so i've got a friend who is, ostensibly, a cis het dude who's been making seemingly joking claims to transness and queerness for years now and i'm not certain how i feel about it or what to do about it?

i've had open and frank discussions with him about transness in the past; he's the token cis het in our circle of otherwise entirely queer late bloomers which had at times made him wonder if he may not actually be cis, and i told him that if he wanted or needed to experiment with things like names or pronouns to figure some stuff out we'd be more than happy to be the space where he could do that but he never took us up on the offer.

we've also had conversations about his sexuality; his last long term partner was enby who has taken steps of masc social transition. they were not out when the two started their relationship and got married, so he wasn't certain if this meant he was still straight. i told him at the time he had claim to queerness if he wanted it, but when the cards are on the table he's always said he's het and he always consistently referred to his partner as his wife even after they came out (they were okay with it at the time).

at first i was fine with his joking claims to queerness, like haha yeah it's kinda funny that you're the only one of us who didn't turn out to be queer, but after splitting with his ex he's been showing his whole ass on internalized transphobia and misogyny in other ways and now the jokes just piss me off. having him be like "bUt WhAt iF i'M nOt" every time it's brought up that he's cis or het is just fucking exhausting.

i don't wanna gatekeep because i know he's questioned before and a lot of people i know (myself included) didn't figure out their transness or their sexuality until adulthood, but every time it comes up i just wanna yell at him to shit or get off the pot dude.

am i treating him with kids' gloves? should i be bringing down the fucking hammer? idfk. i'll probably just slowly cut him out.

Don't worry, my GP said it's probably nothing but still wanted me to let it get checked out

I'm being a little mean, like this is way less bad than 99% of manga ever, I think it's well-intentioned. But the lens through which it's presented is a little, I dunno. I guess I'm not shocked that teenage me missed this one. I literally thought it was something Eiichiro Oda made up.