The problem in the end is reification of gender, there is no real difference between the two except in terms of identity (which is valid). You are who you are, naming it is secondary.
Your comment is hella abstract, which makes sense considering your username. :thonk:
I think I agree with you though? Labels are typically just shorthand descriptions for others, not instructions on who / what we have to be.
One of the cool things about people is we even outgrow the labels used for us over time! The easiest example is around labels based on age, but for a lot of folx it can be based around gender or sexuality as well.
There was a period of time where I was definitely a dude. That shifted as I experienced life and I’m nonbinary now. I love that I’ve had that experience and also that’s definitely not the same journey others have, I’m just a genderfluid dude who also isn’t a dude lol
I'm not sold on this.
Just because gender is nebulous doesn't mean it doesn't exist in a distinctive way. I don't think people would have gender dysphoria if it was sufficient to say "I'm going to be all the socially recognizable things that I already am, and just call it the other category".
It makes a lot more sense to recognize that although most of the markers of gender are not fixed, there are correlations and clusters that we make in the blink of an eye in the process of assessing another person, and that the social construct of gender is built from these.
Just because gender is nebulous doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in a distinctive way. I don’t think people would have gender dysphoria if it was sufficient to say “I’m going to be all the socially recognizable things that I already am, and just call it the other category”.
I vaguely recall reading that desire to physically transition among kids with a proper support network declines massively. If that's true then I'm not really willing to dismiss this. It's plausible that desire to transition comes from desire to be accepted, recognised and affirmed as the gender we are and that genuinely being surrounded by that affirmation eliminates the feeling that there is a need to transition.
Not saying that's all there is to it but I think we have a tonne of research that needs doing into this topic.
Keep in mind that a) there's massive amounts of transphobic disinfo around gender affirming care for children, that b) not all trans people have or are aware of their dysphoria, that c) socially transitioning causes huge amounts of euphoria that wear off over time and that d) children still lack a huge part of the physical characteristics that cause dysphoria in the first place. From my personal experience, i'm absolutely not buying that idea, it is the exact opposite of what i experience. Almost everybody i interact with calls me by my real name and genders me correctly, but that doesn't change the fact that living in this skin is slowly, but surely killing me. I don't think i could handle this if i had socially triggered dysphoria on top of the physically triggered dysphoria. This is accutely life-threatenign for me and the idea that actual, pronounced dysphoria doesn't have to be met with gender-affirming care is something i view as actively genocidal against trans people.
It's ofc important not to pathologize transness in itself and to stress there's much, much more to being trans than pain and suffering, that you do not need dysphoria to be valid etc., but downplaying dysphoria in total is simply a threat for trans healthcare.
Yuh but I'm pretty sure that was one I picked up from Mermaids. My memory of it is messy though it's been a while since I was deeply involved in this topic.
I'm not invalidating you or that experience. I just think we know almost fuck all about this and really need to learn a lot more from very early care without the negative social hellscape playing a factor.
hey comrade! saw this and logged in to post quick. This is a hella relatable question for me. Heads up: this is all coming from an enby perspective.
I agonized over labels for a really long time before I realized that labels exist to serve us and not the other way around.
Labels are useful as descriptors to give other people a shorthand for sorta getting a rough idea of us, but they can become really harmful when we allow them to tell us what we “should” be.
When it comes to gender especially, I’ve found it really helpful to just try things out, see what “clicks” for me and then come up with a label afterwards based on that.
I will say that cis people tend to not spend too much time thinking about their gender as it’s hella affirmed for them every day by society.
That said, introspection is fucking rad! I have cis friends who have unpacked their feelings on gender, experimented and questioned stuff for a while, and then decided that yup, they were cis. That is awesome! That is legitimately one of the most radical things I can think of!
This comment is bordering on a sermon though and I’m agnostic, so I guess the more important question here is: what makes you wonder whether you might be nonbinary?
Also I’m on a bus on the way to a Halloween party so will probably dip out before you have a chance to respond. I’ll try and get you a reply when I log on later, but other comrades can totally jump in and pick up the convo.
Solidarity and love! It sounds like you’re doing the hard work of introspection! That can be scary, but damn is the payoff worth it.
:ancom-heart:
Oh shit, going to also throw this link out there, it’s a great resource that’s helped me a lot with identifying dysphoria and other gender stuff:
https://genderdysphoria.fyi/
It’s a longer read and a little more binary trans focused in some places, but fun if you want something to nerd out on.
I will say that cis people tend to not spend too much time thinking about their gender as it’s hella affirmed for them every day by society.
I get this, but I've also thought a lot about my orientation at several stages in my life and always landed on "straight", so I'm not sure this applies to me personally. I'm prone to intrusive thoughts and fixation, so the fact that I think about something a lot doesn't really mean much.
This comment is bordering on a sermon though and I’m agnostic, so I guess the more important question here is: what makes you wonder whether you might be nonbinary?
I think the largest thing is seeing a picture or drawing of a cute girl with a comment under it saying "gender envy" and finding it relatable. At the same time, I don't mind the way I look (for the most part), I definitely prefer he/him pronouns, and I like being thought of as masculine to an extent.
I've played female characters in video games since I was a kid, and as I've gotten older I like dressing them in cute clothes. I occasionally talk to my sister about fashion and sometimes send her pictures of vg outfits I put together lol.
I think what really eats at me is a feeling that I'm missing out on half the human experience.
EDIT: I think the most import thing to me in terms of labeling is whether or not I'm part of the LGBT community, but because I don't really feel oppressed to excluded based on gender/sexuality it seems weird.
I present pretty masculine, but if doing something or presenting in a way that I'd enjoy would mean breaking out of that box, I'll do so with total indifference.
I take pains to distance myself from the behaviors and thought patterns of your stereotypical toxic cis men, but on the whole I'm comfortable calling myself a man, living a man's life, and being perceived as a man. But equally, I refuse to do, say, or believe things that I don't enjoy or otherwise hold truck with just because they're expected of me as a man.
So, the latter I guess.
In addition to the excellent comments from Dirtbag and Abstraction, don’t be afraid of trying different things out. Try growing out a beard, or wearing makeup/stockings and seeing how you feel. For me, personally, I’ve realised it doesn’t matter what labels people apply to me. They’re all just ways for others to refer to me, not really something I need to personally identify with. That prolly comes from my strict belief in gender abolition tbh. Where we’re going, we don’t need gender.
Where we’re going, we don’t need gender.
brb going to buy a delorean and spray paint the transflag on it
Totally agree with the rest of your comment too, by the way, I just liked the idea of an enby doc brown
:halal:
I bought "programmer socks" a while ago but really don't like them. I texted my roommate earlier to ask about borrowing his nail polish so I'll see how I feel about that.
Oh sure, loads. The gender binary is and has always been trash and I've pretty much always fallen and been identified as being outside of it to some degree or another (I've always been gender non-conforming, now largely consider myself butch and gender-agnostic) so I have spent a ton of time doing that gender math and basically settled on "i don't care what gender I am, I don't care what gender people think I am as long as they don't have the same expectations of me that society has for women" and stopped bothering with it.
It was a big moment for me when I realized that it's never actually bothered me that people see me as a woman, it's only bothered me when I'm seen as incapable on the basis of being a woman 💀 or like, otherwise excluded from conversations or activities or whatever because I'm a woman. Similarly it doesn't bother me when people perceive me as a man, it only bothers me when people have then used that to try to exclude me from stuff because they don't think men should or do care about things. I've never really been bothered when people perceive me as being non-binary either, except for this one person who seemed really annoyed about they/them-ing me, like they were mad they couldn't figure out what gender I've got going on enough to be rude about it in a less passive-aggressive way lol
Another eye-opening thing for me was realizing that I spent a lot of time existing in socially-recognized, unofficial nonbinary genders.
Like, as a little kid, my gender was tomboy. That's how adults perceived me and referred to me in most cases, and was how I liked to be perceived. There was this bullshit expectation that I'd grow out of it, since it's one of the "unofficial" genders that western society definitely does recognize up until you're a certain age — but that was kind of how everyone identified me up until then.
There was a bit of an awkward period between tomboy and butch where my gender was kind of like "girl, but really weird about it" or just like generic baby lesbian, but all of those gender presentations pretty much kept people from expecting things of me that I didn't want them to, so they all worked for me just fine.
I didn't really have a point I was getting at here, but hopefully this was helpful or at worst a neutral use of your time :stalin-heart:
The outlook that holds that these are two real and discrete categories that a person has a fixed place in does not at all square with my understanding - that gender is a culturally-specific, socially-reinforced product of patriarchal oppression - or with my experience. Also, although yeah its a big step, what you decide on for yourself in your heart is nowhere near as important as how you live your life I think. Being non-binary to me means living in a way that conciously rejects the gender binary. I think this is especially important if you are from the bad gender. And obviously I think everyone should be gay if at all possible
And obviously I think everyone should be gay if at all possible
I'll try harder
it can confuse me sometimes, but then I just gotta learn. One must know their inherent prejudices and, through learning and many years, undo them.
