It is a strange time to be a woman…or a man…or neither. In a moment when lifestyle-mogul Martha Stewart is calling herself “the original fucking tradwife,” scientists are quantifying toxic masculinity, and queer people continue to challenge and upend the binary, gender roles are both more fluid and enforced than ever. Of course, whether the labels “man” and “woman” are inherently oppressive is an age-old question, but the stakes right now feel sky-high: A growing number of states have banned gender marker changes on legal IDs. The question of whether trans and nonbinary people can have passports that reflect their gender identity has reached the Supreme Court. And the Trump administration is investigating a middle school with a coed cheerleading team. Where does this leave people who are either deeply aligned with or unsure of their identity? In Gender’s New Era, we grapple with the paradigms and explore what gender means right now.
It’s been a long time since I saw someone shirtless on my For You Page who didn’t have top surgery scars. The algorithm has me figured out. My feeds are flooded with transmasculine people—those who probably wouldn’t think of themselves as influencers but who influence my understanding of my place in this world on a daily basis and those who self-identify as influencers and make their living posting intimate details of their lives. I scroll through it all: how to dress more masculine at your first corporate job, how to masculinize your chest pre top surgery, how to just be, feel, and look more masculine.
My earliest sense of manhood came from watching grown men on reality TV in the early 2000s. I envied their freedom and their confident playfulness the same way I envied the boys in my class whose punch lines got more laughs than the girls who whispered their jokes. I looked at these men’s made-for-TV abs, nipple piercings, and funky hairstyles and felt a kinship with them. Because I was a kid and they were adults, the rift between our identities was rooted in age rather than the fact that I was born in a girl’s body. In my mind, I was going to grow up and look like them, be like them.
So it was only natural that four years ago, when I became interested in working out, I sought out tutorials from ripped trans guys. The most notable were Alyxe and Grayson. For years, they’d documented their fitness and gender transformations and offered virtual personal training programs. Like many trans influencers, they were open about their hormone and top surgery journeys. And when they shared chest and shoulder exercises, their 500,000+ combined followers and I got an up-close look at the way trans men’s bodies change when following a consistent diet and disciplined routine (by this point, I’d also seen countless videos of ground beef slop).
The muscles on these two frequently posting TikTokers seemed to get more defined by the day. Although they were younger than me, I looked up to them, experiencing the same hopefulness that the goofy, shirtless male contestants on Big Brother or Survivor had inspired. That could be me. If I now have any muscle mass or definition, it’s thanks to videos of theirs I had bookmarked.
Being transgender takes an immense amount of self-knowledge and courage, but it doesn’t automatically liberate us from superficiality or aesthetic ideals, from the social pressure to be hot. These days, I’m more aware of my body than ever, because my appearance is as close as it’s ever been to matching how I feel inside—and because I wish it matched so much more. For two years, I bound my chest and was hyperaware of how clothing fit and whether it exposed the fact that I had boobs. Now, I measure the concavity of my chest against other top surgery results. Even though the boobs are gone, I still obsessively check to see if my shirts are falling perfectly flat.
When I watch Alyxe and Grayson now, I feel isolated on a confusing island, somewhere between extreme validation, inferiority, and envy. While I appreciate the muscle mass they’ve helped me gain, I also find myself playing a comparison game when I see them shirtless and flexing. I wonder if their discipline makes them more manly. Does the fact that their shoulders are wider than their hips help them to pass better than me? Is this even the kind of “manly” I want to look like or am I just seeing what’s possible for trans guys and feeling pressure to measure up?
Body comparison online isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s a dangerous game and one that I find myself playing more frequently in this intermediate stage of my transition. As I grow more comfortable expressing masculinity, I become more aware of its toxic constraints. In my feed, sandwiched between Alxye and Grayson’s thirst traps and workout splits, are valid criticisms from other trans creators over the high price of their training programs. And sandwiched between those are people wondering when being transmasculine turned into a bodybuilding competition or sending a call out for more fat butch and transmasculine people to post their outfits, their thirst traps, their daily lives.
The story of the differences between my on- and offline realities is the story of my relationship to my own masculinity. YouTube videos taught me how to give myself an intramuscular injection of testosterone and showed me hundreds (maybe thousands) of trans guys masculinizing—their voices deepening, their faces and chests growing hair, their skincare regimens for fighting testosterone-induced acne, their fat redistribution timelines. Online, all of these guys served me a little slice of practical transitioning tips, and they came together to form this ooey-gooey warm pie of belonging.
Now, the challenging part is finding that sense of shared male experience outside of the digital butch potluck. I never get to see the outer-worlds of my online mentors and guides. If, how, and when they started to pass after transitioning. How they handle being misgendered. The exact moment when the women’s room started to feel off-limits. Unlike their muscle mass or gains, those are the parts we have to face privately, and those are the matters I find myself monitoring like a madman today.
For the past couple of months I’ve been back to the old reliable job of serving tables, a gig where having interactions with strangers is just about the only consistent part of each day. More frequently than ever before I’m being addressed as “sir.” But tables often recognize me as a Survivor contestant and, without fail, some group will refer to me with she/her pronouns.
Outside my pocket-size world of queerness and transness, all I’ve got is my own self-presentation and how I’m perceived is impossible to predict or control. My job gives me an up-close view of whether I am—or not—passing as male.
When people see me as a man, I’m less insecure about how my weight fluctuates and that makes me more motivated to take care of my body. I got top surgery and started hormones for my own sanity, and as inner peace starts to feel within reach, I wonder, is this what cisgender people feel like? Able to make health choices with a sense of hope and possibility?
I still have days when dysphoria persists when I try on jeans or slouch when shirtless, but I also have days where the wind blows my shirt against my chest while riding my bike and I feel male in body and mind. I’m finding solace in the fact that while what I’m describing is shrouded in both the experience of transitioning and the daily plight of male beauty standards, it is more than anything, the experience of being human. And being human in 2026, for many of us, means existing in both physical and virtual spaces. Learning how to make sense of my online world has been more emotionally fraught than the 25 days I spent in Fiji during the taping of Survivor. I don’t know how my understanding of masculinity will evolve and grow, but I’m grateful that—online and off—I’ve found spaces where my identity is mirrored, challenged, and validated.
