Don’t worry, perfectly reasonable thing to be uncomfortable with imo.
It’s “funny” that very thought about gender expectations is what made my own gender crisis in high school so difficult to navigate. I was only aware of the full Binary transition options and so being amab I thought the only way to be “not boy” was to “be girl” instead, I didn’t know nonbinary was even a thing someone could be until my now wife heard my story over a decade later and introduced me to it.
So being the imaginative little doofus I am, I set about imagining my life from that perspective. Trying to see if I’d be happier as a girl. But what I kept coming back to was that as much as being a boy felt wrong, as much as I hated the gender expectations put on me for being born in that box, and as much as I wished that I had been born different because of things like being bullied for showing emotion or being seen as a predator for wanting to work with children deep down, all I’d be doing is trading one set of expectations I hated for a different set of expectations I hated in different ways.
I didn’t learn until much later that a lot of that had to do with subconsciously being very uncomfortable as an asexual person with the amount of overt sexualization women face. Which makes a ton of sense because one of the big “male” expectations I hated was being constantly made to feel like I was broken because I wasn’t looking to sleep with anything vaguely female shaped with a pulse.
Don’t worry, perfectly reasonable thing to be uncomfortable with imo.
It’s “funny” that very thought about gender expectations is what made my own gender crisis in high school so difficult to navigate. I was only aware of the full Binary transition options and so being amab I thought the only way to be “not boy” was to “be girl” instead, I didn’t know nonbinary was even a thing someone could be until my now wife heard my story over a decade later and introduced me to it.
So being the imaginative little doofus I am, I set about imagining my life from that perspective. Trying to see if I’d be happier as a girl. But what I kept coming back to was that as much as being a boy felt wrong, as much as I hated the gender expectations put on me for being born in that box, and as much as I wished that I had been born different because of things like being bullied for showing emotion or being seen as a predator for wanting to work with children deep down, all I’d be doing is trading one set of expectations I hated for a different set of expectations I hated in different ways.
I didn’t learn until much later that a lot of that had to do with subconsciously being very uncomfortable as an asexual person with the amount of overt sexualization women face. Which makes a ton of sense because one of the big “male” expectations I hated was being constantly made to feel like I was broken because I wasn’t looking to sleep with anything vaguely female shaped with a pulse.
Sorry, I’m rambling… uh… gender expectations are bullshit? Yeah… yeah that.