Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

I will keep an eye out for more links, Viceroy. They tend to float through Twitter and Tumblr and it would be nice to give them more discussion.

Hey Rev I'm glad you popped in here.

I wonder sometimes why we talk so much about clothing when we talk about Genderqueer, because it goes so far beyond that, and it does make me worry about coming across as shallow (because "thinking about clothing" is coded "female" and therefore "shallow and not worth considering in any serious manner" and really, fuck that particular logic of thinking.) But given that clothing, in our culture (most cultures?) is the single most visible indicator of "coding male" or "coding female" it's not surprising people end up talking about it.

(I mean, obv there are other aspects of my life where I experience other-triggered gender dysphoria, notably "you're the lead guitarist?" or "you're the DB admin?" or "you're the DJ/producer/soundperson/whatevs" but those things don't make me feel *genderqueer* they just make me feel like the person saying these things is a MASSIVE FUCKING SEXIST because those things are such inherent interests/my fucking career/whatever, even though in their heads these activities are "male-coded" and I spend so much of my time doing them in male spaces and I don't think about "presenting male" in those spaces, I just think about "doing my fucking job." There are, believe it or not, Cis Women who also have those careers! This made me feel like it was a political act to identify as a Cis Woman while in those roles, even though really, I am not.)

So we talk about clothes, and we talk about presenting gender through clothes, because clothing is a language that we choose as a way of expressing something about ourselves. And quite frankly, I don't think "jeans and a hoodie" codes "male" at all in this time in this society, it codes "default clothes; unisex." What would be "coding male" in the way that putting on a skirt (a skirt and not a kilt) is coding female? I dunno; putting on a suit? A shirt and tie? Waistcoats? (Waistcoats are such a "girl in drag" signifier, it's hilarious. I have always loved waistcoats p much since high school. Not even Mumfords can take them from me.) Even now that men almost never wear waistcoats, even with suits (more's the pity) and the last time a boy in my office wore one, everybody said "Oh, you're dressing like (Branwell) now?" and he was mortified.

But the thing is, for me, putting on a waistcoat or a shirt and tie does not *feel* like Drag in quite the same way that putting on a dress and pantyhose feels like Drag. And I don't know how much of that is to do with the fact that women's clothes are often really super-uncomfortable, and change the way you have to stand and sit. And maybe it's deep memories of spending my entire childhood up to and including adolescence running around in my brother's hand-me-downs as play clothes and only having to put on Girl Drag for formal occasions like church and dinner parties and jeez, those situations were uncomfortable, so I have projected the discomfort onto the clothes associated with them?

The only place I've ever felt the slightest bit comfortable wearing "girl clothes" was on stage, and that was always a theatrical performance, and that playing the role of "Rock Star" involves putting on a costume whether that is leather trousers or a 60s minidress. (Or "On The Dancefloor" at clubs, which is a different kind of "Stage".) Playing gigs at the Pyramid Club, where there was a rock venue on one floor and a drag club on the other, and as you went in, the drag queens would look you over, and if you went onstage wearing jeans and a t-shirt even at the height of the grunge era, they would say "Honey, you're not even trying" yet if I turned up in a suit with a model on each arm, they'd be far more approving. (And got into the idea of wearing ballgowns and wigs onstage as a drag performance rather than my actual gender expression.) I own dresses I now never wear because I no longer go onstage and I've given up even wearing dresses to weddings and funerals.

But this is something else that Rev hits on. Performing gender implies an audience. When I was working, it went without saying to put on a shirt and tie to go to work. Now I'm unemployed, I'm not going to do the same just to go to the supermarket. Having a roommate, having a partner, going to queer events and the like give you contexts in which to explore performing gender in different ways. Which is great! It sounds amazing! But without a context, sitting around on the sofa in pyjama bottoms and a massive hippie jumper so large as to render me genderless provides comfort on one level (no one is making me perform gender, phew, what a relief) but having a genderqueer space and a context in which to exist and perform without judgement (or at least without judgement on what gender you're supposed to be) would be way, way better.

Hmmm, I don't consider it drag when I wear women's clothes and I've really never cared for drag as an artform at all. It's exactly the performative aspects of it that I find offputting (also, while this obviously doesn't apply to drag kings or "bio queens", I've always found the idea of men caricaturing women gross). I guess I think about it more in terms of inner expression than performance. Wearing women's clothes doesn't feel performative to me so much as expressing my authentic (bear with me on this word) self. That doesn't necessarily mean that when I wear male clothes I'm being my fake self, depending on how I feel. But sometimes it feels off and I feel dysphoric, albeit this is fairly rare. Like on my dating profile I have a picture of myself in a suit which I have there because it was taken by a professional photographer and it's really the best recent picture I have, from a technical standpoint. But I was just looking at it and going, "that's not me." However, on the actual night this past summer when the photo was taken, I felt like an absolute stud dressed like that.

What I really react negatively to these days is having my masculinity enforced by other people, almost always men.

Something I wanted to say on the other thread: I can't relate to people who say they have no inner sense of gender or never thinking about their gender presentations. I'm constantly thinking about how I present my gender, almost to the point of obsession recently. My friend Lorena said something recently (which I can no longer find) that I identified strongly with about feeling alienated by non-binary people who felt felt neither male nor female. Her response was that she wants all the gender. I feel like that too.

Which is probably why I feel comfortable being addressed by either male or female pronouns but don't like gender-neutral pronouns at all.

I mean, obv there are other aspects of my life where I experience other-triggered gender dysphoria, notably "you're the lead guitarist?" or "you're the DB admin?" or "you're the DJ/producer/soundperson/whatevs" but those things don't make me feel *genderqueer* they just make me feel like the person saying these things is a MASSIVE FUCKING SEXIST because those things are such inherent interests/my fucking career/whatever, even though in their heads these activities are "male-coded" and I spend so much of my time doing them in male spaces and I don't think about "presenting male" in those spaces, I just think about "doing my fucking job."

That's clearly some classic sexist assholism...
"What?! A LADY Doctor! *monocle pop*"
bleeecchhh. Why do people even fucking make comments like that?!

anyway, my only takeaway is that being able to admin a database is 1) not a gendered activity and 2) damn fucking sexy.

Obviously none of this is to shit on people who tend more to the agender side, that's just much farther from how I feel personally than either male or female binary genders would be. xp

anyway, my only takeaway is that being able to admin a database is 1) not a gendered activity and 2) damn fucking sexy.

Haha my response would be 1) not a gendered activity and 2) ewwww techies avoid AVOID AVOID but agreed that that's just plain old sexism.

Hmmm, I don't consider it drag when I wear women's clothes and I've really never cared for drag as an artform at all. It's exactly the performative aspects of it that I find offputting (also, while this obviously doesn't apply to drag kings or "bio queens", I've always found the idea of men caricaturing women gross). I guess I think about it more in terms of inner expression than performance. Wearing women's clothes doesn't feel performative to me so much as expressing my authentic (bear with me on this word) self.

I have in the past taken any chance to wear women's clothes in public with the *pretense* that I was in drag/standard straight boy crossdressing, like for costume parties and such... but really I was trying to see how well I could pass for female. Which in its own way is performative, maybe? I don't think its performative in the same way as being a drag queen or a female impersonator is.

For me, it's more like... I would just like agender to be an *option* for me. It is never going to be an option for me because of my stupid fucking annoying body (and the first person who says "binders" to me will get a pop on the nose, because, really, *fuck* binders.)

Nah, really, I'm OK with my body most of the time. But it just means that "body positivity" has an extra dimension to it. It's not me; it's some station wagon that ferries me around.

I'm feeling kinda bummed now, but it's been a kinda "onslaught of bad news" kinda day.

p.s. adminning a database is not "sexy" it is a fucking job. And I would also really like a space where every action I performed was not judged on whether it was "sexy" or not. I'm really not trying to pick on you, Viceroy, I know you meant it as a compliment, but that's part of what I am trying to get rid of. Say adminning a database is "powerful" or "cool" or whatever else. But I'm kinda done with being judged on "sexy."

Sorry, I guess that was flip... I meant really more that it's difficult and brainy and that sort of thing is attractive to me. I understand how you feel and I apologize.

Also...

For me, it's more like... I would just like agender to be an *option* for me. It is never going to be an option for me because of my stupid fucking annoying body (and the first person who says "binders" to me will get a pop on the nose, because, really, *fuck* binders.)

Is perhaps being able to be fully agender is a privilege that people with relatively androgynous can enjoy? I haven't really thought about that.

^ relatively androgynous *bodies

Nah, I get it, and it's fine, but I do appreciate the apology.

I don't think it's related to "relatively androgynous" but more to "man as default gender." It's easier to pass as the quintessential "non-gendered" avatar stick man of the internet when you have short hair, white skin and no visible breasts.

I could say more about "androgynous" becoming code for "pretty boys and slim girls" rather than people that actually have a mix of masculine and feminine features, but... oops, I think I just did anyway.

"androgynous" becoming code for "pretty boys and slim girls"

I think, unfortunately, that IRL, there's no "becoming" about it - that's what they mean. I mean literally androgynous but not in an avatar stick man way cause that sounds weird and gross.

And I agree with the man as default gender thing as it relates to the ease of being androgynous and identifying as agender. Looks like male privilege wins again.

I guess I don't have anything more to add to that line of discussion.

Well, no, because one can separate the concepts of "androgynous" and "agender" and "default gender" - these are different things to be teased apart.

I feel like your're mad at me for agreeing with you and also mad at me for not being able to completely formulate what I mean to say perfectly.

Of course you can separate those concepts, I was trying to talk about how they might be interrelated. But I'm pretty clumsy I guess. No offense intended.

Her response was that she wants all the gender.

love this

Viceroy! I'm not angry at you at all! I apologise if in any way shape or form, anything made you think I as angry at you! I think these are interesting conversations to be having, and I'm grateful to you for having them with me!

OK, honestly, I am experiencing quite a lot of ~ambient anger~ right now, mostly because it's been "International Talk About Sex With 13 Year Olds" today and yesterday and all week really, and, as someone who was raped at 13, that's a topic that generates huge amounts of quite justifiable anger in me - which I do understand, keeping that anger under control makes my posts about any emotive topics kinda short and curt and maybe a bit strained, which can probably be read as "angry." But I'm not actually ~angry~ at anyone right now. Especially not you, Viceroy. This stuff is cool to think about.

oh ok! Damn, yeah I can see why you'd have a lot of ambient anger and distress! That sounds really shitty to have to deal with and highly triggering!!

I think it's an interesting dynamic, that "I want to have ALL the gender" vs "I want to have NONE of the gender" are related in that they are both rejections of the gender binary, but they're also quite different, both in presentation and maybe in the internal experience of it. The confusion over vocabulary is to be expected when it's still unfamiliar (and in many cases, still in the process of words being defined.) (Are any words ever really *done* being defined? That's another question.)

"What does this word even mean?" is a good discussion to start with IMO.

I don't know if anyone else is still even reading/posting to this thread or if there are just too damn few of us to keep this going?

Anyway, this popped up on Tumblr today:

http://pi-ratical.tumblr.com/post/71437998564/i-am-really-extremely-amazingly-excited-to

And there's been a lot of discussion about pronouns in the trans* community (and I still don't feel entirely comfortable identifying as part of that community, even thought "the trans* community" as such was specifically widened from "the trans community" with the aim of including ~people like me~ - which is a weird thing in and of itself, because the bulk of my life has been identity-based communities narrowing themselves to *not* include ~people like me~ - so on one level it's nice but on another level, it's kinda... I don't want to co-opt an identity I have no right to? But that is not the discussion at hand here...)

The discussion I want to bring up is about pronouns. And though I am really, really in favour of the idea of Gender Neutral Pronouns (whether that be Zie/singular They/whatever) just for the purpose of getting the default misogyny out of the English language. And though I am also really in favour of people using - and other people respecting - the pronoun that best fits their gender. And fully believing that actively misgendering someone who has specified a pronoun is an act of aggression.

Still, I don't actually GAF what pronoun someone uses, regarding me, and feel that it's somehow bad that I've not even considered this. (Dealing with shit in my life, I've got bigger fish to fry/hills to die on.) But trying to say that in a way that is not diminishing of people who do feel it's important to them. This is my personal experience, and my personal preference, and is in no way proscriptive of other people's preferences or experiences!

I would love a gender neutral pronoun to use on *everyone*, and to use in place of all those clumsy "him or her" constructions in instruction manuals. I would love that!

But the idea of adopting a pronoun and insisting people use it with regards to me... wow, I have enough battles.

(The thing about thinking "you are the only one" for years, then finding others ~like you~ is that sudden fear that you might actually be ~doing things wrong~ when you had no idea that all along you were even doing a thing.)

iirc Sweden recently introduced a gender-neutral pronoun ('hen'?) into the language. Will be interesting to see how usage picks up over the next few years.

That's the kind of question that thrills my inner linguistics nerd - is that the kind of thing that can be imposed onto a language, will usage pick up, or will it become a kind of formal thing that falls by the wayside?

Not even looking at pronouns, but looking at formal systems of grammar, there are examples of both tendencies. That Latin, with its multiple declensions, had nouns that were masculine, feminine, and neuter. But most modern Romance languages (at least the ones I've studied) have lost the neuter and gone to a 2-gender system. Then you have a language like English, where, even though its source languages have grammatical gender, almost all nouns except personal ones have had the gender rubbed off them.

Feel like on account of this, English should be better. (And for a long time, it seems like it was - have seen evidence that singular "they" was considered good English grammar for most of modern English's history, and the default "he" was actually fairly modern invention.)

I guess this is just kinda indicative of my systems-thinking, that I really want a gender neutral pronoun for applying in general cases, but am completely uninterested in whether or not it gets applied to me specifically.

I read about someone documenting the organic use of "Yo" as a gender-neutral pronoun by young people--oh, here it is!

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/yo-as-a-pronoun

In most cases you can rewrite a sentence to exclude pronouns and thus avoid the awkward "they." For example:

"A student asked me if they could use the bathroom" becomes "A student asked to use the bathroom."

The place I butt up against pronoun trouble the most is actually in writing manuals/help documentation for databases and other apps. So, although to a certain extent, you can replace gendered language by making it plural (Data entry operators should do X... blah blah blah... then they do Y...) but there are times when obviously only one user will be using a particular bit, and shoehorning in "they" becomes more and more clumsy. The obvious solution would be to use "you do X..." but technical writing can't easily take on that tone of informality.

A Friday LOL relevant to this thread: http://www.robot-hugs.com/but-men/

LOL-tastic! I'm going to go and put that on the Gurl Thread because: relevant to our interests!

I think a gender-neutral pronoun is pretty important but their seems to be a weird glut of them and they seem to be not easily pronounceable or at least it's not self-evident how they would be pronounced. Such words won't catch on if you can't use them unawkwardly in spoken English, I feel.

IDK my knee-jerk opinion is that instead of worrying about misgendering someone, you should probably just ask them their name and use that. If they want to tell you their gender they will.

I love that cartoon

um also in the "don't know where to put this so I'm putting it here" department, two teenagers that I currently know have decided to change gender from F to M in the last year or two. I live in a diehard bastion of the Left Coast, so it is really awesome to see them be able to do this with a minimum of hassle and a lot of community support. in fact, one of the families moved back here from Minnesota so that the kid would have an easier time (they had left a couple of years ago).

Pat Califia was probably the first person I read who really started breaking down the science of gender, in terms of how the reality is non-binary. it makes so much more sense to me when you open up the possibilities like that.

Re gender neutral pronouns, I've been saying "they" since I was a kid. It sounds pretty natural. Re misgendering someone, it isn't often that I have to refer to someone's gender at all unless I do so in the third person, which is a situation that rarely comes up when a person is present, and can be avoided with a little thoughtfulness. What I usually do is explain to the person I'm talking to that I don't want to misgender so-and-so, and say "they," or I just say "they" in the first place and forego the spiel. It's not a perfect solution, because it's not what that person would necessarily prefer, but it's respectful, maybe? Or not. I'm not sure. But they don't have to hear something dysphoric to their face.

I was thinking recently that I suspect there are a lot of cis gendered men who would like to be prettier, or would like to look nicer in women's clothing (or even to have the opportunity (which they do have, I admit) to engage with fashion and style the way women do) or who would like to be more "feminine." I also thought about cis men and women's dissatisfaction with their bodies and genitals: balls that hurt, ugly penises, ugly vaginas, stubbly faces and hairy legs, high pitched and low pitched voices, balding heads, weird boobs. (Assume free indirect discourse where you please. Add your own scare quotes.) The wrong shape. The wrong height. All the sex-characteristic pains and discomforts.

I'm totally happy with my body, it's just my presentation and, I guess, personality traits I find myself unhappy with often. I guess that's not quite true. Sometimes I wish I was short so I would have to stand on my tippytoes to kiss someone.

Re: pronouns, I feel bad about it but "they" just feels awkward to me. I use it if someone has specifically requested it or if I have good reason to suspect I might otherwise misgender someone, but it feels so lumpen on my tongue. For other people's usage to describe me, I prefer male pronouns unless I have specifically given permission to use female pronouns.

Viceroy, I'm guessing for most people who choose pronouns like ze and hir and etc, it's more about queering language than practicality of use.

Two of my roommates had a big shouting match a few weeks ago cause one (cis) kept purposefully misgendering the other (trans). I had to intervene on the side of the latter because the former just did not want to listen to him, but I was really glad he finally stood up for himself on that matter.

Oh and, I was going to post about "yo" a couple days ago when BB first brought this up but I didn't have time! I've been thinking about "yo" a lot lately.

There's this weird disconnect between wanting to use people's pronoun's as a way of showing respect for their gender identity, which is great, and this space of "treating trans* people totally differently from the one one treats cis people, which is totally icky.

I was emailing A, who had met our mutual friend B, who is trans, at a concert, and I wanted to ask "What is B like? Zie is hilarious online! Is Zie the same in person?" because I do not know what pronoun B uses and respect B enough to want to get it right, and know that B's trans-ness is an important thing to B. But at the same time realising, that if A had met C, who is cis, I would not have thought twice about saying 'What is C like? She seems really wise online, is she the same in person?" and I would never have thought to use a gender neutral pronoun with C. And not knowing which of those two options is the better - queering everyone, or trying to adjust my language based on known preferences*.

*Yes, I also know that using the words "preferred pronoun" is problematic. When you are talking about e.g. a trans woman it is quite clear to me that her pronoun is "her" and this is not a "preference", this is just her pronoun. But asking to use "their" or "Zie" or "Hir" etc - the act of *choosing one* of several ambiguous pronouns is a preference, where requesting "a gender-neutral pronoun" is not a preference in the same way "a trans woman is she" is not a preference. It's tough. I'm of two minds about this.

It's shitty, because I've heard both sides, in terms of "showing respect means not assuming and waiting until the person volunteers" vs "OMG I am so sick of having to *tell* people what my pronoun is, it would be nice, just once in my life, to be *asked*" which really starts to feel like, whatever choice you make, is wrong. But still wanting to show basic respect.

It depends. I've said before, I don't really care what pronouns people use (I've spent a lot of my life being indiscriminately gendered, with embarrassment for the other person, and mostly just amusement for me) but for real, if anyone ever uses "zie" or any other gender neutral pronoun with me, I instantly perk up and just think "you are my people!" because it shows they've thought about this stuff.

OK, I'm going to do some reading on "yo". It feels rather too American for me to use, but it's an interesting idea.

Kind of thinking about other stuff, presentation and the like...

Body dissatisfaction in cis people is a whole nother kettle of fish, possibly tangentially related, but... OK, I spent nearly 3 years working for a cosmetic surgeon, surrounded by an environment that was constantly trying to ramp up body dissatisfaction for commercial gain. On one level, it actually made it easier to ignore, because when you see the brutal capitalist machinery of what is behind the constant advertising/media representation of "body perfection" it does on one level empower (ugh, sorry, horrible word) one to see the man behind the curtain and go "this is fucking bullshit and should be torn down and resisted with every ounce of one's being." But on another level, living inside that environment 40, 50 hours a week, every week for 3 years, I do believe that ramped up my body dissatisfaction and, more saliently, my gender dysphoria to the breaking point. The result was a kind of collapse that I'm able to see in retrospect as a nervous breakdown. Living in that environment would have been difficult and challenging for person who was totally confident in their Cis-ness. Living in that environment as a person who was already trans-ish and questioning and would have called themself probably genderqueer had they had that word, it was one of the most actively poisonous environments of my life, all the most poisonous aspects of late capitalist gender malarkey ramped up to 11, all the time.

So... on level, it's like, yeah, this shit is awful for Cis people. But it's worse for trans* people.

But from a different angle, there's a point where, if you are trans* you are almost never going to measure up to "society"s standards of beauty, so why bother, and it's incredibly freeing to recognise them as impossible-for-you and thus disregard them.

OK, what follows is mine own digestion-of-things-I-have-read and quite possibly bullshit and misremembered because my memory is so poor, feel free to correct me or link the correct source or call me out for unexamined bias, but this is my supposition:

It's inspired by the memory of reportings, IIRC, of self image in fat women - I do not remember if this was an actual study, or just a blog or a comments thread, so I do not know the sample size or how representational this is. In this discussion, there was a discrepancy in the self-reporting of white women reporting poor self image based on their perceived fatness, but fat black women had better self image and were more likely to self report feeling "beautiful" and affirming their beauty than fat white women. And there was some discussion of what might cause this, if it were a greater acceptance of a wider range of body types in African American communities (well, yes and no, different range of body types, but not necessarily wider.) But when those black women were asked about their positive self image, individual women said things like - because the standard of beauty in this country is so based around thinness, yes, but also whiteness, blondness, European looks, those things are just Not Applicable. If you have to recreate a personal standard of beauty entirely from scratch, that standard of beauty for self love can include fatness as well as different standards of skin tone, hair texture. It's paradoxically less of a big project to include that one aspect in an image of beauty and self love made completely from scratch, than it is to try to match a standard of perfection where you are capable of matching several aspects (whiteness, European features and hair) that do look like you, but not the impossible one that doesn't look like you (weight).

I apologise again, for any misremembering, misinterpretation and also for lack of links to where I encountered these ideas - the fat-o-sphere is a big place. It might have been a study, a blog, a comments thread, I have such poor memory, I do not remember the source; I would be grateful if anyone else did. I also acknowledge the possibility that I may have got this completely RONG in a way that is hugely offensive to Women of Colour, though I really hope that I haven't. I do *not* mean to imply that black women "have it any easier" in this culture, because clearly they do not, it's about self-reporting, not about how one is perceived by others.

Now I'm done qualifying and hedging and "trying and probably failing not to express racist things when talking about race": the thing that stuck with me, and the takeaway that I took away, was this idea that when you are trying to measure yourself against an impossible standard that *seems* achievable, it is much harder to resist it than an impossible standard that will *never* be achievable. To use an example switched to enhance its absurdity: there is some capitalist fantasy world where if I buy all the products and use all the things, it is just conceivable that it might be achievable, *maybe* to turn out looking like Claudia Schiffer. There is no fantasy world where I buy all the products and use all the things where I turn out looking like Idris Elba.

Cis-Het femininity, I have just accepted, is just not an option that is available to me. I say this as someone who has been "read" as queer, my entire life, even when I was trying most hard to present as heterosexual. Cis-Het masculinity is also just not an option that is available to me. I am already "other". It's up to me to piece together a personal standard of gender, like a personal standard of beauty, which includes me and that I can live up to.

Talking about this stuff is hard, and I am not up to the task. I apologise again for all the ways in which I have got it wrong. I am often aware of being the stupidest person on any given thread, this is just one more. Sorry.

Oh, and one more thing, which I was thinking of after waking up but before reading this thread: wondering about the intersection of "performing a gender" with "interacting with other people."

This is a thought provoked by how currently isolated I am right now, how few IRL interactions with other people I have right now, and if my increasing sense of "being agender" is related to "no others to perform gender to" rather than an intrinsic quality. Interactions with other people = "performing/identifying genderqueer" while being on one's own for days/weeks at a time = "no performance, ergo identifying agender."

Don't want to sound too mopey or "lonely guy just thinkin bout things" though.

Right. Must. Leave. House. Now.

Realised, on reflection, I can summarise that sprawling, overthinky, awkwardly phrased post up above:

For Women of Colour, and/or also for Trans* people, practising self love as a political act.

Yeah, that whole spiel otm. I guess I'm conventionally attractive, but the less I've worried about imposed standards of masculinity, the more attractive I've felt. When I was trying hard to be masculine, I didn't feel attractive at all.

OK, I'm going to do some reading on "yo". It feels rather too American for me to use, but it's an interesting idea.

Not just too American! On a side note, part of the reason I've been thinking about "yo" a lot, is because my roommate, who is black and trans, has a name that begins with those two letters and is used to being called Yo anyways. So I've ended up trying it out a few times since reading about it. Plus it's just fun to use.

Re gender neutral pronouns, I've been saying "they" since I was a kid.

― bamcquern, Friday, January 3, 2014 8:31 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we had a long argument once about your refusal to use "they"!

Haha, I can believe it. I definitely used it as a kid, and it felt more natural and "native" to me then than it does now. It was surely my linguistic miseducation that made me argue against singular they, which i don't specifically remember doing, but i have a terrible memory of myself (Broseph is always telling me stories of me). The thing about language chauvinism is that it is usually as ignorant as it is confident.

Some good stuff happened here:

http://www.hashtagfeminism.com/queeringgender-affirming-us-loving-us/

I liked that whole lot!!!

So I'm currently experimenting with "person/per" as both an ungendered third person singular pronoun, and also as an unspecified pronoun for avoiding the ambiguities of that you/I/we/one cluster which leads so easily to problems. Maybe it will start to come naturally, maybe it will start to feel really clunky and I'll give it up. It feels like an interesting experiment to do right now.

Seeing this play out in various timelines has been interesting, although one conjugate of the new pronoun could result in 'pe'.

1) no, it's person/per
2) I recognise that you are trying to make a joke, but where you point your humour is a reflection on you, and I don't find this playful

Uh, so yesterday my mom asked me if I was trans. That was kinda weird.

I said not really, but I didn't really care about presenting as masculine anymore. She said she asked because of my facebook which shows me in women's clothes and says I'm female and people had been asking her. Plus she also knew I've been hanging with a lot of trans people lately.

I kind of wish I'd answered that better, but I didn't really feel like explaining "genderqueer" to my parents at that moment.

new DN just dropped

haha

kinda side jaunt, deflatormouse i loved your post and i may or may not get back to it. in the meantime i wrote (but didn't post) a thing yesterday about disgust, and then today i wrote this which i figure i will post:

I've found myself talking semi-seriously about what I've started calling "kyphophobia" and today I'm thinking, hey, it's probably worth explaining seriously why I talk about it and what it means to me.

For some number of years now, sometimes I'll be in situations where someone will say "lean back" or "stand up straight" or some such thing, and I will, and they'll say "no, that's not right". That was frustrating, but also kind of routine. My body not behaving the way I wanted it to has been kind of a lifelong experience.

I was born with a developmental disorder that's now known as "dyspraxia". It wasn't medicalized at that time. It was, however, clear that I was unusually poorly coordinated compared to my peers, and as a result I was treated pretty much the same way anyone with any kind of developmental disorder is treated. Oh, you're not good at this thing that everybody else is good at, what's wrong with you? It was something I could get by without it being acknowledged or treated in any way, which I think in some ways is an advantage. Now that I'm middle-aged, though, I find that there are a lot of, like, really effective ways to treat this stuff, and I'm thinking, gee, it would be great if I'd had this 40 years ago instead of being yelled at constantly because my body didn't behave in the ways other people expected.

And this is interesting because this experience is to some extent _correlated_ with my transness, because one of the interesting things about my body is that I have this thing called "hypermobility". Like, there's a normal range of motion joints have, and my range of motion goes a fair bit beyond that. It's a spectrum. I'm not, like, a contortionist like you'd see at sideshows, though I have met some trans people who genuinely are that flexible. It's still enough to qualify as hypermobile. And it turns out this _hypermobility_ is something that is statistically correlated with transness, along with a few other things, like for instance neurodiversity. I got no idea why. As far as I know, nobody has any idea way. Anybody tries to make the slightest _bit_ of causative inference here and I will psychokinetically glare daggers at your brain until you stop. (No, wait, I'm being completely serious here. I don't have psychokinetic powers. Or the ability to double-jump.)

A lot of hypermobility is associated with something called Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes. There are like 13 of these. I haven't been diagnosed with any of them, but it turns out it mostly doesn't get diagnosed. Most people aren't aware of it, aren't aware of the symptoms. As it turns out this is something that's pretty easy to test for! You can genetically test for EDS, which isn't true for a lot of other ways in which people are different. Honestly I'm pretty averse to getting tested for anything just because of the way people use genetics as a form of gatekeeping. If I say "a lot of trans people have EDS", somehow that turns into "if you don't have EDS you're not really trans". I am strongly and actively opposed to that sort of transmedicalist approach, so I haven't had my karyotype done or any of this other sort of genetic testing, because as far as my being trans goes, the results don't matter.

For EDS I guess it does, though, so I'll probably wind up getting tested at some point. For the moment, though, all I can say is that I do have joint hypermobility. See, I didn't think that having joint hypermobility would be correlated with dyspraxia at first. It confused me. I was like, wait, if someone's joints can move that much, that seems more like a superpower than something that would make you uncoordinated. The thing is that humans have the normal range of motion we do for a reason. Because my body moves in so many ways that most people can't, the idea of "OK, here, this is the most kinetically effective way to move", that's pretty difficult for me to get to, even now.

The other thing about my hypermobility is that I wasn't aware at all that I was hypermobile until after I transitioned. Some of the biggest symptoms of gender dysphoria for me were dissociation and depersonalization. I didn't so much feel like I was born into the "wrong body" as much as I resented having a body at all. I hated how it looked, sounded, and felt, I didn't see any possible way to change that condition, and as a result, I mostly tried to ignore it as much as possible. So much of the joy of my existence is what I call embodiment - the feeling of having a body and existing in that body for the first time.

And part of that is realizing the ways in which my body is different from "normal" bodies beyond, like, the trans stuff. When I started spending more time around other people (another knock-on effect of my transition), people started seeing me do my normal wrist stretches for my carpal tunnel and asked me "Wait, how do you do that?" I genuinely had thought that everybody could bend their wrist that far. I didn't think of myself as hypermobile because I wasn't a contortionist or anything. I also realized that my back wasn't curved the way backs usually are, so I went in to get spine X-rays. My physical therapist went and looked at them.

"OK, so these are the ones of you bent over - where are the ones of you standing up straight?"
"Those _are_ the ones of me standing up straight."
"Ohhhhh. Uh. So did this just happen, or...?"

Apparently it's unusual for someone to have kyphoscoliosis as severely as I do and just not _talk_ to anybody about it for decades. Honestly, I have no idea whatsoever how to benchmark pain, what's really severe and I need to get looked at, and what's something I can just deal with and don't need to talk to anybody about. I don't know how much it's _normal_ for people to hurt. See the thing is that physical and emotional pain have a _lot_ more in common than people often like to acknowledge. Not only did gender dysphoria hurt to such an extent that it was very difficult for me to accurately understand or diagnose other sources of pain _before_ transition, but I am still dealing with some pretty significant long-term effects from spending several decades working really hard to ignore the effects of an extremely painful, potentially lethal health condition, one that I really fucking needed to get treated. When it got so bad I couldn't ignore it, I tended to deal with it by doing things like curling into a ball for hours on end or screaming "IT HURTS" repeatedly, and being unable to elaborate any further. I got a reputation for being a bit of a hypochondriac.

My physical therapist is actually really great. I was able to tell her why I spent several decades not caring about my body, and she understood really well. She gave me some physical therapy exercises I can do in case I have days where I'm too depressed to get out of bed. It's worked out really well - sometimes doing the exercises gives me the kind of strength I need to actually get out of bed.

-

All of that is pretty much just background, though. What really has me thinking about this whole thing is what happens when I tell people I'm a hunchback, which is that people will tell me I'm not. It's funny, because the thing I was most scared about when I was coming out as trans was that someone would respond with "no you're not". When people tell me that I'm not a hunchback, though... well, it's just given me a lot of perspective. When I was coming out, what worried me most is that if somebody else said I wasn't trans, _they might be right_. When someone's in a position of authority, it's just so easy to kind of assume that what they're saying is right. With my kyphosis, though, I find people who are situationally in positions of authority arguing with me about my own body. Not maliciously, is the thing. Like one of the people telling me I'm not kyphotic is trans herself. That's kind of what's interesting to me.

I say "I'm a hunchback" and not "I'm kyphotic" because nobody fuckin' knows what "kyphotic" means. I've thought about, you know, is hunchback a slur, am I using a reclaimed slur, but ultimately I gotta tell people things in language they'll understand. Except they don't, because the only thing they know from "hunchback" is Quasimodo.

I don't really know a lot about _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_. I haven't read any Victor Hugo. I didn't see the Disney version (came out after my time). I think I saw some of the Lon Chaney version. I really like him as an actor, even if his girl voice in the sound version of _The Unholy Three_ wasn't exactly all that and a plate of chips. (Heat from fire, fire from heat, Lon.) Overall my impression is that it's a good story, a good movie, and my GOD is it kyphophobic.

Like kyphosis really isn't a super rare condition. Lots of people have it. It's a form of scoliosis, which again, is pretty common. The only conception anybody has in their mind of it, though, is this grotesquely deformed creature, which, like, OK, he's not evil, he has a heart of gold or whatever, that's nice. The Disney character design makes him look pretty loveable even. He's still deformed. I was actually writing about this the other day, the disgust response. Humans often feel disgust when we see something that we consider "extremely ugly". So the only idea in someone's heads of a hunchback is someone who's extremely ugly and disgusting, even if the moral lesson is that, hmmm, when I see someone who I consider to be so ugly that I'm disgusted by them, I shouldn't act on that emotion.

So when people tell me I'm not a hunchback, not kyphotic, what I hear them saying is more that "You're not extremely ugly, I don't feel disgusted by you". Which is good! I'm glad they don't consider me extremely ugly and feel disgust when they look at me. I'm still a hunchback, though!

It helps me to frame things in this way because the stakes for "kyphophobia" are so incredibly low. Nobody's going to try to "clock" me as a hunchback. It's annoying that people try to claim I'm not kyphotic when I am, but people who recognize me as kyphotic don't think of me as disgusting or grotesque because of it. I don't suffer prejudice because of my kyphosis. It's actually not a big deal at all.

And this is frustrating to me because in my mind, that's how people _should_ deal with my being trans. I just can't imagine saying that I shouldn't be allowed in the bathroom because my being kyphotic makes me a predator or some such ridiculous nonsense, but thanks largely to transphobic media narratives, people seem to actually believe that my being trans rises to that level of significance. It's just so bizarre to me that people are looking at me for "signs" of something that's far less observable than my FUCKING HUNCHBACK and meanwhile not only don't _notice_ that I'm a hunchback, they don't BELIEVE me when I tell them that I am! You ask me about my bones and I'll say things like "kyphosis, scoliosis, thoracic compression fractures", but transphobes, all they say is "BONES OF A MAN". Like, it's not even about them being _wrong_. It's not meaningful, accurate, or useful anatomical knowledge. There are a lot of interesting things about my skeletal system. If all someone's interested in doing with it is arbitrarily assigning a gender, they're missing a _lot of clinically interesting shit_. I guess that's what frustrates me the most about the pseudomedicalism of transphobes. If someone doesn't _like_ my body, fine, but if somebody's going to spend that much fucking time thinking about my body, it's absolutely appalling to me that they wouldn't at least find my body _interesting_.

-

So I guess... that's what my kyphosis, my hunchback, my experience with "kyphophobia" means to me. My body is interesting in a lot of different ways _other_ than being trans. Some of the ways in which it's _more_ interesting as well as more _obviously_ interesting are seen as _less important_ than stuff that just really doesn't matter at all to most of the people who make a big deal about it. The "kyphophobia" I experience is directly a result of negative, inaccurate portrayals of "hunchbacks" in the media which lead people to think of "hunchbacks" as grotesquely ugly and disgusting. The only way I can even _describe_ my kyphotic condition to them is by using a word which I'm just gonna go right ahead and call a "slur".

Despite this, my being a hunchback has _not_ caused me to suffer any significant prejudice. Even when people have misunderstandings about my being a hunchback, they don't go into a whole moral panic about it or react at all in a way that's grossly incongruent with my actual condition. People don't assign any moral value to my kyphosis. All of these things are particularly remarkable to me because of how starkly they contrast with the way people react to my transness. Talking about "kyphophobia" is in large part, for me, a way to communicate how grossly inappropriate and malicious the prejudice associated with transphobia really is. My being a hunchback isn't in and of itself important or noteworthy, and it _shouldn't be_.

Not only did gender dysphoria hurt to such an extent that it was very difficult for me to accurately understand or diagnose other sources of pain _before_ transition, but I am still dealing with some pretty significant long-term effects from spending several decades working really hard to ignore the effects of an extremely painful, potentially lethal health condition, one that I really fucking needed to get treated. When it got so bad I couldn't ignore it, I tended to deal with it by doing things like curling into a ball for hours on end or screaming "IT HURTS" repeatedly, and being unable to elaborate any further. I got a reputation for being a bit of a hypochondriac.

ok this is why revising my drafts is good, the "extremely painful, potentially lethal health condition" i'm talking about isn't kyphosis, it's _gender dysphoria_. having kyphosis hurts but god, nothing hurts like gender dysphoria.

I didn't so much feel like I was born into the "wrong body" as much as I resented having a body at all. I hated how it looked, sounded, and felt, I didn't see any possible way to change that condition, and as a result, I mostly tried to ignore it as much as possible. So much of the joy of my existence is what I call embodiment - the feeling of having a body and existing in that body for the first time.

i'm telling you, Plux Quba is the best! it's the only high school classic that I still go back to a lot (i am probably forgetting something). it's... i wouldn't say it's front-loaded, but it is "top-heavy" in that most of the density and physical mass is located in the first 2 or 3 tracks which are each like a minute long. And then after that the dominant voices on the record are disembodied voices.
So like the disembodied voices on Plux Quba are really the clearest expression i can find of how i experienced life as a child. Of, above all, detachment- and also perceiving things slowly, through a haze, and of the tactile and sensual being limited to the euphoria of a gentle lull, a brain sensation like ASMR.

Maybe what i'm trying to describe is trouble activating. And i still experience that some of the time!

I don't know if it's dysphoria or something else, because most of my life i regarded my body as just an avatar, and that kind of outlook leads to neglect and forming bad habits and it becomes like a self-perpetuating cycle. Having the sense that the self and the body are separate, or the mind and the body has been a very good way to experience life as a void ime.

I think I required other people to snap me out of it, honestly. I needed people to force me to be present, in real time. And I needed to be touched! It was never something I could do on my own, or by thinking or talking.

I hear you about how it's easier to just say a recognizable, misleading thing.

I don't know if it's dysphoria or something else, because most of my life i regarded my body as just an avatar, and that kind of outlook leads to neglect and forming bad habits and it becomes like a self-perpetuating cycle. Having the sense that the self and the body are separate, or the mind and the body has been a very good way to experience life as a void ime.

― O Fundo Escuro de (Deflatormouse)

um yeah that's actually textbook dysphoria, that's dissociation, that was most of how i experienced my dysphoria. i legit didn't think i had dysphoria, because i thought "dysphoria" just meant constantly hating your dick and wanting it cut off, which i never did. (yeah i've had it cut off but i didn't ever hate it or even _want_ it cut off or anything, there was just other stuff i wanted that was incompatible with my continuing to have a dick.)

anyway "dysphoria" turns out to be all kinds of shit that i just thought was totally normal. and that also meant that when i felt bad because of dysphoria i didn't ever think of it as "dysphoria" or imagine that it had anything to do with my gender. i just hurt a lot and i wasn't ever to make the connection about _why_ i would have these attacks. like i'd see a girl in a pretty dress and my brain would be like "i wish i could be pretty like that", but i couldn't allow myself to consciously acknowledge that, which didn't make me feel better and sometimes i feel like might actually have made it worse. i felt like wanting to be pretty the way girls are was awful because women had to deal with patriarchy and all that and it was awful of me to want anything like that, i felt like i didn't have a right to want that stuff. i was never big into the stones but i thought about the lyrics to "paint it black" a lot.

My thing with the Stones is the indelible image of their recent incarnations playing Start Me Up or it's Only Rock n Roll in a hockey stadium makes me forget how good they actually were in the 60's.

anyway "dysphoria" turns out to be all kinds of shit that i just thought was totally normal. and that also meant that when i felt bad because of dysphoria i didn't ever think of it as "dysphoria" or imagine that it had anything to do with my gender.

Yeah it's a tough thing to recognize and diagnose.

like i'd see a girl in a pretty dress and my brain would be like "i wish i could be pretty like that"

I have only and always had eyes for the boys tho. Not sure if that complicates things more, or less 😅😂😭

Yeah idk on second thought I mean I have worn eye glitter and mascara, little girls' plastic hair clips, pink and purple feather boas etc on rare occasions, like, the overall look i was going for was still basically male but there is prob some repressed shit going on here LOL

Like at the very least there is def a certain pixie-ish candy/glam/kawaii style that I'm drawn to and have emulated at times

i mean i don't think it's necessarily helpful to be committed to any one label, that's just how it went for me because i present "binary femme" (although also things change and evolve over time, i'm not actually very femme most of the time - i wear sweaters and jeans or t-shirts and jeans). the way i went about it was that anything i was afraid to do because of how people would judge me, i tried it out to figure out how _i_ felt about it. and, you know, one road leads to another; i've done lots of things since starting to explore that i was absolutely sure i _never_ wanted to do. so i'd say don't be afraid to try that, particularly if it's something like... the biggest thing that was a challenge for me was feeling like i had to "dress my age" and that is _absolutely_ not a requirement.

Thanks Kate <3
Oh I’m not at all concerned about what to call this. Much more focused on how I can use it to live more fully

Yeah I do a lot of things that are not age appropriate, nobody gives fewer fucks

I just realized Tuesday was the 20th anniversary of the live premiere of Brian Wilson's "Smile". This is, was, an important album to me. I've seen multiple trans readings of it. Not sure why. For me it's the idea of it. This fragmented, incomplete thing which has sort of been _reconstructed_ many years later. Except "reconstructed" isn't quite accurate. In 2004, it was constructed for the first time, in ways and using methods that wouldn't have been possible in 67. At the same time, a lot of the people who were part of those '67 sessions had passed away, were gone. There's a sense of loss overshadowing it. A sense of "what could have been", of "if only". It's hard not to feel that way about myself. It's hard not to feel a sense of injustice. My constant struggle is to acknowledge the grief I carry with me, grief I will always carry with me, without allowing it to harden into _grievance_. Grievance leads to entitlement, and entitlement leads to the dark side. Or something.

In any case, I've never gotten on really well with people who held on to some prelapsarian idea of the "real" Smile. The theoretical me who didn't get to transition when I was 20 isn't the "real" me. My incomplete transness manifested in fragmentary ways. I wasn't able to genuinely smile. At best I was able to work up an unconvincing imitation. The metaphor isn't perfect. I genuinely love Smiley Smile for what it is. My past self is someone I... have compassion for. See value in. I don't love what they did. It was hard and painful.

If people want to construct their own versions of Smile, cobble it together using what they have, out of the bits and pieces they have access to... I love that. I love _derivative work_. I kind of think of all work as being derivative work, in a way. Smile is one of the bits and pieces a number of us, I guess, have cobbled ourselves together from. The idea of... the Creature raging against its creator... it's not enough for me. More and more these days I think of myself as my own creator. The world gave me these fucked up parts but I'm the one who crudely stitched them together into a whole. In a metaphorical sense. In terms of corporeal surgery I had some fucking _amazing_ work by some fucking _amazing_ surgeons. I'm really fortunate and privileged to be able to have that done.

That corporeal surgery is important and valuable but it's not the essence of my _creation_. For me it's more a sense of stitching together consciousness and body, things which were split, at cross purposes. That's why I think of myself as my own creator. It was work I did.

I think of something I heard someone say about 2004 "Smile" once - something to the effect of "It's only about 10% Brian Wilson, but 10% of Brian is all that's left". Well. I guess in some sense I am diminished. Still. 10% of something beats 100% of nothing at all.

my aborted replies to this would make a pretty good blooper reel ("oh fuck, i'm just talking about Smile again") but the analogy sorta works- because the 3 movement Smile has a surprising emotional arc, a humanity that the unsequenced outtakes don't. And because a 3 movement structure was never gonna happen on 2 sides of vinyl, it's almost unbearably awkward...

We talked about some of the other stuff in a Smile thread months ago (i was heavy handed in declaring my appreciation for The Creature)

the way i went about it was that anything i was afraid to do because of how people would judge me, i tried it out to figure out how _i_ felt about it. and, you know, one road leads to another;

so starting with the glitter shadow, black liner and mascara, now i wanna see it with the little black dress kinda thing? b/c my instinct is 'now i wanna dress more phys ed class than i would have today' and i think buzz-cutter jock boy in extreme glam eye makeup is an underrated look. but i'm already comfortable and familiar with that, and this is about exploring, so, black dress- not terrible on the first try, i'll give it another shot but i wanna put my boy clothes back on *right away*.
second try- alright, swaying a bit, starting to see there's a difference between "i've never wanted to wear dresses" and "i've never wanted to wear that particular dress, or lamented that this look is unavailable to men" and i look at the boy clothes i was going to wear and they seem a bit boring, like inverse wizard of oz stepping back into the b&w universe
otoh, i still want to put the boy clothes back on- if nothing else, i need to get on with my day

how does wearing a dress feel- ehh, it's not a yes or a no rn, it's complicated.

i've been kind of avoiding this since 2018-ish, avoiding the question, feeling i couldn't manage yet another major upheaval. as though i could control the shifts in awareness that happen without my electing to actively "tackle an issue". lol.

but now it does feel more like "electing to tackle the issue"

play with it

I still don't know what my style is I'm trying to branch out from my usual militant androgyne black/navy uniform but it's hard to know what will actually look good when your entire fashion sense has been based on not wanting to be looked at. I'm trying things and some of them look good but feel bad or vice versa which is a whole other issue from what might draw the wrong kind of attention. but I'm trying not to take any of it too seriously. hopefully some things will click eventually

I like the idea of masc and femme days and maybe genderfuck weekends but I'm not brave or stylish enough to pull any of it off yet

yeah that's the thing
it's better imo to think of style as a vehicle for personal transformation than a camouflage
not 'what looks good' but 'who do i want to be today'

i also think it's harder than a lot of people realize to be objective about how your personal style comes across

i wear a lot of dark monochrome, too (at this point, everything in my rotation is black, blue or gray except one lilac t shirt and one grayish-lilac)

that can be conspicuous, of course

on the whole i think it's clean and minimal, but more on the 'genteel' side (if that's a suitably negative word) than utilitarian, in a way i'm not always conscious of. i used to wear shorts much of the year but it made me the target of a sexual assault late in the fall, which i only narrowly avoided, and i've stopped.

now, my bed looks like an 8 year old girl went to town. i've got the princess canopy, the fairy lights, the hanging die cut stars covered in silver glitter, pink and orange tie dye throw pillows. it's a masterpiece, queers. this is part of who i am when no one is looking, i guess.

I still don't know what my style is I'm trying to branch out from my usual militant androgyne black/navy uniform but it's hard to know what will actually look good when your entire fashion sense has been based on not wanting to be looked at. I'm trying things and some of them look good but feel bad or vice versa which is a whole other issue from what might draw the wrong kind of attention. but I'm trying not to take any of it too seriously. hopefully some things will click eventually

― Left

presentation is still a really big challenge for me... i don't know if i've mentioned it but i just realized last week that it's not just worry about being perceived as disgusting, that perhaps the lion's share of it is tied back to SA trauma, to not wanting to be "too cute". it's one of those things that's easy enough to understand intellectually, but a lot harder to put into practice.

for me the pressure to place myself within the "butch/femme" dichotomy is itself a problem. i think i look good in a tank top and tight shorts. i think i look good in a pretty dress. like, a lot of the time i dress for the occasion, i don't know why that has to be part of my _identity_. i mean much as it pains me to say it that's not even _gay_ really.

this weekend i wrote a pilot for a potential serial work that kind of addresses some of these anxieties, about a middle-aged cis lesbian who finds out she's a magical girl and how she navigates things after realizing that - anxiety about femme presentation, anxiety about age, and some other stuff in there as well. now i just have to establish a work routine to keep going with it :)

y'all

the moment y'all have been waiting for is here

f1nn5ter is trans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3reFDwM0yIA

(big umbrella trans. genderfluid. not, like "binary trans" or w/e.)

Just an interesting detail: I was checking online if my library has Lucy Sante's memoir, and noticed that e-book versions of her past books (Low Life, Evidence, etc.) all have new covers with her new name.

Just an interesting detail: I was checking online if my library has Lucy Sante's memoir, and noticed that e-book versions of her past books (Low Life, Evidence, etc.) all have new covers with her new name.

Whoops, double post

That's really fantastic. The thing with deadnames is that they do just tend to stick around forever, I've found.

Juuuuust sticking my head in the door to say that events and thoughts I've been having are probably about to result in my leaning way more into my personal gender expression of butch-ness? That's a weird thing to say because my orientation is strongly toward people with male bodies and toward some (waves hands) definition of masculinity, but ***I*** feel my better/best self when I'm presenting more masculine-ly or at least getting some distance away from a performance of femininity.

I genuinely never put this framing on my gender presentation because I felt (and still feel) fine about saying: "I'm a woman and therefore anything I do is womanly and I refuse to cede that ground." It's just that recent years have opened me up to asking, am I as comfortable as a woman as I thought I was? I think the answer is still yes even though there are some complicating factors (like fat phobia towards my female body) but also I've heard self-described butch people say their butchness is about, like a desire for women to be protected and feel safe and cared for and loved around you, which is pretty damn central to how I want to be in the world. I mean, I believe in care and caring above all else and people's safety and comfort is just part of that but I do specifically have more resonance for women as a group that I also belong to and claim kinship within.

So I think I'm gravitating toward that different spin on things right now and I'm enjoying kind of queering my own expression even as a...straight? person? lol

if the proliferation of gender labels over the past couple of decades highlights anything for me it would be the greatly unsatisfactory and confining nature of all these labels when it comes to defining one's humanity

You know, if something isn't for you or about you just not commenting on it is always an option.

I can definitely relate to the part about therefore anything I do is womanly. I also think about “passing” a fair amount. … like what was that cringe thing associated with Paglia from the 90s, “a gay man in a woman’s body.” And I kinda was into that at the time, because of the patriarchal power imbalance… if I could choose, why wouldn’t I choose to be a man, as they have the most power?

But as I got older, I became more comfortable in my physical body. And now I realize I don’t have to accept the binary… and I can have masc days or months where I wear compression tops and gender neutral pants and … anyway, I support you in this!

great to hear from both of you on this thread... i definitely think gender is more complex than generally gets acknowledged, particularly these days. it's particularly great to hear you talk about being open to _asking_, in orbit. i think there's so much power in questioning, _particularly_ questioning without there NEEDING to be a definitive answer. the way i got to where i am now, it didn't come out of some deep conviction that i was "really a woman". it was just taking the assumption that i was a man, trying things and seeing how they felt.

the thing that i understand a lot more these past few years is that being a gender isn't _one thing_. it can cover a whole wide range of possible ways of being in the world. people who ask these questions like "what is a woman", like there's some universal idea of "womanhood"... it's one of those questions that's Not Even Wrong. "gender as social construct" doesn't mean that womanhood isn't _real_, it just means that there's no clear, definitive marker one can point to and say "there, woman".

it's kind of interesting to me... one of the things i was trying to get to on the maleness and masculinity thread is the ways in which being a man is so rigidly defined and constrained compared to being a woman. it didn't used to be that way, i know, and i don't want to diminish the amounts of shit butches get, cuz there is a lot of bullshit around gender presentation in women. it's more that people used to look at women wearing trousers the way people now look at men wearing skirts, and it's so fucking ridiculous to me. the kinds of pressure butches face is more about erasure than it is about overt hostility... in some ways flat out erasure is worse than hostility, i think. i don't think one problem is "worse" than another. i just think in a lot of ways they're different issues.

I can definitely relate to the part about therefore anything I do is womanly. I also think about “passing” a fair amount. … like what was that cringe thing associated with Paglia from the 90s, “a gay man in a woman’s body.” And I kinda was into that at the time, because of the patriarchal power imbalance… if I could choose, why wouldn’t I choose to be a man, as they have the most power?

― sarahell, Sunday, October 12, 2025 2:04 PM (three days ago)

paglia's statement reminded me of a "joke" when i was young about being "a lesbian trapped in a man's body", to which i would sigh and say "i wish that was a thing". it's kind of funny, when i was young i just assumed that all guys secretly wanted to be girls. it doesn't really make a lot of sense in retrospect, in retrospect it was definitely more of a "me" thing, but at the time, well, nobody talked about this stuff. there's so much shit we just didn't know any better about. i kinda had to embrace cringe a little, embrace wearing clothes that looked terrible on me, embrace not "dressing my age" all the time. i just don't know how to be open to new experiences without being at least a little cringe about it.

in orbit, wanting to feel safe and cared for yeah, i have seen butches talk bout that, that it can be protective. and that makes a lot of sense for me... it sucks that whenever women leave the house guys are out there evaluating us as meat, which just isn't something i experienced before coming out. and it's also, like, _contextual_. like patriarchy doesn't understand the idea of "sometimes". just because i'm into being viewed sexually by _certain people_ in _certain circumstances_ doesn't mean that lens is the default lens through which i should be viewed. i think of myself as a "femme", but what i wear most of the time are t-shirts and jeans and sweaters in the winter. sure i want to look good... i also want to be comfortable, tho.

idk. it would be kind of difficult for me at this point to get people to think of me as a man. maybe if i wore a binder. that's kind of interesting to me.

it's particularly great to hear you talk about being open to _asking_, in orbit. i think there's so much power in questioning, _particularly_ questioning without there NEEDING to be a definitive answer. the way i got to where i am now, it didn't come out of some deep conviction that i was "really a woman". it was just taking the assumption that i was a man, trying things and seeing how they felt.

This is so relatable and OTM!!!

I started asking questions in 2018 after I cast the I Ching in a Toys R Us store, and I interpreted the reading as a breathlessly descriptive image of a Disney Princess/Beauty and the Beast singing tea cart that had caught my eye. It was huge and really gaudy and expensive, so I left it in the store. On the ride home I started unpacking the layers of symbolism- too personal to talk about here, but I actually started weeping, and the next day I went back and got it. Not that this was “the point”, not at all, but it reminded me how as a little kid I was similarly drawn to a lot of stuff like this and thought of myself as “secretly a girl”. I’d completely forgotten about that!

I thought I was avoiding the question for a long time in the absence of a definitive answer!! And only for that reason. However slowly, i’ve been actively ‘doing the work’ all this time.

This is so relatable and OTM!!!

I started asking questions in 2018 after I cast the I Ching in a Toys R Us store, and I interpreted the reading as a breathlessly descriptive image of a Disney Princess/Beauty and the Beast singing tea cart that had caught my eye. It was huge and really gaudy and expensive, so I left it in the store. On the ride home I started unpacking the layers of symbolism- too personal to talk about here, but I actually started weeping, and the next day I went back and got it. Not that this was “the point”, not at all, but it reminded me how as a little kid I was similarly drawn to a lot of stuff like this and thought of myself as “secretly a girl”. I’d completely forgotten about that!

I thought I was avoiding the question for a long time in the absence of a definitive answer!! And only for that reason. However slowly, i’ve been actively ‘doing the work’ all this time.

― muriel’s webdings (Deflatormouse), Wednesday, October 15, 2025 11:20 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

RIGHT, a lot of the work we do is quiet and imperceptible. i may have talked about this previously - i had an experience of what some trans folks refer to as an "egg crack" - this sudden terrifying realization that i was not, in fact, the cis man that i'd believed i as my whole life. it all seemed very sudden and earth-shattering, but when i looked back at it, when i asked myself "wait, why did it take me 43 years to figure out that i as a guy?", i realized how much groundwork there was in that, how many of my beliefs i had to deconstruct. so i can say "trying on a pair of leggings and feeling 'gender euphoria'" cracked my egg", but i can just as easily attribute it to any number of other things.

one can say "egg" but it can also feel like, i don't know, a dam bursting open. what cracked it ultimately came from the inside, came from within me, and for me to do that, the dam wall had to be worn down. that wall wearing down came from many different places. i know i have heard of transmascs having "egg crack" like experiences... at the same time there's much less of a taboo, much less stigma about wearing "men's" clothes. my "egg crack" was clearly a very powerful experience, but there are so many stories of people having powerful conversion experiences and slowly backsliding. obviously my gender is important, or i wouldn't have gone to all this trouble for it... and at the same time it's not important in the sense that people who talk a lot of shit about trans people make it out to be. gender is mostly boring and normal. it's only patriarchal bullshit that makes this stuff seem weird.

-

random side note, i was watching the vincent price episode of the muppets and there's this weird scene where fozzie says he wants to send someone in to audition. "send him in," kermit says.
fozzie: "well, i wouldn't say 'him' exactly..."
kermit: "ok, send her in."
fozzie: "i'd say they're more of a 'them'."
kermit: "so there's more than one of them?"
fozzie: "no, not really"

it's just so weird watching kermit of all people make a big deal about, like, _grammar_. the "they" in question turns out to be a three-headed monster. i mean i guess that's kermit sometimes, he's not full-on sam the eagle (fucking fascist) but he did tend to get weird about normal muppet shit like three-headed monsters, didn't he?

I’ve had a couple revelations to myself in mania that I’m nonbinary. I tried to come out in 2017 and actually did it in April of this year. When the mania faded, I was like, what have I just done? And I started questioning whether I was really nonbinary after I put the cart before the horse. But I think I kind of am, maybe not strongly? When I got into Zen in a serious way last year, I started to feel like I was losing fixed ideas about myself, and I began to question how attached I was to a male gender identity that I always felt was dragging me down, feeling like a failed male and really feeling the yoke of contributing to the patriarchy. And I don’t know, I feel freer from that now, but at the same time I don’t really feel the need to alter my gender presentation from the somewhat neutral way I was presenting already, I’ve become reluctant to give out pronoun preferences even though I do feel a sting somewhat when people refer to me in masculine terms. My mom and my best friend regard me as nonbinary now, but my mom generally refers to me as he/him and it’s a little annoying but I’m afraid to make an issue of it. Dunno now how far to take this nonbinary thing in terms of how I regard myself and how I want others to regard me.

Oh yeah, i struggled with ‘imposter syndrome’ for years before coming out, and for some time afterwards. I think that’s what you’re describing, servoret? I haven’t bothered with queering my presentation at all since i came out as nonbinary. On the contrary, i’ve put on a lot of weight and started dressing more ‘boring’ than ever in my life. I haven’t always ‘conformed’ this much, but I’m still afforded a lot of male privilege, and i’m reluctant to give that up!

Because it is nice , and advantageous, to be able to pass in certain contexts (i work, essentially, as a security guard. The culture is pretty bro-ey, if not as oppressively masculine as in the past). But it also sucks to be invisible in others.

(I mean, it’s also time and money i don’t have to shop for cool leggings. I’ve wanted to! But if I have free time i usually wanna spend it outdoors.)

One of the things that helped resolve the imposter syndrome for me- i don’t think my male friends ever really accepted me as “just a guy”. Or even that gay guys accepted me as a “gay guy”. There’s an otherness about how they approach me, and if they’re doing a “guy thing” i’m not usually invited. It’s interesting that you’re framing this as something you choose, that like, you may or may not want. It absolutely is that, in part. But i think it’s also something that other people choose for you to an extent, by some process of acceptance or exclusion. Other people confront you all the time, sort of ambiently, with what they think your gender is.

Like yourself, i do not enjoy being taken for a bro. Generally, it’s worth the trouble to correct it, and there are ways to do that other than saying “my pronouns are they/them” if you don’t want to press the issue. Leaning into the otherness does it.

Good point about the “being a guy” thing. I always separated myself out from group masculine gatherings like betting leagues, golf weekends, and stuff like that. I participate in a board game night that’s no girls allowed, but I always feel a little other and skip the yearly trips out of town where it’s all guys crammed into cars convoying and then sleeping four to a room. And I was always kind of out of the broey dominance order in school when I was younger. My best friend who I outed myself to at first wanted to slot me in as some sort of class of masculine identity with a greek letter that was the kind of male person that is laid back about performing masculinity, but I don’t feel like that’s it. I’ve never been good at romantic relationships with women either because of an expectation that I’m going to take the male lead in some things. Thanks, I feel slightly less of an imposter now!

I don’t really feel the need to alter my gender presentation from the somewhat neutral way I was presenting already, I’ve become reluctant to give out pronoun preferences even though I do feel a sting somewhat when people refer to me in masculine terms

I feel this so much (though from an AFAB perspective so I'm sure there are lots of differences). I went through a lot of stages, a big one being that I felt "too old" to consider being nonbinary, as it was a concept that I didn't grow up with and therefore didn't necessarily come naturally to me. I still consider myself Not Trans, because I haven't changed, I've just changed the descriptions I use to express how I feel about myself existing in the world. And I honestly don't mind about pronouns, I've used she/her for so long it feels normal, but if a close friend NEVER uses they/them it does feel like a massive slap in the face, like they're wilfully ignoring a part of me, or they think I don't really mean it, or something along those lines.

feeling like a failed male

This is a big one. I spent so long wondering if I only thought of myself as nonbinary because "I failed at being a girl". Society might try to tell you that failing as a man is a thing that is possible, but it really isn't. I still don't feel gender euphoria, and my dysphoria is more about existing physically at all. But nonbinary still feels like the best description of me, and who I am, and I am happy with that.

I'm out of internet reach for most of this weekend and just felt compelled to shoot off a reply because I recognised myself in some of what you were saying, but if you want to continue chatting about it I'll be back on Monday. Also y'know, maybe I'm not being helpful, or maybe I won't have the right perspective you need b/c I'm more on the agender side of NB, so if other people make more sense to you that is fine also!

<3

I also found servoret’s post very relatable.

I don’t really feel the need to alter my gender presentation from the somewhat neutral way I was presenting already, I’ve become reluctant to give out pronoun preferences even though I do feel a sting somewhat when people refer to me in masculine terms

Especially this.

I feel comfortable enough with the way things are that i don’t feel like i need to change much. But there’s also a nagging sense that i should be “doing more”, and i don’t think it’s just cause i feel like an imposter.

I’m considering, like, what did it even mean for me to come out as nonbinary? And i think to me, it represented a commitment to never stop asking questions.

And as well as my own sense of comfort, I think the idea that “if i were trans, all this would feel more urgent” is worth interrogating.

Like io, my orientation is “strongly toward some (waves hands) definition of masculinity”. There are days, or maybe just moments, when butch-ness makes me ecstatically happy, though i’m very much aware that it’s a piece of theater. A lot of days it’s just routine, going through the motions. There are moments when it feels like I’m sitting in my little house in Kansas, looking longingly out the window at Oz in all its technicolor splendor. And i know, like, sooner or later i’ve gotta go out the door and door and check it out. Maybe I’ve already been out there a little ways- whatever, most days I don’t cross the threshold.

it ‘s important to me to have the option of trying on different skins freely and being able to discard them without committing to anything. That’s not really ‘allowed’. One of the reasons it’s so scary to change your presentation is the pressure from other people to be the same every day, predictable, mechanical, sure as the sun will come up. But who is prepared to officiate this, and what authority do they have? If i won’t give it to them? Not speaking for anyone else but when I say “I don’t feel a need to change my presentation for now”, what that actually means is I feel comfortable enough with the way things are that taking this *horrifying* risk of being honest about what i want and defying people’s expectations seems like it might not be worth it. How important is this?

I went to my friend Kayla's memorial yesterday.

Her parents threw it for her out in the suburbs, where they lived. There were about 150 people there, most of them, I gather, people Kayla's parents knew, people who lived around where Kayla's parents live. Kayla's parents are rich white people. Almost all of us there, including her trans friends, were white or white-passing people of a similar social class. Partly selection bias. I couldn't have made it out there if I hadn't had a ride. I didn't stand out at all, though.

Her mom spoke. Her dad spoke. Her older sister spoke. One of her retired co-workers talked about how Kayla was at work, including talking about her experience being a trans mentor for Kayla. I think it was her mom who said "Kayla never had a 'girl party'." It took me a while to understand what she meant. I'd known Kayla since 2022. She had plenty of girl parties. What they meant, of course, was that they'd never _given_ her a "girl party".

Kayla's parents weren't as supportive of her when she was alive as they were at her memorial. Her dad struggled to talk about her. He recognized her as Kayla, recognized her as a woman. He couldn't bring himself to call her his daughter. He called her his child. He said he was a man, that he hard a hard time understanding her.

I can tell you what he understood. He understood that his child was dead. He understood - Kayla's parents understood - that they'd fucked up. That they wouldn't have more than 13,000 or so days with their child.

As Kayla's friend, I'm angry. Because they're too late. Because they had three years to celebrate her and doing it now isn't going to fucking do her any good. I'm angry at them because Kayla can't be angry at them anymore. Because Kayla fucking deserved better parents than them.

And I'm angry because this whole thing matters. I'm angry because there were dozens upon dozens of cishet white people there with visibly queer kids who probably don't treat their queer kids much better than Kayla's parents treated her. I'm angry because our parents provide the soil we grow in, because these queer kids, these are good kids, fine kids, because maybe some of those parents will look at Kayla's memorial service, see Kayla being celebrated too late, and maybe they'll think a little bit about the soil they're providing. About what the soil is doing to the queers.

I needed to say it that way. That's how I am.