Self-Made Man

Despite the dated borderline transphobic comments in passing that sometimes occurs in this book, the majority was true to my own experience. If only I knew then I would later come out as non-binary. The dysphoric-like symptoms Norah experiences towards the end of the book from "pretending" and "deceiving" the people around her regarding her gender can be read in two ways. Well, either as analogous to dysphoria (an analogy I've already implicitly made), caused by the gap between her gender identity or gendered preferences and the gender she is constantly attempting to perform; or, alternatively, as a comment on the inherently debilitating and damaging effects of toxic masculinity on sense of self and emotional well-being. There is probably a bit of both that runs throughout the work, which I think is what makes this account interesting. How do you disentangle the two things? I think this is something I as a non-binary person with selective transfem leanings had to grapple with as I was trying to figure out the source of my distress.