So. This is something I’ve never talked to anyone in my real life about, but for whatever reason I’m more comfortable asking a bunch of strangers on the internet for advice. Deep breath.
I am coming up on 40yo, and since I was 16 I’ve mostly been in dedicated heterosexual relationships. I have always considered myself a cis male and maybe a little bi but things are… changing rapidly, I guess. I am single for the first time in years all this freedom and time means I’m doing some long overdue introspection. I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly happy with my body or my gender. I am finding myself much more attracted to people with penises, and more importantly, I am finding myself wanting to play a different, more submissive maybe, role in the bedroom. I finally have an opportunity to try new and different things with all sorts of different people, and that’s sort of exciting, but I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing or even what I’m feeling.
I see a lot of trans folks self-actualizing and I’m super happy for them. I envy them for knowing what they want. I don’t know what I want and it’s driving me a little crazy lately. I would kill to have that level of knowledge of who I wanted to be. I am not a particularly masculine man, but I don’t think I feel like I would be more comfortable being more traditionally feminine, though that doesn’t necessarily repulse me, either. I would certainly be happier with less body hair. When I was I kid I wanted to be a robot. Now as an adult I maybe just want to be a robot who fucks occasionally, gender irrelevant. Fully functional, you might say. I don’t really know what to do with that feeling, though.
Any advice on how to navigate literally any of this would be awesome. I feel like a teenager again, no idea how any of this works or where to even begin. I don’t have the knowledge or the language to talk coherently about any of this stuff, and certainly no experience. I am doing my best you guys but all of this is confusing as fuck.
Your bedroom role and masculinity/femininity are orthogonal to gender. You can change those without changing your gender, you can change your gender without changing those, and you can change both.
Pick the gender for the gender, not other things. In case that sounds intimidating, note that this is all fuzzy human stuff and there’s no rules (except some stupid social rules) and you can experiment and do whatever you want. I also don’t like traditional femininity, but I figured out I’m still a woman, so now I’m an androgynous woman. Choice!
It’s not uncommon for trans women to want to take a stereotypically feminine sexual role in the bedroom, though - and it can certainly be a sign in conjunction with other things that you are trans.
That said, it’s not a necessary sign, and plenty of trans women enjoy taking stereotypically masculine roles in sex. I just don’t want to dismiss the significance for an egg that sexual roles might play in helping them understand their repressed gender identity, especially since so much repression gets sublimated into sexual behavior (a lot of trans folks never get past conceptualizing their gender needs as a fetish or kink).
Yeah I think a big part of the issue is that I don’t really like either gender expression, at least in more traditional terms. I have work to do learning about non-binary or agender folks, I think. I understand that sexuality and gender are not the same; I just think working through one is making me ask questions about the other. A big part of this is looking to be the task of figuring out what I actually want.
Thanks for the response, everyone here has been incredibly kind.