> I would first be interested to know why you identify as a trans man generally
K so let’s start with, “Is it true that I identify as a trans man?” But in fact I’ll look at the slightly different question, “Is it true that I identify as a man?”, because I think that probably gets more quickly to the heart of the matter. It’s at least clear that I do not identify as a cis man.
I think there’s probably some ambiguity in the way “identify” is used that makes this a little hard for me to answer.
On the one hand, there’s how I present myself to other people. I have a strong impression that most people I encounter have this really strong desire to know whether the person they’re interacting with “is a man” or “is a woman”. I have at times been pretty grumpy about this—lately I’m especially grumpy about it when people find out I’m pregnant and immediately ask, “What is it?”, to which I sometimes reply, “Human, I’m pretty sure.”—and so for a while I presented myself to others as “nonbinary”. I think a lot of that was me being like “I’m not on board with how reliant you are on these particular categories, I don’t want to squish my own thoughts and feelings and perceptions and behaviors into whatever this categorization system means to you, and I’m unwilling to enable your application of this to me.”
Which worked out pretty well while I lived in Berkeley. Most people that I actually wanted to interact with rolled with it. Nearly everyone at my workplace used they/them pronouns for me without any hiccups, for example. And there was generally less stress in my life from the particular direction of gender. It was something I could largely ignore, at least much more so than I had at any other point in my life.
But now I live in a different place where many of the people around me seem to really really want to know whether I am a man or a woman, and it’s so very exhausting to be in constant conflict with them about that. I don’t think they know that they care so much about regarding other people as falling into one of two buckets, but it’s a glaringly-obvious-to-me feature of my interactions with them. So it seems like the options that are realistically on the table for me, if I’d rather avoid the constant battle with the ubiquitous social frame, are to either present myself to them as a man (Mr., he/him, father, clothing style, etc.), or to present myself to them as a woman (Mrs., she/her, mother, etc.).
Of those two options, there is clearly one that causes me to feel tremendous stress and sadness a whole lot of the time when I’m around other people, and another that causes me to feel mostly good and comfortable when I’m around other people. So, socially, I tell other people that I’m a trans man, and this works out ok for me. In that sense, I identify as a man.
But there is another way that I think the word “identify” is often used in the context of gender. It has less to do with social presentation, and more to do with self perception. Sometimes when people say that they “identify” as X, they at least in part mean that they see themselves as X. Perhaps they feel like their conception of X on the inside, or they aspire to embody the properties of their conception of X in the way they live their lives, or they feel really comfortable and at home when they imagine themselves as X, or something like that.
In this second, more personal sense, it is less clear to me whether I identify as a man. I think the most accurate description of my current state with respect to this sense of “gender identity” is that I am agnostic about my gender, or that I am “in the process of figuring it out”.
It seems quite likely to me that the question of “whether I am a man, on the inside” is very much a wrong question, that there simply is no fact of the matter to be discovered here.
Yet I am not confident that it’s entirely a wrong question. I do suspect for several reasons, some of them more easily articulable than others, that the question is at least pointing roughly in the direction of something that is real and that actually matters, both to me and to others who have some kind of strong relationship with gender. For instance, I don’t think that yin/yang clusters are entirely arbitrary. I don’t think it’s a complete coincidence that Aztec and Mayan rituals surrounding corn and cacao crops prominently featured the balance between masculine and feminine elements. I don’t even think it’s wrong or dumb or bad that there exist such things today as workshops and ceremonies focused on “the divine feminine” or “the divine masculine”. I personally feel the draw of these frameworks. I feel a kind of illumination and fitting-ness when I think about my experiences through them. And indeed, overall I feel more at home, cozy, resonant, happy, comfortable, when I rest my attention on the traditionally masculine elements of these frameworks, even though I also feel a lot of familiarity around many of the traditionally feminine elements as well.
But now I’d like to discuss another question that is not quite the one you asked, but that seems unavoidable when trying to understand my experience of being trans, and that I think might also clearly distinguish me from “a masculine female” (and here I notice I’m more anxious about getting into hot water, because I’d describe this way of talking and thinking as at best out of fashion, and at worst sometimes seen as grounds for cancellation): “Am I transsexual?”
And to this, the answer seems very clearly to be, “Yes, I absolutely am transsexual”, if we interpret “transsexual” in a quite straightforward way that has little to do with gender and lots to do with physiology. (I think that most “masculine females” are not transexual in this sense! They’re at least somewhat gender non-conforming, but they’re pretty much fine occupying their female bodies. There may be additional differences between me and them, but I’m at least pretty sure about this one.)
Though even with this term, there seem to me to be two categories of thing going on. The first is about how my actual physical body is (or how I plan for it to be). I was born with a typically female body. I have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome, I went through female puberty and developed breasts and a menstrual cycle and so forth. But I also lack breasts now because I’ve had them removed. And very soon, I will have adult male levels of testosterone in my body, which will probably result in things like a beard, a lower voice, male patterns of fat distribution and muscle development, and perhaps some typically male psychological changes as well (I won’t be surprised if I become more angry, for example). And at that point, it will be pretty misleading to describe me as “female”, and much more accurate to describe me as “transmasculine”.
But additionally, there is the way that I feel about my body and about these changes: I want to be male! And, as a separate fact (not every trans man shares this feeling!), I want not to be female.
I feel so much better now that my breasts are gone. I made the most of them while they existed—I even made money off of them as a professional stripper—but they were a source of constant, low-grade suffering. Every time I paid attention to them, something felt wrong. And they were kind of hard to ignore, ’cause they weren’t small. They were in the way, reminding me of themselves over and over every day, and it just felt bad. I didn’t know why it felt bad, and I still sort of don’t. But it was almost the way I’d expect to feel if some aliens had abducted me and surgically added random lumps of flesh to my body and then deposited me back on earth and wiped my memory. “These don’t belong here. Something is wrong. Get them off.”
And that’s how I still feel about several other features of my physiology. I feel that way about my hips, and my voice, and my musculature (which I have worked very hard, to only somewhat noticeable effect, to modify even without testosterone), and my period, and the truly bizarre things that happen to my cognition just before my period (which I’ll talk more about in a moment). It all feels wrong and weird to me.
But when I wear a shirt that does an especially good job of highlighting my muscles and my chest, I feel happy when I look in the mirror. And when I imaging having a deeper voice, and masculine patterns of hair and fat and muscles and a penis (though I don’t actually plan to get one of those), I feel happy. And I guess it could still turn out that I’m wrong, and I won’t actually feel about the results of testosterone the same way that I feel about the results of top surgery. But I’d be pretty surprised, largely because it seems like almost everyone in my situation does in fact feel a lot better once they’re on hormone therapy.
So in both the personal and the physical senses, it seems right to describe me as transexual.
But the thing is, there’s not a lot of room for nuance in my interactions with strangers and acquaintances. Even if they could easily hold the thought, “This person is more comfortable in a male body, and also they feel kind of confused about ‘masculinity’ but they weakly suspect it’s approximately right that they ‘are a man’ in some sense or another”, it would not be easy for me to communicate that state of affairs, and most people would not want me to try. Given that it’s socially dangerous among some subcultures I often bump into for me to call myself “transexual”, I simply refer to myself as “a trans man”—or, if I seem to be “passing” anyway, just as “a man”. And honestly, I expect it will be awfully relaxing to consistently fly under the radar as simply “a man”, as I expect will happen once I have a beard and a deeper voice.
Ok, I think I’ve touched on most of the other questions in your comment at this point, so now I’ll move on to the topic of pregnancy.
> Has your pregnancy changed or prompted any new thoughts about your gender identity?
Heck. Yes.
When I was planning this pregnancy, I intended to 1) get top surgery first (because I just wasn’t willing to have even bigger and more in-the-way breasts, or to breastfeed, or to deal with the complications that come from lactating without breastfeeding), and then 2) wait until I was “done having kids” to start hormone therapy. I knew I wanted to gestate one kid, and I thought I might want to gestate two.
Now I am not sure whether or not I will try to gestate an additional kid (I’m leaning toward “no”), but if I do, it will definitely have to wait until I’ve been on T for a while (and then gone off of it for six months before conception, as is the standard practice among trans gestational parents). I am not going into another pregnancy with this body, because pregnancy has been even more body-and-brain-dysphoric than I expected.
And to be clear, I did expect to hate pregnancy. I expected to hate getting and recovering from top surgery too; I did that because it seemed worth it to me. Pregnancy is the same. My husband and I wanted to have a kid with our genetics, and this was the way to do that. Creating a new life seems to me like a pretty big and valuable thing, and it seems quite plausibly worth the suffering I expected to undergo. It has been a lot of suffering, and it’s not over yet, but I still think it’s worth it.
My baby bump feels a lot to me like how my breasts did, but way more so. The “alien” aspect is even more prominent, perhaps because there is literally another creature in there wriggling around. At least my breasts did not move of their own accord.
But the effects of pregnancy also seem to be hitting me in particularly gender-relevant ways as well, not just sex/body-relevant.
(And now I’m a bit fearful about describing some of my experiences as “gendered”; I would like to be clear that I’m talking in terms of my own mostly-automatic feelings and associations with femininity and masculinity, and that these associations may be in various ways wrong/bad/inaccurate/harmful. But they exist, and they’re impacting my experience, and I’m going to describe my experience.)
Let me tell you about premenstrual syndrome, or PMS. For me, PMS is mostly a way that my brain is while under the influence of the hormonal changes that immediately precede menstruation, and sometimes last for a whole week. It happens every month, for one to seven days.
What happens to me during PMS is that I feel… “crazy”, is the word I typically use for it. Specifically, the relationship between my emotions and my thoughts changes dramatically.
Ordinarily, my emotions seem to track my thoughts, and especially my beliefs. If I believe something bad is going to happen, I feel scared. If I spend a lot of time planning something and I come to a conclusion about what I will do, I feel prepared. My emotions follow my thoughts.
But during PMS, the relationship is flipped: my thoughts follow my emotions instead. I find myself feeling scared, and then I begin to expect bad things to happen. I feel prepared, and then I believe that I have planned sufficiently. I feel insecure, and I think that my partner is probably angry with me.
I hate this. So much. I aspire to be a person who is exceptionally reasonable, grounded, and clear-thinking. I do not like to be volatile. With decades of practice, I have learned to use my mind differently during PMS. I’m mostly able to act sane, even though I feel crazy (though not always). But it’s exhausting. [Note to commenters who are thinking, “Then why don’t they take [insert birth control method here] so they don’t have periods?” I promise, I have tried a lot of things. For various reasons, none of the things has worked.]
During pregnancy this is happening all the time.
It wasn’t like that at first, but some time in second trimester, it became like perpetual PMS.
Additionally, even though I haven’t lost all that much muscle mass, my body is flooded with the hormone relaxin, which makes my joints and ligaments flimsy. I cannot comfortably run, or use a shovel, or even carry a jug of milk through the grocery store on my own. Compared to how I was before, and especially compared to my husband, I am physically weak and fragile. I have to rely on other people to do things that require strength.
When I imagine that many many pregnant people go through something like this, and then I remember that before birth control, female adults spent much of their time either pregnant or menstruating, some of what’s going on with “femininity” starts to make more sense to me.
I have known trans women who describe hormone therapy as “like a spiritual awakening”. On female hormones, they developed a completely new relationship with and experience of their emotions. They became much more sensitive, much more easily moved, they learned how to cry, they connected with the emotions of others more deeply, they added this whole dimension to their life that was by comparison heavily muted before.
These sorts of things seem to me to have a lot to do with traditionally feminine virtues. Being emotionally open and sensitive, being nurturing, communicating deeply about complex social/emotional topics, recognizing and being moved and motivated by beauty, behaving in ways that are gentle both physically and psychologically, building and maintaining communities whose members are supported and do not have to do things all on their own.
(And I’ve noticed that expectations about these properties are reflected in the ways that strangers, acquaintances, and authors of pregnancy books interact with me about pregnancy. They treat me “like an expecting mother”, which I think is “like an especially hyper-feminine person”. They make a ton of assumptions about what I’m thinking and feeling and how I’m relating to those things. They expect me to already be in love with my unborn baby, to be soft and gentle and nurturing, to be brimming with joy and fear and excitement about bringing a new life into the world and caring for my child. It’s as though they see me a tiny instantiation of some kind of feminine-mother-goddess. I have not been comfortable with this! And I have also noticed that the people and books who have not done this at me are exactly the same ones that say “pregnant person” and “gestational parent”, and they’re the ones that I’m able to make use of rather than rage-quitting out of intense alienation.)
But it seems to me that shifting a brain in that direction comes with costs. For some, the costs are worthwhile. Some people are much more at home in a mind that excels at expressing feminine properties, even if it means access to masculine properties is diminished.
I am not such a person. For me, the costs of this shift are unacceptable. I like to be stable, reasonable, independent, straightforward, and strong. I like being the opposite of on-my-period. I like being the opposite of pregnant. And to me, inside my own head at least, I summarize this as “I like to be masculine”.
So that has kind of clicked into place for me, as a result of pregnancy. I feel a lot clearer about what I want. I’m much more eager to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible, more eager to take a higher dose of testosterone when I do start (I was previously considering a “nonbinary” dose), and more comfortable with the idea that I’ll consistently describe myself as “a man”, “a father or uncle”, and “he/him”. (Though at the moment, I still tend to request “they/he”, when offered the option.)
Pregnancy has felt to me like an overdose of femininity, and now I am done with being a woman.
Thank you for this comment. It’s an extraordinarily perceptive, candid, and thorough look into a set of experiences few are familiar with, and gave me a great deal to chew on. I very much admire your commitment to becoming a parent despite the complexity of your position—good luck with it all, and thanks again for sharing your experience.
Wow! I am so grateful for this comment and the transparency and candor you’ve written it with. I appreciate the time you took to write this out and I have some follow-up questions if you don’t mind.
I have a strong impression that most people I encounter have this really strong desire to know whether the person they’re interacting with “is a man” or “is a woman”.
Have you noticed any difference in people’s behavior depending on what gender category they perceive you as?
Of those two options, there is clearly one that causes me to feel tremendous stress and sadness a whole lot of the time when I’m around other people, and another that causes me to feel mostly good and comfortable when I’m around other people.
What is it about that perception by others that causes you so much stress? Is it because their perception comes pre-packaged along with some erroneous assumptions about you? (e.g. the pregnancy books assuming how you feel about your baby)
And indeed, overall I feel more at home, cozy, resonant, happy, comfortable, when I rest my attention on the traditionally masculine elements of these frameworks, even though I also feel a lot of familiarity around many of the traditionally feminine elements as well.
This might be impossible to answer but are you able to determine which way causation flows? What I mean by this is do you feel more connected to certain concepts because they are coded as masculine, or do you just feel that affinity with concepts that happen to be coded as masculine? You’ve lucidly and transparently described how your cognition is affected by your hormonal balance, and your strong aversion to your PMS mental state, so I’m wonder where this preference cleaves.
It all feels wrong and weird to me.
Similar question as above. Does the discomfort with aspects of your physiology stem from them being coded as feminine? Put another way, if you somehow had no concept of masculine/feminine, would your physiology on its own still cause you discomfort?
This was a really interesting read. I am definitely a person who instinctively wants to categorise everyone as either male or female, and seeing transgender people makes me feel uncomfortable (I don’t know any personally, although I do know a nonbinary person). But I enjoy reading about people’s internal experiences relating to their sex or gender.
> I would first be interested to know why you identify as a trans man generally
K so let’s start with, “Is it true that I identify as a trans man?” But in fact I’ll look at the slightly different question, “Is it true that I identify as a man?”, because I think that probably gets more quickly to the heart of the matter. It’s at least clear that I do not identify as a cis man.
I think there’s probably some ambiguity in the way “identify” is used that makes this a little hard for me to answer.
On the one hand, there’s how I present myself to other people. I have a strong impression that most people I encounter have this really strong desire to know whether the person they’re interacting with “is a man” or “is a woman”. I have at times been pretty grumpy about this—lately I’m especially grumpy about it when people find out I’m pregnant and immediately ask, “What is it?”, to which I sometimes reply, “Human, I’m pretty sure.”—and so for a while I presented myself to others as “nonbinary”. I think a lot of that was me being like “I’m not on board with how reliant you are on these particular categories, I don’t want to squish my own thoughts and feelings and perceptions and behaviors into whatever this categorization system means to you, and I’m unwilling to enable your application of this to me.”
Which worked out pretty well while I lived in Berkeley. Most people that I actually wanted to interact with rolled with it. Nearly everyone at my workplace used they/them pronouns for me without any hiccups, for example. And there was generally less stress in my life from the particular direction of gender. It was something I could largely ignore, at least much more so than I had at any other point in my life.
But now I live in a different place where many of the people around me seem to really really want to know whether I am a man or a woman, and it’s so very exhausting to be in constant conflict with them about that. I don’t think they know that they care so much about regarding other people as falling into one of two buckets, but it’s a glaringly-obvious-to-me feature of my interactions with them. So it seems like the options that are realistically on the table for me, if I’d rather avoid the constant battle with the ubiquitous social frame, are to either present myself to them as a man (Mr., he/him, father, clothing style, etc.), or to present myself to them as a woman (Mrs., she/her, mother, etc.).
Of those two options, there is clearly one that causes me to feel tremendous stress and sadness a whole lot of the time when I’m around other people, and another that causes me to feel mostly good and comfortable when I’m around other people. So, socially, I tell other people that I’m a trans man, and this works out ok for me. In that sense, I identify as a man.
But there is another way that I think the word “identify” is often used in the context of gender. It has less to do with social presentation, and more to do with self perception. Sometimes when people say that they “identify” as X, they at least in part mean that they see themselves as X. Perhaps they feel like their conception of X on the inside, or they aspire to embody the properties of their conception of X in the way they live their lives, or they feel really comfortable and at home when they imagine themselves as X, or something like that.
In this second, more personal sense, it is less clear to me whether I identify as a man. I think the most accurate description of my current state with respect to this sense of “gender identity” is that I am agnostic about my gender, or that I am “in the process of figuring it out”.
It seems quite likely to me that the question of “whether I am a man, on the inside” is very much a wrong question, that there simply is no fact of the matter to be discovered here.
Yet I am not confident that it’s entirely a wrong question. I do suspect for several reasons, some of them more easily articulable than others, that the question is at least pointing roughly in the direction of something that is real and that actually matters, both to me and to others who have some kind of strong relationship with gender. For instance, I don’t think that yin/yang clusters are entirely arbitrary. I don’t think it’s a complete coincidence that Aztec and Mayan rituals surrounding corn and cacao crops prominently featured the balance between masculine and feminine elements. I don’t even think it’s wrong or dumb or bad that there exist such things today as workshops and ceremonies focused on “the divine feminine” or “the divine masculine”. I personally feel the draw of these frameworks. I feel a kind of illumination and fitting-ness when I think about my experiences through them. And indeed, overall I feel more at home, cozy, resonant, happy, comfortable, when I rest my attention on the traditionally masculine elements of these frameworks, even though I also feel a lot of familiarity around many of the traditionally feminine elements as well.
But now I’d like to discuss another question that is not quite the one you asked, but that seems unavoidable when trying to understand my experience of being trans, and that I think might also clearly distinguish me from “a masculine female” (and here I notice I’m more anxious about getting into hot water, because I’d describe this way of talking and thinking as at best out of fashion, and at worst sometimes seen as grounds for cancellation): “Am I transsexual?”
And to this, the answer seems very clearly to be, “Yes, I absolutely am transsexual”, if we interpret “transsexual” in a quite straightforward way that has little to do with gender and lots to do with physiology. (I think that most “masculine females” are not transexual in this sense! They’re at least somewhat gender non-conforming, but they’re pretty much fine occupying their female bodies. There may be additional differences between me and them, but I’m at least pretty sure about this one.)
Though even with this term, there seem to me to be two categories of thing going on. The first is about how my actual physical body is (or how I plan for it to be). I was born with a typically female body. I have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome, I went through female puberty and developed breasts and a menstrual cycle and so forth. But I also lack breasts now because I’ve had them removed. And very soon, I will have adult male levels of testosterone in my body, which will probably result in things like a beard, a lower voice, male patterns of fat distribution and muscle development, and perhaps some typically male psychological changes as well (I won’t be surprised if I become more angry, for example). And at that point, it will be pretty misleading to describe me as “female”, and much more accurate to describe me as “transmasculine”.
But additionally, there is the way that I feel about my body and about these changes: I want to be male! And, as a separate fact (not every trans man shares this feeling!), I want not to be female.
I feel so much better now that my breasts are gone. I made the most of them while they existed—I even made money off of them as a professional stripper—but they were a source of constant, low-grade suffering. Every time I paid attention to them, something felt wrong. And they were kind of hard to ignore, ’cause they weren’t small. They were in the way, reminding me of themselves over and over every day, and it just felt bad. I didn’t know why it felt bad, and I still sort of don’t. But it was almost the way I’d expect to feel if some aliens had abducted me and surgically added random lumps of flesh to my body and then deposited me back on earth and wiped my memory. “These don’t belong here. Something is wrong. Get them off.”
And that’s how I still feel about several other features of my physiology. I feel that way about my hips, and my voice, and my musculature (which I have worked very hard, to only somewhat noticeable effect, to modify even without testosterone), and my period, and the truly bizarre things that happen to my cognition just before my period (which I’ll talk more about in a moment). It all feels wrong and weird to me.
But when I wear a shirt that does an especially good job of highlighting my muscles and my chest, I feel happy when I look in the mirror. And when I imaging having a deeper voice, and masculine patterns of hair and fat and muscles and a penis (though I don’t actually plan to get one of those), I feel happy. And I guess it could still turn out that I’m wrong, and I won’t actually feel about the results of testosterone the same way that I feel about the results of top surgery. But I’d be pretty surprised, largely because it seems like almost everyone in my situation does in fact feel a lot better once they’re on hormone therapy.
So in both the personal and the physical senses, it seems right to describe me as transexual.
But the thing is, there’s not a lot of room for nuance in my interactions with strangers and acquaintances. Even if they could easily hold the thought, “This person is more comfortable in a male body, and also they feel kind of confused about ‘masculinity’ but they weakly suspect it’s approximately right that they ‘are a man’ in some sense or another”, it would not be easy for me to communicate that state of affairs, and most people would not want me to try. Given that it’s socially dangerous among some subcultures I often bump into for me to call myself “transexual”, I simply refer to myself as “a trans man”—or, if I seem to be “passing” anyway, just as “a man”. And honestly, I expect it will be awfully relaxing to consistently fly under the radar as simply “a man”, as I expect will happen once I have a beard and a deeper voice.
Ok, I think I’ve touched on most of the other questions in your comment at this point, so now I’ll move on to the topic of pregnancy.
> Has your pregnancy changed or prompted any new thoughts about your gender identity?
Heck. Yes.
When I was planning this pregnancy, I intended to 1) get top surgery first (because I just wasn’t willing to have even bigger and more in-the-way breasts, or to breastfeed, or to deal with the complications that come from lactating without breastfeeding), and then 2) wait until I was “done having kids” to start hormone therapy. I knew I wanted to gestate one kid, and I thought I might want to gestate two.
Now I am not sure whether or not I will try to gestate an additional kid (I’m leaning toward “no”), but if I do, it will definitely have to wait until I’ve been on T for a while (and then gone off of it for six months before conception, as is the standard practice among trans gestational parents). I am not going into another pregnancy with this body, because pregnancy has been even more body-and-brain-dysphoric than I expected.
And to be clear, I did expect to hate pregnancy. I expected to hate getting and recovering from top surgery too; I did that because it seemed worth it to me. Pregnancy is the same. My husband and I wanted to have a kid with our genetics, and this was the way to do that. Creating a new life seems to me like a pretty big and valuable thing, and it seems quite plausibly worth the suffering I expected to undergo. It has been a lot of suffering, and it’s not over yet, but I still think it’s worth it.
My baby bump feels a lot to me like how my breasts did, but way more so. The “alien” aspect is even more prominent, perhaps because there is literally another creature in there wriggling around. At least my breasts did not move of their own accord.
But the effects of pregnancy also seem to be hitting me in particularly gender-relevant ways as well, not just sex/body-relevant.
(And now I’m a bit fearful about describing some of my experiences as “gendered”; I would like to be clear that I’m talking in terms of my own mostly-automatic feelings and associations with femininity and masculinity, and that these associations may be in various ways wrong/bad/inaccurate/harmful. But they exist, and they’re impacting my experience, and I’m going to describe my experience.)
Let me tell you about premenstrual syndrome, or PMS. For me, PMS is mostly a way that my brain is while under the influence of the hormonal changes that immediately precede menstruation, and sometimes last for a whole week. It happens every month, for one to seven days.
What happens to me during PMS is that I feel… “crazy”, is the word I typically use for it. Specifically, the relationship between my emotions and my thoughts changes dramatically.
Ordinarily, my emotions seem to track my thoughts, and especially my beliefs. If I believe something bad is going to happen, I feel scared. If I spend a lot of time planning something and I come to a conclusion about what I will do, I feel prepared. My emotions follow my thoughts.
But during PMS, the relationship is flipped: my thoughts follow my emotions instead. I find myself feeling scared, and then I begin to expect bad things to happen. I feel prepared, and then I believe that I have planned sufficiently. I feel insecure, and I think that my partner is probably angry with me.
I hate this. So much. I aspire to be a person who is exceptionally reasonable, grounded, and clear-thinking. I do not like to be volatile. With decades of practice, I have learned to use my mind differently during PMS. I’m mostly able to act sane, even though I feel crazy (though not always). But it’s exhausting. [Note to commenters who are thinking, “Then why don’t they take [insert birth control method here] so they don’t have periods?” I promise, I have tried a lot of things. For various reasons, none of the things has worked.]
During pregnancy this is happening all the time.
It wasn’t like that at first, but some time in second trimester, it became like perpetual PMS.
Additionally, even though I haven’t lost all that much muscle mass, my body is flooded with the hormone relaxin, which makes my joints and ligaments flimsy. I cannot comfortably run, or use a shovel, or even carry a jug of milk through the grocery store on my own. Compared to how I was before, and especially compared to my husband, I am physically weak and fragile. I have to rely on other people to do things that require strength.
When I imagine that many many pregnant people go through something like this, and then I remember that before birth control, female adults spent much of their time either pregnant or menstruating, some of what’s going on with “femininity” starts to make more sense to me.
I have known trans women who describe hormone therapy as “like a spiritual awakening”. On female hormones, they developed a completely new relationship with and experience of their emotions. They became much more sensitive, much more easily moved, they learned how to cry, they connected with the emotions of others more deeply, they added this whole dimension to their life that was by comparison heavily muted before.
These sorts of things seem to me to have a lot to do with traditionally feminine virtues. Being emotionally open and sensitive, being nurturing, communicating deeply about complex social/emotional topics, recognizing and being moved and motivated by beauty, behaving in ways that are gentle both physically and psychologically, building and maintaining communities whose members are supported and do not have to do things all on their own.
(And I’ve noticed that expectations about these properties are reflected in the ways that strangers, acquaintances, and authors of pregnancy books interact with me about pregnancy. They treat me “like an expecting mother”, which I think is “like an especially hyper-feminine person”. They make a ton of assumptions about what I’m thinking and feeling and how I’m relating to those things. They expect me to already be in love with my unborn baby, to be soft and gentle and nurturing, to be brimming with joy and fear and excitement about bringing a new life into the world and caring for my child. It’s as though they see me a tiny instantiation of some kind of feminine-mother-goddess. I have not been comfortable with this! And I have also noticed that the people and books who have not done this at me are exactly the same ones that say “pregnant person” and “gestational parent”, and they’re the ones that I’m able to make use of rather than rage-quitting out of intense alienation.)
But it seems to me that shifting a brain in that direction comes with costs. For some, the costs are worthwhile. Some people are much more at home in a mind that excels at expressing feminine properties, even if it means access to masculine properties is diminished.
I am not such a person. For me, the costs of this shift are unacceptable. I like to be stable, reasonable, independent, straightforward, and strong. I like being the opposite of on-my-period. I like being the opposite of pregnant. And to me, inside my own head at least, I summarize this as “I like to be masculine”.
So that has kind of clicked into place for me, as a result of pregnancy. I feel a lot clearer about what I want. I’m much more eager to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible, more eager to take a higher dose of testosterone when I do start (I was previously considering a “nonbinary” dose), and more comfortable with the idea that I’ll consistently describe myself as “a man”, “a father or uncle”, and “he/him”. (Though at the moment, I still tend to request “they/he”, when offered the option.)
Pregnancy has felt to me like an overdose of femininity, and now I am done with being a woman.
Thank you for this comment. It’s an extraordinarily perceptive, candid, and thorough look into a set of experiences few are familiar with, and gave me a great deal to chew on. I very much admire your commitment to becoming a parent despite the complexity of your position—good luck with it all, and thanks again for sharing your experience.
Wow! I am so grateful for this comment and the transparency and candor you’ve written it with. I appreciate the time you took to write this out and I have some follow-up questions if you don’t mind.
Have you noticed any difference in people’s behavior depending on what gender category they perceive you as?
What is it about that perception by others that causes you so much stress? Is it because their perception comes pre-packaged along with some erroneous assumptions about you? (e.g. the pregnancy books assuming how you feel about your baby)
This might be impossible to answer but are you able to determine which way causation flows? What I mean by this is do you feel more connected to certain concepts because they are coded as masculine, or do you just feel that affinity with concepts that happen to be coded as masculine? You’ve lucidly and transparently described how your cognition is affected by your hormonal balance, and your strong aversion to your PMS mental state, so I’m wonder where this preference cleaves.
Similar question as above. Does the discomfort with aspects of your physiology stem from them being coded as feminine? Put another way, if you somehow had no concept of masculine/feminine, would your physiology on its own still cause you discomfort?
This was a really interesting read. I am definitely a person who instinctively wants to categorise everyone as either male or female, and seeing transgender people makes me feel uncomfortable (I don’t know any personally, although I do know a nonbinary person). But I enjoy reading about people’s internal experiences relating to their sex or gender.