This is 💯 my personal stance for myself and myself only: I don’t identify as “trans”. I am not a cisgender person, but I don’t identify with the term “trans man” as I know many people with my biological history do. My life has been layered and complex on a lot of levels, and the gender curtains I’ve been able to look behind make my understanding of the world richer and more empathetic, but fuck one label that eclipses all the other experiences that have shaped me. One of the greatest privileges of cis-ness and whiteness is the opportunity to be treated as blank slates filled in with associations earned vs projected onto us. My manhood has no caveats, it has a contextual addendum. I am a man, period. Greet me as you would any other man. Let people develop their own relationship with my history, and let me decide if I want to open the floodgates of questions and blind spots and perception changes. Normalize granting people like me the dignity of nuance and existence free of politicized buzz-word identities. If you feel urgently pressed to explain something you can say “he’s not cis” until something better reveals itself and the world catches up. 🙏🏼😘