On “feeling like a man”

It’s the wrong way to frame it.

“What makes you feel like a man?”

“Norm is transgender because he feels more like a man, and that’s okay!”

I hate that question, and I hate that phrase. Because if I try to craft an answer or explanation for it with thoughts, emotions, preferences, mannerisms, or social things, it falls right into the trap of “gender is a social construct”.

And, indeed, I agree that gender expression absolutely is. There are no inherent, gender-based limitations on the thoughts, emotions, preferences, mannerisms, or social things that can and should be accessible to any human being. Period.

But I’m still quite fundamentally just…male. Why?

For me personally, it’s about the very ether — chemical and physical — that my thoughts, emotions, preferences, and mannerisms have always lived in. It is the holistic plane of existence that comes before everything else, and a plane that most human beings take for granted, because they don’t notice or need to change it.

I am a human male baseline before I even begin to have thoughts, emotions, preferences, and mannerisms. I don’t feel “like” a man — I feel as one. When I am given the hormonal profile and physical form of a man, as my brain has always expected, I become capable of actually feeling things.

More concretely, in my case, this meant that running on estrogen caused a chronic mental fog, while switching to testosterone therapy completely removed it.

It meant that after top surgery, I felt in a strange sense like nothing had changed — or, maybe, like that entire portion of my torso came into conscious existence and had never not been flat. It was gloriously anticlimactic, as any healthy body should be.

It has meant coming back from a lifetime of dissociation, and learning that you really can just sit still and be content and muse about a future.

So, no. I don’t ‘feel like a man.’ I’m just a man who feels things.