Yeah, when I was teaching, I worked with a female Japanese student who was researching BL and its female readers. It was a really fantastic project. I remember in one specific interview, she was speaking to a reader from Tokyo, who ended up coming out (for the first time in her life) as a lesbian when asked about how BL insulated her from misogynistic violence. Very fascinating stuff.

I'm not offended. It's probably less of a model minority thing and more just that being part Asian makes it easier for me to pass, at the cost of being read as baseline more feminine. And white people are less likely to read me as mixed, so they'll sometimes assume I'm a white trans man who is deliberately trying to look like an east Asian man. I have been accused of asianfishing before, ha. It's more confusing for other people than it is for me, I think.

It's too bad you didn't have to deconstruct all of my writing to get that result, but maybe it speaks to just how common the preference is. I don't know that many people who actively prefer to read "stories where the male character is outwardly and inwardly treated female." Maybe it's something worth looking into, though the description itself is saddled with a lot of baggage that would have to be unpacked eventually.

Well, I don't really think they're a dichotomy, even if it's set up by the American imagination to be that way. Us v. them, etc. So I'll answer it with some detachment from those institutions. I think of 'man' as a broadly inclusive category, the same as 'woman' is.

So I'm changing your question slightly. What does it mean to be a man, to me?

I've had this conversation with lots of trans men and transmascs who were pre-transition or in the closet. People sometimes assume that because I'm a trans man, my relationship with gender is less complicated than those who are transmasc and/or nonbinary leaning. This type of thinking comes from the annoying idea that gender is a linear spectrum, with man and woman at either end. I don't really subscribe to that.

So if it's not a location on a line, then what does it mean to be a man? Probably nothing, honestly. It's a definition that can't be properly reinforced. Like 'woman', it turns out to be incredibly flimsy when interrogated. We can actually see the splintering of womanhood in real time, with the constant stream of exceedingly specific 'experiences', like girl math, girl dinner, etc. If we accept that womanhood has little to do with biology, then we must look to social behaviors instead.

Which brings me to my next points. Gender isn't like species. It's more like a pathology. Instead of gender taking place on a single line, it is a collection of behaviors, feelings, and attributes. Symptoms, let's say. If you isolate some of them, they could be objectively feminine, but in the context of other symptoms, they are diagnosed as male.

Being a man is kind of like being hysterical. I'm sure there's more specific gender diagnoses that would describe me, but I like the freedom of being a man. It's such an expansive category. I have an attachment to many antique things, and I see no reason they have to be tossed out, maleness included. When it comes to gender, I'm less of an abolitionist and more of an advocate for reduce, reuse, and recycle.

One real purpose of any category is to create space for relation. The first men were diagnosed as such so they could have something in common. I will always take the chance to relate to somebody, rather than set myself apart and declare myself as fundamentally different. I enjoy telling cis men that I am a man in the same way that they are. It's like handing them a puzzle. Simply by existing, I challenge the category. I force the category of 'male' to defend itself, not by excluding me, but by expanding to include me.

I like the opportunity to go on my rants publicly, but you are always welcome to message me instead.