Hey look, another "tomboy or trans?" post

Right. Hello. Um.

I am not feminine. I know this. I am SOMEWHERE under that whole umbrella of "people who will throw a fit if you make them wear a skirt". I'm just not sure where.

Where is the line between butch, genderqueer, or just.... guy? Sometimes I think "I'm just my own special subcategory of girl," and sometimes I think "I'm a guy." and sometimes I think "can we just throw the whole guy/girl thing out the window and I'll just be me?"

When I was a kid, I was a tomboy. Sort of. I didn't actually DO that much guy stuff so much as I wanted guy stuff to be associated with me (ex: I hated sports, but I wanted people to see me as someone they would invite to play sports.) Mostly, I was a tomboy in what I WOULDN'T do. I refused to play with barbies, I thought dresses were stupid, I would not let you paint my nails unless you painted rocketships on them. Not so much because I didn't like them in themselves, but because if I did them it would be a "girl" thing. There used to be this short on Disney channel about a brother and sister who tap-danced, and for months after I saw it I wanted to take tap-dancing, but I never said anything (in fact, my parents asked me if I'd be interested and I said no) because I knew if I did I would tap-dance in a skirt and dress and I'd be the sister tap-dancing. I wanted to be/look like (don't know which) the boy who tapdanced.

I don't feel dysphoric. I used to hate my body, but then I discovered feminism/ theRainbow/ that whole category of people who are big on defining your body however you want. I started dressing the way I had always wanted to, and I cut my hair short, and I stopped seeing my boobs as something that trapped me. They stopped feeling like something that was forcing me into femininity. Now I just sort of see them as.... well, mostly I see them as fat on my chest, much like the fat on the rest of me (I'm chubby, and my boobs are pretty small, so they don't even LOOK that girly to me). I kind of was in denial about the fact that hips happened, and then when I realized it I got pretty upset for a while. I remember looking at photos of myself when I was 11, and being wistful/jealous, because I didn't have hips back then. But right now, my body doesn't HURT me. It just surprises me. I'll be walking down the street with my backpack on, and my hand will be gripping the strap, and all of a sudden my brain will be like "oh hey. Your knuckle is resting against your boob. Oh right. Because there's a boob there. Forgot about that." I'll suddenly be surprised by how small I am, or I'll be confused because of how oddly small my knuckles are (I only figured out why this is 10 days ago).

Mostly, I'm confused because of the small things. Like how sometimes, I'll just sit, and I'll see my knee, and something about the way my pant leg sits on my knee will look so.... right, and it'll just make me really happy. Or when the girl at the SAARP (rape prevention center) table told me where the crisis center was if I ever needed it, and I got annoyed, because for a second I wanted to tell her that this didn't apply to me, I wasn't in her target demographic, I wasn't..... and then I remembered that I was. For YEARS, I've intentionally stopped myself from developing good handwriting, because if a stranger found my handwriting, I kind of want them to think it's a guy's/ambiguous handwriting. Like, I went to a forensic website where they analyze handwriting to see if mine did any of the things that marked handwriting as "female". And then I changed how I wrote my a's and g's and y's.

So, uh... there's my thought vomit. Anyway, like I said, I'm not hurting. Mostly I just need a word, both for myself and so that I can explain myself to other people, because I'm not fond of delving into my entire inner world every damn time someone puts me in the wrong box. Also, because I need to start acting like an adult, and I don't know what an adult me-type person looks like.

 

@J Snow: I don't how I felt when you said that. My skin kind of vibrated, and my stomach did something, but but I don't know what that reaction indicates. I CAN say that whenever someone tells me I think like a guy/act like a guy, I'm pleased, and want them to tell me more about why I come off that way.