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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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Do you want an honest answer to your questions or are you set on your worldviews?
I always want to learn more about things. To be totally honest with you, what I'm having the most trouble understanding in the current gender discourse is how can gender be both a social construct/abstraction (in the famous words of Judith Butler "an imitation without an original") but then also gender identity is a deeply-seated innate feeling that people have that then enables the feeling of "my gender is wrong and I need to change it."
I really don't want to be transphobic or even enbyphobic or anything and I will use whatever pronouns people want to be nice. But just on an epistemological level, I'm having trouble understanding it.
I’m (trans) nonbinary, and I’ll try to put to words what this amorphous feeling is. Apologies in advance for the wall of text, this isn’t simple and has been a years long process for me to arrive at this ultimately incomplete articulation.
Spoiler: It all relates back to the social construct of sex and gender and it’s not an either/or as an abstract or deep seated feeling that drives us to change.
Growing up I was socialized as a boy and told who I was supposed to be and how I was supposed to act, both implicitly by society and explicitly by my community (evangelical Christians). I was, however, never able to conform to those norms. I was always left on the outside no matter how hard I tried to fit. I grew up with significant dissonance without understanding that it was these gender labels created for and placed on me causing it.
In my 30’s I started to meet people and acquire language that resonated with me regarding gender. This new language started to connect the dots for me that my ‘aberrant’ and secret feelings and behaviors (wishing I could be a woman while still being a man, being jealous that women got to dress in ways I wasn’t allowed to, wishing I could adopt norms applied to women without repercussion, among others) that caused me so much distress were ultimately due to the fact that I was told they were aberrant and, most importantly, told they were wrong.
So when I discovered that the primary problem was the label, the way to combat that was to accept a new label that gives me the freedom to express myself how I want to. Gender is important to me because I was socialized with gender as a central pillar to my identity, and because society has done the same at scale. That is to say, I look like a man so I shouldn’t wear makeup, shouldn’t paint my nails, shouldn’t wear skirts or dresses, shouldn’t move my body in certain ways, shouldn’t speak in certain ways determined to be feminine, shouldn’t be excited about certain things, and a thousand other ‘shouldn’ts’ that I want to do. I’ve always more closely identified with and been easier friends with women. My motivation for many things has always been in closer alignment with women. But I still feel masculine from time to time and have many ‘masculine’ traits like the desire to protect, an appreciation and love for cars and mechanics, a desire to be bigger and stronger than the person next to me, and a number of other traits considered to be ‘manly’.
There is no paradigm within mainstream western culture to account for this fluidity. I am a deviant from the social norm, and because of that I am an outsider with no community or home. As humans we are social beings and we crave, even need, belonging. So when I discovered that my perceived gender was the source of these feelings of dissonance and loneliness, it became imminently important for me to figure out why, because figuring out why it was important gave me the path to finally finding my community where I can finally experience belonging. Finding the labels that resonate with me helps me find the people that can really understand me. It doesn’t matter how much of an ally you are, if you’re CIS you’ll never truly understand me as a human because of the way that society has structured itself with regards to gender norms. You can empathize, accept, and love me, but that will never fill the void created in me by never feeling truly seen.
With CIS people I will always have to filter and translate what I say in order to be understood as a person, but with other gender-queer people I don’t have to. These are my people, they’ve been on the same road as me, and when I talk about these amorphous feelings md experiences they look at me with understanding and knowing and that’s it. I don’t have to keep going, I can just say what I’m feeling and they not only understand, they are right there in the same space breathing the same air. I have a partner who is trans-masc and one of the things we love to talk about and gush over is when we get misgendered to whatever gender we weren’t assigned at birth. I was recently asked if my pronouns are ‘she/her’ and that filled me with a joy that I can’t articulate. But with them they immediately understood and shared in my excitement. To share that with a CIS person requires significant emotional labor to be put into explaining the context and setting the scene in order for them to be able to celebrate with me (kind of like that last 40 minutes I’ve put into crafting this post). But with this partner it’s immediately known and viscerally understood. Sharing this story with my gender queer friends results in a communal sense of feeling seen and known that I just can’t find from even my closest CIS friends.
I’m fortunate that I don’t have body dysphoria with any of the biology that I have, but this is complicated by the fact that I do have dysphoria with biology I don’t and can’t have. I love having my biologically male body, but I have a deep longing to have a biologically female body too. I don’t talk about this often, so bear with me as I try to stumble through this. This duality is why I know I’m not a trans-woman and why I’ve adopted the non-binary label. It’s also why being gendered he/him is disruptive to me psychologically (I have a bad relationship with masc pronouns because of the quiet trauma I experience being socialized as a boy when I am, in fact, not a boy, and a complicated relationship with femme pronouns, though if I’m going to be misgendered in the binary I’d rather be misgendered in the femme direction). My sense of self vacillates across the spectrum of the binary while sometimes jumping off the scale entirely where gender is meaningless and I best describe my gender as the way kinetic sand drops and falls apart when it’s held loosely (that makes as much sense to me as it does you, I promise…. It just feels right and I can’t explain it. This type of description is common in the nonbinary community). So I have the double dissonance of this physical dysphoria along with my social dysphoria.
And all of this is ultimately important to me because I had it pounded into me like a spike in my head that I am a boy and that I am supposed to experience life a certain way because I’m a boy. Gender is important to me because the expectations for my behavior in society are determined by my (perceived) gender. If I just go along with what society thinks I am, I will never be happy because I will always be stuck trying to conform to what others think I should be. If I could, would express with 100% androgyny, but I can’t for various reasons. So as I hope you can see, I experience gender from both the abstract nature of it being a social construct and as a deeply seated innate feeling that drives me to be different.
What I can say is that in order to not be transphobic (non-binary folks are trans btw), you should learn to accept that we experience the world and ourselves differently than you do. You have no problem accepting that from other people groups, like children, people with disabilities, and people across socioeconomic strati, so apply it to us as well and recognize that we just want to exist as we are and not as we are wanted to be. And you can help by using our pronouns and believing us when we say we are something other than what we look like, even if you can’t viscerally understand it. At the end of the day, if you are CIS, this conversation isn’t for you, it’s for those of us finding ourselves, so of course it will be difficult to impossible for you to understand. And that’s ok. We don’t need that, we need acceptance.
First of all I want to thank you for writing this out and taking my questions seriously. I know it can be hard to put these feelings into words, so really thanks.
I kind of get where you're coming from in terms of gendered socialization. Growing up a small eastern european village as a gay boy and teen, I definitely felt I was pitched very strongly the "right way" to be a man and a "wrong way" to be a man.
What's interesting to me is this talk about labels. I hope I am reading it right, but you seem to be saying you needed the label before you could do things. Why? Why is a label necessary before you can engage in behaviors? For me, I knew I was gay long before I applied the label to myself and in fact, applying that label to finally accept I am gay has been a source of a lot of friction and anxiety in my youth.
What I am saying is, do you not feel when you say
That you are actually reifying gender? Why are these traits masculine? I may be coming to this from a very "second wave feminism" perspective, but to me and many people in my generation, gender "liberation" was about erasing these boundaries and decoupling stuff like cars and strength from either masculinity or femininity.
I'm not saying that all trans rights activists do this, but there is a strain of it I noticed that really does seem to be want to define gender for everyone and then enforce these new gender standards on everyone. I have some stereotypical "feminine" interests too. I like fashion, I like to talk about my feelings with my friends for hours. But I don't feel in any way like a woman because of it.
To me, gender liberation was about learning that my homosexuality doesn't make me "less of a man," that I can still enjoy "masculine" pursuits, but really that I can be any kind of man I want to be without having to adopt any new labels or identities.
In fact, I felt, and many gay men of my generation do, that to accept a new and separate labels means also accepting that we're not "proper" men.
I suppose that's a source of a lot of misunderstanding because it seems to me that current gender theory is diverging from this idea of gender non-essentialism into a new form of gender essentialism where if you like stereotypical "male stuff" then you're not a "proper woman" that is to say you must be either trans or non-binary in some way. And vice-versa. I'm interested in your opinion on this.
The second thing that jumps out at me is your claim that if we're cis we cannot understand you. While it is true that we can never fully grasp the experience of the Other (regardless of identities and lived experiences) I still believe empathy is possible and necessary for building solidarity.
When I hear this, I think I hear two things: one, that there's a fundamental disconnection between us that cannot be remedied; two, that the only way for me to support you is to put myself in a subordinate position to you and simply as some activists say "shut up and listen."
And with all the respect in the world, I am not prepared to accept the second condition. Gender concerns me as well, even if I am cis, and I cannot accept that there should be a group of people, in the current progressive view these are trans and non-binary people, who should have sole authority to define gender and to whom we all need to genuflect.
This isn't about respecting your gender identity, which I do, this is about a society-wide discourse on gender that we're all subject to whether we want it or not. I want the freedom to talk about gender, my own and gender at large, without being shouted down and called a bigot every time I disagree with the current progressive consensus on it.
Anyway, thank you again for your extensive write-up, it's important to hear the actual experience and thoughts of people and not just theories.
I think I’ve reached a character limit so I’m gonna try and break this into two comments, sorry for the novelization 😅
Of course.
I’m curious about how old you are. If you were American I’d be pretty confident you’re Gen X or older. I’ve had very similar conversations with some old guard queer folks and have noticed very similar differences/understandings across the Gen x and older/millennial and younger divide.
I’m also curious to know if you understood homosexuality before you knew you were gay? Did you have gay people in your community? Did your community villainize homosexuality or were they unconcerned with it? For my story, it’s important to understand that I was, for all intents and purposes, brainwashed and conditioned to view all of my ‘aberrant’ behaviors as sinful and something I must change or face damnation. I was given a worldview and not allowed to see any others, and they succeeded by putting me in private Christian schools that taught Christian science (e.g., young earth creation) right next to evangelical theology and Christian social studies (literally just negative conversation about how sinful ‘the world’ is) in order to cement the link between all three. And when we couldn’t afford private school anymore, my mother homeschooled us and our quality of education declined further and isolation increased. I never had any model for what it could look like to be anything but CIS-straight, and the only conclusion I could come to about my feelings was to say what was hammered into me: I’m a sinner deserving only of death and then cry out to a god that wasn’t there begging it to change me.
The first thing I want to point out is that everything you’ve described of your own experience dwells within the gender binary. You were taught the right and wrong ways to be a man. Which is fine, you’re a man. But I’m not. So both are wrong for me.
Re labels: for me, this was deeply personal and not something that I think all folks wind up needing in order to find the freedom to know themselves (note: this isn’t just about permission to engage in behaviors, it’s about being able to accept myself and allow myself to exist as I am). But for me, growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical community, labels were extremely important because we were in a war with the ‘sinful world’. If you look at hard right wing politics in America today and see the culture war we’re in, I can point to the same war being silently fought 30 years ago, because I was in the middle of it (for an interesting look into this culture, check out the documentary Happy Shiny People bout the Duggars. It does a good job revealing a lot of what has led the US to where we are today from a culture perspective. Also look up ‘the Joshua Generation’).
I’m also neurodivergent and my brain absolutely needs structure to be healthy. With regards to gender, I was incapable of recognizing that I could be something different from the cis-het patriarchal structure I was given. My brain just doesn’t work in a way that would let me see beyond the conditioning. So instead of ever realizing I could ask myself ‘if I’m not a, what am I?’ I only ever asked my self ‘if I’m not A, what is wrong with me? Why am I broken? How can I become A?’ So the label was vitally important to me to create the structure and space for me to have my a-ha moments. The labels were a part of my deprogramming to be honest. I know quite a few people, including my partner, who never needed a label to understand themselves. For them, the label is simply a flag. For me, it is a touchstone that ultimately gave me the space to meet myself for the first time just a few years ago. It’s hard to explain what it means to meet myself, but I spent my entire life trying to be a different person to the degree that when I finally broke free from those constraints I felt like an entirely different person. Which really is true. I’ve even changed my name to June because of it… we call the name we were given a deadname for a reason.
Re ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ and reifying gender: remember that I’m operating within a western framework of gender (which exists in the binary) in addition to my own sense/feelings of fluidity. For many of us that are nonbinary, what we want is to travel the spectrum of not only gender expression but of gender… acceptance? I’m. It sure how to describe this, but it’s about being what we are which can be different day to day or even hour to hour. We are fluid, unstable in our gender and we want to revel in that experience. But as ‘boys’ or ‘girls’, we don’t feel that we can. This intermingles with the labels issue that many of us have where identifying as nonbinary cuts through the dissonance of cultural gender expectations and allows us to be more expressive and accept ourselves. It is inexplicable how good it feels to take off the masks and just…. Be. I, and many of my transgender friends, use ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ to describe the energies we feel, but I think that’s only because we don’t have better language for it. It’s worth noting, too, that this discussion is not even touching on agender or gender apathetic folks. While I feel that I travel the spectrum and sometimes jump off the ride all together, there are folks out there that have zero sense of gender at all times.
To respond to your question about why some traits are masculine, I’ll answer with a question: why is anything? Anything (cultural) is what it is because (the royal) we said it is. Gender is a cultural construct, without that construct none of this would be a problem for those of us that don’t experience the dysphoria of having the wrong body. Transgender (defined here as a distinct thing from transsexuality) wouldn’t exist and people would just be people and act and express however they want. But we as humans have separated ourselves out to be men and women with no other options (which appears to be largely a western culture thing, as looking back at ancient eastern and Native American populations in particular, you find a lot more understanding of gender than you find in western culture). So yes, liberation attempts to abolish those lines, and for some the lines have been. But for those of us that didn’t develop with any sort of liberation ideology or that were actively conditioned away from it, the lines exist and we have to find some way to cope with that, and labels help.
I think that it’s those of us who ‘need’ labels and definitions to have a sense of order in the world that results in the feelings that we are trying to push it on you that you’re talking about. It’s unfortunate because that’s not what I want at all. Structuring the world helps me understand and interact with the world, but I never want to try and push my structure on anyone else. I have a friend who’s a drag queen and the first time we met we talked about this exact thing and they were in your position. They are Gen X and as soon as I started talking labels they started telling me how I needed to get rid of them. 30 minutes later I managed to express to them that my labels are for me and no one else, and that I need the structure they provide. But the goal, of course, is to eventually not need them and to be more like you and them. I don’t know if that will ever happen for me, but I can hope because that seems to me to be true freedom, though my pronouns will always be they/them. I also think that there is a hard line group that is actually doing what you’re saying. But like most of the loudest people within any group, I’m reasonably confident they’re the minority.
What you describe as your liberation, sounds exactly like my own, just without the concern of being any kind of man or woman. My liberation, with the help of the structure I’ve described above, is that I can be any kind of human I want to be with any kind of expression and sense of self that I have. You being gay doesn’t make you less of a man, and neither does any of your ‘feminine’ pursuits. Because you are a man. And herein lies the disconnect that I was describing before, and why you and I can empathize and love each other, but how I would never feel truly understood by you.
Empathy is different from knowing. Empathy is always in a different pair of shoes, while knowing is the same pair. One example that’s been helpful for me is colorblindness. As a colorblind person, a person without colorblindness will never understand the way I see the world. Even with those images that depict what I see, they still see it with eyes that can see the full spectrum. When we look out over a crowd and they see dots of red standing out brightly from all the red clothes people are wearing, I only see the people and the muted colors of the cacophony. I can look as hard as I want and never see the red because it’s all jumbled and mixed together. I have no idea what they see or how those colors separate and stand out, because my colorblindness blurs the edges and makes them all wash together. I can look at a painting and try to describe what I’m seeing, but the language would always fail, because how do you describe a color? We all experience color differently, because none of us have eyes that are identical.
Gender is the same. We all know it when we see it, but how can you describe it to anyone else? If an alien from a genderless, asexual planet came to earth, how would we describe gender? How could we separate gender from sex? As such, how can you as a man truly understand what I experience with gender, or the lack thereof? From our conversation here, I think you’d find yourself confused, and I can tell you with certainty that I was, and often still am, too. When I started to dive into my sense of gender it was terrifying because I had no construct to deal with the tumult of realizing that I actually am different and that I actually don’t fit to the norm (couple that with my desire to conform, maybe you can see that it was a horrific experience). You say that you’ve never felt like a woman because of your pursuits, but I have felt like a woman despite my pursuits. But, the next day I’ll feel like a man, or maybe neither. I’ve had moments where I was unsure and moments where I was confident that I was something or neither, and I don’t think those moments were wrong, they were just impermanent.
What you’re doing is confusing pursuits, which are surface level activities, with gender. Tomboys exist without being gender-queer. Femboys can still be men. What they do and how they dress has nothing to do with whether they are men or women (my drag queen friend is a cis man, his pronouns are he/him). Tying pursuits and gender together is understandable within the context of growing up with the prejudice that gay men are seen as ‘less than’ straight men. The cultural ‘cure’ for that, until the culture can adopt liberation, is more masculinity to prove that you’re as much of a man as any man is. But for me… I’m not. I don’t want to be as much of a man as any man is, because that’s not who I am. I want to be as much man or woman as I am, or to be neither as I am. I live in a space where I am both and neither.
So yes, in my experience so far, there is a fundamental disconnect between us that can’t be remedied by empathy or love. But that’s the human condition and not unique to gender or sexuality in any way. It’s why we group with people like ourselves. It’s why gay clubs, and saloons, and pubs, and sports bars, and book clubs, and every other special interest group exists. I was talking to a trans-masc person that I’m seeing and told them about how I had someone ask if my pronouns were she/her and how excited I was about that and they immediately knew the feeling I had, because they had just had it when I told them my wife thought they were a man. Does that experience resonate with you? If not, how can that divide be bridged? I don’t think it can, because you can experience that feeling any more than I can experience seeing the full spectrum of color.
But, that does not, in any way, mean that the only way you can support is to be subordinate. I think you misunderstand ‘shut up and listen’. ‘Shut up and listen’ means, to me, that you hear people without interjecting your own experience. It’s to let people speak without saying ‘but wait, I think…’ or ‘are you sure?’ To support me, all I need is for you to believe me and then stand by me by using my correct pronouns and not deadname me. If you want to take it a step further, you can take on some of the labor of correcting others when they misgender or deadname me because goddamn it’s exhausting.
I, and any other gender-queer person, only define gender for ourselves. Full stop. We are not the arbiters of truth or the final authority on gender for anyone but ourselves. What I find interesting is that the thing you’re worried about is the exact thing that my former evangelical community is worried about with regards to any and everything cultural. You’re falling into a fear that ‘we’ are trying to take over when we are just trying to exist.
And with all due respect for your earnestness, you’ve put me in a position where I am defending myself. I don’t doubt that you’re an ally (I know that’s weird to say to someone else that’s LGBTQ, but when we are diving into these deeper things, I think we are all allies of each other) and respect my gender-identity, but your worry about how discourse is changing is the same worry that the generation before you had. Your fight is still being fought, and I am here with you. My fight is newer and maybe harder to grasp, but at the end of the day they are not different fights, just different flavors of the same fruity ice cream.
My vanity wants to say my struggle is deeper somehow, but I know that it’s not. It’s the same struggle to be accepted for who I am regardless of how different that looks from what’s socially acceptable or ‘normal’. I feel that maybe I can understand you a bit better because I have had a similar journey with regards to my sexuality as a bisexual person, but even then I grew up in a different environment and accepting that I am bi was far easier than accepting that I’m nonbinary—not to mention coming out. I have felt that I stand on the shoulders of giants who made it possible for me to go on my own journey, but I will never truly know the struggle you faced, I can only empathize, accept it, and stand by you. And when you speak I will shut up and listen, because your story is yours and it needs to be told without me coloring it in with my colorblind eyes. But the same is true for me, and I won’t have that taken away from me, least of all by another within the community.
I want you to consider something regarding your engagement with discourse on gender (because it absolutely does concern you): why would anything you say about gender come across to anyone as bigotry?
I think there are three possibilities. First, that you are approaching it with an unwavering, obstinate belief that you know what’s right about gender (which I don’t for a second believe). Second that you are using language that makes people you’re engaging with believe the first. Third, that you’re engaging with people who are so hardlined in their own experience that other transgender people like myself would feel othered by them (let’s be real, this is the internet and people are always emboldened by the anonymity).
My guess is that it’s a mix of the second and third. I see that you are here with good intent and a desire to understand. But nonetheless I’ve felt the need to defend myself to you whether it was your intent or not. Maybe it’s your defensiveness that has given me that sense, or maybe it’s something else. But were it not for the significant work I’ve done through my own journey, I may not have seen past it.
Thank you for engaging with me in good faith, it’s a rarity and I appreciate it.