This isn’t the most profound observation in the world, I realize, but as a starting place it leads to a couple of interesting places.

One of those perennial complaint topics on the Internet is the problem of “manspreading.” Specifically, this is when men sit down in a public space — often on public transit — and sprawl, taking up more space than seems reasonable. Sometimes this is leaning across more than one seat; sometimes it’s spreading their arms across the backs of adjacent seats, forcing anyone who wants to sit there to contend with the possibility of an unwanted hug; but more often than not, manspreading is about sitting with your knees wide apart, often touching the knees of the people on either side of you.

In online discussions, men often respond with some variation of “I gotta keep my knees apart, my balls are in the way.” It may surprise you to find that this is true, to an extent. If you’ve got testicles, sitting down and pressing your knees together will squish them. A bit.

But that’s not the primary reason why “not spreading” is uncomfortable for men.

Advice you get when you’re talking to gender-presentation counselors is to watch women — or, you know, the gender you’re trying to transition into — and see what they do, what they wear, how they move. Pay attention to the details.

Pay attention to the ways what they do is different from what your instinct is to do.

Which is how I came to be practicing sitting with my knees together. And it’s uncomfortable. The reason it’s uncomfortable is that in order to keep your knees together, you have to use muscles in your inner thigh — you have to flex those muscles and keep them flexed in order to keep your legs from falling open.

There are some things you can do to make this easier: Putting your feet together, for example, and angling your toes a little bit inward, will help make your knees come together a little more naturally. But a great deal of it is simply developing muscles that you don’t normally develop, and setting them to do continuous work that they’ve never had to do before.

One thing I had to learn was how to stand correctly: Not as part of any sort of gender training, but just as part of being a healthy human. My instinct is to stand with my knees locked, all the way back, and let the joints of my knees take the weight of my body. I don’t remember deciding to stand this way, I just… always did. A personal trainer I employed once pointed it out, and pointed out that not only is it bad for my knees to stand that way, but it doesn’t give my thigh muscles anything to do.

So I practiced standing with my knees slightly flexed. It did add some spring to my general being, and, surprisingly, it seemed to help with my posture, which has always tended to lean toward a stoop. But I found that I had to keep reminding myself to stand that way. I still, to this day, sometimes find myself standing with my knees locked back, my butt out, my shoulders forward, and adjust myself.

And, at the end of that first day, my thighs were sore. Because I was asking them to do continuous work that they weren’t used to doing.

I’m not a small person, and I have lifted my share of weights. I tend to max out the weight available on thigh-press machines (not the ones that take plates, obviously, the circuit-training ones where you adjust the weight by moving a pin). So it’s not like I don’t have leg muscles, not like my leg muscles aren’t strong, but a continuous flex is really not the same exercise as a concerted push. Standing with my legs slightly flexed all day was work. I had to keep reminding myself to do it.

I had to continuously think about why I was doing it.

It’s the same with the spreading thing. I assume that sometime in girlhood, every girl gets told by some adult authority figure that it’s not ladylike to sit with their legs spread, and then they’re heckled and nagged, the same way little kids are heckled and nagged about picking their noses or making inappropriate noises without thinking.

So by the time they’re adults, women have this set of muscles and muscle memory dedicated to keeping their knees together, and men do not. Sitting with your knees together feels onerous and attention-consuming to men, but for women it’s just the way you sit.

When you are sitting somewhere and you realize that your knees are spread apart again and you carefully put them together again and you readjust how you’re sitting and how your weight is distributed and everything about it is at least a little uncomfortable, you cannot help but think about why you’re doing this. Why not just sit how I want to sit?

For me, the answer is easy: Because I’m learning to be a woman, I am learning to sit the way women sit.

For men who are not learning to be women, the answer is… because I got nagged to by people on the Internet. Because I think it’s polite. Because someone made me feel guilty about not doing it.

In the same way girls are heckled and nagged to keep their knees together, men are taught, continuously and constantly, to push back. Male relationships exist in constant tension, where your friends are constantly pushing you to do stuff, and you’re constantly pushing back. If you don’t push back, you’re going to get plowed under.

I think a lot of men are, actually, plowed under. I know a lot of nerdy, soft men who, at some point, gave up on holding their place in the scrum of masculine relationships and either stopped developing human relationships altogether, or only talk to women, or only talk to other men who’ve opted out.

Something I’ve tried to be conscious about in my transition process is the extent to which I’m motivated by being able to escape from that constant onslaught of low-grade conflict. The noogies and the indian burns and the petty insults and coersions.

Obviously being a woman puts you in the position to be subject to a different kind of tension. Nobody will punch you in the shoulder and tell you your shirt makes you look like a faggot (if you’re a teenage boy on the football team and you wear a colorful shirt, this will definitely happen to you, and the person doing the punching is likely not even being mean, they’re just giving you feedback); you’ll just get… hints. You’ll be made to know, subtly, that you’re doing it wrong. Weird.

Back to the knees — If you’re a man and you’re sitting on the train on the way to work and you realize that you’re doing the manspreading thing that people you respect on social media complained about, and you guiltily pull your wings in, you’re going to think to yourself: You know, fuck this. I don’t have to do this.

And it’s in these little internal moments of reflection that decisions about allegiance and identity get made. If you end up having to choose between being constantly vaguely nagged to do things that are basically uncomfortable, and not, the answer, for a lot of men, is going to be not.

I sit with my knees together because it’s one of a thousand tiny ways I’m learning to be a woman. If I wasn’t learning to be a woman, I don’t know that I’d care at all.