Accepted (by a group of men)

Tonight was... Good. 

I remember the blog post I wrote years ago called "Accepted". This felt sort of like that.

I got to know a guy at a munch a few weeks back. He's not interested in becoming more than friends, but he's a really good (new) friend to me. He invited me to play D&D 5e with his friend group, and I really, really like most of them as well. 

And I feel.. Accepted by them. In a way I'm not used to. In a way I wasn't expecting. I met these people "on my own". Not through T, or through Saint, or through a game conference or anything like that. I'm not really used to making friends spontaneously like this. Don't know what to expect. 

Now, I'm not sure if they actually, truly, like me, or are just civilized people who know how to behave.. That doesn't really matter, though. Because I felt included and accepted and WANTED among them. That's a wonderful feeling. 

They're also clearly viewing me as something masc. When they slip up and use the wrong pronoun, they automatically go to "he/him". That's wonderfully affirming. I feel almost like an... Equal? Equal in a way I don't remember from when I lived as a woman. There would almost always be some underlying tension back then, because they were men interacting with a (perceived) woman. Even when there clearly wasn't anything sexual or romantic on the table.

I'm not sure if that tension was always a real thing, or if it was my discomfort as a trans-egg leaking through... I could be imagining this tension, projecting my own discomfort (discomfort of myself) onto others. Because I certainly wasn't really feeling my feelings, back then.

In some settings, I'm sure it was real though. At least to some extent. In kink settings for example. The hierarchy, to my mind, was fairly clear.. As a dominant "woman", I had many, many willing potential play partners. Meaning most social interactions were in some ways transactional. They wanted something-, or was considering wanting something from me. I often wanted something from them too. And the dominant men also often saw me as a woman and hypothetical sexual/play partner, even though I never played with any of them. 

When I'm being read as a man now, in a group of other men, things are very, very different. Men I meet are NOT potential sex/romantic partners, for the most part. Without any women in the room, the atmosphere changes. The mood is different. Just like a room of only doms, is different from a room with both subs and doms in it. Yes, that's comphet. Compulsory heterosexuality. It ignores queerness completely. I recognize it for what it is. That doesn't make my experience any less real, however. 

I wrote the draft for this post at 3.30am, but didn't feel I could articulate this properly so I just left the post unpublished. Now over 14 hours later, it hasn't gotten any easier. So I might as well hit publish. Maybe this will be the seed for something I can keep building on at some other time?