Dealing With Unwanted Attention From Men When You’re Transmasculine
It triggers intense gender dysphoria as well as severe anxiety and fear
At the beginning of September, I heard a knock at my door.
It was about eight o’clock in the evening, and I was chatting on the phone with my long-distance girlfriend, as I do almost every night. I remember remarking to her that it was strange that someone should knock on my door so late in the day.
I set the phone down and opened the door to see an unfamiliar fortysomething man smiling at me.
He introduced himself and explained that he’d recently moved into the apartment three doors down from mine. Then he asked if I would be interested in watching a movie with him at his place.
“I always see you out alone,” he said. “And I just thought you might like some company.”
Before I could respond, he mentioned that he’d seen me before. He brought up the names of the two specific grocery stores I go to. These days, they’re pretty much the only places I go.
“I wondered if I should have said hi,” he said. “But then I was like, ‘would she even recognize me, you know?’”
My blood turned to ice in my veins. The corners of my mouth turned up in some vague semblance of a smile as I said, “Yeah, I’m not good with faces. I probably wouldn’t have recognized you.”
He’d seen me at two of the only places I really went to. More than that, I was always wearing a face mask when I entered these stores. That meant it hadn’t been my face that had made him recognize me. I had to repress a shiver of disgust at that realization.
In my doorway, the man chuckled. “No worries. So, you wanna come over and hang out?”
I quickly made something up about having promised a family member I would video chat with them tonight. He said he’d be fine with me coming over whenever. We politely said goodbye and I closed my door, feeling like I’d narrowly escaped disaster.
On the surface, it may not have seemed that strange. He could have just been an innocent neighbor being friendly. But it was the way he had admitted to seeing me at not one, but two grocery stores, while the majority of my face was concealed.
It made me vastly uncomfortable to think about.
I was able to put the encounter out of my mind until a few days later when I heard a knock on my door again, this time while I was having lunch.
It was him again.
He asked me again whether I’d be interested in watching movies or listening to music at his place. I hesitated.
“It’s just, I’m going through a hard time right now and I could use some company,” he said. “My wife got arrested the other day.”
Wait, so he was married? And he was still asking to hang out with me? Alone?
I said something along the lines of “I’ll see” and bid him goodbye.
I felt disgust brewing in my stomach. Sure, he could have been an innocent neighbor wanting someone to talk to. But my instinct was telling me that this man just wanted someone to fuck since his wife was now out of the picture.
A couple of hours later, there was another knock on my door. I looked out of the peephole and noticed that it was him. Yet, my gut told me not to open the door. Instead, I hid out of view of the living room window and made no sound. He disappeared after a few minutes.
I immediately closed all of the blinds. He didn’t need to be looking at the inside of my apartment.
It was a good call. He knocked again after another hour or so. Once again, I ignored him.
As the day progressed, my anxiety grew. In the evening, I called my girlfriend and told her about everything that had happened so far with this man.
“Yeah, he definitely wants to get into your pants,” she said.
While hearing her say that didn’t exactly reassure me, at least I knew I wasn’t just being paranoid.
After calling my mom and telling her about the situation, she agreed too. In fact, she suggested I buy pepper spray, just in case. She also said I should never leave the apartment unless I had to and that I should always be on the phone when I do. That way, not only would I look busy, but if the man were to approach me, the person on the other end of the line could hear what was going on.
I began to feel unsafe in my own apartment.
I stopped taking my morning walks, even though they had previously been one of my favorite parts of the day. I only went outside to get groceries. I took my mom’s advice and bought pepper spray the next time I went.
The creepy man had a tiny, two-person table and a couple of chairs on his balcony, just outside his front door. In the past, I’d noticed people sitting there and smoking sometimes. It had probably been him and his wife, but I’d never paid enough attention to recognize them.
Now that table scared the hell out of me.
There was no way for me to tell if he was sitting at it until I was already outside. And if he was, then he had a view of the rest of the hallway, so he could see if I exited my apartment.
Luckily, I didn’t see him on my next few grocery runs. A couple of weeks later, I left my place, while on the phone with my mom, and he was there. Sitting at that little table and smoking a cigarette.
Even as my heart started pounding, I continued talking to my mom about some documentary I’d watched, as if nothing was wrong. I walked to my car as quickly as I could, trying to not seem as terrified as I was.
Once I got inside the car, I looked up to see that he was still sitting there, smoking and scrolling on his phone. If he’d noticed me, he hadn’t given any sign of it.
Huh. Maybe he had given up on whatever his creepy goal was.
I couldn’t remember ever feeling so relieved.
It has been a little over a month since I last saw this guy. Not long after that last instance, I went out of town for a couple of weeks. When I returned, I got the impression that he had given up on me.
I felt safe again.
Still, that didn’t erase the awfulness that the whole situation had left me with.
Unwanted attention from men is terrible, no matter who you are. Pretty much every woman you’ve ever met has been through something similar to what I recently experienced. In many cases, it was something even worse.
Most women will agree that it’s truly disgusting. It makes you feel gross. You feel like you’re a piece of meat that only exists for the consumption of entitled men.
I’m not trying to downplay that at all.
But when you’re transmasculine, it’s much, much worse.
I was assigned female at birth and mistakenly believed I was a cisgender woman for about two decades. Since then, I’ve realized that I’m nonbinary. While being nonbinary means different things for different people, I personally feel closer to the masculine end of the spectrum rather than the feminine.
But because of my body, almost everyone perceives me as a woman. More specifically, I have an obnoxiously large chest. Even though the rest of my appearance would not be considered “conventionally” attractive to men (I have an androgynous haircut, I frequently wear men’s clothes, I’m overweight, I have a very masculine posture, etc.), my chest attracts a lot of male attention.
It would be one thing if I were single. Or attracted to men in the slightest. But I’m neither of those things.
When men talk to me, their eyes almost always dart down toward my chest at some point during the conversation. They think they’re being subtle, but I can always tell.
Even though it’s only for a second, I feel grimy every single time it happens.
It reminds me that other people see me as a woman, which I am decidedly not. It reminds me that because of certain parts of my body that I didn’t ask for, men are not only misgendering me, but imagining me in situations that truly disgust me.
That’s why the unwanted attention of the creepy man down the hall made me feel so awful.
Especially when I think about the fact that he recognized me with a face mask on. Certain features of my body were enough to let him know that it was me. Features of my body that make me incredibly dysphoric sometimes.
This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often anymore, especially now that I work from home. But when it does, it creates this strange disconnect in my mind.
At first, it confuses me that a straight man would be interested in me. Then it dawns on me that he sees me as something I’m not. He’s attracted to the parts of me that aren’t actually me. He’s attracted to the idea of me as a cisgender woman, but that person simply doesn’t exist.
Fortunately, the creepy man seems to be leaving me alone now. I once again feel safe in my own home, which I will never take for granted again.
