College is, above all else, an experimentation incubator. Sometimes the fit is perfect; sometimes you walk out with body dysmorphia and more questions than answers. I arrived at Georgetown with that impulse in full force: curly hair, a soft aversion to labels, and a friend group that doubled as my gender-counseling hotline. One morning, before I’d even had caffeine, my friend Lily texted: “Jacob, I’ve been thinking… you might be a femboy.”
Just a few years back in the midst of COVID, the internet felt like a very horny, very fashionable laboratory where this type of “diagnosis” was commonplace. A single TikTok scroll delivered boys in heavy eyeliner, micro-skirts, and cat-ear headphones, Junko-posing like it was federally mandated. The femboy was the algorithm’s golden child. Unlike other gendered trends that winked at ambiguity (read: the performative man), the femboy was living evidence that masculinity had an exit. And then, almost overnight, he vanished.
Staring at Lily’s text, I couldn’t help but wonder: where did all the femboys go?
So I spent a week trying to find him.
For the sake of academic integrity, I will admit, my “research” consisted of sitting on Copley Lawn, pretending to do homework while doom-scrolling Reddit, watching three hours of YouTube essays at 1.25x speed, and skimming a couple scholarly articles like a responsible, tuition-paying adult. Somewhere in that pseudo-rigor, I settled on a working definition of the “femboy,” someone—usually a socialized man—who intentionally leans into feminine clothing and beauty as a form of expression rather than a complete departure from masculinity.
On closer reading I found a clarifying frame: this is as much about labor and legibility as it is about eyeliner. Cisgender men who adopt feminine aesthetics often receive bemused applause and cultural leniency. Trans women presenting femininity, by contrast, frequently encounter suspicion, administrative hurdles, policing, and harsher consequences. The aesthetic parallels; the stakes do not.
Capitalism complicates that difference. During quarantine, the world briefly turned into a low-stakes terrarium where you could try on nonconforming selves with fewer immediate social costs. When campuses and nightlife reopened, those experiments were photographed, screenshotted, and repackaged into templates. Femininity was extracted, tidied, and served back to a safer customer, the cis man with platform and purchasing power.
And here’s the part we’d rather not admit: much of what we now call “femboy culture” wasn’t invented in a gamer chair during lockdown. Trans women, especially trans women of color, have carried and refined these feminine signifiers for decades, usually at enormous personal cost. What gets called “bold” or “cute” on a boy online was once, and often still is, misread as “deviant,” “dangerous,” or “unintelligible” when it appears on the women who originated and sustained it. The femboy inherited a vocabulary that was already written in someone else’s blood and labor.
That extraction is violent in a quiet way because capitalism takes signifiers while refusing the cost. The aesthetic gets monetized; the risk (wage penalties, police encounters, social ostracism) stays with those who have always shouldered it. Trans women don’t get to monetize the “softness” that influencers market. They’re left paying the bill for styles we clap for when worn by people the world still reads as men.
There’s also a racial and class angle we can’t skip. These fads center relatively privileged bodies: white, middle-class, digitally visible. When an influencer turns a look into content, the labor of survival is erased. These feminine signifiers float free, untethered from the bodies that carried them.
But that visibility is selective. The femboy’s civic work often takes place within those narrower margins. He normalized small, public failures: eyeliner that ran, a skirt that twisted mid-walk, an awkward joke that fell flat. Those micro-mistakes perform a lesson. They say that ornamentation, tenderness, and a little theatricality can live in a masculine-presenting body without turning it into a punchline. That’s how norms bend, not by polished campaigns but by amateurism, risk, and repetition.
When he recedes, permission recedes too. You see it in tiny, accumulative ways: a guy draws a nail with a Sharpie, admires it, then scrubs it off because the online discourse still circulates threats like “Shawn Mendes paints nails and faces public execution.” Men joke about their eyelashes so they don’t have to admit they like them. Those small self-corrections pile up and narrow the bandwidth of acceptable manhood.
So no, the disappearance isn’t mere trend fatigue. It’s the flattening of an aesthetic into a consumable product, a pretty wrapper for the same old gendered orders. The style remains available; the politics are stripped. Feminine signifiers are monetized, while the people who pay the social costs do not see the benefit.
What we need is micro-praxis, neighborhood-sized permission that’s cheap, boring, and persistent. Let someone borrow your eyeliner and return it without comment. Applaud the Sharpie nail. Invite your roommate to a thrift-store raid and insist they keep whatever makes them feel like tea. Celebrate small, nonperformative experiments until they’re not interesting anymore, and the danger lies in the novelty, not the body.
These tiny gestures create informal infrastructure. They don’t replace structural reform—we still need policy, employment protections, and safety nets for trans people—but they shift the texture of daily life. They make it easier to survive, and occasionally to thrive.
After a week of faux-academic fieldwork, I texted Lily, “Stopppp I’m crying.” Maybe the femboy didn’t vanish so much as learn to hide. Maybe we aren’t waiting for a cultural figure to return. Maybe we have to relearn the practice he once embodied.
So find a femboy. Hold them close. Let the slow, small city of permission rebuild itself one painted nail, one genuine compliment at a time. The gender police will be furious.
