Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

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.

Ha, she also noted that my nails are done and hers are not.

prob just jealous of your manicure

lol. My nails are a ragged mess because I was, erm, playing with power tools this weekend.

Have been noticing feedback loops, more, how gender expression in me comes out in relation to other people, or situations.

Like, I went to Homebase because I needed to buy some tools, and of course that means wandering up and down all the tool aisles just picking things up and going "Yes! I need an axe... don't know what for, but I definitely need... oh look, a set of wrenches. WANT. I don't even own a car but these look so great" and the like. And just feeling very kind of manly and macho and trying on leather toolbelts and oh yeah, this is great. I feel so ~masculine~ by which I guess I meant capable and physical and handy and great.

But how it gets you, the separation of gender roles, and on my way to the paypoint, I had to pass through a wall of cushions into the half of the shop that sold soft furnishings and home cleaning products and kitchenware and scented candles and something in the back of my mind just went "Whoops, nope! Not the section for you!" And I caught myself doing it, and just said, this is ridiculous. How do rubbish bins and teatowels have a gender? But of course, most of the people shopping in those aisles were women (sometimes men in tow) while the power tools section had been all men except for me, including the staff. But going on the side of the shop that was full of women felt like encroachment in a way that trying out all the screwdrivers hadn't.

So is that my gender, because I feel more comfortable in one section of the shop? Or is that just ridiculous and absurd, that the way things had been organised had been artificially gendered, and noticing that made me want to express one side more than the other? Oh, consumerist late capitalism, how I hate you! (New work gloves and better screwdrivers = ace, though.)

Also, fancying mostly men again this week, but feeling very gay while doing it. This could just be the men I am currently fancying (nothing makes me feel gayer than looking at pictures of Interpol. Nothing. Well, at least nothing I've done in about 7 years.) But also wondering if this is what causes my eternal fluidity. It's not just that my tendencies/preferences get overridden by an extremely attractive person of any gender (and yes, I said preference instead of orientation deliberately) but my feeling about mine own internal gender changes the nature of my desire. I don't feel like a girl fancying boys right now. Or even a non-gendered girl looking at boys I'd rather be. I feel like a boy fancying boys.

Oh, bodies. Why are you so confusing?

I totally relate to that. My girlfriend makes me feel totally femme and encourages me to explore that side of myself. (It was her, actually, who gave me the purple sparkly nailpolish my mom commented on.) We do a lot of roleplaying, and although she identifies as cis and femme, she usually takes the masculine role. I use the girls holding hands emoji a lot when I text her. Otoh, this other person I'm dating makes me feel very masculine, way moreso than I ever do these days outside of her presence. I'm still trying to figure out my difference in reaction to the two of them.

I think one of my first inklings that something was weird about my gender was when as a teenager I realized I had a very different relationship to girl-on-girl porn than my straight male friends. They enjoyed it in a voyeuristic way, but had difficulty inserting themselves into the scene, at least without a penis or penis proxy available onscreen, whereas I had no trouble identifying with the female performers.

That's very interesting, like your gender identity is fluid enough to change depending on who you are relating to.

Or maybe... I may be way out of left field here, but it's something I was thinking about.

Been reading a lot recently about the definitions of bisexuality - did I talk about this recently? maybe on this thread? I should check. Nope, doesn't look like I did.

How the "bi" in bisexual does not mean attracted-to-two-genders. It means two-orientations, both homo and hetero. Defining heterosexuality as being attracted to those broadly of-a-different-gender to you, and homosexuality as being attracted to those broadly-of-a-similar-gender to you.

But how does that pan out if you are genderfluid or bi/pan-gender, and have a monosexual orientation? Like, if you are attracted to "people-broadly-like-you" then would your gender fluidity orient the gender you feel towards the person you are with? So if you are with a very feminine partner, you will express very femme, while if you are with a masculine partner, you will express much more masculine? Does that make any sense?

When in the past I've dated more feminine women, I often felt very male in the relationship, but I was much more willing to let them dress me up in "girl-drag" and do my hair and make-up. (Even when I end up looking like Robert Smith.) I don't know if that's even particularly sexual, though, as I've let bandmates do it to me, too. I guess, though, I should be more honest about the quasi-romantic nature of bandmate relationships giving way to unrequited-romantic things, which puts a different spin on it.

It's complicated. I'm probably just really into looking at boys in suits at the moment because I'm feeling quite into wearing suits. There's always been this weird identification-desire thing for me, with wanting to be boys I also want to fuck. Why am I such a weirdo. Why.

Oh, I've totally got the wanting to be girls I want to fuck thing going on. But not so much with boys? I want to fuck them, but I don't usually imagine myself as the boys I want to fuck.

With the other girl I'm dating, it might be that she's so thoroughly femme herself that I can't really out-femme her (whereas my gf has more of a "hard femme" style), so I might as well go in the other direction? I dunno.

On a sidenote, my taste in guys has always run toward the femme side, albeit not absolutely. I guess I just tend to be attracted to femme people in general, regardless of their gender identity. I have this theory that people aren't really attracted to gender(s), as society generally thinks, so much as broad gender cues, but most people suppress their attraction to people with genders that fall outside of the one most closely associated the set of gender cues they are most interested. I guess this line of thought comes out of an epiphany I had a while back that if gender is a construct, then so must sexual orientation be.

I don't really identify as bisexual, as I find this term limiting in scope. Usually people use it to mean someone is attracted to just cis men and cis women, but I'm also trans and non-binary people so I guess pansexual works, but I'd feel like a total dork if that word ever came out of my mouth, so just simple "queer" it is.

*but I'm also attracted to trans and non-binary people

And on a related note, I'm suddenly feeling hella disphoric.

Bah, dysphoria is the worst. Sorry, person!

Yeah, I get that the bi- in bisexual is so indelibly associated with "bi" meaning "only 2 genders", but I'm just saying that the ~bisexual community~ (whatever that is) or rather, the definition has been updated to reflect the fact that trans people and non-binary people exist. It's trying to broaden a category, which is always a welcome thing.

Like, I'm not telling you how to identify; you're gonna use whatever words you feel fit you best. But "Bisexual" as a technical term, these days means something different than you're implying.

I dunno. I still feel completely uncomfortable using any kind of -sexual to describe myself because it's been so long since I had sex with anyone of any gender that I don't even know any more what sex would look like for me. (Seriously. It is at a point where it is just stupid, like a mental block. Like, last year I actually asked someone I thought was a friend to, y'know, just help me out so it wasn't such a big *deal* any more. But they freaked out and now... well, they are no longer even a friend. I think I've regressed back to a place of "never feel like I'm going to be comfortable asking anyone ever again" again, because that shit was really unpleasant, and that wasn't really a happy place to be.) So I kinda feel like it would be lying to use any kind of sexual identity except... non-binary. Could be anything. I'll know when it happens. If it ever happens, which it might not. The only thing I know for certain is I *don't* want to do the girl role in the relationship. I'm really done with that.

"Being attracted to" is another matter. I feel uncomfortable trying to generalise my/your experiences onto monosexuals, but yeah, what you describe sounds pretty OTM. I am definitely attracted to a certain set of visual cues, but yeah, during my "I am straight, don't you dare say I'm not, I'm a straighty mc-straight-person" years, if a person I had formerly been giving the eye to stood up and they turned out to be female, I would tell myself "Oh no, I am not attracted, that is a girl" even though clearly, I had definitely been attracted. It's more a question of looking at someone and just thinking "they look interesting" rather than having an expectation. (But that said, I never ever look at, like, super cis-het dudes and think "they look interesting." I think it is ambiguity itself that attracts me. But not always!)

love and good days to you folks. i feel this is an aspect of life i need to better understand.

Well, welcome and feel free to share your own story if that helps you to understand.

the half of the shop that sold soft furnishings and home cleaning products and kitchenware and scented candles and something in the back of my mind just went "Whoops, nope! Not the section for you!" And I caught myself doing it, and just said, this is ridiculous. How do rubbish bins and teatowels have a gender?

i think it depends on the rubbish bin, though tea towels definitely code as femme. But yeah, apart from the cleaning products, these are things I never buy, and I dunno if it's so much a gender thing, as what to me feels like a subset of female, the "suburban homeowning mom." But I also realize that I am fortunate now to live somewhere where there is a broad array of "acceptable female behavior and self-presentation," it definitely wasn't like that where I grew up, which is probably part of why my mother had to drag me (almost literally) kicking and screaming to buy my first bra.

See, I have this beautiful vision of a weird fragmentation/redefinition where "suburban homeowning mum" might be a gender but "urban, gender-non-conforming ex-tomboy who hated bra shopping" might also be a gender and there are dozens of genders, not 2 (or 3) but I get that's not really what you're talking about.

I guess I'm just kinda trying to examine this weird gendering of shops and products and how arbitrary it is, vs how "associated with different activities that men or women perform" it is. Because "Homebase" (I'm assuming this is a US conglomerate, giant DIY/home improvement/gardening centres) is a shop that is full of couples/families/mixed gender groups, but is coded "male". While something like "Ikea" (which is a hugely similar DIY home thing, but more furniture and less power tools) is also full of couples/families/mixed gendered groups but is coded "female". How on earth did these notions of the gendering of shops get into my head? How on earth did the notion that one side of Homebase was coded a different "gender" than the other side? Why am I drawn to one, and vaguely repulsed by the other?

Because I live on mine own, and I don't have "A Man" to put up shelves or do the soldering for me, I'm comfortable with - or even happy and proud - performing those roles to the best of my ability. (I really should take an electrical wiring course, this is how you do not electrocute yourself course to do the rest.) And I'm sure that men who live on their own do, also, somehow accumulate teatowels and washing up implements. "Living by yourself" is a pretty powerful way of erasing bullshit gender landgrabs. (Even *I* own teatowels, though my Mum actually bought them for me.) So *why* do I persist in seeing the "suburban mums" side of the shop as gendered, and why do I recoil from that side of the shop?

It's a dumb question, I guess. I am King of Dumb Questions. (But dumb questions are sometimes the only way you learn anything.)

See, I have this beautiful vision of a weird fragmentation/redefinition where "suburban homeowning mum" might be a gender but "urban, gender-non-conforming ex-tomboy who hated bra shopping" might also be a gender and there are dozens of genders, not 2 (or 3) but I get that's not really what you're talking about.

It is in a way! Like that's how I thought when I was younger, that I was some separate gender from the suburban homeowning moms and those in-training to be them. Now, I am comfortable enough being a "woman" -- and maybe some of this has to do with issues of "passing," I can "pass" and it is easier that way -- and there are women in my life who are more "butch" than I am, or they are about some things, though are more femme about others.

People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

(I am about to start a "passing" thread according to the old, old Greenspun-era "rule of 3" that it has come up on 3 separate threads now, therefore deserves its own thread.)

well BB, I don't really have a story, other than always feeling like a guy who likes guys. Kinda has gotten old at this point.

Everybody has a story! Whether that story is "I'm a guy who likes guys" or "I'm a girl - or so they tell me - who often feels like a guy who likes guys, when liking guys, which I don't always do."

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.