Would I Be a Femboy If I Were Young Today?

I’ve been thinking about this while re-capping a Heathkit power supply and waiting for the soldering iron to come back up to temperature.

Back when I was young, if you were a boy who liked skirts, soft fabrics or anything vaguely feminine, there wasn’t a subreddit for it. There certainly wasn’t a TikTok trend with pastel lighting and thigh-highs. There was just you, your secret interests and a very strong cultural suggestion that you keep those interests to yourself.

I grew up identifying first as a ham radio nerd, then a computer nerd. I was the kid who preferred manuals to footballs, oscilloscopes to engines. I liked precision, systems, patterns. In hindsight, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone (including me) that I also liked the ritual of femininity: the careful coordination of clothes, the technical challenge of makeup, the quiet satisfaction of “getting it right.”

At the time, though, crossdressing wasn’t framed as identity or expression. It was framed as something you did despite yourself, not because of yourself. You either hid it, joked about it or treated it as a guilty pleasure best compartmentalized like a forbidden frequency you never logged.

Fast-forward a few decades.

Now I look around and see young men who openly call themselves femboys, often unapologetically, sometimes joyfully. They’re tech-savvy, online, ironic, self-aware. Many of them are exactly the sort of kids who, in my day, would have been building PCs from spare parts or memorizing band plans.

And that’s where the uncomfortable question sneaks in:

If I were 19 today instead of… well, decidedly not 19, would I be one of them?

Honestly? Probably.

The aesthetic experimentation, the blending of masculinity and femininity, the playful refusal to take traditional gender rules seriously—it all feels very familiar. The difference is that today there’s language, community and visibility. What I experienced as isolation and confusion, they experience as a label and a feed.

I don’t feel envy, exactly. I’ve earned my wrinkles, my call signs, my hard-won confidence. But I do feel a strange kind of recognition. Watching these young men feels like seeing an alternate timeline version of myself... one who didn’t have to wait to stop worrying so much about what the civilians might think.

Am I a femboy now? No. I’m a senior crossdresser with bifocals, a well-organized radio shack and a closet that finally reflects who I’ve always been.

But if I were young today?

I suspect I’d still be a nerd. I suspect I’d still love systems, signals and aesthetics.

And yes, I suspect I’d be posting outfit pics between firmware updates, wondering why anyone ever thought these things were incompatible.

Funny how some signals take decades to propagate.

Wearing ShopBop

Paweł Góral femulating Céline Dion on Polish television‘s Twoja Twarz Brzmi Znajomo.
Click here to view this femulation on YouTube.