This is an insightful and compassionate article. I absolutely agree with your conclusions about the tiny, unsustainable box of patriarchal manhood and what it does to men and those perceived as men.
I have also experienced the anti-man sentiment in queer spaces as deeply harmful. I am nonbinary and appear to most people to be a man. Sometimes I look and dress more feminine. I shapeshift between different presentations. Right now I have a full beard. I have felt significant pressure to hide/suppress my masculinity in queer spaces in order to "belong" or be seen as safe. Regardless of my identity, I have felt shunned at various points by people who assumed me to be a man, or felt fear of my masculinity. In the past I felt this sense that only by fully transitioning to womanhood and rejecting all masculinity would I be seen as safe. I don't feel safe or that I belong in "women and nonbinary/trans" only spaces, despite being nonbinary and trans. This is especially the case when I am presenting more masculine.
This isn't a pressing concern anymore as I have found my confidence in myself, and recognize that reactive harm as a result of people's trauma under patriarchy. However I do think there is a lot to be unpacked there around the sense that "male-bodied" people are fundamentally unsafe, as well as the shunning of masculinity outside of a narrow range. It seems that in many spaces, masculinity is only allowable (and desirable) when performed by butches and more androgynous transmasc folks. Whereas when I (tall nonbinary amab, I know you disagree with that label but it matters to how people perceive and treat me) and more masculine/"passing" transmasc people present masculine it is seen as dangerous or somehow not queer.
Wow, I identify with this so much as a cis man. As a teenager, I was constantly thinking about how my body moved, was I doing it the right way. (Probably also due to untreated anxiety). This was a beautiful, healing read.
Thank you so much Devon for taking the time to gather all of these beautifully vulnerable stories from all the different ways inhabiting manhood can look. As a gay, autistic, flamboyantly enthusiastic cis man I have certainly experienced and at different times perpetrated multiple points on this list. It took me years and a powerful experience with the ManKind project to be able to own my manhood as something beautiful and worthy of love, which has had the add-on benefit of allowing me to love the other men (and women and fabulous queerdos, but especially men) in my life more deeply. And in so many ways I am still learning. It really is beautiful.
It is narratives like this that feel like the true signal in the noise of all of the false stories I inherited from my culture about gender and love and being a human.
What a beautiful piece, thank you so much for sharing. I’m a fat vegan who’s also a straight cis man, and you really, REALLY nailed the gender dysphoria I have felt, the performance around other men that I regularly try to avoid having to do at all, my fears, my insecurities… right down to the moaning about how lonely I am and nobody makes spaces for me. All of it! I am jealous of the community you seem to have cultivated and also inspired by it. Wishing you well in the new year and looking forward to digging more into your past and future work!
All love to the dysphoric cishet boys. <3 As men we often need to lead the charge in building the kinds of communities that we long for, even when such social, caretaking acts have never been modeled for us. Please keep being your sensitive, open self, and offering support to the other men around you when you can. You can make the community your heart longs for. It takes a lot of time and work but that is also what makes it so nourishing! Thanks for reading.
Devon, I love your work and always gain a better understanding of myself (often my past but also as a trans person) and the world we're all navigating.
I'm curious, as these men open up to you, do you think that your being a trans man has any impact on their willingness to be vulnerable with you?
I often experienced presenting as male to be a sadly competitive and closed-off existence. Maybe that was just me not fitting in the spaces I occupied (I may not have recognized it but I've always been a trans woman).
I'll never truly know what it's like to be a cis man (in spite of presenting as such for 58 years). I'll also never fully know what it's like to be a cis woman but that feels so much closer to who I am. I wonder if the same feels true to you.
The world needs more trans people to breakdown rigid stereotypes and suffocating rules and expectations.
I think men do respond to my effeminacy and my transness and feel more comfortable being vulnerable around me. Often this seems to happen at an unconscious level -- I am read as a cis man by everyone now, but men still seem to intutively feel nonthreatened by me due to my size and mannerisms, and the fact I can be quite a warm and attentive listener. I think men often do feel a bit starved for an audience for such an outlet.
honestly? same. that and the autism. i really think some of the men who’ve opened up to me understand the ways i’m an outcast in normative society and feel like “this weirdo won’t judge me, surely”. and also, so many men are yearning for a space to unmask. i tend to open that space for others a lot better than i do for myself.
Good article, for many reasons. But in particular I think you've struck something important by pointing out that hypermasculity is actually a type of gender dysphoria. They're trying to compensate for their insecurity in how they're perceived and how it matches their preferred identity in a toxic way.
Thank you for writing and sharing this. I’m a Black Afrikan cis man who came up in the hip hop generation. Since becoming (more) sick 7 years ago, I noticed that my friendships with men are fewer and far between. I always found it curious
always found it curious when trans men were separated from cis men. But I see that people are just afraid that they won’t be accepted. It’s good you are showing the complicated realm of masculinity. And yes I do tone myself down to not be seen as dangerous or threatening. That’s a form of self-harm too. So much food for thought.
Thank you so much for sharing about your experience. Becoming disabled is such an isolating experience, and I think there are especially few cultural allowances for men to exhibit "weakness" and dependence upon others and to have that not be seen as a shameful thing -- people look away from it, especially other men. Even while we're all witnessing so many public discussions about male loneliness and our collective need for greater emotionality. The number of restrictions faced is immense -- especially once you add the dual pressure to not ever seem domineering, threatening, mansplaining, and so on, which falls especially hard on men of color and Autistic men. I agree with you that stifling our many sides is self harm, absolutely.
I think it is so important to take what can feel like a source of disconnection from our bodies or from other people, and accurately recognise that that feeling of disconnection is actually something we share with others. Making it a point of connection and solidarity instead.
Ive thought about this a lot from the perspective of a trans woman, this idea that there is this 'true experience of girlhood/womanhood' that is completely out of reach isnt something exclusive to trans women. Its an incredibly normal part of being a woman actually. Really glad this is getting talked about for my trans brothers too <3
As a transfemme, I often assume that cis men are unsafe and hold myself a bit more guarded around them than I do with others. I try not to do it, but it's hard when I grew up in those locker rooms and exclusive male spaces and hearing the way they talk about others. And sure, not every boy in those locker rooms and gaming chat rooms was guilty of acting that way, but I almost never saw them speak up either. It truly is safer for me to have trust be earned for them with a little higher of a barrier than I give others.
I'm sure you're well aware of these considerations, but I wanted to mention my experience with it. As always, I adore your writing. Thank you for it.
GGs for this piece. Ate it tf up. Lovely to see two-to-three years of my own interrogation of manhood & masculinity written so concisely, so beautifully.
I really enjoyed your books over the past year so I was delighted to see that you're writing on Substack! I'm telling all of my transmasc advocate friends to read this lol
You always do such an incredible job of bringing nuance and compassion to your subject matter, and finding the connective tissue between different groups’ struggles. This piece challenges me more than most, but naming parts of this subject matter as bound to transmisogyny is a powerful reframe.
It also intersects with important questions I’m constantly grappling with: How do we build safer, Trans-centered spaces that don’t shut out all (or half) of the Trans eggs and hatchlings-in-progress? How do we safely build spaces that actually offer an on-ramp into community for people who may later turn out to be Trans, regardless of what gender(s) has been assigned/perceived/coerced onto them? How do we build a culture that avoids punishing people for their bodies or others’ perceptions of them, while still protecting those who are under direct attack for our known or visible Transness at both the systemic and interpersonal levels?
The “answers” to these types of challenges are probably all about a neverending process of interrogation and self-examination, but I think we get closer thanks to the way you articulate both the questions, and the problems with the answers usually put forward.
They're great questions and very practically and emotionally difficult for us to navigate! I find that focusing on structures of oppression rather than personal identity does help a ton to clarify things, but it's kind of difficult to get people on board with. And there's always a need for people very directly and repeatedly targeted by a form of oppression to have their own private spaces for processing and healing, and how to protect those spaces is damn hard without gatekeeping. I think a shared culture & norms can do a lot though to allow us to presume good faith and nurture new/questioning/unlearning people.
I like a lot of the points you are making, and I have been deeply questioning the patriarchical, westernized norms of masculinity for years - for all men, cis and trans. But for me, as a trans guy of color who transitioned after decades of being treated as a girl and a woman, there IS a huge part of my lived experience that feels erased by the assumption that I’ve just lived as a guy my whole life. And I don’t think it’s a transphobic or transmisogynist myth to recognize that some of us are deeply socialized to not take up space, to do free emotional labor as a matter of course, and to develop traits and skills that would have been frowned upon had we been raised as cis boys. I see a lot of talk about trans men being toxic and taking up too much space, but the reality is that the majority of trans spaces that I have been in have been primarily focused on representing transfems with very little transmasc visibility. I want to know where the line is between being accountable to and thoughtfully unpacking masculinity, and just pretending that all trans men have had the same experience of life as cis men the entire time.
Because I don’t personally feel my masculinity erased by the acknowledgment of my trans experience. How absurd would it be to insist that men of color are overstating their experiences of socialization and that “men of color have more in common with white men than they think”? If talking about racialized differences is not something that makes certain people less masculine, why is talking about trans identity and how it interacts with society any different?
On a related note, personally, my favorite people to be around are other transmascs, because we so often share the same cross section of pre- and post-transition experiences, that I don’t feel kinship over with other folks, both cis and trans. Is that transmisogyny? Because this is similar to what I feel in QTBIPOC spaces. A chance to just breathe and be understood. Some might say that’s “reverse racism.”
I’ve read two of your books and I respect your work, Devon. But I have to say, at the end of the day, I really wish more transmasc writers of color would write about masculinity. Because I feel like I keep having some version of this conversation with white trans folks, and it gets tiring.
I’ve noticed that as i’ve become more masculine (cut my hair, more open about body hair, etc. - i’m becoming butch!!) my social mistakes and hygiene issues have become more harshly punished by my peers. I’m still a very genderqueer looking person and am having more or less the same kind of mistakes and hygiene issues so maybe it’s the masculinization or something else idk.
This is an insightful and compassionate article. I absolutely agree with your conclusions about the tiny, unsustainable box of patriarchal manhood and what it does to men and those perceived as men.
I have also experienced the anti-man sentiment in queer spaces as deeply harmful. I am nonbinary and appear to most people to be a man. Sometimes I look and dress more feminine. I shapeshift between different presentations. Right now I have a full beard. I have felt significant pressure to hide/suppress my masculinity in queer spaces in order to "belong" or be seen as safe. Regardless of my identity, I have felt shunned at various points by people who assumed me to be a man, or felt fear of my masculinity. In the past I felt this sense that only by fully transitioning to womanhood and rejecting all masculinity would I be seen as safe. I don't feel safe or that I belong in "women and nonbinary/trans" only spaces, despite being nonbinary and trans. This is especially the case when I am presenting more masculine.
This isn't a pressing concern anymore as I have found my confidence in myself, and recognize that reactive harm as a result of people's trauma under patriarchy. However I do think there is a lot to be unpacked there around the sense that "male-bodied" people are fundamentally unsafe, as well as the shunning of masculinity outside of a narrow range. It seems that in many spaces, masculinity is only allowable (and desirable) when performed by butches and more androgynous transmasc folks. Whereas when I (tall nonbinary amab, I know you disagree with that label but it matters to how people perceive and treat me) and more masculine/"passing" transmasc people present masculine it is seen as dangerous or somehow not queer.
Wow, I identify with this so much as a cis man. As a teenager, I was constantly thinking about how my body moved, was I doing it the right way. (Probably also due to untreated anxiety). This was a beautiful, healing read.
Thank you so much Devon for taking the time to gather all of these beautifully vulnerable stories from all the different ways inhabiting manhood can look. As a gay, autistic, flamboyantly enthusiastic cis man I have certainly experienced and at different times perpetrated multiple points on this list. It took me years and a powerful experience with the ManKind project to be able to own my manhood as something beautiful and worthy of love, which has had the add-on benefit of allowing me to love the other men (and women and fabulous queerdos, but especially men) in my life more deeply. And in so many ways I am still learning. It really is beautiful.
It is narratives like this that feel like the true signal in the noise of all of the false stories I inherited from my culture about gender and love and being a human.
What a beautiful piece, thank you so much for sharing. I’m a fat vegan who’s also a straight cis man, and you really, REALLY nailed the gender dysphoria I have felt, the performance around other men that I regularly try to avoid having to do at all, my fears, my insecurities… right down to the moaning about how lonely I am and nobody makes spaces for me. All of it! I am jealous of the community you seem to have cultivated and also inspired by it. Wishing you well in the new year and looking forward to digging more into your past and future work!
All love to the dysphoric cishet boys. <3 As men we often need to lead the charge in building the kinds of communities that we long for, even when such social, caretaking acts have never been modeled for us. Please keep being your sensitive, open self, and offering support to the other men around you when you can. You can make the community your heart longs for. It takes a lot of time and work but that is also what makes it so nourishing! Thanks for reading.
Devon, I love your work and always gain a better understanding of myself (often my past but also as a trans person) and the world we're all navigating.
I'm curious, as these men open up to you, do you think that your being a trans man has any impact on their willingness to be vulnerable with you?
I often experienced presenting as male to be a sadly competitive and closed-off existence. Maybe that was just me not fitting in the spaces I occupied (I may not have recognized it but I've always been a trans woman).
I'll never truly know what it's like to be a cis man (in spite of presenting as such for 58 years). I'll also never fully know what it's like to be a cis woman but that feels so much closer to who I am. I wonder if the same feels true to you.
The world needs more trans people to breakdown rigid stereotypes and suffocating rules and expectations.
Keep up the good work.
I think men do respond to my effeminacy and my transness and feel more comfortable being vulnerable around me. Often this seems to happen at an unconscious level -- I am read as a cis man by everyone now, but men still seem to intutively feel nonthreatened by me due to my size and mannerisms, and the fact I can be quite a warm and attentive listener. I think men often do feel a bit starved for an audience for such an outlet.
honestly? same. that and the autism. i really think some of the men who’ve opened up to me understand the ways i’m an outcast in normative society and feel like “this weirdo won’t judge me, surely”. and also, so many men are yearning for a space to unmask. i tend to open that space for others a lot better than i do for myself.
Good article, for many reasons. But in particular I think you've struck something important by pointing out that hypermasculity is actually a type of gender dysphoria. They're trying to compensate for their insecurity in how they're perceived and how it matches their preferred identity in a toxic way.
Thank you for writing and sharing this. I’m a Black Afrikan cis man who came up in the hip hop generation. Since becoming (more) sick 7 years ago, I noticed that my friendships with men are fewer and far between. I always found it curious
always found it curious when trans men were separated from cis men. But I see that people are just afraid that they won’t be accepted. It’s good you are showing the complicated realm of masculinity. And yes I do tone myself down to not be seen as dangerous or threatening. That’s a form of self-harm too. So much food for thought.
Thank you so much for sharing about your experience. Becoming disabled is such an isolating experience, and I think there are especially few cultural allowances for men to exhibit "weakness" and dependence upon others and to have that not be seen as a shameful thing -- people look away from it, especially other men. Even while we're all witnessing so many public discussions about male loneliness and our collective need for greater emotionality. The number of restrictions faced is immense -- especially once you add the dual pressure to not ever seem domineering, threatening, mansplaining, and so on, which falls especially hard on men of color and Autistic men. I agree with you that stifling our many sides is self harm, absolutely.
re amanda bynes: hilary swank had a similar experience when she made Boys Don't Cry
I think it is so important to take what can feel like a source of disconnection from our bodies or from other people, and accurately recognise that that feeling of disconnection is actually something we share with others. Making it a point of connection and solidarity instead.
Ive thought about this a lot from the perspective of a trans woman, this idea that there is this 'true experience of girlhood/womanhood' that is completely out of reach isnt something exclusive to trans women. Its an incredibly normal part of being a woman actually. Really glad this is getting talked about for my trans brothers too <3
As a transfemme, I often assume that cis men are unsafe and hold myself a bit more guarded around them than I do with others. I try not to do it, but it's hard when I grew up in those locker rooms and exclusive male spaces and hearing the way they talk about others. And sure, not every boy in those locker rooms and gaming chat rooms was guilty of acting that way, but I almost never saw them speak up either. It truly is safer for me to have trust be earned for them with a little higher of a barrier than I give others.
I'm sure you're well aware of these considerations, but I wanted to mention my experience with it. As always, I adore your writing. Thank you for it.
GGs for this piece. Ate it tf up. Lovely to see two-to-three years of my own interrogation of manhood & masculinity written so concisely, so beautifully.
I really enjoyed your books over the past year so I was delighted to see that you're writing on Substack! I'm telling all of my transmasc advocate friends to read this lol
You always do such an incredible job of bringing nuance and compassion to your subject matter, and finding the connective tissue between different groups’ struggles. This piece challenges me more than most, but naming parts of this subject matter as bound to transmisogyny is a powerful reframe.
It also intersects with important questions I’m constantly grappling with: How do we build safer, Trans-centered spaces that don’t shut out all (or half) of the Trans eggs and hatchlings-in-progress? How do we safely build spaces that actually offer an on-ramp into community for people who may later turn out to be Trans, regardless of what gender(s) has been assigned/perceived/coerced onto them? How do we build a culture that avoids punishing people for their bodies or others’ perceptions of them, while still protecting those who are under direct attack for our known or visible Transness at both the systemic and interpersonal levels?
The “answers” to these types of challenges are probably all about a neverending process of interrogation and self-examination, but I think we get closer thanks to the way you articulate both the questions, and the problems with the answers usually put forward.
They're great questions and very practically and emotionally difficult for us to navigate! I find that focusing on structures of oppression rather than personal identity does help a ton to clarify things, but it's kind of difficult to get people on board with. And there's always a need for people very directly and repeatedly targeted by a form of oppression to have their own private spaces for processing and healing, and how to protect those spaces is damn hard without gatekeeping. I think a shared culture & norms can do a lot though to allow us to presume good faith and nurture new/questioning/unlearning people.
I like a lot of the points you are making, and I have been deeply questioning the patriarchical, westernized norms of masculinity for years - for all men, cis and trans. But for me, as a trans guy of color who transitioned after decades of being treated as a girl and a woman, there IS a huge part of my lived experience that feels erased by the assumption that I’ve just lived as a guy my whole life. And I don’t think it’s a transphobic or transmisogynist myth to recognize that some of us are deeply socialized to not take up space, to do free emotional labor as a matter of course, and to develop traits and skills that would have been frowned upon had we been raised as cis boys. I see a lot of talk about trans men being toxic and taking up too much space, but the reality is that the majority of trans spaces that I have been in have been primarily focused on representing transfems with very little transmasc visibility. I want to know where the line is between being accountable to and thoughtfully unpacking masculinity, and just pretending that all trans men have had the same experience of life as cis men the entire time.
Because I don’t personally feel my masculinity erased by the acknowledgment of my trans experience. How absurd would it be to insist that men of color are overstating their experiences of socialization and that “men of color have more in common with white men than they think”? If talking about racialized differences is not something that makes certain people less masculine, why is talking about trans identity and how it interacts with society any different?
On a related note, personally, my favorite people to be around are other transmascs, because we so often share the same cross section of pre- and post-transition experiences, that I don’t feel kinship over with other folks, both cis and trans. Is that transmisogyny? Because this is similar to what I feel in QTBIPOC spaces. A chance to just breathe and be understood. Some might say that’s “reverse racism.”
I’ve read two of your books and I respect your work, Devon. But I have to say, at the end of the day, I really wish more transmasc writers of color would write about masculinity. Because I feel like I keep having some version of this conversation with white trans folks, and it gets tiring.
As a trans man this was absolutely wonderful. What an amazing read!
I’ve noticed that as i’ve become more masculine (cut my hair, more open about body hair, etc. - i’m becoming butch!!) my social mistakes and hygiene issues have become more harshly punished by my peers. I’m still a very genderqueer looking person and am having more or less the same kind of mistakes and hygiene issues so maybe it’s the masculinization or something else idk.