Ive questioned my cisness before, and came the conclusion that bein a dude just fits. i do think itd be cool to be a woman for like a few days but outside of general curiosity bout what itd be like to inhabit a body that isnt my own, im comfortable with what i am and how i am

Don’t get hung up on labels. Just do what you want, try out new things and see if you like them or not. I found out I am cis purely through trial and error- being perceived as a woman feels incorrect to me. I hate wearing women’s clothes, whoever designed them is a bastard. I like having a beard. I don’t like the way makeup feels, and even my man boobs are too much for me. You cannot know yourself without putting yourself in new contexts and reflecting on how you relate to those contexts

Like a lot of cis folks, I never even really had to think about it. Privilege of being born in a body that matched what I thought of myself, for the most part. Once my hormones starting rocking in my teenage years, I hit the gym pretty hard, really wanting to embrace my masculinity. Probably helped I had positive masculine role-models in my life, especially my dad, who was a farmer for most of my childhood. Big man, rough hands, dependable, always made time for his family and community, informed a lot of what a “man” is to me without me really realizing it until I reflected on it in adulthood.

I really didn’t give it much thought until the 00s when a friend of mine came out as trans. She was incredibly brave, this was long before even cis gay people had a lot of purchase in culture, especially the rural area I grew up in. Her announcement of it on social media post (sorry for vagueness, trying not to dox), was of the effect “I’m Trans. This is Not a Joke” because that’s kind of how trans issues were seen, even among us relatively left leaning folks (I remember John Stewart making fun of Kucinich during the 2008 primaries for saying he would put a trans person on the Supreme Court). Crazy she had to frame it that way.

When she came out, I did have a bit of self-reflection about it. She actually was already talking a lot about gender in blog posts and stuff like that leading up to that point, she was who taught me about the concept of privilege, for example. And I realized pretty fast that I had a lot of that privilege stuff for being born male and feeling comfortable in not just being a man, but even a lot of traditionally masculine things like being big & strong, watching sports, being attracted to women, etc.

It was cool to have that influence in my life kind of early on, helped me not be a chud about gender stuff, I think. Or at least not struggle with it, like I did for a while with say, abortion. My only early life influence on that issue was being raised in the church, I never knew anyone that, publicly known anyway, had an abortion. Even if I left the church at 17, it took me into my 20s to get right about it through reading and getting more in touch with feminism and what not.

I didn’t know what trans was when I was 4 or 5, but I heard about reincarnation, and I thought “that explains it! I must have been a woman in a past life!” I couldn’t specifically say what it was, but I just never felt like a typical man, and fantasised about being a woman as early as I could remember. I later learned I could be a feminine man, I consider myself non-binary and present mostly male, I’m not big on labels.