#i will never be perceived as nonbinary by others. and all of that makes me think that | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

halfricanloveyou · 1 year

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here’s the thing about being nonbinary for me personally: it is not and has never been about breaking boundaries or daring to be different or freedom of gender expression that made me suddenly choose to be nonbinary.

i have always been this way. i’ve always known but never fully understood why i felt so uncomfortable being a woman. it had nothing to do with leaning more towards femininity or masculinity or gender roles or hating women.

i have always felt that i have never been a woman. it never felt right to me being defined as one. though i share a lot of experiences with women due to society seeing me as a woman and people in society treating me that way, disliking femininity wasn’t what made me think i was nonbinary.

what made me really fully realize and understand was when i realized that when it came to me personally, i didn’t care about femininity OR masculinity. i didn’t really think in those kinds of terms when it came to myself either. the idea of gender isn’t one i felt applied to me, as a person.

i didn’t care about being a woman. i didn’t care about what things were labeled as “feminine” or what i was supposed to be like as a woman. i didn’t WANT to be a woman. i didn’t feel like a woman.

at the same time, i didn’t want to be masculine. i didn’t want to be seen as a man. though i feel i have more in common with men, i still never felt that i was a man.

it was always really difficult and alienating for me, not understanding why i felt so much dysphoria at being seen as a woman OR as a man. why being called either just never felt fully right to me. why trying to be either felt like a chore or a costume i had to put on, and when i was called or mistaken as either i felt like i wanted to scream and cry. why i never understood why i wasn’t good enough as either gender, not feminine enough or masculine enough, not fitting into either category.

i tried to force myself to be a woman. i tried really hard to be more feminine, really hard to force myself to see myself as a woman. i tried really hard to be like the many women i know and have known. and i tried the same on the opposite end. i tried to force myself to be more masculine. i tried to dress differently and posture differently. and it still felt deeply wrong to me.

i’d always appealed more to animals specifically because they didn’t have to worry or care about whether they were seen as boys or girls and they could be loved just as dearly even when their owners had no idea or what gender they were. how being a girl or a boy had very little impact on who they were because it didn’t really matter to them, and how people were always excited to see a dog or cat and what gender they thought the animal was didn’t change how they approached that animal because in reality, whether the animal was a boy or a girl came secondary to the fact that it WAS a pet, a dog or a cat, and in reality nobody really cared about what gender the animal was. and the animal itself also didn’t care or have any sense of it’s own gender outside of hormones and reproduction.

with the several farm cats i owned gender meant nothing when it came to their group dynamics: the cats that were “in charge” or the more combative cats that would chase off and fight cats outside of their colony or the ones who would hunt and bring food to share with each other, who were protective of the other cats in the colony and would attack any troublemakers that intentionally tried to pick a fight; or the ones who preferred to lay back and were more affectionate, who would all lay together and who would simply sit and stare when a cat they were unfamiliar with tried to enter their territory; or the cats that were the ones who seemed to be targeted and picked on by the other cats, who pushed the boundaries of the cats around them, who would randomly pick fights just to lose consistently, who would growl at the other cats and get into spats only to run away or be chastised; gender had nothing to do with which cats tended to fall into which role.

the cats i had that tended to be skittish or aggressive or active or affectionate…gender had no bearing on any of that. i always felt so jealous of that. i wanted to be a cat (especially in childhood lol) because i wanted to live in a world that had a dynamic like that. a world where gender didn’t matter, where no one really had any concept of gender and it really didn’t matter. no cat cared about whether the other was male or female and it didn’t change how they interacted. (unless it was something like intact male vs neutered male or female cat in heat and male cat)

when i finally heard the term non binary, that it was something that even existed, i knew instantly that it sounded like me. i was scared at first, went through a lot of self doubt and questioning myself, calling myself stupid for considering it. but then i started to understand what it really meant.

a gender identity that is neither male or female. a gender identity where the concept of gender simply didn’t apply. an identity where you didn’t have to pick one or the other or lean into one or the other. and once i finally let myself accept that identity i finally felt right. i didn’t have to pretend to care or go out of my way to be feminine or masculine. i didn’t have to care about being a lady or a woman or lean into being a man or wanting to present as masculine or any of that. i didn’t have to be what i was “supposed to be.” i didn’t have to be a tomboy or a girl that was proud to have masculine interests and still be as much of a woman as a feminine girly type of woman. i didn’t have to be a man at my core, being proud to have feminine interests while defining myself as just as much of a man as a more masculine man.

none of those felt right or felt like me or who i was. knowing that i didn’t have to force myself to be any gender or present/lean into any feminine or masculine ideal was freeing to me. that i could like any of the things i wanted without really thinking about whether they were feminine or masculine was so relieving. i could decide it didn’t matter to me. i could be someone who was neither or someone who none of those ideas applied to.

though i still suffer from low self esteem issues and mental health issues, i finally don’t hate myself for not being able to choose one identity or the other. i finally understand why i am the way that i am and why i felt so wrong and inadequate and unable to be the woman or man i was supposed to want to be.

in understanding that i didn’t have to be either if i didn’t want to, i was finally able to accept the person i’ve always been. and i’m finally able to accept that that person exists, even if people don’t understand or are disgusted by them or make fun of them. even though it’s supposed to be one or the other. i don’t have to choose. i don’t have to pick the option my body is biologically defined as.

#nonbinary #NB #enby #long post #honestly this is the first time i’ve been able to sit down and put my thoughts and feelings into actual words #i’m sure no one will read this #but i wanted to write it because i’m not allowed to talk about it #until i am able to defend or explain it in a way that can be understood by someone who hasn’t experienced it #or met someone who was similar or perhaps even the same way #NOT ALL NONBINARY PEOPLE ARE THE SAME THOUGH!!!#this is just what it means to me #and my experience as a transgender person #especially as a transgender person who didn’t feel dysphoria towards their own body #to me it’s always just been a body and i never really hated it for what it looked like #i didn’t like my body for what it was perceived as #to me though biologically my body is considered female #i never really saw it that way if that makes sense #the reason i struggle with it is because it’s the reason i can’t be seen or identified as anything but a woman by other people #i hate that this body is considered female #i hate that this body means people will always call me a woman and see me as one #but the body itself has never been the issue i don’t experience dysphoria because i want it to look different #how it looks really doesn’t mean all that much to me #other than being overweight tbh #men can have breasts or even vaginas and still be men #and women can have short hair or not have breasts or even have ducks #and still be women #in that same way i can still have this body but be nonbinarh #trans #transgender #lgbtq+

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xxlovelynovaxx · 1 month

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Okay, this is not without a point, but (screenshot):

(A post and reblog which read: Nonbinary legit means outside established gender ideas yet you racist, transmisogynist, otherwise bioessentialist assholes keep bothering amab nb people because you think theyre too masc or whatever to be nb. Hey newsflash not all nb people are androgynous-femme white stick thin transmascs with undercuts - and - We're never making it out cisheteropatriarchy without you analyzing your beliefs on who is trans or nb enough)

If you think "transmasc" is the default nonbinary person or even considered to be the default nonbinary person, perhaps you haven't unlearned your bioessentialism either. And like, sure, maybe they don't think that way and meant "afab nonbinary person" by "transmasc nonbinary person", which is itself bioessentialist as those aren't equivalent in either direction (there's plenty of amab transmasc and afab non-transmasc nonbinary people), but the specific issue they're talking about (being perceived as too masc to be nonbinary) actually very specifically prominently affects transmascs as well.

It's almost as if your sex OR gender OR presentation being perceived as too masc can cause this, and also that trans people's AGAB (especially transitioning and intersex trans' peoples AGAB) can be misread by other trans people. Like do you think that all AMAB nonbinary people face this forever, or could this perhaps have a whole lot to do with passing as binary and AMAB people who transition and pass as cis women might in fact face this less than AFAB people who transition and pass as cis men? Never mind that this affects people who are androgenous in an additive way (tits and a beard, as an example) rather than a subtractive way (neither masc nor femme characteristics).

I'd also wonder about how they seem to be conflating "nonbinary" with "nontransitioning" in the way they describe the theoretical standard "femme androgenous transmasc" nonbinary person and think that AMAB nonbinary experiences are somehow universal.

Like, newsflash, anyone who appears masc enough gets hit with the essentialist (bio AND gender) antimasculinity that is such a problem in the queer community. Anyone who appears femme enough typically doesn't, though there are always exceptions. This includes presentation, perceived sex, and perceived gender. Butch trans people in general also face this regardless of gender.

Also this is bothering me especially so. AFAB≠transmasc. AMAB≠transfem. AFAB transfems and AMAB transmascs exist. Nonbinary people who aren't transfem OR transmasc, or who are both, exist. Transmasc/transfem as a new binary just excludes the majority of nonbinary people, because not all nonbinary people are "masc" or "femme" and in fact that's kinda the whole point of nonbinary as a gender category, not JUST that most nonbinary people aren't "men" (only*) or "women" (only*)

*because multigender people who experience binary genders are also just as nonbinary as any other nonbinary person

But (screenshot):

(A comment marked as by the original poster which reads: Transandrophobia believers don't rb this btw. heart emoji I'm late but whatever)

Ah, right, you haven't unlearned your bioessentialism. You seem to think only AMAB nonbinary people face exorsexism, or perhaps you don't even understand that exorsexism is a specific type of transphobia to nonbinary people and think AFAB nonbinary people "only" face transphobia. And I shudder to imagine your opinions on intersex trans people in general.

"Transandrophobia believers" like sorry not sorry I actually believe that transmascs face specific targeted transphobia and that transfems aren't the most oppressed, and also that all trans people can experience any type of specific transphobia and that bigots who famously don't respect trans people's internal identity and infamously can't "always tell" don't choose to be bigoted based on either your ontological identity or your physical sex. It's almost like I base my understanding of oppression on actual material experience and not just what I want to be true so I can pretend I'm punching up at vulnerable people in my community

Also wtf (screenshot):

(A comment marked as by the original poster which reads: Proshippers also don't rb i fucking hate you all)

Like not surprised this person has dogshit views lacking any critical analysis whatsoever but honey sweetie baby pie this is just sad

Anyway take your own advice and analyze your own beliefs on who is trans or nonbinary enough and also unlearn your own bioessentialism because simply saying "only AMAB trans people face more than basic transphobia and are the most oppressed" is bog standard gender essentialism and bioessentialism, and in fact treating all AMAB trans people as transfem or transfem adjacent is WILDLY exorsexist and misgendering a WHOLE lot of nonbinary people

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spacelazarwolf · 1 year

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as yet another Fiasco unfolds on my blog, it’s got me thinking about how anger is an emotion that i’ve never really been allowed to experience.

when i was growing up as a girl, it was “unladylike” to get mad. i was expected to let people scold me and yell at me and taunt me and just deal with it, because lashing out would make me a bitch. my sister struggled with anger issues all through her childhood, which she should have gotten help for but instead i ended up having to deal with her anger in silence. i had to be the mediator between her and our parents. i don’t blame her. she was a kid. but it fundamentally changed how i expressed myself. anger wasn’t something i was allowed to feel.

that is, until i found queer and feminist communities. there, i was celebrated when i expressed my anger at the patriarchy, i was allowed to yell at people who were shitty to me, i was allowed to be fucking pissed.

and then i realized i was trans. i identified as femme nonbinary for a while, then just nonbinary, and then i started to come to terms with my identity as a trans masculine person, and then as a genderqueer trans man. as soon as i tacked on “masculine” to my identity, there was a shift in the way my anger was perceived. suddenly, it wasn’t righteous rage, it was male aggression. when i started t and my voice dropped, suddenly i couldn’t raise my voice above library volume or i was “scary” and “aggressive.” (which, let me tell you, is fucking difficult when you’re an autistic italian jew. volume control has never been my strong suit.)

i went from having my anger, which had been bottled up for twenty years, validated and shared…to being told exactly what i’d been told growing up. to bottle it up. don’t express it. just deal with it. just accomodare the people around you.

i don’t know what the main goal of this post is other than to just talk about how fucking exhausting it is to spend your life being told to sit down and shut up, then experience a couple years of freedom, only to be told to sit down and shut up again. i didn’t know how to express anger before, and i really don’t know how to express it now.

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drdemonprince · 19 days

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Any chance you'd expand on the hank hill trans guy post? (Sorry, best indicator I could come up with.) The concept interests me as I decidedly know my maleness, yet don't feel impeded by for the most part, any male gendered norms/boxes. I am fairly masculine, though I rarely use those kinds terms to describe myself. I have found I often do stray outside of what society pushed for me when I transitioned, yet I again do not feel it has taken from my right to maleness whatsoever. I am just me, who happens to be male. I have had friends try and suggest I am NB adjacent but I do not feel this way whatsoever. I feel more people are outliers to gender expectation than we care to admit and it's disappointing the way cis-people deny that. Hope this wasn't too long winded, I value your writing and perspective, and wanted to hear more of your thoughts on this.

Yeah, well so many things all get conflated by gender labels, and it's all so personal, you know? Masculinity does not have to mean maleness, and a person's gender identity might be a reflection of some innate quality they experience themselves as having, or a general summary of their tendencies, or their desired presentation, or their sense of affinity with other people, or an interpersonal tool, or something they just go along with because it was given to them by society, or any other number of things.

I think my recent substack piece on detransition goes into this pretty well, and I have an upcoming piece of what @pastimperfection calls "bilateral dysphoria" that comes out next week that delves into it too.

I think I mostly saw taking on a male identity as a means to an end more than any kind of innate reflection of who I was, though I did feel an affinity with effeminate men for a lot of reasons. I think I also discounted how much I have in common with my fellow nonbinary people of all stripes, because that identity became so strongly associated with being an annoying type of queer person that everybody else just wrote off as ultimately being their assigned gender at birth anyway no matter how much they protested. it doesn't help that 'nonbinary' is a catchall term for literally thousands if not millions of very distinct experiences and desires.

transitioning gave me control over how i was perceived, finally, but hormones are a throttle that only go in one very specific direction, and you don't really have all that much control over which changes kick in at which times and what people will make of you once you do start registering to them as some identity other than what you were first saddled with. it's an incredible gift to be able to toggle that throttle. but it's limited, not because medical transition isn't incredible and needed for so many, but because there is no escaping the goddamned binary cissexist logic that influences everything about how people treat you, how you navigate institutions, who finds you desirable and what they want out of you, and so much else.

if you're able to cast a lot of the external societal bullshit aside and feel strong in your maleness, maybe you're stronger than me or maybe our orientation to these things is just different, i don't know. i was never all that sensitive to feedback that i was doing the whole being-a-woman-thing all that wrong. i reveled in violating those rules to an extent. succeeding at being a woman despite my best attempts was what felt super dysphoric. and now i guess im succeeding at being a man, insofar as im always read as one, and it feels just as uncomfortable and objectifying and false. i thought that with manhood i could probably just grit my teeth and deal with it, but i'm finding that i can't.

ive always been very open that for me, gender is a thing I Do, and i guess to those who know me well it wouldnt be surprising to hear that i have gotten tired of Doing Being a Man and dont feel like playing that particular gendered game anymore. I tend to get bored of things! and find the flaws in things. and find my comfort in being fault-finding and contrarian and not being a joiner. and thats okay. i learned a lot along the way. not having to try any more is a huge relief. i can just do whatever. and know actively that people will more often than not be wrong in what they make of me.

maybe it was natural feeling for you to decidely 'know' your maleness without a care for masculine standards because that is the right identity for you! and maybe i only feel secure in the "not knowing" realm and in letting go of what people think of me or finding any kind of tidy categorization for it because that's the right spot for me. for now. until i find a new interesting way to be unhappy and striving for more and different again. :) that's just part of being alive, for me.

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starry-eyed-fag · 10 months

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"I do not pass. I am never seen as a cis man in real life." Skill issue. "I simply do not benefit from cis male privilege, and cis women oppress me." Not true. You're seen as a man on here, are you not? I perceive you as a man. I think the most manlike thing about you, actually, is your toxic need to punch down on trans women. I will say, it is very feminine to be such a big fucking pussy and trying to avoid privilege sooo god damn hard so you might want to try cutting that out if you want to pass in the future.

SEND THESE TO MY DISCOURSE SIDEBLOG I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD: @political-faggotry

(also i apologize to my fob followers for this anon being so annoying)

I am done being patient with you lot. You're telling me, a transmasc nonbinary person, that me not having access to hormones is a skill issue. Me suffering from dysphoria is a fucking skill issue? You dipshits are so terminally online you can't even conceptualize a person who experiences any form of oppression outside of "these people were mean to me on Tumblr." Transmascs face actual violence in real life and not only do you deny it, you just call us misogynists for speaking out about it.

You people claim to perceive me as a man but actually you are doing exactly what every transphobe does. In your eyes, I am a woman when it is convenient to you and when you are able to weaponize misogyny against me, and I am suddenly a privileged male whenever I call you people out on it. Your crowd regularly spreads TERF rhetoric (not "terf rhetoric" as in anything i don't like, but terf rhetoric as in things terfs have actually said) by acting like people like me transition to gain male privilege.

It might be news to you that identifying as a man, instead of helping one escape misogyny, actually makes the misogyny worse. THAT'S WHY WE HAVE THE WORD TRANSANDROPHOBIA!!! TO FUCKING TALK ABOUT THAT!!! AN INTERSECTION BETWEEN TRANSPHOBIA AND MISOGYNY!!! DIRECTED TOWARDS TRANSMASCS!!!

I am tired of experiencing misogyny in real life and being called a misogynist by you guys for fucking talking about it.

Why the hell are you accusing me of punching down at trans women? None of this has anything to do with trans women. Trans women have discussions about transmisogyny and I fully support that! Not everything has to be about trans women all the time. Trans men are not some sort of footnote when talking about trans oppression. We are simply subject to more erasure and more invisibility than trans women, which means that WE NEED AWARENESS.

Plenty of trans women support the transandrophobia discussions. Ironically, the people most obsessed with denying that transmascs face oppression are other transmascs who have internalized transandrophobia to the point where they deny that it even exists. While that still sucks, being able to deny transandrophobia's existence while being a transmasc means that you come from a place of privilege.

I do not experience privilege over cis women, given that all other axes of oppression are the same. If you did a few minutes of research you would find many examples of trans men being mistreated and assaulted by cis women.

I EXPERIENCE MISOGYNY AND YOU'RE MAD AT ME FOR BEING A LITTLE TOO ANGRY ABOUT IT?

#ask and ye shall receive #anon hate #i swear to fucking god #transandrophobia #examples of transandrophobia #also i am sorry to everyone but this anon for being so angry

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am-i-the-asshole-official · 9 months

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aita for pretending to be cis online? im a trans man and have been trans for almost ten years now. i am pre-most transition even though i would like to fully transition, due to money and medical phobia complications. i do not pass irl.

a few years ago i attempted stealth (saying i was a cis man) on a discord server before ultimately admitting to being trans because i was afraid everyone could tell, and was informed that even though they even heard my voice on the server, no one there suspected i was afab, and even when i said i was trans, some people assumed i was coming out as transfem, because i had passed myself as a cis man so well. this gave me euphoria, of course, and made me regret telling anyone since i was apparently passing so well.

i held onto those feelings, and a year or so after that, quietly changed my bios and stuff to remove the trans part. a little while after that, i started actively saying i was cis male in my bios and to new friends.

i should clarify this is not out of safety or fear of transphobia, all my family and irl friends know im trans and are 100% supportive, im lucky enough to live in a very progressive area, and my online existence is small and filled with tons of trans and supportive people. it's only because i feel dysphoric when i know people can perceive me as afab, and since i don't have control over that irl, i just want someone in the world to see me as amab, even if im not and never will be.

i also am not by any means a transmed. i myself am also gnc, and many many of my friends are loud and proud queer weirdos, and i am too with everything but my agab. i love the wacky ways other trans folks present their genders and refuse to sanitize themselves for cisciety. i do not think anyone should ever have to water down who they are for any reason and i don't think being afab makes anyone less of a man, just i personally don't like facing the fact that i am afab and would rather people see me as a cis man whenever i can control it.

this might be where the asshole comes in here, because being gnc, being surrounded by so many trans people and being in many "afab dominated" spaces (such as fanfic writers, tumblr, fandom in general honestly) as well as having a lot of trans headcanons makes me paranoid people are going to clock me and even if they don't say anything they'll know im faking being cis. because of that, and to avoid the dreaded "egg" conversations (people trying to insist or imply that ill soon "find out" that im transfem) ive sometimes been telling people when the subject comes up that i had experimented with my gender before and thought i was transfem or nonbinary in the past, so i sort of fit the idea of cis+ and that might be why i feel more trans than cis even though im definitely cis.

i also tell them im intersex and have trans family (both of these are true, though obviously im intersex in a different way than i say) to get them off my scent.

i know i dont owe anyone my agab, but when all is said and done, i am lying about my gender and history with gender exploration, and i kinda feel like im disrespecting other trans folks by implying it would personally feel better to be cis, like i can't relate to other trans people saying they never want to be cis and the goal of being trans isn't to be cis. but i do. i also worry that having trans hcs (including in sexual contexts) for characters while im presenting myself as cis makes people think im a chaser.

anyway sorry this is long, but aita for lying about my gender?

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole

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histrionicscribbler · 9 months

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love how the mere presence of nonbinary people sends some particular folks into sex essentialism fueled rants about how we cant just "ignore sex" as if nb people dont already know the immutable and important nature of sex bc it stares us in the face every day

ignore it? don't make me laugh. we can't ignore a damn thing if we tried.

i hate to break it to you, but WE ALL KNOW you cannot clock a nonbinary person from appearance alone. sometimes (not always) that is even the point. androgyny is not always the nb goal. androgyny also isn't always nb. divorce the two in your mind rn.

we are well aware that what we look and sound like directly influences what we are perceived as upon first impression. it is just the truth. a lot of us will never escape misgendering. but that is really not an excuse to refuse to change your language when you learn otherwise

if ur gonna become deaf when someone uses they/them (or any other non he/she pronoun) on somebody (out loud, multiple times, perhaps even correcting you), then do it about 9000 yards away from me, k?

#peeb post #nonbinary #like bro... who is out here saying sex is not important and ignorable #a lot of medical care and precautions depend on ur sex #the privlege you have both pre and post transition is dependent on ur sex #trans people know this #its literally not a fucking excuse or a gotcha or proof that we dont deserve rights or fair treatment or kindness #literally just act like we exist please #nb #enby #trans enby #enby pride #non binary #nonbinary pride #nonbinary problems #trans #transgender #lgbtq

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punkitt-is-here · 1 year

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It's fascinating to me to encounter people on the internet who choose explicitly not to say what their pronouns are.

To be clear, I respect your decision and applaud the firmness of your stance. I think that overall there should be less personal information on the internet and restricting pronouns is simply another step on the way to taking back internet privacy. The thing is, I have spent enough time, effort, money, and grief on the project that is myself that I am having difficulty grokking the desire not to have one's gender be known at all. I am totally disarmed by the attitude, and I attribute this entirely to my own experience growing up on the internet. I can no longer abide resigning myself to the perceived genericized maleness of the average internet user. I deliberately make my pronouns available I go on the internet, and I correct people in conversation when appropriate.

This is because, in my past experience (middle 2000s ongoing), if one did not have clear gender they got the masculine pronouns. Assigned Male By Forum Users wasn't just the default, it was the practice, the de facto, the un-inspected habit of the english speaking internet user. There Are No Girls On The Internet was then and to a degree still is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even though it was obviously never the case, and that women have always been on the internet, sometimes it is easier to just go along with the flow to avoid the inevitable misogyny.

Keep it up, you funky little internet person. I like your horse comix! They are good.

Haha, I totally get it! When you work so hard on yourself, you want to make sure people see it right. I'm all for pronouns being readily available and stuff.

That being said, I like keeping em a secret for a couple reasons! They'll come out eventually, obviously, I'm a film student with a job and eventually someone from online is gonna meet me in-person and I'll be happy to let them know then and when I (IDEALLY) have a career that'll be public knowledge. I've got a perfectly good gender I'm very happy and comfortable with. For now, tho, since I've seen it a million times with artists online that i really love, I've found out that people tend to weaponize your gender/pronouns a lot. No matter what they are, too! I think I just get less weird comments and mail by just keepin' that shit a secret. Folks don't gotta know cuz it aint really that important. I like being able to speak online and not having one trillion internet strangers who think they know me because of some words in my bio cross-examine me every time I talk.

Also, it's fun! I've had people think I'm a cis girl, a trans guy, a trans girl, a cis guy, a nonbinary no-gender something or other, a neopronoun user, genderfluid...basically everything under the sun! And I think it's fun to see how people perceive me since I don't think you get that option a lot. It's honestly really fun to know that my online presence doesn't have any...like, gender coding to it, if that makes any sense? Because I've seen NO consistency in the guesses and I find that incredibly entertaining. Even some people who've known me for years passively online still use the incorrect pronouns cuz I've never clarified and I think that's just silly and fun. I'm glad to know that I'm very much not explicitly in any sort of "box" with the way I present myself, because I think gender is kinda silly in the first place.

So, uh, yeah! That's mostly my reasoning for not clarifying anywhere, hehe. :3c

#my posts #asks #mrs-edgewick #pronouns...

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jizzweiner · 2 months

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what are your dirkjake gender heaadcanones

my fanfic acc is @jermer10, i mostly write for tf2 but i take reqs for a number of diff fandoms including homestuck disclaimer: i have to stress that some of these practices are extremely dangerous irl, please do your research before binding and taking hrt

dirk: - ftm transgender, homosexual - doesn't have top or bottom surgery because he lives in the middle of a fucking ocean - he binds using bandages and duct tape - created his own testosterone through extremely dangerous trial and error (doesn't give a shit as long as he can grow sideburns) - he mechanically created his packer (yes, it is completely functional as the real thing. no, he would not recommend trying to penetrate with it) - he primarily wears masculine clothing but likes headbands and hair clips - will also wear makeup occasionally - extremely secretive abt his gender identity, the only people who know are his bro and roxy - jake and jane don't find out until they meet him in person and see his bewbs and then it clicks why he never joined vc or would use funny voice changers when he did, why he never really sent selfies and when he did they would be head n shoulders only

jake: - amab nonbinary, bisexual - they use he/they pronouns and have no intention of any surgeries (social dysphoria + gender dysphoria but not much dysphoria abt his body) - they mostly wear feminine clothing because its comfortable - had the most trouble with his gender identity, and didn't even know dirk was trans until he met him in person for the first time - and that's when it clicks that they might alsoooo fall under the trans umbrella - he confides in jane about this before making a coming out speech to dirk and roxy - the general consensus is literally 'yeah i mean it was kinda obvious' - (all of the alpha kids r trans to me so like yeah ofc they dont care) - doesn't really like labels and prefers to remained undefined, he's the kind of person who hates feeling trapped or held back - absolutely HATES being perceived, they hate when others try to project a certain image onto them that they don't agree with but also hates it when they give him labels that he does agree with

#homestuck #dirkjake #dirk strider #jake english #homestuck headcanons #dirkjake t4t

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miggfo · 1 year

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Cis Yet Not Cis: The possible intersection of GNC identities and being trans/nonbinary, and misconceptions about GNC people

Introduction

I think the best way to introduce this post is to simply present a variety of often-conflicting quotes from LGBTQ people about "gender nonconforming" people(like butch women and femboys):

"Femboys can take off being a femboy at any time, unlike trans people."

"The character expressed gender euphoria at being perceived as masculine, so they have to be transmasc, not just GNC"

(a butch woman speaking) "My initial reaction to getting called cis is to cringe... cis is viewed as the opposite of trans, so it implies I'm comfortable with conforming to my gender"

(a trans woman speaking) "What is the material difference between me and my HRT femboy friends?"

"If you take away lesbianism from being butch, then all you have left is dressing differently."

"GNC people are not queer, queer is only if your identity or sexuality differs, and GNC people are cis"

"Nobody is assigned femboy at birth- they're essentially trans."

"Theres a long history of some butch women getting dysphoria for not being masc enough, sometimes going on HRT or getting top surgery."

"Femboy is only an aesthetic descriptor, it has nothing to do with identity"

“We never see him dress masculine, he's ALWAYS dressing fem, so how can he just be GNC?”

These quotes, and many others, reflect varied, conflicting perceptions of gender nonconforming people among even some trans people. So I suspect that a significant percentage of LGBTQ people have a flawed understanding of GNC people, and so I wanted to make this post. I think most of you basically get it but since I see some weird statements every now and then so i figure it may be helpful to convey this breadth a bit better, and that may help solidify it for some people.

(Also, to clarify a definition: I'm using "gender nonconforming" here to mean "someone who's gender expression doesnt match society's conception of their gender identity", ie butch women, femboys, tomboys, etc. As far as I can tell, this is a relatively recent definition for GNC. It has been heavily adopted as the primary definition in many LGBTQ circles(probably because of the vacuum it fills), but theres still people who use the term as an umbrella term for trans+nb+etc(which seemed to be the meaning before the recent shift) or people who use it to mean something like genderfuck, so I felt I should clarify.)

Expression and Breadth

A source of the disparity in the quotes above is that GNC identities involve something like a spectrum. For example, for male-identifying cis femboys, you could lay out a demonstrative spectrum something loosely like:

1)A femboy who is arguably gender conforming outside of the fact that he enjoys the aesthetics of dressing fem. It has no emotional importance to him, he can "take it off" at any time, and his conception of identifying male has not changed much.

2)A femboy who is only modestly attached to being a boy(demi?), but doesnt identify as being a woman nor feels a particular pull towards nonbinary conceptions either. Feminine gender expression is important to him(cant "take it off" without emotional harm), much moreso than what gender he identifies as. His conception of male identity is loose.

3)A femboy who's combination of feminine gender expression and identifying as male is important to him. His conception of male identity has changed a lot from what was given to him by society.

4)A femboy who is very similar to 3), but has a much stronger need to be feminine and be perceived that way, going so far as to go on hrt to feel expressed and fulfilled. His conception of male identity has changed drastically from what was given to him.

These are just loose examples(multi-attribute things dont map cleanly to a linear spectrum anyway, the point is to just demonstrate some things), and of course there are those in between each point. I also suspect a significant % of femboys are somewhere between 2 and 3- feminine expression is important to them, theyve opened up their concept of male identity a lot but are also kind of winging it(which is fine) and are more attached to femininity than male identity, and just have some movement towards certain values in reaction to things like gender restrictions and toxic masculinity.

You can of course construct this sort of demonstrative spectrum for other gnc identities like tomboys, men who identify as gnc but not feminine, gnc people who specifically value a mix(tbh a lot of femboys are like this), etc.

This illuminates a few things especially when viewed alongside conceptions of being trans. For example, theres a difference between:

-simply having "gender expression" without it having emotional importance to you

-gender expression being indirectly important to perception as a gender identity(like being seen as masculine as a vehicle to being seen as a man)

-gender expression being important as perception of a more specific gender identity(like being seen as a masc woman, not just a woman, not just masc, and certainly not a masc man or a feminine woman- the whole picture is key)

Part of why I bring that up is because some people seem to think that expression is only a tool to reinforce/convey identity, rather than sometimes an inseparable part of what's important to someone. (Also, just to mention: gender expression isnt just clothing.)

Another thing the demonstrative spectrum points to is breadth. The quotes at the top of this post pretty much all focus on a subset of this breadth of gnc people. Because of that, that makes some of the quotes flat out wrong(because they only imagined that identity as a specific thing- or are just stupid) and others just sound odd when you dont realize the part of the range they're talking about. Most GNC identities are fundamentally quite broad, partially because they point to a "mismatch" between identity and expression, but expression serves multiple different purposes as mentioned, and thus these identities are naturally broad.

Labels and Conceptions

Now, imagine the above spectrum, but broaden it from "cis male-identifying femboys" to "cis men". Now you have some gender-conforming men at the start of the list. Or do the same with a list for women, from gender-conforming women to butch women.

Having those side by side in the same list brings us to the next question: Do the gender nonconforming people have the same conception of their gender as the gender conforming people? Do they have the same "gender identity"? Is a butch woman the same "gender identity" she was assigned? Is identifying as a woman the same for a gender-conforming woman as for every butch woman who deeply needs to be perceived as masculine? Obviously, there’s some relation, but what counts as “the same gender identity”?

Before I continue on this, theres often some assumptions that go into "Trans" and "cis", such as:

-Being trans means having explored what gender means to you, having worked through discomfort with whats assigned to you and restrictions, and having thought about what resonates with you

-Being trans means gender divergence has a special importance to you

-Cis is thus often positioned as the opposite of these- hasnt thought about gender, hasnt self-realized, hasnt worked through discomfort on restrictions etc

-Gnc people are cis, and therefore etc etc

Again, like that quote above from a butch woman: "My initial reaction to getting called cis is to cringe... cis is viewed as the opposite of trans, so it implies I'm comfortable with conforming to my gender."

For a lot of gnc people(i dont know what %, of course, and have biased assumptions based on the communities im exposed to), their conception of their gender identity is about as shifted from their AGAB's gender conception as a nonbinary gender. But the fact that they use the same label(and probably still have some type of conceptual connection with their AGAB) obfuscates this shift, it obfuscates that they mayve gone through introspection etc. Questioning, exploring and understanding your gender identity doesnt just mean going from two identities with visibly different labels, but also includes going between two identities that have the same label(woman->(butch)woman)

Reconstructing a house can involve as much work and decisionmaking as moving into a new house. The ship of theseus, except gender. Virtually no boy is assigned a conception of manhood that can include being a femboy, nor needing to be perceived as feminine. That is a fundamental change they made/something they discovered while self-investigating, and those different needs demonstrate the differences. If a GNC person cant "just take off" being GNC because it makes them dysphoric/upset/deprives them of gender euphoric feelings, that points to the change and the pursuit of that different conception, and is hardly different from, say, nonbinary genders. Just as there are nonbinary fems who are close to indistinguishable in behavior/needs from very fem women but in a nonbinary identity, theres the same for male-identifying fems.

The "Nobody is assigned femboy at birth" quote initially took me aback because it sounds silly to even say, and while the phrasing could perhaps be better there's definitely a point: Nobody gets assigned very GNC conceptions, they dont start with that, even if you put clothing aside.

Of course, this doesnt mean all GNC people have a different conception of their gender than genderconforming people- again, the demonstrative spectrum before. Some GNC men still harbor toxic masculinity. You cant usually tell from outside signals what a person has thought about with their identity or what their needs are- this is true for every group. And sometimes change is not consciously thought out. But in any case I do think a considerable % of, for example, “cis” femboys basically reshape what being male identifying means to them and are essentially a form of nonbinary/genderqueer.

In general on this topic, I think this comic from https://somethingaboutlemonscomic.tumblr.com/post/678523447463313408/4x10-4x11-4x12-last-update-chapter is relevant:

Conclusion

Ultimately, my main points are:

1)i think some people need a bit more understanding that “gnc” and gnc terms like femboy are pretty broad categories and include some people who have extremely similar needs to trans people, as well as people who are just average cis people with different fashion, and everyone in between.

2)Cis and trans have multiple meanings that are positional/relative- see nonbinary people who hesitate to use trans depending on context, because they associate it with "having gone through a lot of things binary trans people are associated with going through". Similarly, GNC people can have an awkwardness with being called trans even if they have in mind everything i've said about being called cis. Being called trans is assumed to be like girl->boy/enby, rather than girl->genderqueer alteration of girl. Both terms can be perceived as off.

3)Gender identity changes can keep the same label, which can mask the degree of change inside those gender conceptions

This post may come across as like “many gnc people should count as nb and/or as trans”, and maybe, but honestly I don't care much about that, those words are fairly contextual and multi-purpose anyway and have moved so much over the years. That’s only perpendicular to my points of trying to convey GNC people more accurately and move past some assumptions.

In any case, if the fact that i'm walking near that claim is Wrong and Concerning im totally open to criticisms of my thought process etc, and i absolutely dont intend to conflate, say, “gnc people who just dress different but its not related to their feelings/self-conception/etc” with trans people or nonbinary people let alone the degree of their struggles/oppression, which is part of why its necessary to convey that gnc people are a range.

Like Shel said in https://cohost.org/shel/post/1221440-some-wisdom-about-be , people tend to get very confident in their specific experience of lgbtq communities etc, and similarly can get overly confident in what an average person is like. So I just caution you to be aware of the limitations of your own circles and small data sets. Like if youre about to say something like “all the people I know are <>” then you should probably immediately tread with caution because it seems to me that gender groups are usually considerably heterogeneous in many ways.

A few clarifications and misc comments:

-I definitely understand that cis GNC people have privileges that usually help them avoid some problems trans people face. Like being able to avoid a higher amount of bioessentialist ire, less likely that medical gatekeeping prevents them fulfilling their needs, etc. I dont mean to downplay that. But I do want people to understand things like that butch women have faced intense hatred for a long time, and some of the most violent hateful fascist comments I have ever seen on the internet have been directed at femboys- these things point to important dynamics of how right wing hatred works.

-I used the terms butch/femboy predominantly in this post because I felt like they quickly convey the degree of GNC i'm talking about, but I dont mean for them to monopolize conceptions of GNC. Talking about GNC people is always messy compared to, say, talking about agender people. With "agender", afaik(correct me if I'm wrong!) almost noone who would be classified as agender dislikes the term and also it is very clearly about them specifically- it is both sufficiently broad and specific. In contrast, "GNC" is pretty vague, "Femboy" doesnt cover all very gnc men(such as ones who dont consider their expression to be fem), and "Butch" has very particular connections with lesbianism, etc. Terminology is currently avoidably sloppy for describing GNC people, no way to avoid it.

-As alluded to at a few points, you dont have to be male identifying to be a femboy, although thats usually who uses the label. An accurate, inclusive definition of femboy would be "someone with a very feminine gender expression but still aligned with a mix of masculinity in some way(ie usually, identifying as male)". Somewhat similarly, butches are definitely not exclusively women, I was just focusing on that subsection of butches for the purposes of this post.

-Theres simply a huge overlap between the experiences of, say, fem trans women and fem gnc men and fem enbies.(and the same for the masc inverse) Theres a tendency to see a set of experiences and go "Oh! Same identity as mine!!!!" and not see whats shared across different identities rather than is particular to a single identity. Seriously the experience overlap is fucking enormous.

-The positioning of 2) in that spectrum is partially arbitrary but thats what you get when you try to map 4+ things to a 2 dimensional spectrum

-"Genderqueer" can be used to convey the meaning of "having a 'queer' version of your cis gender", but its has a ton of meanings and is very often used to just mean "nonbinary/trans", so its pretty impractical to try to use it to mean specifically that concept

-I focused on cis gnc people to make my points and comparisons more clear(isolating the focus to GNCness), but a lot of what I said is relevant to understanding trans gnc people, who are extremely based

#gender #femboy #femboys #butch #transgender #trans #nonbinary #lgbtq #gnc

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the-fabled-geedis · 5 months

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My first day on testosterone.

Hey guys, I'm Geedis. I mean not actually, but ya know. The date is 12/22/23, and this is my first day on T.

As of this month, I'm now 24 years old, and have been on a very slow journey of gender discovery for the last seven years or so. It's been a journey of hesitation, self doubt, fear, avoidance, and denial. But over the course of this year, I set out to finally dig deeper and come out the other side having learned something about myself, and have an idea of how to proceed in my life. I knew that I was nonbinary for a few years, but I had hit a plateau, a stagnation in my knowledge of how to continue on my journey of self-understanding.

So I worked at it; I finally began going by my chosen name, and slowly but surely taking the required steps to legally change my name. I tried out they/he pronouns. I bought a gender identity workbook. I started going to therapy. And I ultimately arrived at some level of understanding that being perceived as more masculine would make me more comfortable.

My choice to go on T is not without its hesitations. But I knew that I'd never be 100% truly sure it was what I needed. That wasn't something that was going to just magically occur one day after a little bit more waiting. I felt that I had asked all the questions that I could of myself and the world around me, and that no more answers would reveal themselves unless I gave this a shot. Hahah shot, get it?

No but actually I'm doing gel! There's no way I could stick myself with a needle lol. If gel proves to be inconvenient in some way, I'll opt instead to visit the clinic every week for a shot.

I applied the gel to my upper arm this morning, staring at it as it dried. It didn't feel real. This was something I had been thinking about for so long.

I'll be keeping a log of my thoughts, feelings, and changes during my transition here. Thanks for reading if you made it this far :)

Welp, here we go.

#transgender #trans #transmasc #nonbinary #ftm #testosterone #hrt #transition

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skadream · 2 months

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i was gonna delete this and move on but im bored so i'll take this seriously even tho it will somehow prove a point for the phobes

i think this chris fleming video sums up my thoughts on this question perfectly

i saw a tiktok from a trans man that nearly made me cry about how he didn't give a shit when transphobes say "you will always be a woman" but it hurt if someone were to say "you will always be a girl" because for him there is some truth to that statement. neither i nor this random dude online speak for all trans men, but for me this resonated a lot. i do not connect to womanhood at all, i enjoy many things that are perceived as feminine but to me those are things i enjoy as a man. however, girlhood and being a girl is something i do connect to a lot. maybe it's nostalgia or just the specifics of what many people who were assigned female have to go through in childhood? the specifics of my intersection of identities outside of genders? idk but it's not to do with liking or doing feminine things or being feminine.

i went to an all-girls school, i have three older sisters, i've kinda been surrounded by women my whole life and the number of men that i interact irl with that isnt family (thru blood or marriage or even longtime family friend) is very very small. and none of that makes me a girl but obviously that impacted my life greatly! like when i was questioning whether or not im trans i like, basically terfed myself into thinking i CANT be trans because i can be a woman and not shave or whatever, and i need to embrace my body as a woman's body etc and i did that! im still all about body positivity for women! but i just. never was one. it never worked. and i genuinely thought i must be a massive misogynist because i cant see myself embracing being a woman. (btw this was all self-targeted, i never felt this way about other trans men prob bc i just see them as. men.)

i felt like if i were to transition i would be doing a disservice to the me who was a little girl that had all these hopes for my future. i thought i could be nonbinary and genderfluid in my online life and be okay with being perceived as a gnc woman irl because thats what a feminist would do right. i had accepted more fluid labels long before ever considering myself a man, and i do still consider myself to be nb and genderfluid! but the first time someone assumed i was a man, something just clicked in my head. like oh. oh yeah this makes sense this is what i was missing. i dont feel so empty anymore, and not saying genderfluid/nonbinary people are empty but rather i felt empty so i identified with labels that could be nonspecific. now my fluidity is something i embrace not as emptiness but wholeness. like all these terms individually gets you some of the way there, and even all these terms together dont necessarily paint the full picture, but i've conveyed the idea to you well enough.

anyway i didnt answer the question LMAO so am i a girl? no not right now. hope this helps

#trans day of visibility #arcyaps

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uncanny-tranny · 1 month

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I'm trans nonbinary and I really kind of hate myself for it and feel like such a fucking freak and I don't even know why because I didn't even grow up around a lot of homophobia or anything. I let everyone assume I'm a (trans) man because in my head if someone found out I was nonbinary they would just think I'm so fucking wierd, even when I'm in spaces or with people I know for a fact wouldn't actually think any of that. I don't feel this way about anyone else, just me. I'm really sorry if this is too much of a vent kind of thing I totally get you deleting it or whatever, but any advice you have would be really great.

I want to preface this by emphatically saying: Nobody here (least of all myself!) are judging you. I am sure many trans people who are following this blog know how you feel intimately. It's a consequence of the world we live in, not an intrinsic failure of character. I want to make this clear because you were incredibly vulnerable and I don't want you to worry that your vulnerability is a bad thing. It takes a lot to open up like this, no matter if you're on anon or not.

I've talked about this before, but this is a process that takes... a long time to work through, if I'm honest. I've been out since I was a young teenager, and now as an adult I still fall into the trappings of feeling similarly to you. What helped for me is to generally avoid judging myself for when I do feel like this. I think trying to outright ignore how you feel is very inefficient - I have tended to be a person who needs to feel those awful feelings so that I can look back and notice exactly what went wrong. I wouldn't specifically recommend that you do this - I have had many years of combating internalized transphobia to feel this is effective for myself. But, regardless of where you are in your journey of internal acceptance, I will advise this: don't judge yourself for these feelings. It is easy to do, but you don't deserve to have even more feelings of shame, isolation, or overall feelings of hopelessness or helplessness.

Often, we won't know exactly "why" we feel these feelings of internalized transphobia. For me, I also didn't grow up with outright homophobia, but I did grow up with the idea that I would only be loved if I was cishet, so when I discovered I was neither, it was jarring. I thought I would never be loved. And years later, I became open to the idea that I might have been wrong because there were people along the way - friends, certain family, strangers, even - who showed the love I felt I surrendered when I realized who and what I was.

It has helped me to expose myself to other trans people, as well. It's a delicate balance, at times, because there are moments where I find myself growing envious of another trans person for the way I perceive their own transition. It's a natural response, I guess, a natural human response that is amplified when you are part of a group that is often maligned. But I have found that the pros outweigh the cons: I see trans people of all identities now, trans people who look like me, who have incredibly similar experiences, who taught me so much about what it actually means to love and be loved. It's funny, because I'm largely a trans man (with caveats), yet some of the people who have deeply impacted me forever weren't always the same as I am (in fact, one of the first true "I look up to this person" experiences was from a trans woman who I still to this day admire and look up to).

I'm not going to lie, this (how you're feeling) is an incredibly common, but sometimes devastating result of so many factors. While we all go about these feelings in different ways, it can be hard. Therefore, it's important that we support each other. I want to offer my support to you, and let you know that you aren't going to be looked at by others in the way you might fear. It's hard to even conceptualize, honestly, but I am being honest. I understand that some of what I might have said won't resonate with you now, or ever, and that's okay. When we have a community to talk about ideas as a way of support, we can start to have more resources that we might be able to utilize effectively.

Your vulnerability right now isn't going unnoticed. It took a lot to express this, and I hope you might read this and feel even slightly better. I wish nothing but good things for you, nothing but bountiful joy and understanding that you deserve so much from this world.

#ask #anon #trans #transgender #lgbt #lgbtq #nonbinary #internalized transphobia #internalized transphobia tw #long post #(just for any blacklisting reasons)#this one hits home for me in so many ways #so at the very least anon: you aren't going through this alone

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house-bound · 1 year

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Once I saw someone saying that bigender Sollux was too on the nose and like that stuck out to me because you could say literally everything about Sollux is on the nose.

Sollux’s entire thing is duality, his two colored shades, his interest in coding is because binary, when he becomes half dead half alive, his interest in Aradia and Feferi are both extremes in the hemospectrum and are themed around Death and Life, on one of the flashes he has a brief crush on Gamzee, the pacific guy who just snapped and now switches between lower and upper case, Gamzee who btw is a capricorn, between aquatic and terrestrial life.

He has two dreamselves for fucks sake, that is never explained, his actual sign is derse even though he is in both moons, that is an thing that only happens to him and the one other goldblood, because their entire thing is duality.

My point is why would you argue that headcanoning him as bigender is too on the nose as if that has been a objection for literally anything else for his character? How is him being bigender different from other traits for his character being decided to match his theme?

That is how the trolls work, a lot of things about them like their hobbies and jobs (Terezi collecting Scales and being dragon themed, Kanaya being themed around Mother Mary, named Maryam, being forced into a “mom friend” role) as well as their goals and traits (Again Kanaya’s desire to “mother” the entire troll species by securing the matriorb) follows whatever the trolls theme is.

Using Kanaya as an example again, her constellation is usually presented as a woman, just chilling on the sky, and Kanaya is a woman, so her gender matches her sign, would that be considered too on the nose and forced like how Bigender Sollux apparently is?

Eridan being a man might also be “on the nose” since the Aquarius constellation is a male water carrier, Pisces is Aphrodite turned into a fish, who is a woman, Capricorn is Diyonisus turned into a sea goat, therefore is Feferi being a woman, Eridan and Gamzee being men are all too on the nose aren’t they? Should we start disregarding any headcanon that makes Feferi a woman, Eridan a man and Gamzee a man? Maybe! Since apparently that is on the nose, which very little things in Homestuck are, so we should keep those as far from the nose as possible.

Let’s take all of our gender headcanons and keep them as far from this universal entity known as “THE NOSE” as possible! Since that is a parameter that is worth using at all for things in homestuck, but only things related to gender, let’s just make Gamzee a woman so it’s not a direct reference to the gender of her star sign, because if a character trait of a homestuck troll is related to their respective star sign than it is bad writing! If anything about homestuck is anywhere near the facility of a single organ used for breathing and perceiving smells than it is bad.

So yeah I just wanted to be annoying about this because since when is something being too close the respiratory receptor a reason for us to avoid it. Are things like Karkat having a crab dad also on the olfactory orifices? Should we rewrite the entirety of Homestuck as to avoid things being there? Should we just remake Karkat’s dad into a horse since that is distant enough from his theme that it is no longer predictable or corny or whatever? Or are things too on the nose only when they are trans headcanons? Is that where we cross the line? When trans and nonbinary people dare to exist?

#homestuck #sollux captor #sollux #kanaya maryam #kanaya #bigender sollux

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