... but I'm not sure if I *really* have gender dysphoria?
June 17, 2024 3:36 AM Subscribe
That's Gender Dysphoria This experience of discontinuity between the societal presumed gender and the internal sense of self is what we describe as Gender Dysphoria, and is common among nearly all trans individuals, regardless of their position within or outside of the gender binary. This has at times been something of a political topic within trans communities, as different groups have their own ideas of what Gender Dysphoria is, how it manifests itself, and what qualifies a person as being trans.
So as not to get lost in that topic, this site will define Gender Dysphoria in broad terms of incongruence with sex assigned at birth. If you experience gender identity in a way that does not match what was assigned to you at birth, your claim to the transgender identity is valid, no matter how that incongruence manifests for you.
How to Support A Friend or Partner Who’s Dealing With Gender Dysphoria
If your friend or partner wants to talk to you about their gender dysphoria, listen to what they have to say. Don’t offer advice unless they ask for it. Instead, validate their feelings—like by reflecting what they have said back to them in a way that lets them know you really heard or saw them, or by letting them know you agree their feelings are right and real—and ask questions.
So as not to get lost in that topic, this site will define Gender Dysphoria in broad terms of incongruence with sex assigned at birth. If you experience gender identity in a way that does not match what was assigned to you at birth, your claim to the transgender identity is valid, no matter how that incongruence manifests for you.
How to Support A Friend or Partner Who’s Dealing With Gender Dysphoria
If your friend or partner wants to talk to you about their gender dysphoria, listen to what they have to say. Don’t offer advice unless they ask for it. Instead, validate their feelings—like by reflecting what they have said back to them in a way that lets them know you really heard or saw them, or by letting them know you agree their feelings are right and real—and ask questions.
Started browsing through the first link, but this jumped out at me on the Societal Dysphoria page: If you are holding an infant or tending to a child then you are labeled a mom (unless the child is mixed race, in which case you’re demoted to nanny, but that’s a whole other topic).
As a mixed race kid... what? I sort of get where they're coming from, but that's a very particular white upper-middle class perspective.
posted by May Kasahara at 4:10 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]
As a mixed race kid... what? I sort of get where they're coming from, but that's a very particular white upper-middle class perspective.
posted by May Kasahara at 4:10 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]
When you see the world through a duck shaped lens, everything looks vaguely like a duck.
that quacked me up :-)
seriously: thanks for this, especially the section on euphoria!
posted by HearHere at 4:26 AM on June 17 [2 favorites]
that quacked me up :-)
seriously: thanks for this, especially the section on euphoria!
posted by HearHere at 4:26 AM on June 17 [2 favorites]
This is interesting as I have two trans children who regularly point out to me that some things I say suggest that I have experienced gender dysphoria. But I never recognized it as such at the time. Mostly it’s taken the form of self-doubt about my abilities as a father to be a male role model. I was scared to have a son, and most especially a son who was into traditional guy stuff. Basically, I have always thought “I’m no good at being a man.”
posted by wabbittwax at 4:44 AM on June 17 [11 favorites]
posted by wabbittwax at 4:44 AM on June 17 [11 favorites]
As a mixed race kid... what? I sort of get where they're coming from, but that's a very particular white upper-middle class perspective.
My guess is the author means “mixed-race” as in “mixed-race couple” i.e. the baby is a different race to the adult. I know I catch myself often assuming that an adult and baby aren’t parent and child for that reason (which is something to work on!)
posted by cabbage raccoon at 4:46 AM on June 17 [3 favorites]
My guess is the author means “mixed-race” as in “mixed-race couple” i.e. the baby is a different race to the adult. I know I catch myself often assuming that an adult and baby aren’t parent and child for that reason (which is something to work on!)
The article did say "unless the child is mixed race", so I assumed they meant the child of parents who are different races, which tracks with my personal experience.
My own skin is lighter than my mom's, and I had a mixed race classmate at one point whose skin was much lighter than her dad's. It's normal for mixed race kids who have one parent with darker skin and another with lighter skin to have that kind of variance, but at the same time, mixed race can mean many other things.
Anyway, didn't mean to get too off-topic; carry on ^^;
posted by May Kasahara at 4:53 AM on June 17
The article did say "unless the child is mixed race", so I assumed they meant the child of parents who are different races, which tracks with my personal experience.
My own skin is lighter than my mom's, and I had a mixed race classmate at one point whose skin was much lighter than her dad's. It's normal for mixed race kids who have one parent with darker skin and another with lighter skin to have that kind of variance, but at the same time, mixed race can mean many other things.
Anyway, didn't mean to get too off-topic; carry on ^^;
posted by May Kasahara at 4:53 AM on June 17
When they call you a dude
And you think that it's rude
...
When you hear "thank you ma'am"
But you know it's a sham
...
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:58 AM on June 17 [6 favorites]
And you think that it's rude
...
When you hear "thank you ma'am"
But you know it's a sham
...
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:58 AM on June 17 [6 favorites]
wabbitwax, I've definitely had the feeling of "being no good at being a man" but I generally ascribe it to being a traitor to patriarchy. I question gender roles and gender expression all the time (it's fun to wear a skirt, you can even call it a "kilt"), but I've never questioned my gender identity. The world is going to hell in a lot of ways, but it's really incredible to be part of the blossoming of queerness and the explosion of the gender binary into a beautiful multicolored spectrum. Let's fight like hell to keep making things better.
posted by rikschell at 5:39 AM on June 17 [14 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 5:39 AM on June 17 [14 favorites]
This is really interesting. Thanks for posting it.
posted by joannemerriam at 6:41 AM on June 17
posted by joannemerriam at 6:41 AM on June 17
I do want to mention that some of the recent history on that site is less than ... precise. One that bugs me is that they say "gender dysphoria" wasn't used in the US until 2013 (which I assume is the date on DSM-V). I really struggle with framing, well, any of my experiences of being trans as "dysphoria" precisely because the term was in use and I understood it as a term of medicalisation, something that was placed on my experience by others, not something I controlled. I'm pro giving people language to talk about their experiences, just don't tell me what mine was in the process.
posted by hoyland at 6:55 AM on June 17 [17 favorites]
posted by hoyland at 6:55 AM on June 17 [17 favorites]
Meanwhile, one of my favorite transgender writers wrote a IMHO much more concise and reasonable essay on the entire 'dysphoria and what to do next' bit, and then put in more information about other parts of your life.
posted by mephron at 7:12 AM on June 17 [12 favorites]
posted by mephron at 7:12 AM on June 17 [12 favorites]
This was such a useful resource to me when I was first starting to figure out some gender shit. In my mind, dysphoria was always a physical thing, and I was pretty okay with my body* so I couldn't possibly be trans. It was the social dysphoria that killed me. The way people treated me as a man—the assumptions people would have, the expectations of my behavior, all of it felt wrong and infuriating and I felt trapped. And, thanks to this site, once I realized social dysphoria was a thing and that it could mean I was trans finally helped shift my perspective enough to start exploring transition.
The way I'm perceived and treated now, while far from ideal, is much more attuned to who I am and how I present, and it's alleviated so much. Yes, being a woman** in society has its problems, risks, and dangers... so many of them... but it's the sort of problem I want to have versus the way I was seen and treated before.
*Except for my minor case of gynecomastia, which I was totally misreading. Turns out I didn't like my little moobs because they were too small, not because they existed.
**Woman is not my gender identity but it's close enough.
posted by SansPoint at 7:15 AM on June 17 [12 favorites]
The way I'm perceived and treated now, while far from ideal, is much more attuned to who I am and how I present, and it's alleviated so much. Yes, being a woman** in society has its problems, risks, and dangers... so many of them... but it's the sort of problem I want to have versus the way I was seen and treated before.
*Except for my minor case of gynecomastia, which I was totally misreading. Turns out I didn't like my little moobs because they were too small, not because they existed.
**Woman is not my gender identity but it's close enough.
posted by SansPoint at 7:15 AM on June 17 [12 favorites]
I sort of get where they're coming from, but that's a very particular white upper-middle class perspective.
I have a black friend in this situation and it absolutely does happen to her with some frequency (though I think it's dropped off significantly as the kids get to less of a nannying age and also one of her kids has gotten darker as he's gotten bigger). The world compares her skin color to theirs and concludes she is not their parent. Since they read white and she reads black, they conclude...servant.
posted by praemunire at 8:41 AM on June 17 [6 favorites]
I have a black friend in this situation and it absolutely does happen to her with some frequency (though I think it's dropped off significantly as the kids get to less of a nannying age and also one of her kids has gotten darker as he's gotten bigger). The world compares her skin color to theirs and concludes she is not their parent. Since they read white and she reads black, they conclude...servant.
posted by praemunire at 8:41 AM on June 17 [6 favorites]
Meanwhile, one of my favorite transgender writers wrote a IMHO much more concise and reasonable essay on the entire 'dysphoria and what to do next' bit, and then put in more information about other parts of your life.
I only skimmed it, but I think I might bookmark this one.* Because, really, having a gender, whether you are trans or not, is all choose your own adventure. It's one of the awesome and terrible things about being human in a society.
*I do want to note the transmasculine bottom surgery number is probably an underestimate at this point. I'm guessing that's the 2015 survey number and it is not possible to overstate how inaccessible genital surgery was in the US for transmasculine people then. There's a really complex legacy there that is going to make that a very difficult topic to survey accurately for a long time. Regardless of how you lean in terms of bottom surgery (yes/no, which procedure(s)), you are not alone, even if it sometimes feels like it online.
posted by hoyland at 8:48 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]
I only skimmed it, but I think I might bookmark this one.* Because, really, having a gender, whether you are trans or not, is all choose your own adventure. It's one of the awesome and terrible things about being human in a society.
*I do want to note the transmasculine bottom surgery number is probably an underestimate at this point. I'm guessing that's the 2015 survey number and it is not possible to overstate how inaccessible genital surgery was in the US for transmasculine people then. There's a really complex legacy there that is going to make that a very difficult topic to survey accurately for a long time. Regardless of how you lean in terms of bottom surgery (yes/no, which procedure(s)), you are not alone, even if it sometimes feels like it online.
posted by hoyland at 8:48 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]
Basically, I have always thought “I’m no good at being a man.”
Worrying about not being good at being a man is probably the most commonly shared experience of masculinity imho, though of course it's not limited to men. It seems kind of weird to bucket that (at least in isolation) into gender dysphoria. It's certainly some sort of gender feeling though!
posted by BungaDunga at 9:13 AM on June 17 [19 favorites]
Worrying about not being good at being a man is probably the most commonly shared experience of masculinity imho, though of course it's not limited to men. It seems kind of weird to bucket that (at least in isolation) into gender dysphoria. It's certainly some sort of gender feeling though!
posted by BungaDunga at 9:13 AM on June 17 [19 favorites]
But these two things are not the same:
...discontinuity between the societal presumed gender and the internal sense of self
...incongruence with sex assigned at birth. If you experience gender identity in a way that does not match what was assigned to you at birth
Society regularly tells me I am not, or not sufficiently, or not correctly, a woman, due to my performance of femininity. I however have no sense of incongruence, and am just a badly dressed cis woman. Society perceives me as some type of non binary person, whereas I believe everything I do is per definition feminine because it's a woman doing it. This has genuinely begun confusing the shit out of me, perhaps I *am* a non-binary person who simply identifies as female. This feels like a shitty and invalidating thing to wonder though.
posted by Iteki at 9:22 AM on June 17 [29 favorites]
...discontinuity between the societal presumed gender and the internal sense of self
...incongruence with sex assigned at birth. If you experience gender identity in a way that does not match what was assigned to you at birth
Society regularly tells me I am not, or not sufficiently, or not correctly, a woman, due to my performance of femininity. I however have no sense of incongruence, and am just a badly dressed cis woman. Society perceives me as some type of non binary person, whereas I believe everything I do is per definition feminine because it's a woman doing it. This has genuinely begun confusing the shit out of me, perhaps I *am* a non-binary person who simply identifies as female. This feels like a shitty and invalidating thing to wonder though.
posted by Iteki at 9:22 AM on June 17 [29 favorites]
I suspect it's possible to worry about being a man in a cis way and in a... not cis way. I assume the internal experiences are quite different once explored sufficiently. If it's "I am bad at being a man in some ways, but in other ways it's boss, please don't vote me off Man Island" then that's just masculinity. If it's "I just don't understand or enjoy enough of what's going on here on Man Island, I feel the Call of the Sea" then that's maybe something else.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:00 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 10:00 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]
Iteki, if it helps, I have the opposite experience.
I used to wonder whether I was just a gender non conforming woman, but then I realised that I see gender non conforming women as women with absolutely no doubt, but I don't see myself as a woman, no matter what my gender presentation is.
For me, it's not (as a lot of people tend to say about trans and nonbinary people) that I'm just overly influenced by society's gender stereotypes and I can "you can just be the kind of woman you want to be".
So tldr, if you think of yourself as a woman, that's what you are, there's no "maybe I'm in denial and I'm secretly [whatever gender identity].
posted by Zumbador at 10:01 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]
I used to wonder whether I was just a gender non conforming woman, but then I realised that I see gender non conforming women as women with absolutely no doubt, but I don't see myself as a woman, no matter what my gender presentation is.
For me, it's not (as a lot of people tend to say about trans and nonbinary people) that I'm just overly influenced by society's gender stereotypes and I can "you can just be the kind of woman you want to be".
So tldr, if you think of yourself as a woman, that's what you are, there's no "maybe I'm in denial and I'm secretly [whatever gender identity].
posted by Zumbador at 10:01 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]
But these two things are not the same:
...discontinuity between the societal presumed gender and the internal sense of self
...incongruence with sex assigned at birth. If you experience gender identity in a way that does not match what was assigned to you at birth
This is honestly a failing of most attempts to describe experiences of gender, to be honest, and is one of the things that has really frustrated me about attempts to make trans 101 mainstream. Suddenly everyone's gender is a) knowable and b) supposed to fit neatly in a box. The ability to move boxes does not liberate me. The ability to do my own damn gender as I please, whether or not it looks like one of society's boxes liberates me.
posted by hoyland at 10:07 AM on June 17 [25 favorites]
...discontinuity between the societal presumed gender and the internal sense of self
...incongruence with sex assigned at birth. If you experience gender identity in a way that does not match what was assigned to you at birth
This is honestly a failing of most attempts to describe experiences of gender, to be honest, and is one of the things that has really frustrated me about attempts to make trans 101 mainstream. Suddenly everyone's gender is a) knowable and b) supposed to fit neatly in a box. The ability to move boxes does not liberate me. The ability to do my own damn gender as I please, whether or not it looks like one of society's boxes liberates me.
posted by hoyland at 10:07 AM on June 17 [25 favorites]
also, riffing off hoyland, the idea that, for our whole lives, we stay in one box or no box, a different shaped box, moving from box to box, sometimes living in a bucket or a bottle, some of the above, all of the above, etc etc etc
in other words, it can all be fluid and changeable if that's what feels right
posted by kokaku at 10:46 AM on June 17 [3 favorites]
in other words, it can all be fluid and changeable if that's what feels right
posted by kokaku at 10:46 AM on June 17 [3 favorites]
Halloween Jack: Ah yes, that comic.
The woman who writes the blog I mentioned before is writing a book about webcomics, webcomic writers, and figuring out you were trans during the pandemic, and that's one of them. And it's come up a couple times here on the Blue.
posted by mephron at 11:01 AM on June 17 [4 favorites]
The woman who writes the blog I mentioned before is writing a book about webcomics, webcomic writers, and figuring out you were trans during the pandemic, and that's one of them. And it's come up a couple times here on the Blue.
posted by mephron at 11:01 AM on June 17 [4 favorites]
I guess the distinction I'd make is that "societally presumed gender" is not the same as what society expects of that gender.
Dealing with the incongruity of those is what has made it very difficult for me to even realize I was a transwoman, nevermind the transitioning part. In retrospect, I have a very strong and consistent preference for being a woman. One of the biggest things that made me have to admit things to myself was talking to trasnwomen I knew who were doing and considering all the medical transition stuff and realizing that they were actually more ambivalent about gender preference than I was. Like "oh no" right?
I firmly believe everyone should be free to do what they want. No one needs a box. But for my part, I want my dang box! However, I don't need people being annoying and wrong in telling me what to do with that box. My conception of what an idealized woman is and my idealized self is so at odds with what society expects of women. And that's real trouble for me.
The women who raised me were largely career oriented and feminist. I chafe at the expectation need to wear make up and shave all their body hair to exaggerate the differences between men and women beyond what personal biology allows. I mean I like femme fashion sometimes when it is a choice and you get to do it playfully and expressively, but a lot of the time I'm stuck trying to figure out how to look a lot more butch and a lot less masculine, which is a bit of a predicament, really.
I'm not going to claim to have all the answers. Every woman has to decide for herself what compromises to make with patriarchy to just, you know, get by. That's a part of growing up I haven't had to do yet. It's been far too long.
posted by Zalzidrax at 11:34 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]
Dealing with the incongruity of those is what has made it very difficult for me to even realize I was a transwoman, nevermind the transitioning part. In retrospect, I have a very strong and consistent preference for being a woman. One of the biggest things that made me have to admit things to myself was talking to trasnwomen I knew who were doing and considering all the medical transition stuff and realizing that they were actually more ambivalent about gender preference than I was. Like "oh no" right?
I firmly believe everyone should be free to do what they want. No one needs a box. But for my part, I want my dang box! However, I don't need people being annoying and wrong in telling me what to do with that box. My conception of what an idealized woman is and my idealized self is so at odds with what society expects of women. And that's real trouble for me.
The women who raised me were largely career oriented and feminist. I chafe at the expectation need to wear make up and shave all their body hair to exaggerate the differences between men and women beyond what personal biology allows. I mean I like femme fashion sometimes when it is a choice and you get to do it playfully and expressively, but a lot of the time I'm stuck trying to figure out how to look a lot more butch and a lot less masculine, which is a bit of a predicament, really.
I'm not going to claim to have all the answers. Every woman has to decide for herself what compromises to make with patriarchy to just, you know, get by. That's a part of growing up I haven't had to do yet. It's been far too long.
posted by Zalzidrax at 11:34 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]
This helped me a lot to take some of the early steps in figuring out my own identity. I had been asking myself if I might be trans / wishing I were trans for years, but I had so many experiences of dysphoria that I had never considered might be connected. It is difficult now for me to even understand what I was thinking before.
posted by eruonna at 12:29 PM on June 17 [5 favorites]
posted by eruonna at 12:29 PM on June 17 [5 favorites]
Hey, thanks for sharing this.
A couple years ago, I was doing a lot of self-reflection on why I had so much resentment for my father (his extremely rigid perspective on masculinity) and why I sometimes (but not often) wish I had a feminine body, and after reading the term demi boy/male (which I'll readily admit I'm not sure is used still/often), I had an oh shit moment of, "Hey, that's me."
So after a lot of thinking about who I am, confronting my dad (after he asked me, sincerely, if he'd ever done wrong by me), and talking things over with my partner, I settled comfortably on masc-leaning NB. I do experience dysphoria sometimes, but I'm usually comfortable in my body, and the people I've come out to have been really chill about it.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 1:16 PM on June 17 [10 favorites]
A couple years ago, I was doing a lot of self-reflection on why I had so much resentment for my father (his extremely rigid perspective on masculinity) and why I sometimes (but not often) wish I had a feminine body, and after reading the term demi boy/male (which I'll readily admit I'm not sure is used still/often), I had an oh shit moment of, "Hey, that's me."
So after a lot of thinking about who I am, confronting my dad (after he asked me, sincerely, if he'd ever done wrong by me), and talking things over with my partner, I settled comfortably on masc-leaning NB. I do experience dysphoria sometimes, but I'm usually comfortable in my body, and the people I've come out to have been really chill about it.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 1:16 PM on June 17 [10 favorites]
I wish some of the authors weren't quite so hostile to/dismissive of autogynephilia/autoandrophilia. I mean, I get that they have been wrongfully used to invalidate trans identities. But, like, lots of cisgender people really have those kinks. Presumably some transgender people genuinely do too. It shouldn't necessarily be rolled into their trans experience, it can just be totally separate
I mean I'm an AMAB egg, if I experience autoandrophilia I see no reason that needs to be related to my identity.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 2:28 PM on June 17
I mean I'm an AMAB egg, if I experience autoandrophilia I see no reason that needs to be related to my identity.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 2:28 PM on June 17
they have been wrongfully used to invalidate trans identities
correction, they were invented to invalidate our identities. 99% of the time we hear that term, it's a terf attacking our right to exist. it doesn't have a meaning outside of transphobia.
posted by sharktopus at 4:20 PM on June 17 [14 favorites]
correction, they were invented to invalidate our identities. 99% of the time we hear that term, it's a terf attacking our right to exist. it doesn't have a meaning outside of transphobia.
posted by sharktopus at 4:20 PM on June 17 [14 favorites]
Thanks for posting this, it’s definitely informative and helpful!
posted by herda05 at 4:59 PM on June 17 [1 favorite]
posted by herda05 at 4:59 PM on June 17 [1 favorite]
So the thing with autogynephilia is that it's not just the fetish but also a whole constellation of stereotypes about being The Bad Kind of Trans Woman that Ray Blanchard made up, which amount of "trans women who are attracted to women are really disgusting male fetishists with stereotypically male interests and attitudes who just want to get off on feeling like women". Its counterpart is not "autoandrophilia" (which Blanchard later admitted he doesn't believe in and had only said he did so people wouldn't get mad at him) but "homosexual transsexual", which is to say a particular set of stereotypes around trans women who are really gay men trying to trick straight men into fucking them- a narrative that repeatedly gets trans women tortured and murdered- and who are also really stereotypically feminine and passive and not very smart and so on.
Talking about autogynephilia like it's a real thing is simply participating in the larger project of violent transmisogyny Blanchard (a member, by the way, of the white supremacist/eugenicist Human Biodiversity Institute) has made a career of.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:53 PM on June 17 [16 favorites]
Talking about autogynephilia like it's a real thing is simply participating in the larger project of violent transmisogyny Blanchard (a member, by the way, of the white supremacist/eugenicist Human Biodiversity Institute) has made a career of.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:53 PM on June 17 [16 favorites]
The kink is gender transformation/TF. Because if it's not transformation, then you're just liking sex as your preferred gender, which is just called liking sex.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:47 PM on June 17 [1 favorite]
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:47 PM on June 17 [1 favorite]
I was very confused by my experience with gender until very recently, when I learned my experience is actually quite common.. among people with autism.
I’ve just never understood gender. It’s completely arbitrary and dependent on the culture you grew up in, I’m my experience, whether various aspects of your presentation are considered masculine or feminine. I’ve never had a concept of myself as being a gender — it’s like growing up in a religion that was never personally meaningful to you. It has always, as far back as I can remember, felt like something that is imposed on me from the outside rather than something that actually exists within me. As much as I’ve never seen myself as a girl/woman, I’ve equally never seen myself as a boy/man.
Exploring my own recent diagnosis of autism, I’ve learned this is how a lot of other autistic people feel. Like gender is BS and why do people keep trying to put this random label on me and tell me what I can and can’t and should and shouldn’t do based on this arbitrary label.
It’s a weird place to be. I have no interest in changing my body, despite the fact that it’s annoying that everyone else clocks me as “woman”, because to me my body is just “me”, so what on earth would I change it to? I tried cutting my hair short once, but it grows funny and looks weird short, and anyway man buns exist, so why should I have to cut it? I gravitate towards male circles in social interactions because the kind of things guys talk about tend to be more interesting to me in a general sense than the kinds of things groups of women talk about. But then I also knit and cook and I’m not the one who fixes things around the house so 🤷🏻.
posted by antinomia at 1:44 AM on June 18 [24 favorites]
I’ve just never understood gender. It’s completely arbitrary and dependent on the culture you grew up in, I’m my experience, whether various aspects of your presentation are considered masculine or feminine. I’ve never had a concept of myself as being a gender — it’s like growing up in a religion that was never personally meaningful to you. It has always, as far back as I can remember, felt like something that is imposed on me from the outside rather than something that actually exists within me. As much as I’ve never seen myself as a girl/woman, I’ve equally never seen myself as a boy/man.
Exploring my own recent diagnosis of autism, I’ve learned this is how a lot of other autistic people feel. Like gender is BS and why do people keep trying to put this random label on me and tell me what I can and can’t and should and shouldn’t do based on this arbitrary label.
It’s a weird place to be. I have no interest in changing my body, despite the fact that it’s annoying that everyone else clocks me as “woman”, because to me my body is just “me”, so what on earth would I change it to? I tried cutting my hair short once, but it grows funny and looks weird short, and anyway man buns exist, so why should I have to cut it? I gravitate towards male circles in social interactions because the kind of things guys talk about tend to be more interesting to me in a general sense than the kinds of things groups of women talk about. But then I also knit and cook and I’m not the one who fixes things around the house so 🤷🏻.
posted by antinomia at 1:44 AM on June 18 [24 favorites]
I still find the terminology difficult, though, especially how it's used in the linked article, when they say, essentially, that if your experience of gender differs from the cultural expectations around you, then you are trans. I starting to hear this a lot, but to me "trans" implies a binary. Maybe because I know the term first from chemistry, and a compound can only be cis or trans if it has two possible conformations.
For me, and people like me, neither conformation feels applicable, so trans is equally wrong as cis. So I tend to say queer, and feel a bit like, saying we're all trans is erasing non-binary and agender people. But perhaps the source term "trans" is obscure enough that using it isn't reinforcing a binary like it does for me?
posted by antinomia at 4:12 AM on June 18 [5 favorites]
For me, and people like me, neither conformation feels applicable, so trans is equally wrong as cis. So I tend to say queer, and feel a bit like, saying we're all trans is erasing non-binary and agender people. But perhaps the source term "trans" is obscure enough that using it isn't reinforcing a binary like it does for me?
posted by antinomia at 4:12 AM on June 18 [5 favorites]
antinomia, my association with "cis" and "trans" is with the place names in South Africa where I live, Transkei and Ciskei which mean "That side of the Kei river" (Transkei) and "This side of the Kei river" (Ciskei).
So in my word association, "trans" means "the other side". And "transgender" means "a gender other than the one assigned to you at birth".
Since no one knew I was nonbinary when I was born, I'm nonbinary as well as trans. I'm not on this side of the river. I'm not on the other side of the river either, I'm either in the river, or floating around up above all that territory.
But that's what the words mean to me, and that's not true for everyone else so you might not find it helpful.
posted by Zumbador at 4:23 AM on June 18 [11 favorites]
So in my word association, "trans" means "the other side". And "transgender" means "a gender other than the one assigned to you at birth".
Since no one knew I was nonbinary when I was born, I'm nonbinary as well as trans. I'm not on this side of the river. I'm not on the other side of the river either, I'm either in the river, or floating around up above all that territory.
But that's what the words mean to me, and that's not true for everyone else so you might not find it helpful.
posted by Zumbador at 4:23 AM on June 18 [11 favorites]
>The kink is gender transformation/TF. Because if it's not transformation, then you're just liking sex as your preferred gender, which is just called liking sex.
What no. I'm AMAB. My preferred gender is androgyny, I think. My kink is the idea of being hypermasculine. That's not something I want out of bedroom fantasies. It's not just "liking sex".
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 6:50 AM on June 18
What no. I'm AMAB. My preferred gender is androgyny, I think. My kink is the idea of being hypermasculine. That's not something I want out of bedroom fantasies. It's not just "liking sex".
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 6:50 AM on June 18
So I tend to say queer, and feel a bit like, saying we're all trans is erasing non-binary and agender people.
This is more or less the opposite of my experience of trans spaces, or at least transmasculine spaces. People often suppose that "FTM" means/meant binary-identified and interested in medical transition and that really wasn't how I understood it (and the "interested in medical transition" was demonstrably false). It was a big tent because it was the only* tent. And, by extension, we were all trans. (See also the saga of the appearing/disappearing asterisk.)
I think, though, that what gets lost in a lot of these simplified cis/trans explanations is, paradoxically, gender non-conformity, mostly because people are bad at talking about gender without resorting to stereotypes.
(On the language front, the prototypical cis/trans pair in my brain is Gaul, which is the same use Zumbador describes. Chemistry is the odd usage in the sense of having a clear opposition.)
*If you wanted a critical mass of people, that is. There were a whole host of identities in the early 2000s that are just... gone. We've all but lost genderqueer, for god's sake.
posted by hoyland at 7:19 AM on June 18 [7 favorites]
This is more or less the opposite of my experience of trans spaces, or at least transmasculine spaces. People often suppose that "FTM" means/meant binary-identified and interested in medical transition and that really wasn't how I understood it (and the "interested in medical transition" was demonstrably false). It was a big tent because it was the only* tent. And, by extension, we were all trans. (See also the saga of the appearing/disappearing asterisk.)
I think, though, that what gets lost in a lot of these simplified cis/trans explanations is, paradoxically, gender non-conformity, mostly because people are bad at talking about gender without resorting to stereotypes.
(On the language front, the prototypical cis/trans pair in my brain is Gaul, which is the same use Zumbador describes. Chemistry is the odd usage in the sense of having a clear opposition.)
*If you wanted a critical mass of people, that is. There were a whole host of identities in the early 2000s that are just... gone. We've all but lost genderqueer, for god's sake.
posted by hoyland at 7:19 AM on June 18 [7 favorites]
antinomia, thanks for the connection to autism. I think I'm probably ADHD (or AuDHD?) rather than autistic—I don't have a diagnosis because it isn't, for me, worth the trouble—but a lot of what you are saying really resonates for me.
When people talk about how cisgender people are supposed to feel about their own gender identities I am often just like what? because I am (putatively) cisgender and I really don't have a sense of "feeling like a woman" or whatever. In fact I am frequently quite uncomfortable with the demands of gender presentation, to the point of panic attacks occasionally when called upon to wear a fancy dress and make-up, but I think this is body dysmorphia plus just the general terribleness of being a fat woman in western society and not me being non-binary or trans, because I don't have what the first link calls existential or sexual dysphorias, although I can't be sure because I also don't "actually enjoy" my gender (as the first link confidently states most cis people do), although I do enjoy things people associate with gender, like having sex, but, like, if having a vagina doesn't make a trans person a woman then it doesn't make me a woman either, and otherwise I really don't understand what it means to "enjoy being a woman."
When the first link says, "Cis people still enjoy their genders. They might wish that certain aspects of how their gender is performed in society were different, but they would still choose to keep their assigned genders if swapping were on the table."... I am just, like, of course I would swap to try it out, otherwise how would I know what being a man is like? And only after experiencing being a man could I even figure out if being a woman is my preference or if it's just my default body. I don't have a control body that is something other than a woman, so how am I supposed to know? I'd love to be able to swap back and forth in a painless and more or less effortless way but that doesn't mean I want to be a man, it means I'm curious and lacking data. The first link says that even having these thoughts constitutes gender dysphoria but I feel like it just means I've read a lot of science fiction and I'm really not strongly attached to any particular conception of gender?
A few years ago I had a long conversation with a non-binary friend about all of this, trying to work out if my feelings were gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia, and they asked me, "what would you do differently if you figured out that you were non-binary or trans?" and my answer was nothing, I already use they/them pronouns sometimes but I am fine with she/her and I mostly don't give a shit if people think the way I gender-present is lacking or whatever already. I think I'd probably identify as non-binary if I were growing up now, because the bar would be so much lower: I'd be doing all the other teenage stuff of figuring out who I am already anyway. But to take it on at 50 when I don't even know for sure if I, for lack of a better term, qualify? It just seems like a lot of effort when half of the time I don't even understand what anybody is talking about wrt gender identity.
posted by joannemerriam at 8:28 AM on June 18 [15 favorites]
When people talk about how cisgender people are supposed to feel about their own gender identities I am often just like what? because I am (putatively) cisgender and I really don't have a sense of "feeling like a woman" or whatever. In fact I am frequently quite uncomfortable with the demands of gender presentation, to the point of panic attacks occasionally when called upon to wear a fancy dress and make-up, but I think this is body dysmorphia plus just the general terribleness of being a fat woman in western society and not me being non-binary or trans, because I don't have what the first link calls existential or sexual dysphorias, although I can't be sure because I also don't "actually enjoy" my gender (as the first link confidently states most cis people do), although I do enjoy things people associate with gender, like having sex, but, like, if having a vagina doesn't make a trans person a woman then it doesn't make me a woman either, and otherwise I really don't understand what it means to "enjoy being a woman."
When the first link says, "Cis people still enjoy their genders. They might wish that certain aspects of how their gender is performed in society were different, but they would still choose to keep their assigned genders if swapping were on the table."... I am just, like, of course I would swap to try it out, otherwise how would I know what being a man is like? And only after experiencing being a man could I even figure out if being a woman is my preference or if it's just my default body. I don't have a control body that is something other than a woman, so how am I supposed to know? I'd love to be able to swap back and forth in a painless and more or less effortless way but that doesn't mean I want to be a man, it means I'm curious and lacking data. The first link says that even having these thoughts constitutes gender dysphoria but I feel like it just means I've read a lot of science fiction and I'm really not strongly attached to any particular conception of gender?
A few years ago I had a long conversation with a non-binary friend about all of this, trying to work out if my feelings were gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia, and they asked me, "what would you do differently if you figured out that you were non-binary or trans?" and my answer was nothing, I already use they/them pronouns sometimes but I am fine with she/her and I mostly don't give a shit if people think the way I gender-present is lacking or whatever already. I think I'd probably identify as non-binary if I were growing up now, because the bar would be so much lower: I'd be doing all the other teenage stuff of figuring out who I am already anyway. But to take it on at 50 when I don't even know for sure if I, for lack of a better term, qualify? It just seems like a lot of effort when half of the time I don't even understand what anybody is talking about wrt gender identity.
posted by joannemerriam at 8:28 AM on June 18 [15 favorites]
Just popping in to mention agender or as I like to emoji it: 🤷🏻♂️
posted by knobknosher at 8:34 AM on June 18 [11 favorites]
posted by knobknosher at 8:34 AM on June 18 [11 favorites]
We've all but lost genderqueer, for god's sake.
genderqueer me waves from the genderether to hoyland
posted by kokaku at 8:44 AM on June 18 [7 favorites]
genderqueer me waves from the genderether to hoyland
posted by kokaku at 8:44 AM on June 18 [7 favorites]
joannemerriam I have a different take than the linked article about strength of gender identity and cis / trans.
I think that some people have strongly linked gender identity and sex and some people don't, and that's not aligned to whether they are cis or trans.
Some trans people have a strong link between sex and gender identity, they need surgery and hormonal treatment to affirm their sex, and don't like the "assigned at birth" language or "sex is seperate from gender" explanation because they ARE whatever sex they feel, regardless of the shape of their bodies. Not just gender identity. Those concepts are strongly linked for them.
Some cis people don't have a strong link to their assigned gender identity, they can accept it without discomfort but they don't necessarily feel it strongly either.
Some cis people feel that strong link between sex and gender identity, they have a strong sense of the rightness of their assigned gender and it fits, for them, with their sex.
Some people are agender, or don't have a strong sex to gender identity link. Some know they are man /woman /nonbinary /etc but they don't need their body to fit with the usual male=penis woman =vagina situation.
posted by Zumbador at 9:04 AM on June 18 [9 favorites]
I think that some people have strongly linked gender identity and sex and some people don't, and that's not aligned to whether they are cis or trans.
Some trans people have a strong link between sex and gender identity, they need surgery and hormonal treatment to affirm their sex, and don't like the "assigned at birth" language or "sex is seperate from gender" explanation because they ARE whatever sex they feel, regardless of the shape of their bodies. Not just gender identity. Those concepts are strongly linked for them.
Some cis people don't have a strong link to their assigned gender identity, they can accept it without discomfort but they don't necessarily feel it strongly either.
Some cis people feel that strong link between sex and gender identity, they have a strong sense of the rightness of their assigned gender and it fits, for them, with their sex.
Some people are agender, or don't have a strong sex to gender identity link. Some know they are man /woman /nonbinary /etc but they don't need their body to fit with the usual male=penis woman =vagina situation.
posted by Zumbador at 9:04 AM on June 18 [9 favorites]
This is more or less the opposite of my experience of trans spaces, or at least transmasculine spaces. People often suppose that "FTM" means/meant binary-identified and interested in medical transition and that really wasn't how I understood it (and the "interested in medical transition" was demonstrably false). It was a big tent because it was the only* tent. And, by extension, we were all trans. (See also the saga of the appearing/disappearing asterisk.)
I mean that's a big part of why terms like FTM and MTF have been largely deprecated in favor of transmasculine and transfeminine, isn't it? One implies a set starting point with a set goal and the other simply indicates a direction.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:08 AM on June 18 [4 favorites]
I mean that's a big part of why terms like FTM and MTF have been largely deprecated in favor of transmasculine and transfeminine, isn't it? One implies a set starting point with a set goal and the other simply indicates a direction.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:08 AM on June 18 [4 favorites]
While the concept that a person's gender identity can be anything along a diverse spectrum and not just be strictly one of two binary options is now becoming fairly widely understood (even if people disagree) the idea that the strength or intensity that a person feels an "internal sense of having a gender identity" can also be on a spectrum is less widely acknowledged. I'm going to call the measure of the intensity (or lack thereof) of an internal sense of gender "Gender Valence" but if there's a better term of the art I would love to hear what language other folks are using. The trans folks with very strong gender valences are the ones who experience gender dysphoria the most intensely and acutely and so they have been the ones on the forefront setting the tone for the conversation. There are a lot of cis people out there with strong (or at least perceptible) gender valence so the "I just know that I am a man/woman/nonbinary person" argument from an internal sense of self knowledge does work pretty well because many cis people can relate that to their own internal intuitive sense of gender.
But now that we have moved a few steps closer to gender liberation and a lot more people are asking themselves "what gender am I anyway?" simply because that's now a thing that is okay to ask yourself rather than a question that people only asked when the disconnect from what their intense internal sense of identity said and what the world projected onto them was so painful that they had no other choice. Now there are a whole bunch of people with low gender valence or none at all asking these questions and getting confused when all of the resources seem to assume that everyone has this internal sense of gender. And, to make matters even more confusing, there's really no clear answer that I can see even after you learn and acknowledge that gender valence can vary in intensity from person to person. Someone with zero gender valence is just as valid deciding "If I don't feel strongly about it being cis-by-default works fine with me" as they are deciding "If I don't identify as any gender then that makes me agender".
This is important knowledge for anyone exploring or questioning their own gender, of course, since it can help to reassure that there isn't anything wrong with you and accept that even that if you don't have the 'compass' that other folks seem to have that you can still choose the path you want to travel, but I think it's also very important that the conception of gender valence as a spectrum makes its way out of trans conversations and spaces and into the mainstream cis understanding of gender. This is because, in my personal observation, many of the most stanch transphobes, TERFs, and 'gender critical' types seem to fall into the low gender valence end of the spectrum if you can get them to talk about their own internal experience of gender. It's very easy to fall into the trap of dismissing people who insist that they have an internal sense of "I am a woman/man" when you yourself have never experienced this despite being a woman/man (according to the rules of cis-normativity). Getting low gender valence cis people to accept that their own personal experience of not feeling any internal sense of gender is only one point on a varied spectrum of experience is a necessary foundation that needs to be established before we can move on the next step of "and some of those internal gender identities don't align with that people are assigned at birth".
posted by metaphorever at 9:58 AM on June 18 [30 favorites]
But now that we have moved a few steps closer to gender liberation and a lot more people are asking themselves "what gender am I anyway?" simply because that's now a thing that is okay to ask yourself rather than a question that people only asked when the disconnect from what their intense internal sense of identity said and what the world projected onto them was so painful that they had no other choice. Now there are a whole bunch of people with low gender valence or none at all asking these questions and getting confused when all of the resources seem to assume that everyone has this internal sense of gender. And, to make matters even more confusing, there's really no clear answer that I can see even after you learn and acknowledge that gender valence can vary in intensity from person to person. Someone with zero gender valence is just as valid deciding "If I don't feel strongly about it being cis-by-default works fine with me" as they are deciding "If I don't identify as any gender then that makes me agender".
This is important knowledge for anyone exploring or questioning their own gender, of course, since it can help to reassure that there isn't anything wrong with you and accept that even that if you don't have the 'compass' that other folks seem to have that you can still choose the path you want to travel, but I think it's also very important that the conception of gender valence as a spectrum makes its way out of trans conversations and spaces and into the mainstream cis understanding of gender. This is because, in my personal observation, many of the most stanch transphobes, TERFs, and 'gender critical' types seem to fall into the low gender valence end of the spectrum if you can get them to talk about their own internal experience of gender. It's very easy to fall into the trap of dismissing people who insist that they have an internal sense of "I am a woman/man" when you yourself have never experienced this despite being a woman/man (according to the rules of cis-normativity). Getting low gender valence cis people to accept that their own personal experience of not feeling any internal sense of gender is only one point on a varied spectrum of experience is a necessary foundation that needs to be established before we can move on the next step of "and some of those internal gender identities don't align with that people are assigned at birth".
posted by metaphorever at 9:58 AM on June 18 [30 favorites]
I mean that's a big part of why terms like FTM and MTF have been largely deprecated in favor of transmasculine and transfeminine, isn't it?
They went because people didn't like the implication that one was once male/female. The assumption of the small tent came happened after the fact.
posted by hoyland at 10:00 AM on June 18
They went because people didn't like the implication that one was once male/female. The assumption of the small tent came happened after the fact.
posted by hoyland at 10:00 AM on June 18
metaphorever, gender valence is such a useful concept - thanks.
posted by joannemerriam at 11:59 AM on June 18 [3 favorites]
posted by joannemerriam at 11:59 AM on June 18 [3 favorites]
metaphorever gender valence as a spectrum is indeed very useful, and so is the point about low gender valence being less acknowledged or even noticed until recently.
Also aligns with neurodivergent lack of interoception.
posted by Zumbador at 12:24 PM on June 18 [6 favorites]
Also aligns with neurodivergent lack of interoception.
posted by Zumbador at 12:24 PM on June 18 [6 favorites]
I was excited to read this article until I learned that I'm doing trans wrong and I don't exist. Would someone please tell my tits?
posted by hypnogogue at 1:39 PM on June 18 [3 favorites]
posted by hypnogogue at 1:39 PM on June 18 [3 favorites]
Hmm, the lack of feeling like a gender doesn’t feel like… a lack. It feels very there. With that religion analogy again, if you’re atheist it’s not that you don’t have a sense of your own spirituality, you just are in fact not religious at all.
But the neurodivergent lack of interception thing is a bit like the lack of empathy thing, a label that comes out of the neurotypical experience of us and not our internal experience. Many? Most? of us actually have so much empathy we take on the feelings of those around us and that can cause us to get overwhelmed and shut down — and then we are perceived as lacking empathy because of our lack of appropriate response or any response at all. For those of us with autism our internal state can be so loud that we developed eating disorders from gut discomfort. I can often feel my own heartbeat, which is also not uncommon, and on several occasions I’ve had doctors and dentists tell me that yes, they see that there is something causing my pain, but it’s the sort of thing most people don’t notice. Sure, we can also ignore our bodies when we hyperfocus, and that gets a lot of attention from neurotypicals, whereas our day to day experiences of loud body sensations don’t, or are minimized.
But that’s a big digression. I do like the valence idea, although I don’t think I follow the logic that low valence would lead one to become a TERF, because in my experience being denied a lot things you wanted to do because of the gender others assigned you, and pushed into a “little girl” box over and over again when that’s not a box of experiences you enjoy, is not going to make you want to reinforce a binary that caused you so much misery.
I love seeing people be gender non-conforming because it normalizes not shoving people into fixed boxes against their will. It makes me feel freer, like there’s less social pressure around me to perform femininity, something I find annoying and exhausting.
posted by antinomia at 3:35 PM on June 18 [6 favorites]
But the neurodivergent lack of interception thing is a bit like the lack of empathy thing, a label that comes out of the neurotypical experience of us and not our internal experience. Many? Most? of us actually have so much empathy we take on the feelings of those around us and that can cause us to get overwhelmed and shut down — and then we are perceived as lacking empathy because of our lack of appropriate response or any response at all. For those of us with autism our internal state can be so loud that we developed eating disorders from gut discomfort. I can often feel my own heartbeat, which is also not uncommon, and on several occasions I’ve had doctors and dentists tell me that yes, they see that there is something causing my pain, but it’s the sort of thing most people don’t notice. Sure, we can also ignore our bodies when we hyperfocus, and that gets a lot of attention from neurotypicals, whereas our day to day experiences of loud body sensations don’t, or are minimized.
But that’s a big digression. I do like the valence idea, although I don’t think I follow the logic that low valence would lead one to become a TERF, because in my experience being denied a lot things you wanted to do because of the gender others assigned you, and pushed into a “little girl” box over and over again when that’s not a box of experiences you enjoy, is not going to make you want to reinforce a binary that caused you so much misery.
I love seeing people be gender non-conforming because it normalizes not shoving people into fixed boxes against their will. It makes me feel freer, like there’s less social pressure around me to perform femininity, something I find annoying and exhausting.
posted by antinomia at 3:35 PM on June 18 [6 favorites]
TERFs in general believe that you shouldn't have to perform feminity or have a strong internal gender identity in order to qualify as a "woman." (And therefore that transwomen don't qualify as women just because of their strong internal gender identity and their performance of feminity.)
Instead, the TERF definition of "a woman" is something more like "someone who was forced into the female role in our patriarchal society by virtue of the body their were born with, through no fault of their own."
I am actually kind of sympathetic to this idea, probably because I am also one of those people who can't imagine what it would feel like to have a strong internal sense of gender identity, so it DOES feel more like something which is imposed by society to me. I'm not entirely sure I am a woman by the standard of "a woman is someone who strongly identifies with the female gender." I don't and never have. But I would not want to be excluded from Girl Scouts or the Society of Women Engineers or whatever on that basis, because I do have shared experiences with other people who are treated by society as "women," and I enjoy the sort of support-group functions of those organizations. So I would prefer a definition of womanhood that does not depend on having that strong internal sense of one's own gender.
I'm not a TERF, though, because it does not actually upset me if other people DO have that strong internal sense. I may not understand it, but I don't really need to. Because I don't need to police anyone else's clothes, bathroom use, health care, athletic activities, or membership in advocacy organizations and social clubs. I don't feel threatened by transwomen, and don't feel any particular need to keep transwomen out of the Society of Women Engineers or Girl Scouts... It's not like patriarchy is particularly kind to them either. I welcome their support and am happy to offer them mine. And I will make every effort to use their preferred pronouns, because why not? It costs me nothing and makes them happy.
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:12 PM on June 18 [8 favorites]
Instead, the TERF definition of "a woman" is something more like "someone who was forced into the female role in our patriarchal society by virtue of the body their were born with, through no fault of their own."
I am actually kind of sympathetic to this idea, probably because I am also one of those people who can't imagine what it would feel like to have a strong internal sense of gender identity, so it DOES feel more like something which is imposed by society to me. I'm not entirely sure I am a woman by the standard of "a woman is someone who strongly identifies with the female gender." I don't and never have. But I would not want to be excluded from Girl Scouts or the Society of Women Engineers or whatever on that basis, because I do have shared experiences with other people who are treated by society as "women," and I enjoy the sort of support-group functions of those organizations. So I would prefer a definition of womanhood that does not depend on having that strong internal sense of one's own gender.
I'm not a TERF, though, because it does not actually upset me if other people DO have that strong internal sense. I may not understand it, but I don't really need to. Because I don't need to police anyone else's clothes, bathroom use, health care, athletic activities, or membership in advocacy organizations and social clubs. I don't feel threatened by transwomen, and don't feel any particular need to keep transwomen out of the Society of Women Engineers or Girl Scouts... It's not like patriarchy is particularly kind to them either. I welcome their support and am happy to offer them mine. And I will make every effort to use their preferred pronouns, because why not? It costs me nothing and makes them happy.
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:12 PM on June 18 [8 favorites]
I mean, I don't think I, a trans woman, have a strong internal sense of gender identity, not really. I spent most of my life so far thinking of myself as a man with no real attachment to manhood or masculinity. I'm not really sure I can fully describe what it was that let me know I was trans, but it was certainly not a strong feeling that I was a woman. If I had that, I would have transitioned much earlier.
I honestly don't really care for the idea of the strict separation between physical sex, gender identity / experienced gender, gender presentation, gender roles, etc. Gender is made up of a whole bunch of experiences and reactions we have, not some singular identity that is separated from everything else. These things are useful lies to cis people or Gender 101 material, but they are far from the whole story.
posted by eruonna at 6:25 PM on June 18 [6 favorites]
I honestly don't really care for the idea of the strict separation between physical sex, gender identity / experienced gender, gender presentation, gender roles, etc. Gender is made up of a whole bunch of experiences and reactions we have, not some singular identity that is separated from everything else. These things are useful lies to cis people or Gender 101 material, but they are far from the whole story.
posted by eruonna at 6:25 PM on June 18 [6 favorites]
antinomia, neat to read someone else whose experience of gender mirrors my own somewhat. (Yet another box tick on the ol' guess-that's-a-spectrum-thing list.) I've read a lot about gender dysphoria trying to understand how I relate to it, though I pretty much always pull up short at the idea of gender euphoria, because it just doesn't really click for me. In a magical TERF-free world that is awesome to trans people I would list my pronouns as "ugh, no thank you" like someone was trying to convince me to try a food that I'd already explained I hated.
If I were in my 20s, maybe a label like nonbinary and/or agender would click for me. But two decades past that, I can't wrap my head around an affirmative pronoun switch or any of the options that I strongly support for other people, because in an ideal world, people I interact with would be thinking about my gender as little as possible. So, cis-default it is, and I stick she/her in the mandatory pronouns fields that are increasingly showing up for event name tags and stuff now and figure my low key discomfort is less important than being welcoming to others who come at this with a much stronger gender valence and deal with a lot more shit from cis people.
posted by deludingmyself at 8:40 PM on June 18 [10 favorites]
If I were in my 20s, maybe a label like nonbinary and/or agender would click for me. But two decades past that, I can't wrap my head around an affirmative pronoun switch or any of the options that I strongly support for other people, because in an ideal world, people I interact with would be thinking about my gender as little as possible. So, cis-default it is, and I stick she/her in the mandatory pronouns fields that are increasingly showing up for event name tags and stuff now and figure my low key discomfort is less important than being welcoming to others who come at this with a much stronger gender valence and deal with a lot more shit from cis people.
posted by deludingmyself at 8:40 PM on June 18 [10 favorites]
I like "transsexual". It fits nicely for me. It's cool sounding. It makes what I'm about immediately and completely clear to a lot of people. It also makes sense, because it's my sex I'm changing. My belief is that my gender has always been the same. Why would I talk about changing genders??
posted by Audreynachrome at 1:53 AM on June 19 [5 favorites]
posted by Audreynachrome at 1:53 AM on June 19 [5 favorites]
I spent most of my life so far thinking of myself as a man with no real attachment to manhood or masculinity.
I think of myself this way now. However, I have had thoughts one might label as feminine, like experiencing a moment of jealousy towards a woman's hair or dress, etc., that another part of me dispassionately interrupts with a Lt. Cmdr. Data voice, "Note that you are a cis male.". It is possible that this voice is attachment to masculinity... I don't know what it's like in other men's heads.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 7:51 AM on June 19 [1 favorite]
I think of myself this way now. However, I have had thoughts one might label as feminine, like experiencing a moment of jealousy towards a woman's hair or dress, etc., that another part of me dispassionately interrupts with a Lt. Cmdr. Data voice, "Note that you are a cis male.". It is possible that this voice is attachment to masculinity... I don't know what it's like in other men's heads.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 7:51 AM on June 19 [1 favorite]
antinomia,
mm, the lack of feeling like a gender doesn’t feel like… a lack. It feels very there.
To clarify, my example of a zero gender valence agender person is just one among many possible ways to come to an agender identity. Some people will have gender valences that do signal some level of internal sense of gender where that sense is oriented towards 'none' or 'agender'. There's a whole range of agender sub-labels ranging from more affirmatively claiming the lack of gender like gendervoid to more ambivalent ones like apagender (apathetic wrt gender) or cassgender (my gender is unimportant). There are a lot of different experiences that fall under the agender umbrella and part of why I think gender valence is useful as a concept is because it can help differentiate those experiences. There can be gender athiests and gender agnostics and there are many paths one can take to reach the same destinations.
I don’t think I follow the logic that low valence would lead one to become a TERF
I definitely didn't mean to imply any causal link here. It's simply an anecdotal observation of the incredulity they often express when presented with the idea that having an internal sense of gender is a thing a person could have. I don't think that low gender valence is predictive of transphobia but rather that there's a broader pattern of not accepting/believing the experiences of trans people because those experiences are very different from (and seemingly contradictory to) one's own experience. A difference in gender valence can be one of those differences and I think that establishing a foundation of 'you don't experience a sense of gender, but other people (both cis and trans) do', is helpful. I think it's vital that the evolving conversation around gender seeks to explore the depth, nuance, and diversity that exists in cisgender experiences of gender and gender valence is a very useful tool for highlighting that diversity of experience. Exploring the range of cisgender experiences allows for more opportunities to discover commonalities with transgender and gender diverse experiences which is vital to building community, empathy, and understanding.
eruonna,
I mean, I don't think I, a trans woman, have a strong internal sense of gender identity, not really.
I really want to be clear that gender valence is mean to describe a broad and varied spectrum of feelings and experiences, rather than a polarity of strong/absent. I also want to be clear that, whatever one's place on that spectrum, one's level of gender valence is not a thing that makes your lived gender any less valid. As someone who is personally located somewhere in the murky middle of the gender valence spectrum I absolutely can relate to you saying "I'm not really sure I can fully describe what it was that let me know I was trans" and gender valence as a concept is absolutely meant to include that inchoate, nagging feeling that you can't put into words. Those feelings you can only properly identify as dysphoria in hindsight.
deludingmyself,
my low key discomfort is less important than being welcoming to others who come at this with a much stronger gender valence
I don't want to put labels on your experiences if you don't want them but "low key discomfort" at typing she/her in pronoun boxes sounds like textbook dysphoria to me. I really want to emphasize that just because I talk about gender valence as a scale from low to high I am talking about a scale of legibility and intensity of feelings, not validity or importance. Experiencing 'low' gender valence does not, at all, mean that the feelings of the people who experience it are of lower importance or any less vital to listen to or take seriously. You ignoring your discomfort doesn't actually help other trans people. Pushing back against mandatory pronoun disclosure is important. Listing your pronouns should be a normal, unremarkable, thing to do but it should be voluntary--an affirmative choice that someone makes to share about how they want to be addressed rather than something forced onto those who don't feel comfortable doing so for whatever reason. Mandatory pronoun fields hurt folks like you and they put people who are closeted in the impossible position of either misgendering themselves or outing themselves before they are ready and it's okay to push back against well-meaning institutions in a 'yes and' kind of way saying 'yes it's good to offer this option and you can make it more inclusive by not making it mandatory'.
If I were in my 20s, maybe a label like nonbinary and/or agender would click for me. But two decades past that, I can't wrap my head around an affirmative pronoun switch or any of the options that I strongly support for other people
As someone who came out later in life I can relate a lot to these feelings and the self-abnegation of 'I support this for other people, but I don't think it's worth it for me'. It's scary to think about and I am very familiar with the pain calculus of weighing whether the discomfort of being misunderstood outweighs the pain of trying (and potentially failing) to convince people to understand you as you really are. My advice would be to remember that it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. You can be nonbinary and/or agender or whatever feels best strictly of the privacy of your own mind or only among trusted friends or safe spaces. You can say 'these pronouns (or no pronouns) feel right for me' even if you never broadcast that publicly or commit to the sisyphean task of 'correcting' people. Anything you can do to better understand yourself and give yourself comfort is worth while, even if it isn't the very public affirmative declaration of gender that follows the traditional 'coming out' narrative.
posted by metaphorever at 9:05 AM on June 19 [11 favorites]
mm, the lack of feeling like a gender doesn’t feel like… a lack. It feels very there.
To clarify, my example of a zero gender valence agender person is just one among many possible ways to come to an agender identity. Some people will have gender valences that do signal some level of internal sense of gender where that sense is oriented towards 'none' or 'agender'. There's a whole range of agender sub-labels ranging from more affirmatively claiming the lack of gender like gendervoid to more ambivalent ones like apagender (apathetic wrt gender) or cassgender (my gender is unimportant). There are a lot of different experiences that fall under the agender umbrella and part of why I think gender valence is useful as a concept is because it can help differentiate those experiences. There can be gender athiests and gender agnostics and there are many paths one can take to reach the same destinations.
I don’t think I follow the logic that low valence would lead one to become a TERF
I definitely didn't mean to imply any causal link here. It's simply an anecdotal observation of the incredulity they often express when presented with the idea that having an internal sense of gender is a thing a person could have. I don't think that low gender valence is predictive of transphobia but rather that there's a broader pattern of not accepting/believing the experiences of trans people because those experiences are very different from (and seemingly contradictory to) one's own experience. A difference in gender valence can be one of those differences and I think that establishing a foundation of 'you don't experience a sense of gender, but other people (both cis and trans) do', is helpful. I think it's vital that the evolving conversation around gender seeks to explore the depth, nuance, and diversity that exists in cisgender experiences of gender and gender valence is a very useful tool for highlighting that diversity of experience. Exploring the range of cisgender experiences allows for more opportunities to discover commonalities with transgender and gender diverse experiences which is vital to building community, empathy, and understanding.
eruonna,
I mean, I don't think I, a trans woman, have a strong internal sense of gender identity, not really.
I really want to be clear that gender valence is mean to describe a broad and varied spectrum of feelings and experiences, rather than a polarity of strong/absent. I also want to be clear that, whatever one's place on that spectrum, one's level of gender valence is not a thing that makes your lived gender any less valid. As someone who is personally located somewhere in the murky middle of the gender valence spectrum I absolutely can relate to you saying "I'm not really sure I can fully describe what it was that let me know I was trans" and gender valence as a concept is absolutely meant to include that inchoate, nagging feeling that you can't put into words. Those feelings you can only properly identify as dysphoria in hindsight.
deludingmyself,
my low key discomfort is less important than being welcoming to others who come at this with a much stronger gender valence
I don't want to put labels on your experiences if you don't want them but "low key discomfort" at typing she/her in pronoun boxes sounds like textbook dysphoria to me. I really want to emphasize that just because I talk about gender valence as a scale from low to high I am talking about a scale of legibility and intensity of feelings, not validity or importance. Experiencing 'low' gender valence does not, at all, mean that the feelings of the people who experience it are of lower importance or any less vital to listen to or take seriously. You ignoring your discomfort doesn't actually help other trans people. Pushing back against mandatory pronoun disclosure is important. Listing your pronouns should be a normal, unremarkable, thing to do but it should be voluntary--an affirmative choice that someone makes to share about how they want to be addressed rather than something forced onto those who don't feel comfortable doing so for whatever reason. Mandatory pronoun fields hurt folks like you and they put people who are closeted in the impossible position of either misgendering themselves or outing themselves before they are ready and it's okay to push back against well-meaning institutions in a 'yes and' kind of way saying 'yes it's good to offer this option and you can make it more inclusive by not making it mandatory'.
If I were in my 20s, maybe a label like nonbinary and/or agender would click for me. But two decades past that, I can't wrap my head around an affirmative pronoun switch or any of the options that I strongly support for other people
As someone who came out later in life I can relate a lot to these feelings and the self-abnegation of 'I support this for other people, but I don't think it's worth it for me'. It's scary to think about and I am very familiar with the pain calculus of weighing whether the discomfort of being misunderstood outweighs the pain of trying (and potentially failing) to convince people to understand you as you really are. My advice would be to remember that it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. You can be nonbinary and/or agender or whatever feels best strictly of the privacy of your own mind or only among trusted friends or safe spaces. You can say 'these pronouns (or no pronouns) feel right for me' even if you never broadcast that publicly or commit to the sisyphean task of 'correcting' people. Anything you can do to better understand yourself and give yourself comfort is worth while, even if it isn't the very public affirmative declaration of gender that follows the traditional 'coming out' narrative.
posted by metaphorever at 9:05 AM on June 19 [11 favorites]
Another "thank you!", metaphorever, for the concept of gender valence. I can't say as I've ever *felt* gender very strongly, except maybe "definitely not this, but probably not that either". I was in my mid-thirties before I was introduced to the idea that *none* was an even option. A valid one, even! I have experienced pretty bad dysphoria, but mostly only had the word for it in hindsight.
I got lucky in finding an informed consent clinic that would let me experiment with hormones, and I feel better, more me. But stronger gender valence, no. Maybe even less now that none is my valid. I have no attachment to any gender label, not agender or nonbinary nor either of the binary defaults. I mostly use nonbinary as a concept others can understand which is closest to my internal sense. I do identify as trans, though, because it has been, and continues to be, a transition, coming into myself and asserting This is Who I Am and no longer trying to fit the boxes the world tries to shove me into.
So many people above have expressed this so much more eloquently, but I love the concept of a gender valence spectrum, and suspect it will be useful in discourse in the future.
posted by MuChao at 6:14 PM on June 19 [2 favorites]
I got lucky in finding an informed consent clinic that would let me experiment with hormones, and I feel better, more me. But stronger gender valence, no. Maybe even less now that none is my valid. I have no attachment to any gender label, not agender or nonbinary nor either of the binary defaults. I mostly use nonbinary as a concept others can understand which is closest to my internal sense. I do identify as trans, though, because it has been, and continues to be, a transition, coming into myself and asserting This is Who I Am and no longer trying to fit the boxes the world tries to shove me into.
So many people above have expressed this so much more eloquently, but I love the concept of a gender valence spectrum, and suspect it will be useful in discourse in the future.
posted by MuChao at 6:14 PM on June 19 [2 favorites]
If I were in my 20s, maybe a label like nonbinary and/or agender would click for me. But two decades past that, I can't wrap my head around an affirmative pronoun switch or any of the options that I strongly support for other people,
You can definitely be agender without doing anything but just existing. Lots was more eloquently stated above. But from a completely practical point of view, I know multiple people who are some flavor of agender and I don’t think any of them really care what pronoun you use for them besides feeling like they are lying if they have to affirmatively pick one. So, with no pressure from me to identify as anything you don’t want to, yours is pretty much the modal experience for agender people, at least in my experience.
posted by knobknosher at 8:25 AM on June 21 [5 favorites]
You can definitely be agender without doing anything but just existing. Lots was more eloquently stated above. But from a completely practical point of view, I know multiple people who are some flavor of agender and I don’t think any of them really care what pronoun you use for them besides feeling like they are lying if they have to affirmatively pick one. So, with no pressure from me to identify as anything you don’t want to, yours is pretty much the modal experience for agender people, at least in my experience.
posted by knobknosher at 8:25 AM on June 21 [5 favorites]
Also, I personally don’t feel like not wanting to name a pronoun is gender dysphoria. At least for me, it’s sort of like people asking you to declare your deep personal lifelong allegiance to either the Red Sox or the Yankees so that people can treat you accordingly. It feels like a weird unnecessary way of making me lie about something I don’t care about.
posted by knobknosher at 8:28 AM on June 21 [7 favorites]
posted by knobknosher at 8:28 AM on June 21 [7 favorites]
My recent news post to another thread was just deleted, about keir starmer promising to ban trans women from women's spaces. Because I asked why another user was using the "suffrage" (TERF) colours in the UK election.
I can't with this site. This is disgusting. The note could have included the news post. They actively chose to remove news about Starmer's transphobia.
posted by Audreynachrome at 6:47 AM on July 3 [3 favorites]
I can't with this site. This is disgusting. The note could have included the news post. They actively chose to remove news about Starmer's transphobia.
posted by Audreynachrome at 6:47 AM on July 3 [3 favorites]
What is the point of having a survey if the mods are going to be like "In 2024, as someone engaged with the UK election, choosing to use the "Women's Equality Party" (TERF) colours is a neutral choice."
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:15 AM on July 3 [2 favorites]
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:15 AM on July 3 [2 favorites]
I think I'm the youngest member who comments on the Blue. I turn 28 this month. I tried for so many years to get people to join this site. Good luck with your future, people.
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:37 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:37 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]
8 years on this site and I'm still not welcome or part of it. You can start at 19, live your life, and still not be worthy of being considered a real member. Keep making the homestuck references people.
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:40 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]
posted by Audreynachrome at 7:40 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]
« Older Never quite made it into the respectable hard... | I set up in the kitchen, as I will every day going... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Gender Dysphoria First Aid
I like this resource as it helps you deal with gender dysphoria without centering the opinion or reaction of other people.
This is important to me as a nonbinary person, who pretty much by definition will always be misgendered.
I find that watching my self talk helps a lot, replacing "they probably think I'm x" with "I'm obviously radiating Science Fiction Writer and Dog Lover as an identity right now!"
posted by Zumbador at 3:45 AM on June 17 [18 favorites]