STOP BOYING YOURSELF
you can't keep doing this.
I am talking directly to you. Yes, you. The transgender reading this1. You need to stop calling yourself a boy immediately.
I. Stop it right now.
I know you have your reasons. You might be doing it because you think it’s funny, or for purposes of sexual abnegation, or because you have a sick attachment to the wrongs committed against you. You might be doing it out of fear. You might be doing it out of shame. But I am going to knock any and all of those reasons out from under you, with the rubber mallet of saving you from yourself, because you can’t keep doing this.
It is not funny to boy yourself.
When you boy yourself you harm all women, by contributing to the misogynist stereotype that women aren’t funny.
There are much better ways to derive sexual abnegation.
“it/its” “he/his” ughhhh you are missing! the! point! You are Human. Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree? We already have a set of pronouns and social role historically denoting objectification, in much more interesting and sexually compelling ways!!!
You have to stop regarding yourself as a boy. People do horrible things to girls, anyway.
There are less awful forms of self-harm, like drugs, or Christianity. “Wait,” you are saying. “I thought those things were unhealthy and terrible!” Well they are, but at least when you’re high or worshipping your absent father figure you aren’t denying your true heart. Yes, I guess I would rather you play Magic Gambling than this. Although somebody is going to take that last line out of context and say I endorse it, which I do not. Why do I even bother? Because I’m trying to save you.
What you should really be afraid of is withering away without ever having been born.
The only defensible reason to ever call yourself a boy is for safety. But that can’t last. If you are a trans girl you medically need Hormone Replacement Therapy, and if you are on Hormone Replacement Therapy it will become very obvious to everybody around you that you are a girl very soon. Probably it already has.
How is being a boy any less shameful?
Boys are on the whole2 weird and gross! They smell bad, insist on self-sufficiency to the point of self-sabotage, and fail to properly appreciate the contexts from which they are inextricable. All the classical “boy” virtues are things girls can do anyways. Yes, being a girl and growing into a woman means developing a complex and multifaceted relationship with shame and society, mediated historically by one’s mother, but you have internality whether you like it or not. Or you wouldn’t be doing this.
Ultimately you should not be boying yourself because you are not a boy. Labels exist to be used appropriately, and I have found trans women are one of the demographics most likely to understand and appreciate this.
II: Why you do it
However. All of these awful reasons are but heads, upon the despicably transphobic hydra that is the Ur-Cause of your “boymoding” yourself:
You think being trans is an imposition.
Transness is not an imposition. Stop treating it like one. If you act like people are doing you some great favor to use your proper name, that’s how they will treat you. We read people’s genders daily! People treat other people as women all the time; it is not much of an ask for them to categorize you in that box with a few salient differences (as all women have!).
How does your transness inconvenience anybody? Does transitioning demand anybody else’s time or money? At least one of your coworkers has a name with a non-intuitive spelling — nobody insists they change it! If it does make them uncomfortable that is 100% on them, for being a bigot. Sure, early-transition mania makes you kind of weird to be around but that’s just normal girl puberty stuff.
“But my transness is an imposition,” I can already hear you saying. “Being a girl is hard and I’m not good at it and I am actively making people around me uncomfortable!”
III: What Happens If You Don’t
Okay fine. Transness makes some people uncomfortable, whether or not it should; that isn’t really disputable. However: all the alternatives to transition: staying as you are; pretending nothing is wrong; killing yourself; will make people even more uncomfortable. Seriously.
Here are some classic ways that people who are repressing womanhood get weird:
They think filling themselves with something bigger — religion, military service, feminism, sex, art — will save them.
They think abstracting all their needs away and living the smallest possible life will absolve them of their desires.
They get really visibly jealous and weird around women. They may lean into misogyny as a means of convincing themselves.
Alternately, they get really creepily nice, like they think that being nice enough will somehow get them something they want — not something sexual, something else.
They project and launder their emotions through girls, real or fictional.
They get self-destructive in attractive ways. Not to me personally. To straight girls, whose emotions they drink as they tip over the edge.
They develop alarming and questionable fetishes.
They get really into tkmiz.
Basically all of this weirds normal people out. They can tell something is wrong, even if they don’t know what — though I do personally find tkmiz’s Klee-esque compositions deeply affecting.
This phenomenon isn’t unique to repressing transes. Every lesbian knows a cis “bisexual” girl who won’t stop talking about how much she loves girls but also she can’t, because she has a boyfriend she has to mother, who she has never shown any indication of actually liking (Actual bisexual girls this is not about you; go on in peace, with my mystified but supportive3 blessing). Even straight people get weirder when they stew on a crush for long enough. Stifled desires will twist and corrode until they express themselves, regardless of how you feel about them; everybody can tell! Transitioning actually makes you much more normal!
IV. It Doesn’t Even Work
And no matter what you do, dressing up as a boy doesn’t even work! You’re going to get called a slur I cannot say no matter what you do — so you may as well become a girl about it. And less weird. Please.
I missed last week due to a personal matter. It would be physically impossible for that personal matter to ever happen again, so I’m not going to discuss or think about it.
non-transgenders reading this go send this to a trans right now.
individuals, and hypothetical individuals, notwithstanding;
transitioning really did make me a more functional and adjusted adult (after the first year) it's kinda crazy how far basic self dignity takes you
this is true. im not fully through the process of outgrowing my pain but i can already tell you its true . i became far healthier and more pleasant to be around when i stopped trying to be someone i wasnt