
This is understandable, I feel the same way in some regards. I believe the sudden "shock" of puberty and dysphoria is to blame for shutting off parts of ourselves that we may have otherwise greatly enjoyed simply because they were/are more commonly associated with the gender that we're trying so hard to get away from. I'm AFAB, and when I was growing up I despised femininity and resented other women for it, and in the process of dissociating from my dysphoria, I ended up casting aside many feminine things that I really enjoyed and ignoring the parts of myself that were feminine, just because I didn't want to be read as a "girl". Now that I am aware of my dysphoria and becoming more comfortable with my identity, I've been able to kind of backtrack and be apart of things I dismissed before that I really like because I know I don't have to be a "girl" just to do / like them.
I had the exact same conversation with one of my friends the other day! I've always dressed in quite neutral clothes but with feminine patterns if that makes any sense and I've always refused to wear dresses or skirts and I very rarely wore jewellery. Recently I've started wearing dresses sometimes. I like 1950 style dresses because they swirl. It doesn't make a girl, just a boy in a dress. I've always hated dresses and I think that's it's because that made people know that I was a girl and not just a person. Now that I know I'm not a girl I'm more comfortable with dresses because I can tell myself that I'm not a girl rather than feeling that I'm just a normal girl and not just me. I spent all of my childhood suppressing my femininity because I so wanted to be one of the boys and not have my body dictate how good I am at playing something. Now I've figured myself out I don't have to feel inadequate because I know being myself doesn't invalidate me at all.
I've had a similar experience. Before I realized I was trans, I refused to like a lot of feminine things because I wanted to be perceived as more masculine. Plus, it made me uncomfortable that femininity was what was expected of me. Being forced to wear a dress was a reminder that everyone expected me to be female. When I realized I was a guy, I gradually found that I actually like a lot of feminine stuff, including dresses. The more comfortable I became with my gender, the less I felt like I had to force myself to be more masculine than I am.
