Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

For me it’s closely linked to the word “identity” and I think I just don’t find gender to be necessary or relevant or important to my identity at all? Like it feels way more affirming for me when someone recognises me as a music nerd than when someone accurately senses that I’m queer or not-not-a-woman lol.

Caveat to a caveat lol - that said, part of the reason why that might be is growing up AFAB and being continually dismissed as a music nerd due to being perceived as a cis woman and therefore cannot possibly be a music nerd who should be taken seriously. (ILM for all its flaws (and how!) was a breath of fresh air for me nearly 20 years ago in that it was the first place that didn’t completely alienating for a teenage female music fan.)

Re: “identify”

and

This blasé-ness about gender btw is also prob the reason why I’ve never really participated in these threads or discussions before - I don’t really feel or behave like a woman but it doesn’t bother me if people perceive me as one.

I was just compelled to post today because the part in emily’s post, about how even calling oneself non-binary feels too much like labelling something one doesn’t care to label, really resonated with me.

Hi, FGTI! How are you?

I totally get that, Roz - like, for many years, "music geek" was something that I felt was way, way more integral to my personality and identity, than a gender that had just been doled out at birth, and I'd had no choice in? Like, man, I had to WORK at earning my music geek status! But I slowly realised that "interested in gender and its complaints" was moving up and up the level of importance for me. (While "music geek" was waning, in part due to horrible experiences on music messageboards.)

Trying to think of how to do this without being proscriptive/prescriptive: but I believe it's worth exploring the ways in which "I find the gender binary restrictive and wish to live outside the constraints of cisheteropatriarchy" and "I am trans and wish to be read and treated as a gender other than the one handed out at birth" are NOT a perfect circle as a Venn Diagram. Nor should they have to be!

(Also something about ... the ways in which cisheteropatriarchy is a systemic problem, like capitalism. And just as it is extraordinarily difficult to just "opt out" of capitalism by individual personal choices - (though it *feels* as though it should be easier to do so, the more you belong to class(es) which capitalism favours) - individual, personal choices are unlikely to dismantle cisheteropatriarchy as a whole. That requires systemic solutions. What a "systemic solution" might look like depends on one's position with regards to the different, often weirdly conflicting, power structures of cisheteropatriarchy.)

xp how's it all going for you?

― paolo, Thursday, February 18, 2021 3:06 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

still working through it! trying to figure out how i fit and dont fit into masculinity other than feeling more feminine/softer than the average man. i did buy a couple of tops from the women's section of the thrift store, but they still code p masculine aside from the colors. so nothing groundbreaking, just a lot of self-questioning and imagining other possibilities.

Like it feels way more affirming for me when someone recognises me as a music nerd than when someone accurately senses that I’m queer or not-not-a-woman lol.

Ha, I get this SO MUCH. Though I think because I've been read as cishet most of my life there is a keen desire in me now to be recognised as a queer person who has some kind of non-binary relation to gender - sometimes I do get that anger of "I'm sick of passing, rarrrgh smash it all up smash smash smash".

Lots of posts since I was last on the thread but I did want to circle back to: I understand why people might want to think of nonbinary as a "third category" but it's not a category at all, it's an umbrella. An umbrella that includes the third category, the fourth category, the fifth, and also identities and people that are mixtures of multiple categories, and also identities/people that fit none of the categories, and in fact defy categorisation at all.

(It it not, however, *solely* that last thing. It's an umbrella that contains multitudes.)

I've been trying to pick my words carefully here and saying stuff like "gender roles are bullshit" when my heart deep inside wants to say "gender is bullshit". But I do know people who genuinely feel gendered, and the fact that I can't comprehend that experience does not invalidate it. I also know people who love gender play in all its varieties, and people who are v stereotypically NB-androgynous. So yeah, I'm not advocating for non-binary to solely be "uncategorisable", or anything like that. I just find that our old friend ~~the discourse~~ has kind of made it tougher for the uncategorisable to avoid being categorised.

Ha, I just had this thought, possibly a stupid thought but it sounds good in my head right now. You know when you get to the personal information boxes on a form and you get the box "prefer not to say"? That's actually my gender identity.

Ha! emil.y - Gender of the Day had the perfect gender for you:

Marxist Gender - when you refuse to belong to any gender that would have you for a member!

I do know people who genuinely feel gendered

I was trying to find a specific tweet, because it expressed it far more succinctly and poetically than I ever could.

But a couple of months ago, I saw ~~~discourse~~~ that was talking about exactly this: an ideological divide (perhaps generational?) between those who saw their gender as something unknowable, opaque, unfathomable and utterly indefinable - and those who enjoyed the constant defining and refining of more and more specific microgenres of gender.

I can totally see that both methods have their advantages and detractions. And we'd lose something if we lost either. But I can also see why someone who sung their gender using one form of poetry would feel mystified, maybe even alarmed by the other.

Wait, I found the exact thread:

there’s such a huge difference between a queer gender politics based on refusing classification (think Foucault, “do not ask me who I am”) and a queer gender politics (v common now) based on a infinite proliferation of new forms of classification.

— e. thorkelson (@unambivalence) December 8, 2020

Good thread, and good comments. There's one that mentions the difference between adjectives and nouns (specifically in reference to "queer"), which is something I was thinking about earlier when I was asked if "agender" would work as an identity for me. I feel like I don't fit any of the noun forms, but a variety of adjectives would work okay as descriptors.

I've been trying to pick my words carefully here and saying stuff like "gender roles are bullshit" when my heart deep inside wants to say "gender is bullshit". But I do know people who genuinely feel gendered, and the fact that I can't comprehend that experience does not invalidate it. I also know people who love gender play in all its varieties, and people who are v stereotypically NB-androgynous. So yeah, I'm not advocating for non-binary to solely be "uncategorisable", or anything like that. I just find that our old friend ~~the discourse~~ has kind of made it tougher for the uncategorisable to avoid being categorised.

yes to all of this <3 and to the differences between nouns and adjectives

Gender is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake, my morning mantra

You mention being ace, and it does seem like there is some correlation between being ace, and also being drawn to the agender / nongender / ungender family of genders (but also to the pangender family of genders?) That makes a lot of sense to me, because in the allosexual world, so much of the work that gender expression DOES, is sending out visual signals about what sort of partner one might desire. (That's not ALL that gender expression does, but it is one of the big ones!) So if you do not experience desire for a partner, then WTF is so much of that... *display* aspect of gender even for?

I think this is a good point and not one I'd really thought about. I'd assumed that ace people were more likely to be NB or trans because it feels like us lot (and other LGBT+) folks almost *have* to think about our identities and ask a bunch of questions about ourselves that your cishet types don't, which can lead to people researching stuff and ending up at all sorts of places. The ace people I know are also not representative of the general population - they're more likely to be young and more likely to have been involved in LGBT+ stuff. You love to see it.

Also not having a go at you here, but plenty of ace people do want to attract partners or to look good or present in a traditional way for their own enjoyment. I know you're not trying to say that aces don't care about their appearance or anything like that but some of us like to appear in a traditional gender role way just because we like it. For example, ace activist Yasmin Benoit works as a lingerie model even though she's totally ace. But I do take your point, I think we are less likely to conform to gender appearance norms because we don't conform to sexual norms.

But this is where I kind of flail and go "danger! danger! don't make the mistakes I did!!!" In making this a political statement, there is a danger of universalising your specific needs, wants, desires around gender, in a way that conflicts with the needs, wants, desires of other People Of Gender (that is a shit term, yes, but until someone comes up with a better way of saying "not cis men", that's all I got.)

For many people of gender, especially the ones with identities involving the Femme family of genders, being able to be and express and *DO* that gender is as important to them, as "I want to live in a world completely without gender" is to the a/un/non-gender folks. And that's valid, too.

Just try to bear that in mind? Like, I completely understand and support the exploration of "if I could wave a magic wand and .... X" That's an amazing and important thing to be able to do, in your personal gender journey. But learning not to universalise that is a big part of surviving in THIS world. (And wow, do I tell you this from painful personal experience!)

Thanks for pointing this out. I don't think that I've been thinking that people *shouldn't* be cis or gendered or whatever but yeah I'll bear this in mind gong forward.

Also, categorization is human. Human beings sort themselves into categories. I personally want identities to belong to as long as they are other rather than The Other. I have no problem with non-binary as one of my labels, but I don't have a problem with anyone who thinks differently. This is a big world with lots of space for different types of thinking.

don't forget to vote in the Top 77 Sexualities poll

78: sapiosexual

Also not having a go at you here, but plenty of ace people do want to attract partners or to look good or present in a traditional way for their own enjoyment. I know you're not trying to say that aces don't care about their appearance or anything like that but some of us like to appear in a traditional gender role way just because we like it. For example, ace activist Yasmin Benoit works as a lingerie model even though she's totally ace. But I do take your point, I think we are less likely to conform to gender appearance norms because we don't conform to sexual norms.

No, thanks for the clarification! I agree, it's important to learn and understand the stereotypes and tropes, so one can avoid them, so I appreciate your point.

I also think my message may have gone a little awry? (I'm not sure I phrased it in the best way, there.)

The work I'm talking about, that gender expression does - it definitely can function in the way you're talking about, as a signal *to* potential mates, as to one's availability and interest. But it does a lot more work than that. That even when someone is partnered and/or not looking for mates, gender expression is still used to signal, subtly or overtly, anything from "I'm a femme heterosexual woman" to "I'm a gay leather he/him-lesbian Stud4Stud top". Clothing, haircuts, styling, presentation, it's a highly expressive language, in which orientation and gender and position interplay in complex ways.

It was genuinely mindblowing to me, to learn how much of heterosexual cisman gender expression seems to be about proclaiming, as loudly and obviously as possible, "I'm a man, I'm heterosexual, I'm a heterosexual man!" Which seems so strange - like honestly, cis-heterosexual men are so much the *default* of whole system (especially the white ones!) - why do they need to advertise that identity and signal it so strongly? Well. Because most of the time, it's like it's not even about attracting heterosexual women at all, what it is about is establishing and maintaining their place, as a Heterosexual Man, at the top of the pecking order.

(Transmasculine people, funnily enough, are often trying to express "I'm masculine, I'd like to be treated as a man, but wow, I would like to put some serious distance between myself and Heterosexual Cismen, thank you!")

The thing that it seems to me, that asexual folks and agender folks would share in common (and please correct me or amend if I've totally misread this!) is that much less of the bandwidth is dedicated to expressing "I'm asexual" or "I'm nongendered" - that their presentation is far more likely to be signalling "I'm a music geek" or "I love anime" or "I'm into steam engines and Victorian melodrama" or "I appreciate beautifully designed lingerie"? To choose a gender expression because one likes it aesthetically, rather than because one is trying to *say* something with it?

"How do you signal neutral or non?" is a really interesting question. How to announce the absence of something is an interesting tautology. To signal neutral could be to remove all signifiers. To signal neutral could also be to display contradicting or non-legible signifiers? I am probably not expressing this well; words are hard. I'm stopping typing now.

Gender is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake, my morning mantra

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8uIfLIWflI

Because most of the time, it's like it's not even about attracting heterosexual women at all, what it is about is establishing and maintaining their place, as a Heterosexual Man, at the top of the pecking order.

or because the system is so set up to deride and shame anyone stepping out of the default that billions of cishets who don't actively care about gender, or any place in a pecking order, feel forced to perform masc just to get out of thinking about it

I think it's an interesting point, Branwell! When I present femme I feel this entirely different energy when I'm in public, which I would absolutely describe as one of gender euphoria, but completely devoid of any desire to sexually "attract". I say but, yet these two states are likely related

Maybe "euphoria" is too strong a word, but it's on the spectrum. Somewhere between comfort and elation

Quiet, self-contained sense of "rightness"?

The comfortable sigh of "ah, that's better" when getting home from work and taking the bra off and putting the feet up.

It can definitely take the form of a small, still voice, Ein Leichtes Leises Säuseln, rather than tempests and lightning bolts.

(I have a lot of kinda-angry-kinda-sad feelings myself, about how much of my gender presentation through my life, was about feeling that I'd have to look and act a certain way to get to shag the people I wanted to shag, rather than how I actually wanted to move through the world, because those two states conflicted.)

Someone referred to me as 'they' for the first time the other day. Felt pretty good.

yay!

that's awesome :)

Well thank you! I gotta say, I'm not sure that any of the nonbinary pronouns on offer feel 100% right for me but I think they is best of the bunch for now. I'd be interested to hear from other NB/GQ people about how they chose theirs.

Just came out to my husband as non-binary. He's accepting, but I can't get him to figure out that there's a difference between that and being bisexual. Fortunately, I happen to be both. He's now nattering on about art colonies and hanging out in Coconut Grove in the early Seventies.

Congratulations!

woohoo

excellent news!

Aww. I hope he does actually make more of an effort to understand as well but that sounds like a good first step.

NYT and its union arguing over whether or not to change trans journalists' bylines retroactively after they've transitioned, per an email from @newsguild pic.twitter.com/omuJ8idPm1

— Ben Smith (@benyt) April 20, 2021

Bros it’s one SQL statement it’s not fraught

Forgive me if this is a stupid question. I am editing a short bio of a trans scientist (Ben Barres). Is this line OK? "Barres officially transitioned to male in 1997 and became the first openly transgender member of the National Academy of Sciences." The "officially" strikes me as potentially off, and I am not confident about the phrasing generally.

the "officially" sounds a little awkward and would probably imply to me specifically that 1997 is when he got legal recognition of his transition (which doesn't necessarily correspond to just his coming out or presenting as a man etc.). just "Barres transitioned to male in 1997" would be fine generally but otherwise it's all good

maybe something like "has been openly trans" or "has publically identified as" since whenever or explicitly mention the legal recognition since officially can be ambiguous. but if you have anything specific about how he describes or conceives of things i'd go with that and try to avoid other more general rules unless there's nothing else to go on

‘Openly’ is a bit retrograde; you wouldn’t append any other type of LGBTQI person with that in the 21st century.

Thanks all!

I take the point about "openly", but in a sentence like this doesn't it work as an acknowledgement that there were likely previous transgender members we don't know about? What other word/expression would do that job?

Unless you know for a fact that there were closeted trans people in the field, you’re just leaving a hostage to fortune. Try the sentence without ‘openly’ and I think you’ll find it’s OK.

Are you able to get in touch with this guy and ask him what he'd prefer?

Unfortunately Prof Barres passed away in ... 2019 was it? 2017. I loved his anecdote about overhearing people after a seminar he gave describing him as much more impressive than his "sister".
For the interested: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08964-1

pretty sure i'm a woman, not really in a position to do anything about that yet, not sure why i'm telling y'all first but y'all have proven to be a really accepting community when it comes to things like this so maybe i am sure why i'm telling y'all first, it's also confusing and ambiguous knowledge to try to hold onto and thus doesn't yet feel real. not sure why typing this up made me feel more sad than relieved

<3 brad

<3 <3 <3 <3

:)

Thank you for telling us, and congratulations on taking this step!!! I'm happy and honored to know more about one of my favorite ilxors. I'm sorry you're sad, and hope this will soon bring you some joy as well. <3

<3 Brad

<3<3