More trans

Remember in mid October when I worried that I wasn't "trans enough"? Lol, yeah, so I was both sort of right and really wrong. Wrong, because I'm definitely trans. I don't doubt that (though I'm sure doubt will come crawling back at some point). Also I was sort of right, because if we imagine that you're somehow "more trans" the further away you are from your assigned gender, then... I turned out to be a lot more trans than I thought in mid October. 

(Now that notion in itself, that you can somehow be "more" or "less" trans, is silly. It's actually inherently transphobic, because it uses someone's assigned cisgender as a benchmark and puts genders on a sort of linear scale. But anyhow, the feeling is there, so I'll still use it to explain my point.)

Back then I thought that I wasn't "only a woman". My chosen pronouns in the first trans-related Discord server I joined, was "she/they". As if my identity went from "woman" to "woman+". "Woman" was still a very strong part of my identity, and that's not so strange. It was all I knew for the first 35 years, 9 months and 25 days of my life (give or take.. I probably didn't have much conscious thought about my own gender as an infant). Of course it was hard to let that go. 

But the song that really struck a cord in me.. It's about a boy... And.. From a young age, I've always been intensely fascinated by gay men. I love gay porn, both visual and written, and yeah I always thought that was because I prefered to sexualize the male body (instead of the female body like in mainstream porn). Since I've always been primarily attracted to men.. But it's more than that.. I've read a lot of novels and short stories about gay or bisexual men. I love reading "coming out stories" or stories about overcoming, written from a gay man's perspective...

When explaining my gender to people online these past few weeks, I've placed myself "slightly on the masculine side of androgynous". So certain not just "woman plus"... I've also been reading up on a lot of transmasc stuff these last few weeks. Stuff relating to testosterone treatment, mainly. I'm curious how it would affect lichen sclerosus (the skin disease I've got), I'm curious how it would affect lipoedema (a fat disease, where fatty deposits on the legs just don't go away. It almost exclusively affects women). 

The egg finally cracked two nights ago, when I saw a gif of two (really good looking) men kissing. My first thought was "damn, that's hot". My second thought was "I wonder what it would be like to BE one of them". Gender envy. The classic "do I want to fuck them or be them"-sort of thing. 

That night, I tried a masculating filter on Snapchat. And sure, a Snapchat filter is far from reality but.. Damn, I looked really good with a broader jaw and a bit of stubble. Sexy as fuck, actually. Looking at that manipulated image of myself gave me a good dose of gender euphoria. 

So am I a man, then? A transman? I don't know. I don't think so. I think I still belong in the nonbinary category, but I would place myself a lot further towards the masculine side than I first thought. I've joined a transmasc server on Discord, and a lot of people there have stories that really resonate with my own. It feels more right to me than the colorful, genderblending chaos that is often seen as "real nonbinary".

Of course, there's a voice in the back of my head worrying if I'm basically brainwashing myself. After all, isn't this how depressed, uncertain, religious people get radicalized online? Isn't this how someone who used to only be slightly alternative, suddenly starts to believe that the earth is flat? They do a lot of googling, chat almost exclusively with people who are further down the rabitthole than they are, and feel like they've found a "simple" answer to a very complex set of problems... Is that what I'm doing? Or am I genuinely discovering myself? How would I ever know the difference? 

Is the fact that I'm worrying about this, in itself, a sign that I don't have anything to worry about?