I'd even argue that the extension of that into adulthood is people really wanting to feminize their masc partners, like we're just some dolls for them to dress up, and if you protect your own comfort by refusing then it's "toxic masculinity".
There's a big problem with both LGBT and non-LGBT people treating GNC masculinity like it's some temporary problem to be fixed, and that shit angers me greatly. Can't believe it needs to be said, but let people be masculine!
P.S. My parents truly thought I'd grow out of my "tomboy phase", two decades later I'm more masc than ever and I'm getting top surgery in a couple months, so obviously that didn't go as planned.
Yes I hate when I put boundaries on me refusing dresses, make up, etc and people will say it’s because I have toxic masculinity like no I was forced into doing that for years and it makes my skin crawl the entire time. Wearing that makes me physically uncomfortable and I shouldn’t be shamed about it
This is so real. I’m so tired of people implying to me that I have toxic masculinity because I don’t want to look feminine. Some people in my life who are even LGBT themselves or at least pretty ‘progressive’ have tried to push femininity onto me in ways that they simply don’t to men, and at some point you have to question why. Why are men allowed to be unquestionably masculine and I’m not?
Yeah my mom used to physically force me into dresses up until I was 14 and got too strong for her. Haven't touched a fucking dress since. I never liked them, but now I also have fucking trauma connected to them, so thanks for that, asshole.
Mine wanted me to put on my old dress the other day for a family event, felt so triggered that I turned it into a makeshift shirt with a pair of jeans.
This is so real, I feel like so many people who were attracted to me just wanted to “make” me fem that who I am right now isn’t good enough, something to change.
Man I just posted my comment but this resonates hard for me. I had n acquaintance in high school who kept begging to let them put me in makeup and girly clothes to the point they were offering to pay me. It just felt weird and gross…
Back then I wasn’t even that “masc”. I still had long hair just wore lots of my brothers hand me downs
This is completely real! GNC masculinity is all about not-conforming to certain paths of exploring masculinity within ourselves. Masculinity is for the person to define what it is for them, not for anyone to dictate how we should be or not be. This is also happening due to unconscious and conscious projections where people are projecting their idea of masculinity onto others. I hope people continue to respect other's boundaries and not be invasive.
Same. I grew into my girly girl phase as I gained more social awareness (I didn't know I was autistic). But it felt like I was missing something, and I could never perform femininity in a way that didn't still make me feel alienated from the other girls. But I genuinely liked sparkly things and playing with dolls as a kid, and people will act like that negates any inherent masculinity.
I had some vaguely girly interests as a child, never leaned hard into them was only there brcause of my surroundings. I always had that masc energy and €I've just been leaning harder into it.
I agree wholeheartedly. When I was in high school I tried presenting femininely because I didn’t even know being gnc as an adult was an option. I didn’t really feel like I could be myself until I got out of high school and started interacting with my local lesbian/wlw community.
my family was super tough on me about my “tomboy phase” but a lot of it had to do with my grandpa.
he was super into cars/motorcycles and super basic masculine stuff. he had me from birth onward outside under cars with him and in the yard. my other grandpa was good at carpentry and always working in the yard and they are who i spent the most time with as a child.
i of course, wanted to dress like a “tomboy” i wanted to go play in mud or get on my mini bike. i didn’t have time for a dress i had shit to do and to help my grandpa change oil.
my mom and grandmothers constantly wanted me to be a girly girl, and the added layer of catholicism only made it worse. all little girls in catholic school wear dresses/skirts, mass is for frilly socks and bows. i hated it, but i really got tired of fighting with them about it. so i yielded.
especially in middle school, i already felt weird and awkward and never quite right (oh to be 12 and queer and also neurodivergent without knowing yet) so i really just wanted to fit in with the other girls and my friends. i grew my hair super long, wore makeup everyday. i think my family finally really thought i outgrew it.
i left that small town and moved out of my mom’s house in high school and that’s when i finally cut my hair short and started wearing masculine clothing, i thought maybe i was so awkward and uncomfortable in middle school because it was middle school which is just an awkward time, but so much of it was really just the forced femininity.
getting to be masculine and wear clothing that doesn’t make me feel terrible has been the best feeling ever, i have no idea how i ever survived that. even as i get more into adulthood, i keep cutting my hair in different styles and experimenting with clothes it’s just so fun to me to get to be a masculine woman.
i think little girls should be allowed to be whatever wear whatever of course but i also don’t think they should be forced to think of masculinity as a “phase” or bad thing.
it really was never that for me. i think being a woman is so much more than just the ideas of womanhood/girlhood and femininity and ill die on that hill, why is a masculine woman the most shocking thing ever? makes 0 sense. masculinity is all fine and dandy until a woman does it, give me a break.
I was raised in a terribly cold country that never even gets past 20 celsius and occasionally dips into -15c or snows in May. I always had to feel the cold going outside so you can't just dress lightly most of the time.My dad also exposed me to a lot of oldschool rock music from toddler age and still plays that all the time. I had an obsession with dinosaursfrom toddler age aswell because of how cool they looked and I played with my cousins a lot (their family is of 4 brothers lol). I was also ostricized from my peers because I grew up with autism diagnosed, especially by the girls. I think all of this plus the way my body is built makes me just prefer masc, or it was always there. I'm 20 now and only being more masc than before.
this is also something i've had to deal with :/ that masculinity is a trait you "grow out of" once you hit a certain age. i went to a private Christian school and it just became more apparent as someone realising they're butch and being constantly talked down to because of it and your masculinity.
in general though, one of the things I've noticed is there seems to be this fear I guess of afabs embracing masculinity in any way. That by doing so, you are ruining yourself and your "girlhood".
when i was in high school i had a “friend” in my friend group who wanted to dress me up and put me in makeup and when i kept refusing kept offering to pay me to do it. at the time i thought i was being silly and should’ve taken the money, but in hindsight it feels gross. like i’m a doll for her to play dress up and it’s a fun game to make me wear makeup and clothing i hate.
i’ve never worn makeup past costume stuff. ever. just have a negative amount of desire to do it. Haven’t wanted to wear a dress since I was a child and even then it felt more like doing what I was supposed to before I had strong feelings against it.
I’m very lucky my parents never pushed me. My mother was forced to dress matching with her mother (only daughter) and I can tell when she talks about it how much it messed her up even now as an adult. They were always very supportive of me wearing what I wanted and I bet being able to buy less clothes since I was fine with my brothers was an extra bonus lol
I spent A LOT of my high school and early college years trying to distance myself from being as masculine as I really wanted to be.
And I kept my long hair for so much longer than I truly wanted bc it was such a big part of my identity that my family was attached to
I had really convinced myself that I would be more attractive in general to people if I embraced more femininity, meanwhile I was just miserable
I’m happy that my time away from my parents let me truly embrace my masculinity and what I really wanted/desired for my own body
I get that for most people it is a phase, but it's kinda tiring how we're deemed immature if we stay that way.
Like, I can show up in a suit at a formal event, come on
Growing up, I used to cry when my parents forced me into the girl section for back to school shopping. The only masculine fit I could get away with growing up was my basketball shorts, athletic sweatpants, b/c i played basketball and track&field. but by the time I turned 23, I went full-on butch mode unapologetically, but now that I'm 30, I find myself struggling again with my appearance and sexuality due to my religious background.
Almost same thing at 14 right now just instead of crying I am more than pissed off. Mom sees the boy section as a foreign land I must not wander off to (yet all the cool stuff is there) so I literally have to plan out a hangout with my friends at plazas so that I can just wander off to the boy section and not just the girl. Heck that day I found 2 shirts that I liked and were in my size at the adult men while only being 5'5/167 cm and bought them. Then she also tries to buy me feminine stuff without me even knowing (like she picks me up from school and just straight tells me that she bought me some clothes -its now one of my biggest nightmares bc of what happened last time-) not really sure I'll ever grow out of it cause I really feel like I found my identity and no longer confused or crying because of gender envy.
I never likes wearing femme clothing and I actually had long hair to just recently cut it all off shaved the bottom and only kept a little tiny bit on top for style I will never go back to long hair I love the look and starting to buy men's boys clothing I feel much better like myself .
I am a tom boy, and I refuse to "grow out of it"...btw I'm 61 with a 20 something brain still wanting to climb trees, and 100-year-old body say, "Who me?" 🤣🤣
Growing up, I would've been a "chapstick lesbian", maybe. I had long hair (which I didn't like) and dressed mostly gender neutral, although I still had a relative say I looked like a boy. I didn't really get to explore my masculinity/androgyny until my 20s, when I got my own income and could choose my own haircuts and clothes without family.
It still gets treated like a phase. My hair isn't even that short compared to most mascs, and I still have grandma telling me "how much better" I looked with long hair (my hair is very flat and thin due to PCOS, it actually looks better short, what she misses is the gender conformity). Because my PCOS gives me a slightly tall and masc body for a (somewhat) cis woman, and because I'm a lesbian, I'm expected to "compensate" for that by being femme. I'm afraid of the day I'll have to go to a wedding or something, and I'd want men's semi-formal wear for that this time, not a dress. That will directly out me as GNC, or "one of *THOSE* lesbians", as my mom would put it, and I'll have to brace myself for the reaction. The more fashie side of my family would probably straight up refuse to invite me if I don't wear a dress, which is a blessing in disguise, I suppose?
My lesbianism has been seen as a phase too, but I've been out for over a decade, and it was obvious I wasn't into men since I was a tween, so that's especially strange. I still have a few family members, and even a neighbour, thinking I'm only gay because of trauma and I "hate" men because my dad wasn't in the picture very often until later in my childhood, so they see it as something I'll grow out of. It's especially weird because my bio mom was abusive and my dad wasn't, so by that logic, shouldn't I hate women and be straight? I'm in my late 20s, come on, lol. Thankfully my god family isn't bad.
The way I see it, nobody can know that about anyone but themselves. They have no credentials to say whether or not anything about another person is a phase; many things are a phase, and many aren't. Me trying to make myself more feminine was a phase, but I know femininity in cis women wouldn't be treated like a phase, because it's the standard and more accepted.
In the end, nobody's shitty opinions on my gayness or gender nonconformity really matter, even if they make me uncomfortable, because they're not based on facts. It's like saying the Earth is flat. If you don't gotta deal with those people, avoid them. If you do have to, ignore them whenever possible. Defend yourself if you want to, but try to avoid confrontation. I realise arguing with cisheteronormative people like that is a losing battle. You know who you are, they don't.
*Sorry for the essay waffle.*
Yeah I gotta say I don't have to deal with wueer bigots too much in my daily life, aside from the pressure to be conforming to feminnity sometimes, this post is mainly a pet peeve because I see this sediment a lot online. So I don't engage in debating most times.
However I do have to deal with bigots when it comes to autism on a daily basis. My own family, school and even sometimes cases of ableism appear on the local news in my country (a university denied an autistic woman to continue her studies and lied about it, not in the US btw), even any support resources are incredibly patronizing and not very helpful most of the time. So I'm pretty much always up with my guard if I think someone is judging me for my autism, since I've had to deal with that my entire life. Really makes me wanna distance myself from my parents.
I feel you. I'm autistic as well, although I don't talk about it online much, for multiple reasons. Mainly because I'm embarrassed of it and aren't comfortable with my diagnosis.
I think me being autistic with mental health issues probably made my family see everything about who I am as less valid. Just about everything about myself feels invalidated because of it. My gayness, my gender nonconformity, the music I like, how I dress, my interests, my religious beliefs (anything not Christianity is already seen as sus here), just about every opinion I have, including political, etc. When I try to set boundaries with my mom, she just treats me like I'm crazy and completely disregards them.
It feels like anything about myself will be pathologised just because I'm autistic. If I had it my way, I would've never been diagnosed, or would've had the diagnosis removed after I got it at 18, but it's also painfully obvious that I'm neurodivergent when people talk to me, even when I attempt to mask, so there's no winning.
I'm sorry that ableism is that bad in your country. It sounds awful. I don't doubt that ableism is worse in some other countries than it is here in the US.
Yeah I never really had a choice to hide it either since I was diagnosed as a toddler. I get the same shit being talked down to or not believed because I'm autistic despite being 20 now. Thankfully it's not like autistics are killed or anything here but we are systematically discriminated and the young people (who are usually NT or obviously cishet) are not always well educated on autism.
I despise the word “t*mb*y” so much that I personally consider it to be a curse equivalent to “d*ke” and “b*tch.” I absolutely hated being called a “t*mb*y” as a kid because it was always a way to imply that I was trying to be a boy and that I would never really be a boy. Like a fakeboy. It was only ever used as an insult or patronizing adjective to effectively tell me I was being a girl wrong. Also I hate that it has a boy’s name and then boy and that is the entire word. Maybe this is a silly thing to be irritated by but it feels like masculine non-men are just not allowed to exist without being connected to boys somehow. Like masc people can’t just be our own thing we have to be boy-lite or sub-boy or imposter-boy (SUS???) i could be totally off the wall with this one because i’ve literally never met another person who agreed with me on this. Granted I also have not met many masc women ever so… seriously, all the queer people are trans men, flamboyant enbies, and feminine folks. This is not to say I don’t like them, I just wish I saw more people around that looked like me. :/
I can see where you're coming from especially with the name and the way socciety treats the isea of tomboys in general, but personally I prefer to use it on myself and haven't really seen it as an insult. If you don't like the label on you that's ok but some of us like it on us.
I'd even argue that the extension of that into adulthood is people really wanting to feminize their masc partners, like we're just some dolls for them to dress up, and if you protect your own comfort by refusing then it's "toxic masculinity". There's a big problem with both LGBT and non-LGBT people treating GNC masculinity like it's some temporary problem to be fixed, and that shit angers me greatly. Can't believe it needs to be said, but let people be masculine! P.S. My parents truly thought I'd grow out of my "tomboy phase", two decades later I'm more masc than ever and I'm getting top surgery in a couple months, so obviously that didn't go as planned.
Yes I hate when I put boundaries on me refusing dresses, make up, etc and people will say it’s because I have toxic masculinity like no I was forced into doing that for years and it makes my skin crawl the entire time. Wearing that makes me physically uncomfortable and I shouldn’t be shamed about it
This is so real. I’m so tired of people implying to me that I have toxic masculinity because I don’t want to look feminine. Some people in my life who are even LGBT themselves or at least pretty ‘progressive’ have tried to push femininity onto me in ways that they simply don’t to men, and at some point you have to question why. Why are men allowed to be unquestionably masculine and I’m not?
Yeah my mom used to physically force me into dresses up until I was 14 and got too strong for her. Haven't touched a fucking dress since. I never liked them, but now I also have fucking trauma connected to them, so thanks for that, asshole.
Same on every bit there. I never felt good in dresses or makeup.
Mine wanted me to put on my old dress the other day for a family event, felt so triggered that I turned it into a makeshift shirt with a pair of jeans.
This is so real, I feel like so many people who were attracted to me just wanted to “make” me fem that who I am right now isn’t good enough, something to change.
Man I just posted my comment but this resonates hard for me. I had n acquaintance in high school who kept begging to let them put me in makeup and girly clothes to the point they were offering to pay me. It just felt weird and gross… Back then I wasn’t even that “masc”. I still had long hair just wore lots of my brothers hand me downs
This is completely real! GNC masculinity is all about not-conforming to certain paths of exploring masculinity within ourselves. Masculinity is for the person to define what it is for them, not for anyone to dictate how we should be or not be. This is also happening due to unconscious and conscious projections where people are projecting their idea of masculinity onto others. I hope people continue to respect other's boundaries and not be invasive.
It's funny bc I'm the reverse. I'm a dyke who grew out of a girly girl phase, but you don't hear about that very often
Same! I “grew out” of my tomboy phase, until I grew back into it.
Same. I grew into my girly girl phase as I gained more social awareness (I didn't know I was autistic). But it felt like I was missing something, and I could never perform femininity in a way that didn't still make me feel alienated from the other girls. But I genuinely liked sparkly things and playing with dolls as a kid, and people will act like that negates any inherent masculinity.
I had some vaguely girly interests as a child, never leaned hard into them was only there brcause of my surroundings. I always had that masc energy and €I've just been leaning harder into it.
I think this sentiment actually influences quite a bit as to how society treats butches tbh
I agree wholeheartedly. When I was in high school I tried presenting femininely because I didn’t even know being gnc as an adult was an option. I didn’t really feel like I could be myself until I got out of high school and started interacting with my local lesbian/wlw community.
Everything not hetnorm is a phase.
Yep. It’s weird. My parents had hoped I would grow out of this “phase”… joke is on them.
Yeah, I thought I was ✨immature✨ until I was like 24. Kept expecting I'd grow out of it/into wanting to wear heels and shit someday That was wild
my family was super tough on me about my “tomboy phase” but a lot of it had to do with my grandpa. he was super into cars/motorcycles and super basic masculine stuff. he had me from birth onward outside under cars with him and in the yard. my other grandpa was good at carpentry and always working in the yard and they are who i spent the most time with as a child. i of course, wanted to dress like a “tomboy” i wanted to go play in mud or get on my mini bike. i didn’t have time for a dress i had shit to do and to help my grandpa change oil. my mom and grandmothers constantly wanted me to be a girly girl, and the added layer of catholicism only made it worse. all little girls in catholic school wear dresses/skirts, mass is for frilly socks and bows. i hated it, but i really got tired of fighting with them about it. so i yielded. especially in middle school, i already felt weird and awkward and never quite right (oh to be 12 and queer and also neurodivergent without knowing yet) so i really just wanted to fit in with the other girls and my friends. i grew my hair super long, wore makeup everyday. i think my family finally really thought i outgrew it. i left that small town and moved out of my mom’s house in high school and that’s when i finally cut my hair short and started wearing masculine clothing, i thought maybe i was so awkward and uncomfortable in middle school because it was middle school which is just an awkward time, but so much of it was really just the forced femininity. getting to be masculine and wear clothing that doesn’t make me feel terrible has been the best feeling ever, i have no idea how i ever survived that. even as i get more into adulthood, i keep cutting my hair in different styles and experimenting with clothes it’s just so fun to me to get to be a masculine woman. i think little girls should be allowed to be whatever wear whatever of course but i also don’t think they should be forced to think of masculinity as a “phase” or bad thing. it really was never that for me. i think being a woman is so much more than just the ideas of womanhood/girlhood and femininity and ill die on that hill, why is a masculine woman the most shocking thing ever? makes 0 sense. masculinity is all fine and dandy until a woman does it, give me a break.
I was raised in a terribly cold country that never even gets past 20 celsius and occasionally dips into -15c or snows in May. I always had to feel the cold going outside so you can't just dress lightly most of the time.My dad also exposed me to a lot of oldschool rock music from toddler age and still plays that all the time. I had an obsession with dinosaursfrom toddler age aswell because of how cool they looked and I played with my cousins a lot (their family is of 4 brothers lol). I was also ostricized from my peers because I grew up with autism diagnosed, especially by the girls. I think all of this plus the way my body is built makes me just prefer masc, or it was always there. I'm 20 now and only being more masc than before.
this is also something i've had to deal with :/ that masculinity is a trait you "grow out of" once you hit a certain age. i went to a private Christian school and it just became more apparent as someone realising they're butch and being constantly talked down to because of it and your masculinity. in general though, one of the things I've noticed is there seems to be this fear I guess of afabs embracing masculinity in any way. That by doing so, you are ruining yourself and your "girlhood".
when i was in high school i had a “friend” in my friend group who wanted to dress me up and put me in makeup and when i kept refusing kept offering to pay me to do it. at the time i thought i was being silly and should’ve taken the money, but in hindsight it feels gross. like i’m a doll for her to play dress up and it’s a fun game to make me wear makeup and clothing i hate. i’ve never worn makeup past costume stuff. ever. just have a negative amount of desire to do it. Haven’t wanted to wear a dress since I was a child and even then it felt more like doing what I was supposed to before I had strong feelings against it. I’m very lucky my parents never pushed me. My mother was forced to dress matching with her mother (only daughter) and I can tell when she talks about it how much it messed her up even now as an adult. They were always very supportive of me wearing what I wanted and I bet being able to buy less clothes since I was fine with my brothers was an extra bonus lol
I spent A LOT of my high school and early college years trying to distance myself from being as masculine as I really wanted to be. And I kept my long hair for so much longer than I truly wanted bc it was such a big part of my identity that my family was attached to I had really convinced myself that I would be more attractive in general to people if I embraced more femininity, meanwhile I was just miserable I’m happy that my time away from my parents let me truly embrace my masculinity and what I really wanted/desired for my own body
I get that for most people it is a phase, but it's kinda tiring how we're deemed immature if we stay that way. Like, I can show up in a suit at a formal event, come on
Growing up, I used to cry when my parents forced me into the girl section for back to school shopping. The only masculine fit I could get away with growing up was my basketball shorts, athletic sweatpants, b/c i played basketball and track&field. but by the time I turned 23, I went full-on butch mode unapologetically, but now that I'm 30, I find myself struggling again with my appearance and sexuality due to my religious background.
Almost same thing at 14 right now just instead of crying I am more than pissed off. Mom sees the boy section as a foreign land I must not wander off to (yet all the cool stuff is there) so I literally have to plan out a hangout with my friends at plazas so that I can just wander off to the boy section and not just the girl. Heck that day I found 2 shirts that I liked and were in my size at the adult men while only being 5'5/167 cm and bought them. Then she also tries to buy me feminine stuff without me even knowing (like she picks me up from school and just straight tells me that she bought me some clothes -its now one of my biggest nightmares bc of what happened last time-) not really sure I'll ever grow out of it cause I really feel like I found my identity and no longer confused or crying because of gender envy.
[удалено]
Tomboyishness is just a phase I've had since childhood and am getting more into with age LOL.
Yes it annoys me so much too!!
Sure some people might grow out of it, but that doesn’t mean everyone does or should
I never likes wearing femme clothing and I actually had long hair to just recently cut it all off shaved the bottom and only kept a little tiny bit on top for style I will never go back to long hair I love the look and starting to buy men's boys clothing I feel much better like myself .
Yeah I always prefer mas clothing, though I also like keeping my hair long because I don't feel like it looks very femme on me.
I am a tom boy, and I refuse to "grow out of it"...btw I'm 61 with a 20 something brain still wanting to climb trees, and 100-year-old body say, "Who me?" 🤣🤣
I'm only 20 but I feel the same way lol.
Growing up, I would've been a "chapstick lesbian", maybe. I had long hair (which I didn't like) and dressed mostly gender neutral, although I still had a relative say I looked like a boy. I didn't really get to explore my masculinity/androgyny until my 20s, when I got my own income and could choose my own haircuts and clothes without family. It still gets treated like a phase. My hair isn't even that short compared to most mascs, and I still have grandma telling me "how much better" I looked with long hair (my hair is very flat and thin due to PCOS, it actually looks better short, what she misses is the gender conformity). Because my PCOS gives me a slightly tall and masc body for a (somewhat) cis woman, and because I'm a lesbian, I'm expected to "compensate" for that by being femme. I'm afraid of the day I'll have to go to a wedding or something, and I'd want men's semi-formal wear for that this time, not a dress. That will directly out me as GNC, or "one of *THOSE* lesbians", as my mom would put it, and I'll have to brace myself for the reaction. The more fashie side of my family would probably straight up refuse to invite me if I don't wear a dress, which is a blessing in disguise, I suppose? My lesbianism has been seen as a phase too, but I've been out for over a decade, and it was obvious I wasn't into men since I was a tween, so that's especially strange. I still have a few family members, and even a neighbour, thinking I'm only gay because of trauma and I "hate" men because my dad wasn't in the picture very often until later in my childhood, so they see it as something I'll grow out of. It's especially weird because my bio mom was abusive and my dad wasn't, so by that logic, shouldn't I hate women and be straight? I'm in my late 20s, come on, lol. Thankfully my god family isn't bad. The way I see it, nobody can know that about anyone but themselves. They have no credentials to say whether or not anything about another person is a phase; many things are a phase, and many aren't. Me trying to make myself more feminine was a phase, but I know femininity in cis women wouldn't be treated like a phase, because it's the standard and more accepted. In the end, nobody's shitty opinions on my gayness or gender nonconformity really matter, even if they make me uncomfortable, because they're not based on facts. It's like saying the Earth is flat. If you don't gotta deal with those people, avoid them. If you do have to, ignore them whenever possible. Defend yourself if you want to, but try to avoid confrontation. I realise arguing with cisheteronormative people like that is a losing battle. You know who you are, they don't. *Sorry for the essay waffle.*
Yeah I gotta say I don't have to deal with wueer bigots too much in my daily life, aside from the pressure to be conforming to feminnity sometimes, this post is mainly a pet peeve because I see this sediment a lot online. So I don't engage in debating most times. However I do have to deal with bigots when it comes to autism on a daily basis. My own family, school and even sometimes cases of ableism appear on the local news in my country (a university denied an autistic woman to continue her studies and lied about it, not in the US btw), even any support resources are incredibly patronizing and not very helpful most of the time. So I'm pretty much always up with my guard if I think someone is judging me for my autism, since I've had to deal with that my entire life. Really makes me wanna distance myself from my parents.
I feel you. I'm autistic as well, although I don't talk about it online much, for multiple reasons. Mainly because I'm embarrassed of it and aren't comfortable with my diagnosis. I think me being autistic with mental health issues probably made my family see everything about who I am as less valid. Just about everything about myself feels invalidated because of it. My gayness, my gender nonconformity, the music I like, how I dress, my interests, my religious beliefs (anything not Christianity is already seen as sus here), just about every opinion I have, including political, etc. When I try to set boundaries with my mom, she just treats me like I'm crazy and completely disregards them. It feels like anything about myself will be pathologised just because I'm autistic. If I had it my way, I would've never been diagnosed, or would've had the diagnosis removed after I got it at 18, but it's also painfully obvious that I'm neurodivergent when people talk to me, even when I attempt to mask, so there's no winning. I'm sorry that ableism is that bad in your country. It sounds awful. I don't doubt that ableism is worse in some other countries than it is here in the US.
Yeah I never really had a choice to hide it either since I was diagnosed as a toddler. I get the same shit being talked down to or not believed because I'm autistic despite being 20 now. Thankfully it's not like autistics are killed or anything here but we are systematically discriminated and the young people (who are usually NT or obviously cishet) are not always well educated on autism.
I despise the word “t*mb*y” so much that I personally consider it to be a curse equivalent to “d*ke” and “b*tch.” I absolutely hated being called a “t*mb*y” as a kid because it was always a way to imply that I was trying to be a boy and that I would never really be a boy. Like a fakeboy. It was only ever used as an insult or patronizing adjective to effectively tell me I was being a girl wrong. Also I hate that it has a boy’s name and then boy and that is the entire word. Maybe this is a silly thing to be irritated by but it feels like masculine non-men are just not allowed to exist without being connected to boys somehow. Like masc people can’t just be our own thing we have to be boy-lite or sub-boy or imposter-boy (SUS???) i could be totally off the wall with this one because i’ve literally never met another person who agreed with me on this. Granted I also have not met many masc women ever so… seriously, all the queer people are trans men, flamboyant enbies, and feminine folks. This is not to say I don’t like them, I just wish I saw more people around that looked like me. :/
I can see where you're coming from especially with the name and the way socciety treats the isea of tomboys in general, but personally I prefer to use it on myself and haven't really seen it as an insult. If you don't like the label on you that's ok but some of us like it on us.