A friend \u2013 who sees more of me than my shame ever did \u2013 once told me that I think too much. That wasn\u2019t quite a revelation, but what followed was. In inevitable spaces where the possibility of rejection lingers, apparently I often tend to speak of things that carry the ghostly shadows of generational hurt. Especially in romantic spaces. I often, knowingly or unknowingly, bring it up \u2013 perhaps sooner than needed \u2013 that I am non-binary, Dalit, and that I feel too much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On one of those late nights, when sleep looks at me curiously but cautiously from a distance, I sat alone with my friend\u2019s observation. Aloneness does something strange to me \u2013 it reveals truths that dissolve into disillusion the very next moment. My thoughts \u2013 sticky, and at times uncomfortably slimy \u2013 play an endless game of snakes and ladders in my mind, with no opponent and no real win. It\u2019s a seductive, never-ending loop. I fall into the mouth of the snake \u2013 spiralling into the fear that my identities might be sabotaging my experiences \u2013 just as easily as I climb the ladder, chasing the thrill of being desired in spite of<\/em> who I am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Earlier this year, I matched with someone on Hinge. A few dates in, I found myself completely taken by his charm, intellect, and smittening smile that almost reminded me of Shabana Azmi from the 80s. He said he was gay. As an AMAB non-binary person, I often find myself navigating queer (and mostly gay) spaces \u2013 but now with clearer assertion: I\u2019m not a man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was articulate and expansive in how he viewed desire and desirability. On one of our dates, in a moment of our delicious intimacy, he kept gently touching my Adam\u2019s apple. I thought he found it sexy. I tried to feel sexy too. Is he seeing me as a sexy man? Is he trying to find the sexy in my male non-binary body? Is he trying to locate masculinity in my body?<\/em> A thousand thoughts swarmed in. The friend who sees me more than my shame ever did, was so right. Later, when I told that friend, as I always do, she asked, \u201cDid you feel body or identity dysphoria?\u201d Apparently, dissociating in moments of intimacy may be my body trying to tell me something deeper. I don\u2019t know!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I rested in my beloved bewilderedness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve been trying to rest more often. To resist less. To reclaim my sensual, erotic self \u2013 which I exiled for years in pursuit of being taken seriously. Now, when I look at my naked body and see markers of masculinity, body and facial hair, muscles, do I hate them? I\u2019m not sure. Sometimes, I find them sexy. I feel sexy when I go for a run or do push-ups in public parks. I feel sexy when I exude boyish charm sometimes. I also feel sexy wearing chunky silver earrings. Wearing androgynous clothes. I talk softly, I have been told many times I exude careless femininity, and I like the idea of it as well. I realised what I don\u2019t like is when I am reduced to one fragment of my elaborate realisation and performance of gender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I came out to my natal family as trans long before I ever talked about who I\u2019m attracted to. Gender has perplexed me throughout life. I never quite understood femininity or masculinity much \u2013 I mostly lived in what other people thought I was. One thing I did know always is that I never, ever, want to be seen as a man. But can I still hold masculinity?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I again rested in my beloved bewilderedness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, I began to think of masculinity not just personally but also objectively. I started facilitating sexuality and masculinity workshops with adolescents, young people, teachers in Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Delhi, and West Bengal. In social justice spaces \u2013 where I mostly breathe, grieve, live and love \u2013 masculinity is often discussed in close cohesion with power, violence, dominance, control and manhood. And perhaps rightly so. I remember back in early 2018, when I first began entering government school classrooms in Mumbai \u2013 rooms filled with adolescent boys and their undefined, untamed demeanour \u2013 there was something invisibly intimidating that I could never quite name. I thought to myself, is masculinity so piercing, so pervasive, that it transcends the power of age, position, wisdom, even the knowledge I brought into the space?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why don\u2019t I feel anchored in masculinity as much?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The more I thought about it, the more I realised \u2013 I was never raised as a man like them. I could never be. There were attempts, of course, but I have always experienced the world as who I am, not as who I was told to be. My masculinity or femininity \u2013 as with many trans people\u2019s expressions of gender \u2013 has always been met with suspicion. There is an obsessive urge to knot male bodies tightly with masculinity, to believe, almost instinctively, that bodies (sex) and gender are the same. Much of what we see unfolding in the US now. In the gender sessions I have facilitated or have seen being conducted by organisations and sexuality educators, there\u2019s often a heavy emphasis on separating sex and gender \u2013 explaining how sex is different from gender, and how one does not determine the other. Which is an absolutely meaningful discourse. I\u2019ve implemented this discourse in sessions so many times, that now sometimes I feel it took years from me, looking curiously at the connection between my sex and my gender on my own terms. In Gender: A Graphic Guide<\/em> by Meg-John Barker, they write that sex\/gender is always biopsychosocial. Our bodies and brains both influence and are influenced by personal experience, social relationships, and cultural contexts. We can\u2019t truly disentangle these dimensions of a person\u2019s gender. When masculinity is discussed in queer-trans contexts, trans femmes and non-binary persons are rarely seen as stakeholders in the conversation. To me, this reflects the lingering influence of cis-heteronormative imaginations about who masculinity belongs to \u2013 and how it should be embodied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Simplifying, so much attention to create meaning around gender, also takes away the softness the meaninglessness of gender could ever offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the \u2018revolutioning\u2019 of discourses and narrative around masculinity in social justice spaces \u201cMen can be feminist,\u201d they say. \u201cMen should cultivate soft masculinities.\u201d These words are reiterated. And by \u201csoft,\u201d they mean gentle, emotional, responsible, empathic, crying, melting men. But never feminine. Rather than dire attempts of making masculinity soft, softer, softest, why can\u2019t we ask men \u2013 and boys \u2013 to be feminine? Or just make everything a bit meaningless, unpacking both to an extent, where they \u2013 femininity and masculinity \u2013 heartbreakingly lose charm?<\/p>\n\n\n\n We all rest in our beloved bewilderedness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last August, I travelled to a town in the outskirts of Kolkata to hold day-long conversations with primary government school teachers on masculinity. The town, green and lush, rested quietly by the Hooghly River. In one of the classrooms, while I was eating lunch, a friendly teacher from my session approached. Her gaze lingered, curious. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you remove the hair from your arms?\u201d she asked. \u201cYou\u2019d look so much prettier.\u201d Later, she said I reminded her of her first boyfriend. I didn\u2019t ask how she perceived me and my gender. We had talked extensively about gender, masculinity in the sessions though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It reassured me, while making sense of masculinity, there is also space for taking away meanings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How would the world feel if we were not perceived rigidly as masculine, feminine, or even non-binary? If I could assert myself with a kind of meaninglessness \u2013 not frivolously, but deliberately? I have my suspicion about post-genderism, the idea of abolishing gender. I\u2019m curious, of course. But I often find its politics rooted in transphobia. What if trans people could anchor the thinking and making of this meaninglessness? It\u2019s unfortunate that not enough trans-queer folks lead conversations, curriculums on masculinity. While holding sessions on comprehensive sexuality education, or on gender and masculinity, simply anywhere that exists beyond academia, brainy theorisation, it\u2019s important to create spaces where the idea of meaninglessness <\/em>can be explored \u2013 spaces open enough to absorb and be informed by the imaginations of people from the grassroots. Arriving at meaning is important, just as much as unmaking it. Creating meaninglessness, for me, is about moving away from fixations, towards a space where masculinity can stay with flexibility, ambiguity, exploring, something that doesn\u2019t belong to bodies or gender, or single narratives alone. In the end, there is never really any meaning of anything at all. Our thoughts are mercilessly swallowed by snakes, and wisdom \u2013briefly \u2013 elevates us on a ladder. Circling in a never-ending conundrum, continuing, as one must be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This article was originally published in the May 2025: Masculinities and Sexuality<\/a> issue of In Plainspeak.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Cover image by Robert Clark<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gender has perplexed me throughout life. I never quite understood femininity or masculinity much \u2013 I mostly lived in what other people thought I was. One thing I did know always is that I never, ever, want to be seen as a man. But can I still hold masculinity?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":573,"featured_media":28139,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5148,8],"tags":[4017,4714,66,121,26,1826,1001,71,2062,2617,48,2856,4715,4713,99,68,25,251,2310,1105],"class_list":{"0":"post-28939","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-anthology-issue-january-2026","8":"category-voices","9":"tag-ambiguity","10":"tag-dalit-queer-voices","11":"tag-desire","12":"tag-feminism","13":"tag-gender","14":"tag-gender-expression","15":"tag-lgbtqia","16":"tag-love","17":"tag-non-binary-identity","18":"tag-non-binary-people","19":"tag-pleasure","20":"tag-politics-of-desire","21":"tag-queer-de","22":"tag-queer-masculinity","23":"tag-relationships","24":"tag-sex","25":"tag-sexualities","26":"tag-sexuality-education","27":"tag-sisa-spaces","28":"tag-trans"},"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/573"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28939"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29001,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28939\/revisions\/29001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}