Good heavens - I'm demiromantic!

yea you!!

your gender’s looking great today!!

whatever you identify as

however you prefer to present yourself

however you look

my understanding is "gender identity" is defined as "your internal sense of gender" and like, that is not an intelligible statement. i have spent a serious number of hours on this; it just isn't.

i could agree that there are two socially constructed gender roles that we assign to bodies based on our reading of the sex of those bodies. (and if we don't think we can read the sex of a body: anxiety happens, because it disrupts this deeply trained process.)

i could agree that i have learned to present well enough as my assigned sex to avoid being policed. this is where it gets all circular: i allow my body to have signs of its sex, and perform the gender role 'enough' to avoid causing anxiety, confusion, backlash. i (like to think i) have more creative things to do with my energy than invest more than necessary into this performance.

i could agree i am what i am, and that i don't conceptualize of my traits or interests in terms of gender. conversely, my gender does not inform the things i pursue. i do not feel validated by performing normalized behavior for my gender role; i do not feel diminished by performing nonconforming behavior. i don't feel a need to do anything to "feel like" my gender.

i don't even know what "feeling like" a gender is like? i tested out the other gender role, but it was the same thing with a lot of misogyny heaped on.

when i choose to display gender non-conforming behaviors, it's not because "knitting expresses my gender" but because i want to push on the externally imposed chains of gender roles, breaking them down bit by bit. people read my sex as male, but knitting, and maybe get inspired to push on their own cages a bit.

when i choose not to display these, it's not because i'm feeling different about gender liberation, it's because i'm feeling tired of all the policing that non-conformance invites.

I want to boost everything this person has said and add on.

The reason I call myself a tomboy now, despite it being seen as a childish word and having had someone swear at me over it because ‘tHeRe’S nO suCh thInG as BoY thInGs anD giRL thIngS sHut uP’ is because I couldn’t call myself that or be like that when I was a kid. It was seen as a negative thing and I was already bullied enough. “Looking like a boy” was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.

And I’m not even 26 yet. We aren’t talking 30+ years ago, we are talking 2000s and even 2010s. It’s only since trans people have become more accepted in the past few years that gender nonconformity has too.

And the people who helped me accept my gender nonconformity more than anyone else? Were trans people. They taught me, “there’s nothing wrong with how you feel. You’re still a valid woman no matter what you wear, how you have your hair or what you’re into ❤️”

And don’t even get me started on how people treat gender nonconforming men. JK Rowling has a lot of nerve to be like “uwu boys can wear dresses and only us gendercrits accept that!” when she has, even in recent works, made femininity in men a negative trait, as well as making masculinity in women a negative trait also.

A lot of people still don’t accept gnc people even now. Just last year I had someone tell me they’d never let their daughter “dress like a boy”, and I’m always terrified to walk into a bathroom in case the next JK Rowling is in there, sees my gender expression and pepper sprays me or worse.

okay

that will require stealth trans men to out themselves in order to receive help

that will require closeted trans women to out themselves in order to receive help

that will require nonbinary people who don't ""look nonbinary"" because they look too masculine to out themselves in order to receive help

it will also alienate transfems & trans people who were AMAB who haven't realized they're trans yet from spaces that could provide them a safe place to explore gender & sexuality and be introduced to the idea of being trans

trans people are eventually going to get uncomfortable with your hatred for cis men, because people who were AMAB are gonna wonder if you secretly hate them for being "actually men" and trans mascs are gonna wonder if you hate them for being men at all

people attracted to cis men are going to feel uncomfortable when they try and bring up their love for men including cis men or bring their cis boyfriends/partners/friends to your spaces

there are cis queer men & queer men who blur the lines between cis and trans and they have just as much a right to queer spaces as you do

^ intersex men also exist including intersex cis men

there is never going to be a group of people who it is alright to blindly hate just because of circumstances of their birth or identity and every time you try you are going to end up hurting people. embrace compassion and nuance

The pathologization and criminalization of pecularity doesn't only affect the neurodivergent and the mentally ill, it can and will be used by the state against "normal" people the moment they step out of line.

I understand how you got here because this is the "making prescriptions for other people's behaviour" website but I am not making a prescription for anyone else's behaviour. I couldn't care any less how individual white people identify. Meaningful resistance to the colonial gender binary will have to occur in arenas other than that of personal identification; in fact, the fantasy of complete personal divestment from the colonial gender binary is a part of the tendency I'm trying to criticise here.

The other thing I'm criticising is a taxonomical view of gender—"taxonomical" here meaning "assuming that each identity label describes a unique, innate facet of the human experience that people merely attached a word to, rather than understanding categories as historically and culturally constructed." This taxonomical view of gender leads to the assumption that "nonbinary" is an innate, pre-discursive category to which some people ontologically (inherently, by virtue of their very being) belong—so you get people calling "pre-colonial," Indigenous, or Global South people or groups "nonbinary" despite the fact that they did not or do not understand gender this way.

Assuming the right to construct categories and subcategories, to decide how they are organised and nested, to sort people into groups according to these categories and subcategories regardless of whether they themselves have a different understanding of gender grounded in a different context—in short, assuming that these categories get to the "real truth" of human nature or something, such that you are doing no disservice to anyone in applying them to everyone—this is the colonial gender project. This is the logic that produces the gender binary as a tool of colonial domination in the first place.

My argument is that the imposition of any term or mode of understanding gender against and across Indigenous understandings of gender when referring to Indigenous peoples, the construction of any taxonomy of gender with the assertion that it is the One Correct Way to understand gender—the argument is that these things play out colonial logic, and thus the very gendered logic that they purport to resist. But an individual chusing to identify themself as nonbinary is not automatically imposing anything on anyone.

A brand new essay, many weeks in the making: "Gender-Affirming Care for Trans Youth Is Neither New nor Experimental: A Timeline and Compilation of Studies."

It provides a brief history of how gender-affirming care came to be, debunks the most common anti-trans talking points & tactics, and includes a reference list of over 100 studies & reviews showing how established this field is. I hope that it's a useful resource to counter the current wave of trans-skeptical and just-asking-questions media pieces.

my main interaction with gender are experiences like:

i wear masculine stuff so that i don't get policed

whenever i transgress anyway, like taking up knitting, people act like it's a Spectacle, including people who KNOW i think gender can go fuck itself

people talk about "i need to feel like [my assigned gender]" and i 100% do not get this feeling/need

my maleness does not give me a sense of embodied gender, but other people talk as if it does/should

the 'other people' in last point may support bioessentialism, but then the one before immediately overthrows it. and both are on equal footing, in the realm of personal (not cultural) experience.