Androgynous / Masculine : gender labels

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This scrap is a comment I left elsewhere. Without that context it likely reads oddly. Something for me to keep for future working up.

Femininity doesn't equal weakness. Long ago first trying to frame my feelings about feminine gay men I said they often had a steely moxie that I would never be able to equal. Male femininity isn't socialized heterosexual womanhood. It is a gift to be beautiful in a unique way (at least to my eyes).

When I was much younger I once called myself androgynous / masculine. I didn't have a strong sense of gender. (I knew I was a guy but that was a genetic fact.) But I do have a conventional male persona. So I've interacted with guys who (perhaps) invested masculinity in me. My 'masculinity' made me attractive to people that I found attractive. Over time I came to think of myself as masculine.

Over time my masculinity evolved as a desire to care for gentler people. But the need to care for was born of my identification with my mother. So my male strength found fulfillment in being as a man the woman my mother was.

We can't escape categories and labels because we need words if we are going to communicate with others. The labeling is a sort of psychological geography. But the maps don't include the details of our topography, our texture, individuality.