This is really true, and a little painful or frustrating for me to read at the same time, even though it also strikes me as funny.

Like it’s also one of the ways in which I feel most genderqueer.

I feel like a really big part of male socialization in the U.S. is the hyper-sensitivity to the fear of coming across as gay, which is related to the social norms of guys not touching as much, especially not touching in more sensual / intimate ways, and I think also limiting the intimacy of same-gender relationships, in terms of verbal expressions. I think that this fear really stunted my emotional and social development growing up.

It’s also a barrier that I feel a lot when interacting with girls or women–I feel hyper afraid of touch because I’m afraid of it being interpreted as a sexual advance. But I feel like when I’m shying away from touch like this, I’m not being myself, not expressing myself, not acting the way I really want to be. This is one aspect of maleness that I want to move away from and work to break down. It’s subtle and tricky though, because it involves other people’s response to my actions, which is something I don’t control.

It’s like, some people express dysphoria about being called by their assigned birth gender. If everyone always referred to me as “he/him” and male, I’d still be comfortable with that. I experience great dysphoria though, at how people respond to my perceived “maleness” in compliment situations, i.e. things like the “no homo” genre of comments, or men perceiving me as gay because I’m interacting with them in the way that feels most natural to me, or women perceiving me as hitting on them because I want to touch them or compliment their appearance, again, stuff that to me just feels natural and like part of being myself. That stuff. That’s the stuff that really bothers me and where I really want people to stop perceiving me as male and acknowledge that my experience of and preferred expression of gender is not strictly male. Because like, I don’t seem to think about this stuff the way males are expected to think about it, the things I want and the way it feels most natural for me to interact with people, is more along the lines of how women interact with people and how people interact with women, than how men do and how people interact with men.

(Source: sarahseeandersen)