#multimisia

Hey 🍯! Nice to talk to you again <3

Absolutely it makes sense to me, I really love seeing how the same label has different nuances for different people. Im really sorry to hear about people harrassing you just for talking about your experiences, that's so awful, but you're not doing anything wrong for existing as yourself. Your not appropriating, it's your word if you want it to be, it's just a way to describe your gender. Just because most people use it to mean one thing, it doesn't mean that everyone uses it the same way, because identity labels are broad generalizations of different wildly nuanced and multifaceted experiences. The label itself cannot account for all those nuances- it's more like boiling them down to something they have in common, in this case, trans femininity, but how that is experienced and why and how it affects you is all things the labels cant say.

If you want to describe your experience that way, you can. I dont think it's right to tell someone that their way of experiencing something is any less valid just for being different from how people are used to conceptualize it. It's no different than saying that someone cant identify as butch if they're not a woman or have long hair or dress feminine or are shy and not physically strong. Like maybe it doesnt fit into how you are used to imagine the idea of a butch, but it doesnt mean that someone calling themselves a butch is "appropriating" if they dont fit that idea.

Ive seen people way more focused on labels as "what others perceive you as and treat you as" instead of "how you feel about yourself", and to me that's kind of sad. Defining everything through the lens of oppression, because it reduces the complexity and wonderfulness of gender identity to just the worst aspects of dealing with how society conceltualizes the ideas of genders and defying that. It's the same feeling of 'appropriation' and it's what society tries hard to instill into trans people, crossdressers, gender non conforming people, that if they dont fit neatly in the ideas society has, then they're doing something wrong and deserve to be punished or harrassed for it.

Sometimes people want to talk about perisex monogender cis men, and not anyone who doesn't fit that demographic. That's fair! But the way many end up conflating "pericis monogender manhood" with "true manhood" ends up just being transphobic. To say to a trans person who says they are a man "you're not like really a man" (aka, you're not a *real* man) is transphobic. It's stating that the only real men are pericis monogender ones, and everyone else doesn't have access to "real manhood", that their manhood is less because they're trans.

That's textbook definition of transphobia, especially towards non binary people.

It's true, you can end up saying invalidating and discriminatory things without the intention to *be* invalidating or discriminatory. You're not tarnished forever because of it, even though the effect of those words is absolutely still hurtful, but it's good to learn to be better. We've all been ignorant once, nobody is born knowing everything.

A lot of people have, instead of decostructing the gender binary, simple added a third category, one again mutually exclusive from the other two; that's non binary. Effectively they create a gender trinary, having woman, man and non binary as genders but still presenting them as strict separate boxes. And with non binary being a broad label for anything that isnt "just man" or "just woman", multigender people are excluded from identifying with binary genders. Not only that, the sentiment ends up being "sure you're a man, but you're not really man" (because a real man would be a monogender binary man, and since you're multigender, therefore dont fit in the *monogender* binary man category, you're automatically part of the non binary category whether you want it or not. And because the non binary and binary category are exclusive in this framework, you cant be a binary man.)