#genderflux

Gender-flux Honami my beloved.

They so squishy, they so petite. Such a cutie patootie.

I lob Hona

Honanananananami

Honami🥹.

They look like Sayori like this.

But that's the thing - when you have a preconceived notion of what "dysphoria" means, you won't see it even when it's staring you in the face.

For years I assumed I was "asexual" or "demisexual" or something other than "fully sexual" because I often didn't want to have sex. I was horny, I was attracted, I would go through all the foreplay and everything, and then get to the point of actually having sex (as a man, having sex with a woman), and be like, "nah, I'm good".

This didn't happen every time, but a significant number of times, over years, decades, it's a lifelong pattern, not some kind of temporary phase.

I now realize with almost perfect clarity, that in those moments the reason I didn't want to have sex as a man was because I wasn't a man. I was a woman at those moments, I wanted to have sex as a woman. I wanted my body to be a female body. And since I didn't have that, I didn't want sex, in spite of being as horny as a toad.

And that, my friends, is dysphoria.

One of the bigger mysteries of my life, solved.

First of what could be many posts of musings about gender. It describes some ideas I went through and have already moved past.

Years and years ago, like 2007-2009, I was almost on the verge of coming to a modern understanding my gender situation, years early.

I remember preparing a post, I don't remember where I was planning to post it, explaining I was 70% male, 30% female. This was based not on sexuality, and not on outer presentation, but on inner identification.

But *at the time*, I felt myself as being almost exclusively attracted to women, not men, so I was also 90% female-attracted, 10% male-attracted.

So I imagined, like, a chart that has me a kinda in the lower right.

But I ended up repressing all this, and mostly forgetting about it, for years, until 2025. And only in 2026 did I realize I was actually right back then, I've been bigender and genderfluid all along.

Thing is, though, I don't think I could even make a simple 2d chart like this now. My female side is very attracted to men. I'd just been repressing it. As man I am more or less straight, as a woman I am bisexual, but closer to a straight woman than a lesbian. This would not be possible to represent on such a simple chart. I could try:

But this still isn't right. My female (pink) me is depicted at 30% because I see myself like a woman about 30% of the time, but that doesn't mean I'm only 30% a woman in that time.

So that, right there, renders this whole thing a curious exercise I've now moved beyond.

And that's only two axes of it.

A few months ago when I finally broke, I spent some time thinking about this (before I even realized how attracted to men my female side is) and came up with several different axes that such a chart would need to have to be useful:

gender identity (as shown above)

sexual orientation, attraction (as shown above)

gender presentation - I classified myself as male-presenting, regardless of my gender identity - but this isn't quite right, presentation isn't just clothing and voice, it (IMO) includes stuff like posting on tumblr "as" a certain gender even if the post includes no photos of yourself

"hardness" - the same thing that is in play in terms like "soft butch" and "hard femme", generalized to apply all identities, orientations, and presentations - I classified myself as soft

"sweetness to strength" - a concept I came up to try to capture certain gender stereotypes in a gender-neutral way. where one end of the scale acts "sweet" (nurturing, caring) to other people, and the other end of the scale acts "strong" (protecting, fighting for) other people. Applicable to all identities and presentations. Named after the Homer Simpson quote, "the strong must protect the sweet". - I classified myself as "sweet"

"sex" - I never really thought through whether this means the sex organs you were born with, or the organs you currently have, or the secondary characteristics you currently have... Because of that, it's probably not usable.

I stopped at 6 because "visualizing the 6th dimension" is an in-joke among a certain peer group of mine. So, like, 10 people would get the joke. But realistically there'd need to be more than 6. I didn't even include an axis for asexual to allosexual, or agender to gendered, stuff which is important to a lot of people. And you'd definitely need to tease apart the 6th axis into something that isn't just a rebranding of what anti-trans people mean by "biological sex".

I heard of it but hadn’t looked it up-

I don’t have a good descriptor for it but it’s an oddly rapid shift, it doesn’t sneak up on me in any way, and then just disappears for no reason- it’s another reason my attempts at telling people my gender on a daily basis when I thought I was solely genderfluid would become too difficult. I was using earrings and you can only change those so many times in 1 class period (my record was 5) before teachers start wondering if you were listening (I was)

Genderflux keeps being described in the descriptions I’ve found as 0% to 100% gender, but mine is moreover 0% to 5% gender. There’s barely any difference but it’s still noticeable enough to have me originally calling myself genderfluid before knowing what agender is.

Also, the gender isn’t stable, I use he/him as the example because that’s the most recent one that happened (that was a week ago and lasted for 3 days), but I’ve previously had days where they/them, she/her, or even some neopronouns fit better than they typically would. It’s like the line is flat but on occasion it bumps up, and the bump can last from 10 minutes to a full week. Any pronouns in the pronoun wheel have previously been that 5% gender, and I actually have a few new ones I should add

If there’s a type of genderflux that is only the 0% to 5% then that’d be accurate. I’m prolly not gonna actually put that in the intro post though ‘cause I am, most often, entirely devoid of gender, and even when the 5% gender is showing up I’m not entirely inclined to have people call me those

By the definition of genderflux being purely a shifting degree of gender, then yeah, yeah that’s right, and which one it is shifts as well, which would describe the fluid part.

Like I said, my gender is pain, especially the lack of it, and I can barely comprehend it myself. It is like a purely decorative cup, sometimes having something tiny in it, mostly having nothing. It sits there, empty, and occasionally has a single drop of water or maybe a dead bug.

The reason I call myself agender is that my results are always inconclusive, mostly due to a lack of evidence. Most of the time that cup is empty, so it’s nigh impossible to decipher what type of bug dies in it most often. And when there is something in there, it shifts, it changes, it is a moth that dies and then looks like a butterfly for no apparent reason. The water is water, hydrogen peroxide, everclear, and sprite. It shifts based on nothing and at irregular intervals, making this analogy annoying as hell to make non-magical. But importantly, it’s mostly empty. There’s almost never anything in there, and even when there is, there’s barely anything in there.

So, I guess it’s probably something like genderflux and genderfluid and agender, which is a hellscape I cannot even begin to describe in anything other than analogies

It’s like a very specific type of agender that is none but the gender sometimes shows up to the party but it stays outside the house and which gender it’ll be is entirely unpredictable, which is where the genderfluid comes from. It’s like it shows up and I’m like, hey there, why are you that? My gender is hell but it’s best to just not use pronouns for me, though again, one/oneself is great. I still have no clue if one is really 3rd person or 1st person or some twisted form of 2nd person-

Thank you for bringing genderflux to my attention, I’ve been meaning to look that one up for a while. Anyone who has more info, please let me know what’s going on there. I want to find a more direct explanation for what’s going on with my own gender than “Agender but it shifts a tiny bit on occasion so some pronouns don’t hurt”

AHEM:

Pansexual

Gender flux (gender fluxatuons)

Nebulasexual (confusion about sexual attraction related to neurodiverance)

Saphiosexual (more attraction to "intelligence" then looks/gender but I interpreted it as no gender pref)

Quiogender (used by nonbinary folk to convey sheer confusion about gender and how it's inaccessible to me)

Polyamorious (multiple people relationships)

Gendervoid (complete lack of gender in a way where there should be gender there isn't)