Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

it's also still in my username (for now) after all

Ivy! Hullo

Do you still prefer they/them?

she/her and they/them are both fine, thank you for asking, i always forget about that part

👍🫶

Ivy!

Heyo Ivy!

hey Ivy!

I love it!!! xxx

Hey Ivy!

Yay Ivy!

there was blue ivy and now there is you, ivy!

How're ya

HI IVY!

hi
hii
hiii
hivy

Howdy Ivy!

Hello Ivy!

HIVY

Hello, Ivy!

Hi, Ivy!

hello Ivy!

IVY

greetings, ivy!

So glad to know you, Ivy!

great choice of name :)

Hello Ivy!

Hi Ivy!

hiya! xx

how's it feeling for you? because it took me a wee while to get comfortable with my new name

Ivy's a great name, congrats!

just reading through my posts from when i started questioning my gender a few years ago (as one does) and got a real how it started/how it's going moment

then - I've never really questioned my gender identity until recently (I always thought I was a cis male) but over the last few months I've been wondering if I'm non-binary or genderqueer. The main thing that I'm wondering about is whether I'm NB or GQ enough to really go all the way and identify as such.

I think the main reason I'd want to do that is for what I guess you could call political reasons - I think gender is bullshit and it would be great if all that gender role stuff just went away so we didn't have separate pronouns, different clothing sections in shops etc, so I sort of want to be the change I'd like to see and step outside of all of that. In terms of what I actually do/how I present there's not much that I do or would like to do that wouldn't really be classified as 'normal' male behaviour - except for wearing makeup, which I would totally do more of if that was more accepted. I think I'd like to use they pronouns but again I'm just not sure.

now - am out as a trans woman to pretty much everyone, am about to legally change my name and i also have a wee pair of tits

I sympathize with the feeling of not being genderqueer enough, but the fact that it’s weighing on you at all is a pretty big hint that you’ll be happier if you start sloughing off the dead skin of your received gender

― Canon in Deez (silby), Wednesday, 17 February 2021 16:15 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

ot fucking m, awesome piece of advice here, skin has been sloughed to fuck and it feels terrific :)

Ava Weepairotits

ahaha love it!! wish i'd thought of that :)

oh yeah, i started keeping a diary at the beginning of 2019 and reading some of those early journal entries are a blast. "I don't know about hormones... I mean no reason to rush things... maybe in a couple of years I might consider it..." three months later i'm like "I NEED HORMONES NOW" and two years later i had bottom surgery... i sort of speedran it in retrospect, mind you

how's it feeling for you? because it took me a wee while to get comfortable with my new name

― ava (paolo), Saturday, June 17, 2023 4:07 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was playing board games with my friends last night and they were so sweet to insistently call me ivy but yeah: it's taking me an extra beat to respond to it bc it's all so new

I'm glad your pals have been nice! but yeah it can take time to get used to it. quite often when i've been trying out something new genderwise eg a new name, makeup etc it can feel lovely and gender affirming but there's also a sense of wrongness there too, like what the fuck am I doing here, this is weird and new and I don't like it etc. trying new gender stuff can bring up a lot of difficult feelings and i hope it's not too hard for you, it pretty much always gets easier with time if you are finding it tough xx

xp yeah I know quite a lot of trans people who've sped through it and good for them, afaik none of them with that they'd taken it slower. I'm more of a slowly and gradually inching into the waters of transness gal myself though :)

I'm late but hi Ivy!

hi!!! :)

a couple of months ago it occurred to me that i've essentially self-identified as nonbinary for years, but that i've been uncomfortable with the outward identification because i imagine part of what it signifies to others is that i know how to be a better ally than in fact i do, when i have far too much to learn about how to respect others. iow, i "haven't earned it". yikes. i understand this is reeeeally common.

the other thing i had to reckon with was a feeling of not wishing to saddle myself with more labels and identities that i would just have to tear down and dispose of inevitably, and i... eventually put it down to a latent transphobia. i'm a fan of fewer, broader labels, and "non-binary" felt unnecessary to me because i for some reason regarded it as *chosen*. well, that fucking sucks. it was like 'no, i am looking at this the wrong way around, i'm not acquiring an additional identity, i'm divesting myself of a false one, that should be so fucking obvious". cool.

it's been a lot like coming out as gay- by the time i acknowledged it, i had long since settled into it and everyone else already knew. just a matter of fact 'oh, this is what it means, i guess.'

i'd stopped identifying as a "gay man" pretty much since i stopped dating and hooking up and in general living as a gay man several yeara ago and had come to just think of myself as "queer".

i have a wonderfully unisex middle name that starts with the same letter as my first name (and my last name lol), it's tempting to use it but i think my given name actually connects me more to my early childhood when my gender identity was least stable.

Twice this week I was in a group with introductions around the table of name and pronouns, and I just settled on "all pronouns apply." Which is true and also keeps me from holding anyone responsible for referring to me one way or another.

a couple of months ago it occurred to me that i've essentially self-identified as nonbinary for years, but that i've been uncomfortable with the outward identification because i imagine part of what it signifies to others is that i know how to be a better ally than in fact i do, when i have far too much to learn about how to respect others. iow, i "haven't earned it". yikes. i understand this is reeeeally common.

oh yeah it's basically the quintessential queer experience. straight people tend not to think of queer identities as awards one has to earn :)

the other thing i had to reckon with was a feeling of not wishing to saddle myself with more labels and identities that i would just have to tear down and dispose of inevitably, and i... eventually put it down to a latent transphobia. i'm a fan of fewer, broader labels, and "non-binary" felt unnecessary to me because i for some reason regarded it as *chosen*. well, that fucking sucks. it was like 'no, i am looking at this the wrong way around, i'm not acquiring an additional identity, i'm divesting myself of a false one, that should be so fucking obvious". cool.

see, i come from the opposite perspective - i love labels and i'll take all of them i can. i see this kind of queer dialectic going on all the time - the meme is one person saying "abolish gender!" and the other person is saying "more gender!" and both POVs are based and the people who hold either or both POV are awesome. for me, the absence of language is a greater burden to me than the presence of language, so i do tend more towards the "more labels" side, though not to a MOGAI extent or anything.

some 3 am thoughts, just kind of thinking through a couple of things.

a friend was talking to me about jules gill-peterson's new book, "a short history of trans misogyny", and i sort of skimmed it last night. i found that a lot of it resonated with some thoughts and feelings i've been having over the last year regarding my own queerness. particularly in conjunction with you kind of "coming out" as non-binary, deflatormouse, if that's even how you'd frame it.

i really appreciate this space because it's really opened me up a lot to taking a larger view of queerness and what i think of as "effeminacy". my transition background, a lot of the people i socialize with, are more-or-less binary-presenting white transfemmes, often from a background where, whether we identify as "eggs" or not, presented more or less as cisgender heterosexual men. i had, particularly early on in transition, this idea of "transness" as being this sort of "correct" superior way of doing gender non-conformity. the last five years, and in particular my experiences in this space, have helped me to challenge this idea. there's this idea in radical thought of "killing the cop inside your own head". that's not something i really intended to do, but...

it was important to me, early on, to prove that i could transition without losing any of the trappings of - well, here's a challenge for me to talk about, when i talk about my past experience, it's the experience of being a white cishet man. because it's the sort of existence that is only really _possible_ for white cishet men. the "cishet man" thing isn't something i was able to do, but the whiteness, that hasn't and isn't going to change. it's dishonest of me to pretend that my whiteness had no relevance to the privilege i had. it's also misleading, at best, for me to phrase things in a way that suggests that i'm not still white and don't still have all of the privilege that comes with that. maybe "white 'cishet man'" is a better way of putting it. i might try that.

anyway, it was important to me to prove that i could transition without losing any of the trappings of being a white "cishet man". the monogamous relationship with a cisgender woman, the house, the professional job. i worked really hard to preserve those things. the last thing i wanted to be when i transitioned is the person i am now. who i am now is the person i was most afraid of becoming. when i started transition i sort of made a bargain with myself, that i'd transition but i wouldn't ever become one of those kinky polyamorous marginal queers who lived an unstable, precarious existence.

in retrospect it was a form of the same kind of bargaining process i had when thinking about whether to come out. gill-peterson talks about her own version of the bargaining process in _framing agnes_ when she said she thought if she wrote _histories of the transgender child_, that was something she could do instead of transition, and of course it doesn't actually work like that. in my case i thought that being a "trans woman", this sort of respectable version of effeminacy, was something i could do instead of being a, well, f-slur. it was really important to me to be a "real woman".

thinking about it now i do think that was a real, genuine need. being able to see myself as a "real woman", to be accepted as a "real woman", is a tremendous and extremely rare privilege. it's also something that i very much _didn't_ want, in the sense that by "real woman" people often at least implicitly mean "cisgender woman", someone whose transness is _invisible_.

there's this question in my head of "why didn't i transition", and the easy answer is "it wasn't possible", easy because it was true. why couldn't i? why wasn't it possible? and the reason is kind of at the heart of the difficulties i face as a "trans woman" today. one is that i believed i couldn't ever pass. the other is that i believed i would have _had_ to pass. my passing privilege means that i have a choice in how people perceive me, a choice between two things: a white "cisgender" woman, or a t-slur f-slur. each is partly accurate and neither are completely accurate. the latter is far more accurate than the former, though - nothing in the latter formulation requires me to use quotes.

one of the things gill-peterson talks about is the, here we go, _dual role_ a word like "transgender" has - in one context, a radical term of liberation. in another context, however, she talks about it as a term employed by NGOs to label people who _don't_ think of themselves in that sense. what i appreciate about "transness", my experiences as trans, is that it's allowed me to see the similarity i have with all of these other femme people, past and present. the thing i think that i perpetuated, early on, is the idea of the white binary transfem as being the Correct Way of doing gender non-conformity. the more i tried to follow that path, though, the more apparent the impossibility of it became to me. the second i make myself visible, people start seeing me as a t-slur f-slur, even (especially, perhaps) if it's not something they'd ever say aloud. i didn't, early on, have the strength to accept being looked at in that way, and because of my background, i had the privilege of not _having_ to confront that. it has been an exceptional privilege and it's a huge part of why i can say unequivocally that i'm a "real woman". i'm also, however, non-binary. i'm also a t-slur f-slur.

my experience isn't one of _mujerisma_, in the sense gill-peterson uses it. i have also, though, through this space as well as through nominally "trans" spaces, come into contact with all different kinds of queerness. when, here in portland, a queer bar calling itself "sissy bar" opened, run by people who i guess could roughly be framed as "cis gay men", i was aggrieved. i took it as an example of the gulf between cis gay men and trans women. i had, particularly, this ignorance about drag. what i got most from gill-peterson's book was words to frame an understanding i implicitly had - the difference between the professional drag queens, the "dual role" folks, and the street queens, the ones who didn't change out of their clothes before going out on the street - in other words, not just being gay, but being gay and doing crime, because going out on the street dressed like that was illegal. it's not drag itself i ever had a problem with. it's the ones who try to be gay _without_ also doing crime.

i don't "do crime" in the same sense that street queens do. that's largely, i think, a function of privilege. as much as i can be oppositional, doing crime is also _work_ for me. it's not illegal for me to go into a women's restroom and pee, for instance. it's not illegal for me to take estrogen. if i lived in a lot of other places, it would be. if i lived in a lot of other places, i'd be doing crime, just by existing. it would be a lot of work for me to _not_ do crime.

well, no, because it's not about the estrogen. in other places, in other _times_, before I had the privilege i do now, the crime isn't _existence_, the crime is _work_. even today, if you're not in tech (i'm in tech), it's hard to get by without doing sex work. it's important to me to not _have_ to do sex work. always has been. i'm also very much in favor of sex work, in favor of people having the ability to _choose_ sex work, to be able to do it safely and be respected for it. that's one of the first things i learned from being around other queer people - not trans people, queer people. you do what you need to do in order to get by. if other people judge you for that, well, they can think what they think. it doesn't change who you are. i needed to learn that in order to survive. i didn't learn it from respectable trans women.

--

transition, to me... in one sense i chose it, but in another sense i tried very hard, for many years, to _not_ transition, and failed. i can portray my transition as a "success", convince other people to recognize me as "valid" or whatever. among other trans women, though, it is different. among other trans women there's not the pressure to be "brave" or a role model, to say that yeah, i transitioned because it was too fucking hard not to.

these days it's important to me to talk about that experience. a couple of years ago that was mainly for the benefit of other trans women, and now, i still do that, but i also think of it in a broader sense of queerness, of effeminacy. one of the other things gill-peterson talks about that i related to was the way, in the '70s, masc queerness became the normative paradigm for queerness. that was the world i grew up in. one of the things i'm most angry about, w/r/t transmedicalism, was that it erased my _queerness_. i do think that erasure came from a number of different places, most of them, i think, more _situationally convenient_ than intentional. i don't see mustachioed leather daddies as being an intrinsically more "respectable" form of queerness. they're differently queer from me, _very_ differently queer, but we're not opposed - we both act to make the invisible visible. it was that generation and the genocide they suffered that taught me "silence = death".

i don't think that it was their _fault_ that femme queerness wasn't something open to me at that time. i'm glad it's open now. i'm glad that as a trans woman i can see myself as part of a larger femme diaspora, and that i've had the opportunity to learn that my being a trans woman isn't the Correct Way of being femme.

I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once last night and selected The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams to listen to immediately afterwards, probably because in it Me'shell Ndegeocello erects and populates simultaneously occurring tiered dimenson-worlds (the different planes in 'Man of my Dreams' don't quite merge together the way the temporal layers in, say, b&w Blue Oyster Cult do. for BOC provide 'access points' only to immediately shut them down; Ndegeocello sustains your awareness of multiple space-time layers through an entire album by constantly pointing out interdimensional sightings)

But it got me thinking about the album title in a context of her expressions of gender fludity and i guess my own needs. It's very meaningful to me suddenly, almost talismanic, where it was a little perplexing before. I'm able to see confluence in the dissonances of my past and the divisions between my various selves. This is like the point where my own spatial-temporal layers merge together. Feels good.

I misspoke before, this isn't like coming out as gay. I came out as gay when after a long period of living as gay, it had become completely undeniable. Here, i have to keep reassuring myself that I'm not faking it. As much time as I've taken to settle into it, in some way it feels premature.

If i were to enter into a new relationship with a boyfriend, would i again consider myself a gay man? YES
Would I still identify myself as nonbinary, in that case? YES
Is there a queer subculture that i want to be part of, "like goth"? YES
SO WHAT
Are you afraid you might have to walk this back?
SO WHAT

Ndegeocello is an important role model for me in how she deals with overlapping and sometimes conflicting identities and how to deal with a language of categorizations that is hopelessly inadequate BY DANCING OVER THE FUCKING ABYSS

brb

This thread might be useful to some people in here.

https://x.com/siobhanftb/status/1222871029929766912?s=46&t=bJOqpCuQneT7ju08y55VSA

have i ever talked about how completely affirming i've found encountering transphobia in the wild to be? i had all these fears about not being really queer or being queer in the right way, and they seemed like really sensible and persuasive things to be worried about. it got me down for a long time, until i heard other people saying the same things about me that i said about myself. because when i looked at them, i said "wait a second, these people are incredibly ignorant and hateful people". and i mean not just that, hearing it out of someone _else's_ mouth it was so clear how completely wrong, distorted, and unfair everything they were saying was. which instantly turned into "why am i saying these terrible, wrong things to myself?" like, i wouldn't say them about somebody else. that would be completely cruel and unfair. and other people saying those things about me, that's _also_ cruel and unfair.

there's kind of this idea of queerness as this taxonomy, this set of categories into which one has to be slotted neatly, and once i do that, i choose a category, i have to live completely within the confines of that category, or i'm a fake, an imposter, a disgrace to whatever category i've chosen to, i don't know, pledge to. there are people, queer people, who think like that, and i'll be totally honest i do _not_ get how they can live like that at all. to me being gay isn't about placing arbitrary limitations about what i am and am not allowed to like or want or do. there _are_ limitations, very specific limitations, but those limitations are absolutely not arbitrary - there are extremely good reasons for those limitations. "non-binary", though? yeah there aren't actually any limitations around that one at all. i mean i'm gonna be honest a lot of the time when i talk about gender to cis people i sand off the rough edges for their benefit.

like, i'm a non-binary trans woman. this is a really common thing, at least among the people i know. none of us understand "trans" and "non-binary" as being mutually exclusive. they're just different ways of looking at this one thing. i've seen some hints that on social media there might be some _discourse_ around this. one of the video essayists whose work i really love is lily alexandre, who made a video with the wonderfully clickbait title (because you gotta feed The Algorithm) "Do binary trans women even exist?" Of course they do. At the same time a lot of the "binary-presenting" trans women are also non-binary. Being binary-presenting and using she/her pronouns was a conscious decision I made. I looked at a world full of cis people who didn't really have a clear grasp on the idea that "non-binary" wasn't something _distinct_ from transness, looked at myself as someone who was unlikely to ever pass in any event (I was completely wrong about this, but by the time I realized that I didn't see any reason to completely change the way I presented myself), and figured, look, I don't _have_ to fight every single battle at once. I'm just gonna tell cis people I'm a trans woman and leave the rest of it out. I don't _have_ to also, at the same time, insist on being recognized as a non-binary person. That's not my responsibility.

It's been part of who I am since I started transition, though. All my paperwork has "X" for gender on it. That's important to me. It just doesn't really come up outside of that, though.

As far as sexuality, I don't even know how to _start_ explaining that. My standard line is that I'm a pansexual asexual - I'm willing to not have sex with pretty much anyone. That's one of those things that's a joke but also serious, in that whatever I do that's not-quite-sex and not-quite-not-sex - kink, mostly - I don't see a reason to care much about gender. Genital preference (which isn't gender anyway) is a non-starter for me since I don't do anything where genitals would need to get involved. I mean, what arbitrary criterion am I going to rule people out based on? Hormone balance? Like, when I ask for the results of someone's most recent STD screens should I also demand they give me all of the results of their hormone level tests for the past year? "Well, it says here your estrogen level is within the typical cis female range, but you've only been on HRT for nine months, I'm sorry, I'm gonna need you to be on HRT for at least three more months and to have started progesterone before we start going out." I mean god-damn. Finding somebody to do things with is difficult enough without placing stupid arbitrary restrictions like that on top of things.

Labels are great. Am I going to rule people out based on gender and/or sexuality labels? Generally no, unless it's something like "transamorous". Chasers can fuck right off.

Yeah that's pretty good. "What do i really want?" is a favorite divining question.

Kate, i really appreciate your generosity. I'm not the first to say this and I won't be the last, but a number of your posts have helped me personally as i've been working things out. Ngl, I worry that saying so places more of a burden on you to sustain the level of generosity you have shown. but I guess you already addressed this kinda

i found that a lot of it resonated with some thoughts and feelings i've been having over the last year regarding my own queerness. particularly in conjunction with you kind of "coming out" as non-binary, deflatormouse, if that's even how you'd frame it.

Yes, I've been "coming out" to friends and family one by one over the last couple of months. I felt i should say something here incase it's an important context for some of the things i post, because i think enough people posting here regularly recognize my handle as belonging to a male poster, at this point.

ok that got messed up. first thing in quote tag is my reply to twitter thread linked by picesx

see, i come from the opposite perspective - i love labels and i'll take all of them i can.

i know.

i see this kind of queer dialectic going on all the time - the meme is one person saying "abolish gender!" and the other person is saying "more gender!" and both POVs are based and the people who hold either or both POV are awesome.

that is so sweet and really warmed my heart to read.

I actually was thinking of how you've talked about "not existing" before you transitioned, and i have talked about finding that "i don't exist" in a completely different, more positve sense.

There's a lot of brilliant stuff in your last posts that I feel no need to respond to. But i can talk a lit

I am middle eastern with dark olive skin. I think middle eastern kids in America are in an unusual position in that it's about as close to a blank slate as you are going you get. You're conspicuous but you don't really have an identity, other than 'the foreigner'. In fact, lot of people aren't quite sure what race you are; it's almost like you have to choose. There are pressures to assume the culture of white people but by choosing white you are then always bombarded with various forms of "why aren't you white?" - you are never really going to be acceptable.
A lot of Persian guys gravitate much more to the parts of Black culture that reach the suburban mainstream. Obviously, they are not going to be accepted as Black (my brother can attest lol)

I style myself as boyish/very soft-masculine. Because perceptions of softness are closely related to perceptions of whiteness, a friend once called me "white enough". I am still kinda pissed about that years later actually. Buuuuut the image of the brutish queer Arab in The Screwball Asses was really shocking- if I have dysphoria or dysmorphia it probably comes from stuff like that

I see the evolution of how I present myself as a process of subtracting metadata. I'm happy with where it is right now. As an album, maybe Plux Quba- it is vaguely childlike but there is so little information attached to it that you start to think about the difference between "Untitled" and " ". And then what little info you get raises more questions than it answers. It's really important for the content (music), which is so delicate and abstract, not to be overwlemed by the packaging. So much would be lost if you were directed towards a particular reading. It has to be allowed to take its own shape without presuming on what it is. There are a couple of important clues but they're very cryptic. That's all you need and all the material can sustain.

So, I secretly thought of myself as transgender in my early childhood and it was a *major* preoccupation of mine & something i was deeply ashamed of already then. I don't put a lot of stock in that memory, but it's been very helpful to me to hear women talk about their experiences.