How Trauma Shaped my Relationship with Femininity
Hello beautiful people. Trigger warning for SA and discussion of how it affected my gender presentation.
I wanted to share my experience for anyone else whose gender presentation was impacted by sexual trauma, and also as a contrast to people whose experience was different.
I’m a masc-leaning person, and yesterday I was decluttering my wardrobe, making donation and garbage piles from clothes I haven’t worn in years. Then I got to the skirts and dresses. My first instinct was to get rid of most of them, but instead I had a mini crisis and suddenly wanted to hold onto them.
I don’t see myself wearing them right now, but it made me more aware that I miss a feminine facet of myself that I haven’t expressed in a very long time.
I started presenting more masculine about a year after being sexually assaulted. At the time, I was dealing with intense shame, a fight-or-flight response around attraction and arousal, difficulty being touched, deep discomfort with attention from men, etc. One of the ways I coped was shaving my head and keeping a men’s haircut. Initially it was absolutely about safety and trying to stop being perceived in a certain way.
But as the years went on, I genuinely grew to love seeing myself that way. I felt like myself. I still do. I feel handsome, cute, and authentic in my masculinity.
Now that I’ve healed more, though, I’ve started questioning parts of my relationship with femininity. I’ve been trying to incorporate it in small ways, for example, makeup and wearing some of my old clothes. And every time I’m hit with this deep feeling of vulnerability. It feels like part of me associates femininity with danger, while masculinity feels safe.
What makes this complicated is that I do genuinely love my masculinity. I don’t think it’s inauthentic or trauma-created because it still feels good and right to me. But I do feel that trauma influenced how strongly I walled myself off from femininity and how unsafe it began to feel.
Right now, I think the most healed and authentic version of myself would be able to move between masculinity and femininity depending on mood and the day, without either one threatening my sense of safety or identity.
And again: this is my experience. I don’t want closed-minded people using my story as a “gotcha” against gender nonconformity or trans/masc identities in general. I believe trauma made associations between femininity and danger that I want to explore, and pushed me to uncover this other facet of my identity that was always there. I probably always will lean masculine in some way, because that feels "right" and authentic to me.
I’d really love to hear from other people about their experiences, whether similar or completely different.