Gender Shopping at the Second-Hand Store: Constructing Trans Masculinities

I wrote this paper for a sociology class about how trans guys like me sort out what kind of masculinity to do.

On one hand, I don’t love how dense academic writing is and how it turns basic communication into this maximalist dance of hyper-specific language gymnastics, but on the other hand it can still hold profound truths for people who write and read it. This is the tension I’m feeling with the piece you’re about to read. It’s about (my) trans identity and the ways that someone coming to masculinity later in life has to decide how to move through the world, what with society’s demands on guys being pretty tough.

I don’t blame you for a second if you skip it, knowing full well its academic maximalism. If you do read it, thank you, and I hope it offers something interesting and hopeful for you about the state of masculinity. There are in-text citations throughout and some footnotes at the bottom to add context. You can find the reference list here if you’re curious about the works I drew from, or if you want to do some reading of your own.

Have fun, bye!

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Gender Shopping at the Second-Hand Store: Constructing Trans Masculinities

Transgender¹ people have always existed, whether there was language to describe them at the temporal moment or in the culture in which they lived, whether they lived their identity in public or private, and whether they were sure or unsure about the specifics of who they were (Devun and Tortorici, 2018). I feel fortunate to live in a moment where I have access to appropriate gender-affirming care and where I can live authentically as a transmasculine² person. During the first months and years of my transition, I thought often about how I was going to be perceived in the world and how my decades of life attempting to meet the social criteria of ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ would influence my chances of being accepted as a member of masculine society³. Part of this worry was how I would go about building – or restoring - my truest identity. I was never interested in the chest-beating, duel-for-honour style of masculinity performance; coming from queer feminist ideological roots I was primed to reject the requirement to uphold structural misogyny and ideas of biological essentialism in my version of masculinity. Beyond that, though, I had no concept of what my gender expression could or would be as I began to socially transition. Since that time I have certainly taken up new aspects of masculinity and shed others in an ongoing practice of identity (re)formation. The purpose of this research is to establish an understanding of how transgender scholarship fits into notions of identity, to connect lived experiences of trans masculinity with the theoretical bases of identity formation, to explore the diverse ways in which trans men perform and embody gender, and to discuss how trans men navigate cis men’s spaces. The primary research questions to be answered here are how trans masculinities are informed by popular notions of transness and how they interact with hegemonic masculinity, while exploring the multifaceted methods of gender embodiment and temporality. I will also digest my own trans identity through these lenses.

I. Historical and Modern Conceptions of Queerness and Transness

Gender non-conforming people in history present as challenging subjects of study because of the nature of how history is written and maintained (i.e., by the victors, by the powerful, by men). Gay history, as relatively uncontentious as it is today, is still subject to mainstreaming under narrow parameters; the common refrain of ancient Greek indifference toward the gender of their sexual partners often prevails over accounts of non-white and non-Western examples of same-sex desire. But there are established historians and social scientists bringing those institutionally silenced voices to the forefront. Through the colonial lens, Indigenous African culture is incongruent with same-sex desire based on the racist myth that Black people are more “primitive” than white people, thus “devote [sexual energy] exclusively to their ‘natural’ purpose: biological reproduction” (Jones and Ferguson, 2020 p. 337). There is an “historical depth” (p. 340) of homosexual social patterns in Swahili-speaking regions of coastal east Africa; the authors also report that as many as 1 in 10 Muslim men in the Mombasan region have had a homosexual experience. Further, Hernández, Alvarez, and García (2021) reflect on queer immigrants and gender transgressive members of ethnic diasporic communities who negotiate change through various spatial, temporal, and cultural borderlands. Concepts like transmovimiento offer improvements to understanding how someone might “cross” categories while considering this change to be occurring outside of binary states of gender or geopolitical location (pp. xviii-xx). These and other descriptions and understandings of queerness set in their specific social contexts permit the maintenance of what a decolonized queerness can look like within the literature.

Transgender history is similarly fraught with white Western cissexism, as well with the challenge of ascribing modern identities upon those without the agency to describe themselves (Skidmore, 2017a). Where today a person who lives as a gender different than their sex assigned at birth likely has a relationship to the notion of being transgender, Emily Skidmore (2017a, 2017b) considers the ethical problem of describing historical figures with modern terminology. She chooses to use “trans men” in her writing because her subjects “expressed the sentiment that they were men” during their lives and lived publicly as men, sometimes even under threat of harm by the state (2017b, p. 10). By today’s standards the latter criterion is not necessary to accept someone’s transness, but it is nonetheless a high bar to meet for establishing plausibility within a historical context. Susan Stryker (2017) remarks on the changing and sometimes contradictory meanings of words like “transgender” and “transsexual” that have applied to different subsets of the population at different times. It’s polite, she says, to “call people what they want to be called,” and as a speaker or writer to use terms that capture the subject’s “self-understanding” best (pp. 36-38). But historical trans folks of all genders are still caught in the lens of gay history, with accounts of “female husbands” and “cross-dressers” confounding whatever intrinsic truth they may have felt (Manion, 2020). Scholarship focused on butch lesbian identities are in tension with transmasculine readings of historical figures about which camp gets to claim whom, sometimes with figures moving between prescribed identities over time. Among the most well-known and contested figures is Joan of Arc, thirteenth-century teenage French military genius, who dressed in men’s clothing while leading campaigns during the Hundred Years’ War and opted to be burned at the stake as a heretic rather than resume dressing as a woman⁴ (Feinberg, 2006). Trailblazing trans healthcare activist Lou Sullivan’s writing on historical trans author and wartime medic Jack Bee Garland led the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project (now the GLBT Historical Society) to change their description of Garland from “a lesbian passing as a man” to a “transgender man” in their museum displays (Koskovich et al., 2020, p. 76). Representations of transmasculine people in history range from assumptions and educated guesses to self-proclamations by the subjects themselves and many points in between. For all its improved epistemologies, however, the transmasculine experience in the 21^st century is still murky in its popular representation.

Popular expressions of the trans experience are on a continuum with three intersecting planes. Along one plane, there are explorations of what it means to be trans and the ways in which trans people take up and perform normative aspects of their gender identity (Anzani et al., 2022; Phillips, 2020; Todd et al., 2022). Trans men safely navigate male spaces by adapting their expressions of masculinity to fit the environment, perhaps in the forms of emotion they show or the social evidence they present for inhabiting a “modern male sex role” (Connell, 2005, p. 86; Laguna Maqueda, 2020). If a trans man wants to be taken seriously as a man by his peers, popular discourse requires him to perform conventional heterosexuality while engaging in activities in service of accumulating social capital, thereby reproducing the same forms of hegemonic masculinity his existence may undermine (Connell, 2005; Schilt, 2006). Along the second plane is the confluence of the body and politics, where hegemonic masculinity is coupled with an implicit requirement to put one’s body at risk, through labour or relation to machines among other expressions (Connell, 2005). Here, the masculine body is necessarily related to its risk of damage or displays of strength. Meanwhile, a transmasculine body might be interpreted through the lens of otherness, as it is when it is the object of political acts. Recent legislation in the United States prohibits transgender people from entering public washrooms that align with their gender (Horne et al., 2022). Any person, trans or cis, is subject to the scrutiny of entering a space where their gender is appraised by others and having to demonstrate their adherence to the normative form of masculinity or femininity. The body is demonstrated here as the frontier of gender politics. The final plane of the trans experience continuum centres on the embodiment of transness, where there is spirited debate among the gender critical segment and others on who gets to be called trans, under what conditions, and what exactly constitutes transition (Magalhães et al. 2020; Gleeson, 2021; Nagoshi et al., 2023). Whereas one in-community perspective of trans identities is to accept individual proclamations of identity at face value with the understanding that any person has the most accurate interpretation of their own life⁵, it is also common to experience ideological tension between expecting, for example, medical trans embodiment in someone who does not have or need it. It might require a person to devalue elements of hegemonic masculinity to accept non-normative aspects of others’ masculinity into their social and cultural capital exchanges. The next section zooms in on economic theories of identity formation and explores the experiences of trans men taking up (or leaving behind) aspects of hegemonic masculinity in activities of social exchange.

II. Cultural Capital, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Identity Formation

There is undeniable value in performing normative masculinities in interactions with others, the most significant being reducing the risk of interpersonal violence and discrimination (Boffi et al., 2022). Kimmel (2008) uses the fictional location of Guyland to represent hegemonic masculinity and to situate how trans men might download masculine socialization from their environment. Someone who has entered Guyland, stepping into their masculinity and seeking to build their social currency with other guys, is immediately evaluated for the purposes of approval or disapproval based on their gendered performances relative to the hegemonic ideal (Catalano, 2014). Under a Marxist analysis, gender can be seen as cyclical or perpetually in motion, just as capital is “always contingent,” in the sense that the relative position of any gendered expression is evaluated based on ever-evolving normative culture (Lee, 2021, p. 64). A neoliberal conditioning of gender performance accumulation allows for elements of hegemonic masculinity to appear fixed in their social currency value rather than allowing participants to integrate expansive forms into the social rubric. So when a trans man reaps increasingly valuable rewards of social interactions, he becomes more aligned with rigid masculine hegemony, re-investing his social capital in the scrutiny/capital rewards cycle with other men. Rosa Lee (2021) draws on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter to make the argument that normative features of (trans)gender identities are both mandatory and ultimately a site of cultural reproduction without the benefit of reifying non-normative masculinities into the capital exchange. Specific appraisals of hegemonic performance are beyond the scope of this research, but categorical considerations of these performances can provide insight into what types of masculinities trans men take up during their social initiation to Guyland.

            Kieran Todd and colleagues (2022) find an iterative pattern of transmasculine identity formation, whereby early versions rely on harmful behaviours like tobacco and alcohol use that work to affirm aspects of masculinity; as the study’s participants moved through legal, social and/or medical transition, they moved away from those behaviours for gender affirmation. The authors use the Masculine Identity Development Framework, a four-stage system to describe how trans men move through the process of identity formation with “envisioning, adoption, questioning, and revisioning” (Todd et al., 2022, p. 4). Some study participants reflected on their intent to avoid “toxic” features of masculinity and adopted versions that centred a more non-hegemonic set of traits, while others had more specific cultural considerations to adopt, like one person whose barber modelled Black masculinity and another whose Colombian culture established expectations of stoicism (pp. 4-5). Megan Phillips (2020) draws on similar themes in discussing cultural capital, where she suggests that hybrid masculinities perpetuate social inequity when white trans men, for example, leverage aspects of Black masculinity for greater social power. Finally, when Iranian trans men shared their perspectives on what kind of men they are or want to be with Zara Saeidzadeh (2020), they spoke at length that their relation to women (i.e. living as a woman for some period of their [young] adult life) was central to their identity as men. This perspective is at odds with Iran’s dominant gender order, which emerges for these trans men in conflict with their earlier position related to women. They almost universally go on to integrate the desire to be the provider and head of the household, as well as to communicate open disdain for trans women and gay people, both of which are dominant expressions of masculinity in Iran according to Saeidzadeh (2020). These subjects represent the complex array of forces determining the rewards and limitations of certain masculine characteristics.

            In my experience, arriving at my transness in my late twenties out of predominantly lesbian and queer women’s spaces made my masculine identity formation challenging on two fronts. First, I felt like an outsider in my closest friend group comprised of cis women. Having come of age together reading the now-defunct online feminist magazine Jezebel.com from the mid-aughts on, we were galvanized by the stories of women, seeing ourselves in them and having future selves reflected back at us. When I first disclosed my non-binary identity to them, I was afraid that they would get my shiny new they/them pronouns wrong. Nine months later when I told them I was starting testosterone and scheduling a surgery consultation, I was afraid they would see me as someone I wasn’t: a man. I was aware of the common refrain from lesbian circles about trans guys “joining the patriarchy” or “going to the dark side” (Zitz et al., 2014, pp. 21-12). And as much as I heard echoes from the corners of my larger community, it was also coming from within me all along, since I had internalized the transphobia I was afraid of. Some of the hardest conversations I had in the early days of my transition were with my partner about what effects I was hoping to see with hormone therapy. It was a source of shame for me to desire an embodied masculinity because of what I learned masculinity to mean: the hegemonic type. I witnessed a particularly unsympathetic version of it as an androgenous queer feminist, and that informed what I was prepared to integrate into my emerging identity. As in Todd and colleagues (2022), Phillips (2020), and Saeidzadeh (2020), my experience falls in line with the hundreds of other transmasculine people who are building their identities based on what they hope to see in the world, balanced with what will affirm their true selves and help them access acceptance and social capital. Trans men are especially poised to disrupt the gender order by merely releasing themselves of the assumptions they may hold about what masculinity must be.

III. How Transmasculine People Understand and Embody Their Gender

The last decade has seen an influx of writing by out transmasculine people about being trans. Books like Thomas Page McBee’s Amateur (2018), andrea bennett’s Like a Boy but Not a Boy (2020), and Elliot Page’s Pageboy (2023) join community mainstays like Stone Butch Blues (Feinberg, 1993) and Becoming a Visible Man (Green, 2004) in the community zeitgeist. And true to the adage that there are no two identical trans guys, each of the books delivers on what it means for the author to be who they are, and on their own terms. McBee’s Amateur is especially apt in its analogue of transgender embodiment based in the author’s story of entering a charity boxing match with very little time to learn how to box. It is true that being trans sometimes feels like getting repeatedly punched, in the way that one’s stomach drops when a curious bus seatmate is obviously trying to decide what gender one has, or how one’s ears sting at hearing the wrong name called at the doctor’s office. In learning to fight in the boxing ring, McBee doesn’t feel more like a man than before, but rather he considers why he has felt drawn to conflict as a mode of self-expression while he establishes himself in manhood. The reflexive practice that created Amateur can also be used by others to ascribe meaning to their experiences and can begin to help answer questions like “what does manhood mean to me?” or “what does masculinity mean to me?”. The personal terms of these questions don’t exclude the structural influences of and on identity; I agree with Carol Harrington (2021) that individually shaving off the “toxic” parts of masculinity in one’s own gender is no way to induce multidimensional change. But I do contend that intentionally wrestling with the versions of manhood one wants to embody for the purposes of serving as a source of non-normative⁶ masculinities for others is valuable, in that it templates those expressions of gender as something that is both possible and acceptable.

            The question of a normative transgender identities being contingent on social and/or medical transition is not one I will delve into further here, but it does offer an entry point to discuss the myriad ways that trans people choose to embody their gender. Chase Ross’ (2018) dissertation on trans men’s tattoos demonstrates a connection between the lack of perceived control participants felt over their transitions specifically, and their lives more broadly, with their ability to transform their bodies for the purpose of self-expression. Whereas Todd and colleagues (2022) note that their cohort discussed non-permanent behaviours like smoking, in which one participant described the way he changed his grip on cigarettes to look “tough like Clint Eastwood” (p. 7), Ross draws out the difference between performance and embodied form. One subject, Steve, got a stomach tattoo to “show his bad-ass side,” which Ross describes as “a way of allowing him to embody more masculinity through the branding of a symbol associated with it, into his skin” (2018, p. 53). The primary difference between gender performance and gender embodiment in these examples is in the role of the body. In changing his grip on the cigarette, the subject manipulated his body to demonstrate an aspect of gender. For Steve and his tattoo, the expression of gender was of the body itself, immutable. Further, the immediately recognizable ways that skin can be altered and inscribed is representative of why, perhaps, tattoos are many trans people’s body modification of choice to “make the inside visible on the outside” before, during that wait for, instead of, or as part of medical transition (p. 54).

IV. Imagining Transgender Masculinities

            One of the alternate titles for this paper is “Going to Dap School,” in reference to the first real friend I made after socially transitioning, Michael (a pseudonym), who initiated me into the world of masculine social conventions. A “dap” or “dapping someone up” refers to a casual low-five-to-handshake move that guys do to greet each other or to say goodbye, which he did with me without fail every time we saw each other. The process of trading the markers of friendship with another guy whose unselfconscious expressions of kinship, emotions, and curiosity of himself and others established a template of possibility for me outside the compulsory model of masculinity. The foundation of my experience of friendship with Michael is the utter absence of suspicion on his part about the validity of my masculinity, despite my smooth face and bony wrists on which he practiced athletic taping, while chiding me for my sparsely haired “white boy arms”. He once told me a story about how he went on a date with a man “just in case” he was bisexual and noted his perspective of accepting the date’s outcome with self-compassion. We talk at length about mental health and the interplay of our intrinsic femininities with our embodied version of our genders. What an opportunity our friendship is to address my feelings of being an interloper, of misrepresenting myself, but ultimately of getting to experience what I’d craved virtually my whole life: to be at home in my masculinity and witness others doing so. I am still getting to witness the plurality of trans masculinities within myself and, as Jack Halberstam puts it, working to determine if “gender is ever fluid or stable, unfinished or finished, a property of the self or a creation of the outside world” (2016, p. 368). Spending time with cis guys has offered me a way into in-group dynamics that, in turn, have shown me their performance of disruptive forms of masculinity with each other (Schilt, 2006). The surprising nature of men’s interactions, in my relatively limited experience, represents an undercurrent of displeasure with the dominant gender order whereby they often behave in ways that reject the masculine convention altogether.

Abelson’s (2014) concept of a transformative masculinity is the through-line of how I relate to the idea of trans men through history. Even as figures called female husbands, bulldaggers, and butches, gender-nonconforming people presently transform masculinity out of the past (Skidmore, 2017b). A circular exchange of gender ideology through time is necessarily transformational to the gender order from wherever the influence originates and at the temporal point at which it lands (Amin, 2014). For trans men, the process of integrating elements of masculinity from others connects them to other men in phenomenological ways; my gender is of Thomas Page McBee’s as much as it is of Ma Rainey’s and Lou Sullivan’s. The elements of masculinity that I’ve integrated over the course of my transition is as reflective of the past and future versions of masculinity as it is of who I know myself to be. I don’t think I would be exactly who I am without the non-normative gender performances of the men in my life and the ways in which they critique the demands of hegemonic masculinity upon us all. If these are the offerings at the second-hand gender store, I’m happy to have found them for myself.

1. To be transgender today is to identify oneself as a different gender than assigned at birth, though people who describe themselves as genderqueer, genderfluid, non-binary, and other descriptors of gender non-conforming identities may or may not accept trans(gender) as personally accurate (Beemyn, 2014). For the purposes of this work, the words trans and transgender are understood to be an imperfect umbrella for all variations of identities beyond cisgender.

2. My personal gender identity falls somewhere near ‘nonbinary guy’; I generally don’t take on the label of trans man despite holding many of the common identifiers (e.g., having been assigned female at birth and undergoing masculinizing medical transition). Others assume my gender to be male often, which I understand to be reflective of my physical appearance. My philosophical position is that my gender is something beyond masculinity and femininity and that those categories are largely irrelevant to me, but the term “transmasculine” is useful in describing that I feel most comfortable expressing aspects of masculinity. I use they/them and he/him pronouns interchangeably.

3. I feel complicated about this concept. On one hand, I never want to be a categorical man, but the expression of my personness is fairly aligned with elements of masculinity. On the other hand, I live with the goal of helping dismantle the demands of hegemonic masculinity. Drawing on Audre Lorde (1984), there is value in accessing the tools of masculinity’s hegemony and knowing it intimately, while not seeking ideological agreement in the pursuit of liberation from it. I will use the term “trans man” or “trans men” as inclusive of my experience despite its shortcomings in capturing the nuances of my identity.

4. Joan of Arc’s own final testimony reads: “For nothing in the world will I swear not to arm myself and put on a man’s dress” (Feinberg, 2006, p. 219). A Google search of “joan of arc transgender” returns 1.22 million results with entries ranging from “What if Joan of Arc Wasn’t a Woman?” (The Atlantic, 2022) to “Joan of Arc Was a Woman” (National Review, 2022) and “’A Farce Beyond Measure’: The Queering of Joan of Arc” (Catholic Herald, 2022).

5. Amos Mac, founder and co-editor of the magazine Original Plumbing (2009-2019), noted in the publication’s inaugural issue that “It is our belief that surgery and hormones don’t necessarily make the man… It’s more than just that. Maybe it’s an attitude, a swagger, a limp wrist, or just an awareness of ones self. Needless to say, there is not just one way to be a trans man.”

6. Trans clothing designer and artist Mars Wright has documented his transition on his social media page where he exalts “trans joy is resistance” and other affirming phrases meant to offer permission for other trans people to pursue rich emotional lives despite what normative notions of masculinity might say (Wright, 2023).