gender feelings
@noahtheduke posted:
Father: And this offends you as a trans person.
Trans Jerry: No, it offends me as a comedian!
@noahtheduke posted:
i wrote this post last week but i actually came up with the joke back in the fall. i've been mulling it over ever since, and i think i know why it resonates. this might take a moment to write out tho, so my apologies up front.
i will start at the end.
after much introspection, i am not trans. i feel great in my body, i like being seen as a man and by all accounts i experience gender euphoria, i like being "papa" to my kids "husband" to my wife and "son" to my parents, i like my birth name.
i've spent a lot of time thinking about and wondering if i am trans tho. it's like an itch in my brain i keep poking at. the only moment that's ever said to me, "hey maybe you're trans", i tried on my girlfriend's bra and then put my metal t-shirt on over it in 2016 and was overcome with erotic feelings towards myself in the mirror. is that enough to say, "yep, time to transition?" i don't think so. it's very light evidence towards being trans and very heavy evidence to liking women/femininity imo.
in 2017 i spent the summer wearing dresses, in part because fuck the patriarchy but also because dresses seem comfortable and nice and breezy. why do women get comfy clothes but not men? i enjoyed it but it was a lot of work to find dresses that fit and matched my style, so i gave it up. at no point did i ever experience gender feelings.
why the itch then? where's it coming from?
the longer i'm on the internet, the more time i spend interacting with trans people and specifically trans women. they're some of the coolest and funniest and smartest people i know online. i'm incredibly jealous of them, tbh. i am not a great poster, i'm more of a "lurker". the things i make don't get popular, and only rarely do the things i write get any traction. but i'm fuckin surrounded by smart and funny and cool and hot transwomen.
there's a funny transposition happening here, where i see them online and think (sensationally, not linguistically), "wow, being trans is so cool, i wanna be cool like that." being trans (from the outside) looks like a cool club where a lot of my favorite people get to hang out and have intimacy and make funny jokes and be in a community.
i don't have that. that's okay, i have community in other ways, ways that are fulfilling and meaningful. i don't have to be a good poster, i'm funny irl and my wife laughs at every joke i make. my friends invite me to stuff, we chat, we all love each other. this isn't a pity party, to be clear.
and yet, i get online and see cool trans women and i'm like, "damn, i wanna be like her, she's something else"