Dorian Shire

DORIAN SHIRE

My experience of masculinity is different to cisgender males because, being trans, I’ve had to fight to be seen as masculine, and for a long time I felt like I had to be completely masculine. I wore jeans, t-shirts, polo shirts and denim jackets, and tried to fit in with other men as much as I could. But now I’ve realised that I don’t want to be like that, I want to dress however I want, whether that be wearing heels, makeup, whatever. Being masculine isn’t about being big and wanting to protect women. It’s just to do with thinking, “Hey I’m a man, this is my idea of masculinity”.

Danielle Goodland

In the future, if I want to transition further, I will have to pay to seem more masculine, which is a completely different experience to someone who was born into it. However unfair that may be, I feel that it does give me and every trans man a choice as to whether we want to conform to typical masculinity or if we just want to do our thing and have fun with it. I also feel like this makes me less judgemental of less gender conforming people because it doesn’t matter to me at all. To be a man you just have to be a man, to be a woman is the same, you just have to be who you want to be. My style is androgynous at the moment; I feel like that makes me more comfortable in my masculinity than someone who is stressed out about having a small dick or something. I feel like I have power over them because I can do what I want. to be addressed with different pronouns, but then I realised that when people referred to me as ‘he’, it felt right, it felt like me. Ever since I was a child, I was much more drawn to characters that were men; until 13, I was convinced that I was Peter Pan! I didn’t know why I identified with this, but it felt more right than me identifying with anything that was a woman. I live in an era that is much more accepting than if I had lived at any other time, for which I’m very lucky.

When I first came out, the ultimate goal was getting testosterone, growing a beard and being a man. Now I’m not sure if I want to do that. At the moment, I just want to find a way of being comfortable with me rather than changing myself. I would never judge anyone for transitioning, but for myself, I just want to work out what I want. It may come to a point when I want to carry a baby, and you can’t do that after you’ve reached a certain point of transition. I think I would be happy doing that because, yes, I would be a man, I would be a father, but I can still carry a baby and I think that is kind of beautiful, it’s kind of lovely.

To be a man you just have to be a man

Because of things that have happened to me before, like dysphoria, not feeling right in myself and eating disorders, I’ve never felt very comfortable in my own skin. So before I go through these huge physical changes that would happen with transitioning, I just want to learn to chill out and be comfortable as I am, which I think I’m getting towards. It’s fun.

My advice for cisgender people: if you see someone and, to you, they look like a boy in a dress, you might not be correct, that might be a woman or it might not. You need to learn how to throw away your ideas that conform to gender norms, your ideas that conform to masculinity and learn not to make everything so binary. You need to learn to accept that some people don’t always conform to your little box of ideas about gender, because it’s no fun if we’re all the same.