Boys Like Me
By Danny Palmer
This piece is a part of the Harry Potter Alliance’s series for Pride 2017, exploring issues and perspectives from the LGBTQ+ community related to Pride. To find out more about the Harry Potter Alliance and how to get involved, visit thehpalliance.org.
We’re so often told we can be anything we want to be, that there are a million different ways to express sexuality and gender, that we’re ~beyond boxes~ or a number of other well intentioned platitudes.
However, a big part of figuring out who I am was not only about finding my box, but about dictating what could fit into it. I think a lot of the time, people who talk about rejecting boxes don’t recognize that having a box can have power.
The trans community has a weird relationship with boxes at times. Sometimes when you’re sure you don’t fit into the box someone else gave you, the reaction is to try really hard to fit into another box because that seems logical. There’s a lot of attention spent pointing out that trans men look like men and trans women look like women. Trans women are women and trans men are men, regardless of how they look. The concept of “passing” as a goal comes from a genuine desire to be accepted and to feel comfortable with oneself, but can also lead to pitfalls of stereotyping what it is to be a particular gender.
So first things first: It took me a long time to realize I was a dude even after I had known that I wasn’t a girl.
When I was younger, a lot of the issue was that I just thought I wasn’t very good at being a girl. I didn’t feel the way that other girls I knew felt, when I eventually started dressing and presenting very femme it felt sort of like a costume. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to fit into a “girl” box and make that make sense. It was sort of like trying to do a “paint by numbers” if you didn’t have a key and didn’t know where any of the colors went. I didn’t have any access to Queer folks, I grew up in a very rural community. I can count on one hand how many gay or lesbian people I knew growing up. I had no idea people like me even existed.
Eventually, through discovering fan communities and gaining access to internet resources and Queer peer groups, I came to decide that I was nonbinary. I bought binders. I dressed as male characters at cons, and I used “they” pronouns. It felt more correct than being a girl did. Nonbinary genders are very real, that’s just not who I am. There’s often an assumption that nonbinary folks are just trying to figure out being trans. For me, it was a step in my process, but I want to be clear that it didn’t need to be, nor is that usually a thing nonbinary people experience.
When bathroom bills started popping up, there was a viral campaign of trans men and women who passed taking photos in restrooms of the gender they were assigned at birth. While this made a very pointed and compelling visual statement and was maybe a wakeup call to some cis folks who had outdated and flat out incorrect ideas of what gender and being trans are, it also didn’t help and perpetuated erasure of nonbinary trans folks and those who don’t yet pass or don’t want to pass. When I saw those photos, all I saw was the fear that I wouldn’t be safe in any bathroom, because I wasn’t interested in being masculine in that specific way.
I thought that I wasn’t a guy even though at that point I knew I was transmasculine, because the trans men I was seeing didn’t look like me. The idea of having tons of body hair or facial hair wasn’t really appealing to me. I didn’t want to get jacked like Aydian Dowling on the covers of magazines, and I was very comfortable with liking all sorts of people, not just women. The common narrative depicted of trans folks is a very heteronormative, cis passing, traditionally gendered experience. Trans men face expectations of masculinity, often of toxic masculinity and performance of misogyny. Trans women are faced with the expectation that they must be very clearly femme and wear makeup and fashionable clothes all the time. There’s an implication of a burden of proof that you must demonstrate that you’re a “real” man or woman by adopting what is stereotypically associated with men or women. Often nonbinary folks get questioned as to how one can even be nonbinary, because the association with transness is so related to the concept of passing. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to pass, but the idea that everyone has to pass to be successfully trans or that passing is the ultimate goal and validation hurts those that don’t or can’t fit into that narrative.
For me, a lot of figuring out my own identity was seeing guys who looked like me. I spent hours and hours a couple of summers ago watching video after video of people like Troye Sivan flaunting painted fingernails and Connor Franta wearing scarves and brooches. I came back to Chase Ross, who I remembered briefly from watching a video years ago he had made about going off testosterone (he’s since resumed taking it), and I found someone who looked like I wanted to. Pastel hair, no beard, and visibly queer. For the first time I was seeing someone who was not traditionally masculine, who talked about parts of his body that trans men sometimes don’t acknowledge in ways that were positive, who was not your typical dude but also unapologetically firm that he was still trans. Chase has made a number of videos since about the concept of passing and transness and acceptance of trans folks of all sorts, and I still find myself watching a few hours of videos on bad days.
There can be a ton of fear related to transitioning medically, and some people do detransition. A lot of that fear is not rooted ultimately in whether someone is sure about whether they’re trans, it’s in a fear, at least for me, of “will transitioning make me happy?” “Will I be a “real man” if I take testosterone or have top surgery?” The bottom line is, I don’t need to validate my masculinity. Pervasive policing of gender and the high visibility of cis passing trans folks leaves so many of us out of the equation, but we’re still here, and we’re still trans.
I’ve chosen to be very open and public about my transition and about the struggles of being trans in public and in private. For me, a lot of the motivation behind that is that there are probably people who will see me and have the same moment I had watching Chase or some of my trans friends.
When we choose to be open and honest about who we are despite our identity not necessarily fitting common perceptions, we give voice to people who may not see themselves otherwise. We all had that person, that moment where we saw ourselves in them, where we knew ourselves and felt valid and accepted. And if I can be that person for someone who’s not there yet, it’s worth it.
Danny Palmer (he/him/his) has been doing this for 6 years now. What exactly “this” is may be somewhat ambiguous, but involves having been a Slytherin since the age of 9 and being a part of the Leaky/Geeky community in any and every way possible. As a disability and LGBTQIA+ advocate and photographer by trade, Danny spends most of his time using fandom circles and stories to engage in bettering the world and discussing themes in fiction and how they translate to real life. Danny also believes in always being yourself, as strange and wonderful as that may be, except when you can be Captain America. Then be Captain America.
