I think I’ve reached a character limit so I’m gonna try and break this into two comments, sorry for the novelization 😅

Of course.

I’m curious about how old you are. If you were American I’d be pretty confident you’re Gen X or older. I’ve had very similar conversations with some old guard queer folks and have noticed very similar differences/understandings across the Gen x and older/millennial and younger divide.

I’m also curious to know if you understood homosexuality before you knew you were gay? Did you have gay people in your community? Did your community villainize homosexuality or were they unconcerned with it? For my story, it’s important to understand that I was, for all intents and purposes, brainwashed and conditioned to view all of my ‘aberrant’ behaviors as sinful and something I must change or face damnation. I was given a worldview and not allowed to see any others, and they succeeded by putting me in private Christian schools that taught Christian science (e.g., young earth creation) right next to evangelical theology and Christian social studies (literally just negative conversation about how sinful ‘the world’ is) in order to cement the link between all three. And when we couldn’t afford private school anymore, my mother homeschooled us and our quality of education declined further and isolation increased. I never had any model for what it could look like to be anything but CIS-straight, and the only conclusion I could come to about my feelings was to say what was hammered into me: I’m a sinner deserving only of death and then cry out to a god that wasn’t there begging it to change me.

The first thing I want to point out is that everything you’ve described of your own experience dwells within the gender binary. You were taught the right and wrong ways to be a man. Which is fine, you’re a man. But I’m not. So both are wrong for me.

Re labels: for me, this was deeply personal and not something that I think all folks wind up needing in order to find the freedom to know themselves (note: this isn’t just about permission to engage in behaviors, it’s about being able to accept myself and allow myself to exist as I am). But for me, growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical community, labels were extremely important because we were in a war with the ‘sinful world’. If you look at hard right wing politics in America today and see the culture war we’re in, I can point to the same war being silently fought 30 years ago, because I was in the middle of it (for an interesting look into this culture, check out the documentary Happy Shiny People bout the Duggars. It does a good job revealing a lot of what has led the US to where we are today from a culture perspective. Also look up ‘the Joshua Generation’).

I’m also neurodivergent and my brain absolutely needs structure to be healthy. With regards to gender, I was incapable of recognizing that I could be something different from the cis-het patriarchal structure I was given. My brain just doesn’t work in a way that would let me see beyond the conditioning. So instead of ever realizing I could ask myself ‘if I’m not a, what am I?’ I only ever asked my self ‘if I’m not A, what is wrong with me? Why am I broken? How can I become A?’ So the label was vitally important to me to create the structure and space for me to have my a-ha moments. The labels were a part of my deprogramming to be honest. I know quite a few people, including my partner, who never needed a label to understand themselves. For them, the label is simply a flag. For me, it is a touchstone that ultimately gave me the space to meet myself for the first time just a few years ago. It’s hard to explain what it means to meet myself, but I spent my entire life trying to be a different person to the degree that when I finally broke free from those constraints I felt like an entirely different person. Which really is true. I’ve even changed my name to June because of it… we call the name we were given a deadname for a reason.

Re ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ and reifying gender: remember that I’m operating within a western framework of gender (which exists in the binary) in addition to my own sense/feelings of fluidity. For many of us that are nonbinary, what we want is to travel the spectrum of not only gender expression but of gender… acceptance? I’m. It sure how to describe this, but it’s about being what we are which can be different day to day or even hour to hour. We are fluid, unstable in our gender and we want to revel in that experience. But as ‘boys’ or ‘girls’, we don’t feel that we can. This intermingles with the labels issue that many of us have where identifying as nonbinary cuts through the dissonance of cultural gender expectations and allows us to be more expressive and accept ourselves. It is inexplicable how good it feels to take off the masks and just…. Be. I, and many of my transgender friends, use ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ to describe the energies we feel, but I think that’s only because we don’t have better language for it. It’s worth noting, too, that this discussion is not even touching on agender or gender apathetic folks. While I feel that I travel the spectrum and sometimes jump off the ride all together, there are folks out there that have zero sense of gender at all times.

To respond to your question about why some traits are masculine, I’ll answer with a question: why is anything? Anything (cultural) is what it is because (the royal) we said it is. Gender is a cultural construct, without that construct none of this would be a problem for those of us that don’t experience the dysphoria of having the wrong body. Transgender (defined here as a distinct thing from transsexuality) wouldn’t exist and people would just be people and act and express however they want. But we as humans have separated ourselves out to be men and women with no other options (which appears to be largely a western culture thing, as looking back at ancient eastern and Native American populations in particular, you find a lot more understanding of gender than you find in western culture). So yes, liberation attempts to abolish those lines, and for some the lines have been. But for those of us that didn’t develop with any sort of liberation ideology or that were actively conditioned away from it, the lines exist and we have to find some way to cope with that, and labels help.

I think that it’s those of us who ‘need’ labels and definitions to have a sense of order in the world that results in the feelings that we are trying to push it on you that you’re talking about. It’s unfortunate because that’s not what I want at all. Structuring the world helps me understand and interact with the world, but I never want to try and push my structure on anyone else. I have a friend who’s a drag queen and the first time we met we talked about this exact thing and they were in your position. They are Gen X and as soon as I started talking labels they started telling me how I needed to get rid of them. 30 minutes later I managed to express to them that my labels are for me and no one else, and that I need the structure they provide. But the goal, of course, is to eventually not need them and to be more like you and them. I don’t know if that will ever happen for me, but I can hope because that seems to me to be true freedom, though my pronouns will always be they/them. I also think that there is a hard line group that is actually doing what you’re saying. But like most of the loudest people within any group, I’m reasonably confident they’re the minority.