Growing Up With Narrow Ideas About Masculinity
Many LGBTQ+ people grow up learning very early that there are “right” and “wrong” ways to be masculine. These messages often arrive long before we fully understand our sexuality or gender identity. Sometimes they come through bullying, ridicule, rejection, or violence. Other times they appear more subtly through family expectations, school environments, television, religion, peer groups, or social messages about what a “real man” should look and behave like.
A boy who is emotional, gentle, expressive, sensitive, creative, feminine, or different in some way often quickly learns that these traits may come with social consequences. Many LGBTQ+ people become highly self aware from an early age. The way they speak, move, laugh, dress, gesture, or interact with others may become carefully monitored in an attempt to avoid judgement or rejection.
Looking back, I can recognise how early some of those messages began for me. I remember wanting to play with my sister’s dolls but already somehow knowing that this was “wrong” for a boy. So my seven year old brain found a way to justify it to myself. I pretended that I was the dolls’ uncle and that their parents had died in a horrific plane crash, so it had fallen to me to look after them. Even writing that now makes me smile a little because it’s so dramatic, but it also says something important. Even at that age, before I properly understood sexuality or gender, I was already being socially conditioned into believing there were things boys should and should not do.
I also noticed a subtle but significant shift in my relationship with my dad once it became clear that I wasn’t interested in football or sports. My dad coached a local football team and because I didn’t like sports, it felt as though we had nothing in common and he stopped making much effort with me emotionally. Nothing explicit was said, but children notice these subtle relational shifts. They notice who receives praise, enthusiasm, attention and connection, and who doesn’t. Those experiences can quietly communicate powerful messages about masculinity, belonging and worth.
For many LGBTQ+ people, masculinity becomes less about authenticity and more about survival.
Hegemonic masculinity refers to the dominant cultural idea of masculinity that places value on toughness, emotional control, heterosexuality, dominance, competitiveness, independence, and physical strength, while often rejecting vulnerability, softness, femininity, or emotional openness. Boys and men who fall outside these expectations can experience shame, exclusion, fear, or pressure to conform.
For many LGBTQ+ people, these experiences shape identity development in powerful and long lasting ways.
The Emotional Impact Of Hegemonic Masculinity
Growing up under rigid masculine expectations can create deep internal conflict. Many LGBTQ+ people learn that acceptance and safety may depend on how successfully they can perform masculinity. Some people begin hiding parts of themselves in order to appear “normal,” “safe,” or less visible. Others become hyper aware of how they are perceived and develop constant self monitoring as a survival strategy.
Over time, living under this kind of emotional self surveillance can create anxiety, shame, hypervigilance, perfectionism, and exhaustion.
Many LGBTQ+ people grow up feeling simultaneously “too much” and “not enough.”
Too emotional, too feminine, too sensitive, too different, while also never feeling masculine enough, attractive enough, confident enough, or socially acceptable enough.
Some people become highly performative versions of masculinity in order to feel safer. Others disconnect from masculinity entirely because it feels associated with fear, rejection, or emotional pain. In both cases, people can lose connection with authenticity because so much energy becomes focused on managing how they are perceived by others.
These survival strategies may once have helped people stay emotionally or physically safe, but over time they can create disconnection from identity, relationships, and emotional wellbeing.
Intra Minority Stress Within LGBTQ+ Communities
Many people expect LGBTQ+ spaces to feel automatically safe and accepting. While these communities can absolutely offer healing, belonging, solidarity, and connection, they can also reproduce wider societal ideas about masculinity, attractiveness, status, and worth.
This is sometimes referred to as intra minority stress. Intra minority stress describes the pressure, judgement, exclusion, or discrimination that can occur within marginalised communities themselves. For LGBTQ+ people, this can include racism, body shaming, transphobia, ageism, ableism, classism, or rigid expectations around masculinity and femininity within LGBTQ+ spaces.
For many gay and bisexual men in particular, masculinity can become heavily tied to desirability and social value. Dating and hook up apps can intensify these pressures. Phrases like “straight acting only,” “masc for masc,” “no fems,” or “real men only” appear so frequently on some profiles that many people barely notice them anymore.
But repeated exposure to these messages can have a powerful emotional impact, particularly for people who already grew up feeling ashamed of being “different.”
These statements often communicate the idea that femininity in men is undesirable, inferior, embarrassing, or something to reject. For many people, this reinforces old wounds from childhood where they may already have been bullied, mocked, or excluded for appearing “too feminine,” emotional, expressive, or gender non conforming.
Over time, some people begin internalising these messages. They may change the way they speak, move, dress, laugh, or express themselves in order to appear more masculine and therefore more socially or sexually acceptable. Some people lower their voice, avoid certain clothes, suppress emotional openness, or distance themselves from femininity altogether.
Others may begin rejecting femininity in other people because they have learned to fear or dislike those qualities within themselves.
This can create a painful contradiction where LGBTQ+ spaces that are supposed to offer safety and belonging instead become environments where people feel scrutinised, compared, or measured against narrow standards of masculinity and desirability.
Importantly, attraction itself is not the issue. People are naturally drawn to different qualities in others. The difficulty arises when wider cultural shame around masculinity and femininity goes unquestioned, reinforcing the belief that some LGBTQ+ people are inherently more valuable or acceptable than others.
Shame, Masculinity And Self Worth
For many LGBTQ+ people, masculinity becomes deeply connected to shame.
When children repeatedly receive messages that certain behaviours, emotions, interests, or ways of expressing themselves are unacceptable, they often begin believing that something is fundamentally wrong with them. Shame differs from guilt. Guilt says “I did something bad.” Shame says “I am bad.”
Many LGBTQ+ people grow up carrying chronic shame linked to identity, visibility, vulnerability, or perceived failure to meet masculine expectations. Some people become perfectionistic in response, believing that if they become attractive enough, masculine enough, successful enough, desirable enough, or emotionally controlled enough they may finally feel accepted.
Others cope by withdrawing emotionally, avoiding intimacy, overachieving, people pleasing, dissociating from feelings, or using substances to numb painful emotions.
I remember one small but surprisingly powerful example that highlighted just how deeply external judgement had shaped me. Years ago, somebody casually told me that “you don’t wear white socks with jeans.” After that, I simply never wore white socks with jeans or trousers again. I never questioned it. Looking back, it wasn’t really about socks at all. It reflected something much deeper: a lifelong habit of monitoring myself through the imagined judgement of others.
The same thing happened with clothes and appearance more broadly. If I noticed certain groups of men all wearing particular brands of t shirts or dressing in a certain way, I would often think, “right, I need to be wearing that too.” So much of my self worth became tied to trying to fit into what felt socially acceptable, attractive, masculine, or safe. I spent years unconsciously scanning other people for clues about who I was supposed to be.
For many LGBTQ+ people, life can quietly become organised around the question:
“What will people think?”
This constant self monitoring often develops as a survival strategy in environments where difference felt unsafe. Over time, those external judgements can become so deeply internalised that people lose touch with what genuinely feels authentic to them.
Part of healing my relationship with masculinity has involved slowly giving myself permission to stop performing quite so much. These days, if I want to wear colourful clothes, I wear them. If I want to paint my nails, wear a necklace, or wear a sparkly bracelet, I will. What feels important about those things is not really the clothes or jewellery themselves, it’s the freedom underneath them.
The freedom to make choices based on authenticity rather than fear, shame, or the need for approval.
The difficulty is that shame based coping strategies often create further disconnection from self and others. The more people perform who they think they “should” be, the harder it can become to know who they really are underneath the performance.
Healing often begins when people slowly reconnect with the parts of themselves they once learned to hide.
Redefining Masculinity On Your Own Terms
Healing your relationship with masculinity often begins when you start questioning who taught you these rules in the first place.
Many LGBTQ+ people eventually realise that the version of masculinity they spent years trying to live up to was never truly theirs. It was inherited from wider cultural expectations built around fear, hierarchy, emotional restriction, and rigid gender roles.
Healing does not necessarily mean rejecting masculinity altogether. For many people, it means creating space to redefine masculinity in ways that feel more authentic, flexible, and emotionally healthy.
For some people this means allowing themselves to become more emotionally expressive. For others it may involve reconnecting with softness, creativity, vulnerability, intimacy, or self compassion. Some people begin embracing the very qualities they once hid in order to survive.
Others slowly realise that strength and vulnerability are not opposites. In fact, it often takes far more courage to live authentically than it does to perform emotional invulnerability.
Healing your relationship with masculinity can involve recognising that your worth is not dependent on appearing dominant, emotionally detached, heterosexual, or “straight acting.” It can involve recognising that there are many different ways to exist as a man, and that authenticity is often healthier and more sustainable than rigid performance.
Grieving The Parts Of Yourself You Had To Hide
Healing can also involve grief.
Many LGBTQ+ people carry sadness for the younger version of themselves who learned to shrink, hide, or disconnect from who they really were. There can be grief for missed experiences, lost confidence, years spent feeling unsafe, or the emotional energy consumed trying to earn acceptance by becoming someone else.
Some people look back and realise how much of their life was organised around avoiding judgement. Others recognise how deeply they internalised the belief that femininity, vulnerability, or emotional openness made them weak or undesirable.
Many LGBTQ+ people carry grief for the younger version of themselves who learned to suppress ordinary parts of their identity in order to feel safe or accepted. Grief for the child who monitored how they spoke, hid their interests, distanced themselves from softness or vulnerability, or learned to disconnect from parts of themselves before they even fully understood why.
Sometimes healing involves recognising just how young those adaptations began.
That grief deserves compassion.
For many people, healing involves slowly reconnecting with the parts of themselves they abandoned in order to survive. This may include creativity, softness, emotional openness, playfulness, tenderness, or vulnerability. Over time, people may begin discovering that authenticity feels far less exhausting than constantly performing a role.
How Therapy Can Help You Heal Your Relationship With Masculinity
Therapy can provide an important space to explore these experiences safely and without judgement.
Many LGBTQ+ people benefit from exploring how shame, bullying, family dynamics, gender expectations, minority stress, intra minority stress, and social conditioning have shaped their relationship with masculinity and identity. Therapy can help people understand survival strategies compassionately rather than seeing themselves as flawed or inadequate.
An LGBTQ+ affirming therapeutic space can also help people reconnect with authenticity, emotional safety, and self acceptance. This may involve exploring boundaries, vulnerability, relationships, self worth, identity, or the fear of being fully seen by others.
Therapy can also help people challenge long held beliefs around masculinity and worth. For some people this involves developing self compassion. For others it may involve learning emotional regulation, exploring attachment patterns, reducing shame, or building confidence to exist more openly and authentically.
Importantly, healing your relationship with masculinity is not about becoming more masculine or less masculine. It is about becoming more fully yourself.
Moving Towards Authenticity And Self Acceptance
Many LGBTQ+ people spend years believing they must change themselves in order to deserve acceptance, love, safety, or belonging. But over time, healing often involves recognising that the problem was never simply who you were. The problem was growing up in environments that taught you certain parts of yourself were unacceptable.
You don’t have to spend your life performing masculinity in order to be worthy of connection or respect.
Healing your relationship with masculinity can involve learning to exist more freely, more honestly, and with greater compassion towards yourself. It can involve letting go of shame based definitions of what a “real man” is supposed to be and creating space for a version of masculinity, or identity more broadly, that genuinely feels like your own.
If any of this resonates with you and you’d like support exploring it further, I offer LGBTQ+ affirming therapy both online and in person from my practice in Manchester city centre. You’re welcome to get in touch to arrange a free 15 minute introductory call.