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Been doing a lottt of reading and film-watching the past couple weeks, so I’m going to ramble about my thoughts here.

I recently started reading ‘Female Masculinity’ by Jack Halberstram, and I’m realising how invisible I feel as a queer trans man- and I’m not about to spiral into a rant about how 'trans women have it so much better' due to their hyper-visibility, but I do still feel a kind of mourning, a loneliness living in a nebulous space between the sexes, a distance from both the queer women I used to find community in and the cis men I’m still not accepted into. The relative lack of historical accounts of trans men also adds to this, a feeling of disconnect from all the trans men who came before me, possibly due to many historical trans men choosing to go stealth, and the blurry lines between whether these individuals transitioned because they felt male, were living as men in order to have relationships with other women, or were doing it in order to gain freedoms not afforded to women.

I feel quite a lot of guilt over being a trans man- a nagging fear that I’m ‘choosing’ to become 'the oppressor' or that my transsexuality betrays my feminist beliefs in some way. Ive spent the past six months or so trying to combat these feelings of guilt + lack of belonging through literature- reading ‘stone butch blues’ felt like it articulated painfully well the feeling of loss when you begin to pass as male and lose the solidarity you had with women before your body became masculine enough to be perceived as a threat. I’ve been recommended ‘the diaries of Lou Sullivan’ as another important read.

Anyway, back to ‘female masculinity’- I’m not too far in yet, but in the introduction, the photography of Catherine Opie is brought to light (specifically the series ‘being and having’), and I don’t think I’ve ever seen art which shows bodies like mine in this way. While I often avoid people’s gazes in public, the eye contact here feels strong and intentional. These expressions of queer masculinity feel self-assured and authentic and beautiful, far from the skinny, white, ‘soft boy’ stereotype which trans men are often fit into in media depictions of us. Seeing butch bodies represented so lovingly in fine art like this seems to bring me into existence a little more.

I’ve also been getting into Czech new-wave cinema at the moment, which I was introduced to at university- I have a bit of an underlying prejudice that older, especially black-and-white, films are less interesting or creative than modern-day filmmaking, and the Czech new wave entirely disproved that for me. The two that Ive watched so far- Daisies (1966) and The Cremator (1969) are so expressive and compelling in their storytelling, visual style and camera movement, I absolutely loved them both.

I went to a goth clubnight last night, it was great !! I’ve never been particularly into the genre but I had so much fun doing all the flowy dancing and losing myself in the music, so I’m going to ask my goth friends for more recs :) It was a great chance to wear my new latex top too,, I was rly happy with how I looked.