I want a new gender

[liv]

This is probably all kinds of wrong and possibly offensive but I have got the point where I need to vent.

I'm starting to feel like general Queer and affirming culture is converging on, don't like your gender? have you thought of being male? Not like, shitty toxic masculinity male or anything, just kind of normal person gender.

Now, I have nothing at all against trans masculine people, non-binary men, demiboys or anybody who is drawn to masculinity. People for whom the 'man, but not shitty' part of the gender spectrum works well have all my love and respect and support, whatever their gender journey to get there. What I'm complaining about is the compass needle drifting back towards treating maleness / masculinity as neutral, against everything else being extremely marked.

What do I mean by this? The last straw that made me post this instead of worrying that I'm being offensively clueless was a Twitter thread mocking some kind of man-dress concept. There was an advert for a sort of pinafore in plain blue denim, modelled by a heavily muscled man wielding an axe. And I saw a comment to the effect of, I'm all for de-gendering dresses. And, well, yes, I am in theory for de-gendering dresses, there is absolutely nothing wrong with men wearing dresses if they want to, and there is nothing wrong with dresses being plain and practical and suitable for hard outdoor work. But there's nothing less "de-gendered" than an image of cliched extreme masculinity. Why is a macho manly man with his broad shoulders and bulging muscles and facial hair and his man-tools somehow post-gender, but any other part of the entire possible spectrum of expression, is well, gendery?

It reminds me of the whole "pink stinks" notion of raising children supposedly without gender stereotyping. Clothing that gender essentialists regard as masculine is recast as neutral - all kids can wear trousers and dark colours and prints of vehicles and dinosaurs, because that's gender neutral. But anything that gender essentialists might regard as feminine, the colour pink or other pastels, flowers, cute animals, frills and lace and shiny fabric and, shock horror, dresses, that's not gender-neutral, that's inferior, that's evilly gendering children. Same with toys and interests: science, construction, sport and physical activity are good and gender-neutral, but dolls and jewellery and imaginative play are feminine and should be shunned.

Some of this is a re-emergence of the anger I had when I was a small child, I had to have short hair which I hated, and I was interested in a range of stuff some of which was considered to be 'for boys', so people kept calling me a tomboy. But I wasn't at all masculine, I felt strongly that I was a girl who liked football and hockey better than rounders and netball, I liked robot toys and action figures better than dress-up dolls, but I also wanted to wear totally impractical frilly dresses and take the girls' side in girls v boys face-offs. I remember fiercely fantasizing this entire range of toys that simply didn't exist, a sort of mash-up between Transformers and Polly Pocket. I got into playground fights over insisting that there was too a pink Transformer which could become jewellery instead of a car. Which of course didn't help convince people that I was a proper girl, because girls weren't supposed to get into physical fights.

Some years ago I told rmc28's kid (he was quite little at the time) that I got discouraged from liking Transformers, and he very righteously assured me that anyone who told me girls couldn't play with robots was stupid, all toys are for all genders. But the truth was I didn't really like Transformers as such, I wanted robots that were girl-coded or at least not to have to act "tomboyish" or take interest in the boring explosion-heavy characterless storylines of the cartoons to get access to them. It would have been fine if I had been a tomboy, the people who called me that were trying to validate my gender expression, not suppress it. But I had this nebulous sense that everybody around me was over-insisting that masculine things are for "everybody", but refusing to acknowledge that these supposedly universal things were in fact coded masculine.

Of course, now in the 2020s, the broader world is still extremely gender essentialist and homophobic and transphobic and all these things are a much more serious problem than what I'm complaining about. But among the select social groups that challenge those restrictions, there's still this invisible masculine default. People assure me, non-binary isn't just woman-lite, you know! You can be non-binary without being androgynous in your presentation! But it feels like non-binary people who might be misgendered as men can counter that incorrect assumption fairly straightforwardly, by painting their nails pretty colours or wearing a bit of make-up or wearing any clothing at all that is not totally boring. (Obviously being legible can be dangerous, there is real violence against people perceived as un-masculine men.) Whereas non-binary people who might be misgendered as women have to bind their breasts if not seek top surgery to achieve the same effect. Again, I'm totally in favour of people altering their body shape if it makes them happy, and it visibly does, I'm delighted for all my non-binary friends who have found ways to look like themselves. But the mean petty part of me wants to ask, why is flat-chested gender neutral but curvy is always and inescapably feminine? There are plenty of flat-chested women, and there are plenty of men with breasts even if we don't call them breasts in English, we call them moobs or pecs or something.

I am definitely not a classic trans person who always knew from a young age that my assigned gender was wrong. I know that's just the medical gatekeepers' assumption, and it's some trans people's story but not others. Sometimes I meet someone who seems more like me, someone assigned female, who grew up as a girl and was basically ok with that, they had some gender-non-conforming interests but they lived in a fairly enlightened environment where girls can do anything, and gradually as a young adult or even a mature adult comes to question their gender assignment, and I start to wonder, am I more like them than like a cis woman? But then they get top surgery, and the tiny part of my brain that maybe got a bit wistful snaps shut. I'm just not masculine enough to be non-binary. I'm probably not even masculine enough to be agender. I read stories of people who say, I used to think I was bad at being a girl but it turned out I wasn't a girl after all! But I think for me I'm just purely bad at being a girl. Maybe "demigirl" is a more positive way of putting that but that still doesn't feel quite right.

It seems to me that the problem I have is that you can't really opt out of being female unless you're prepared to be, well, a non-shitty man. You maybe don't have to go to quite so much effort to prove you're definitely nothing other than masculine as a man who very strongly wanted to hold on to that identity might. But it feels like you have to constantly, constantly project: not-female, honest, definitely don't treat me as a woman. And I don't have dysphoria, I don't mind, I'm even quite content to be viewed as a woman. I suppose how I want to be seen is as a person, someone whose gender isn't the most important factor about them. Which maybe just means I'm a woman who hates being subjected to sexism! Except that there's this weird overlap between 'person' and 'man', and at least as a woman I have my body shape on my side, it will cue a roughly correct assumption even if I'm not very good at standard feminine presentation or keeping my mouth shut.

Probably all of this is unfair and transphobic and generally bad. I'm sorry. Turns out I'm even bad at explaining the ways I'm bad at gender.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I really do like my curvy top silhouette for aesthetic reasons! If I wind up having top surgery it'll likely be because a K cup is unfair to my back (and hard to get clothes for). Fat can have a degendering effect past a certain point; it definitely has the effect of getting me off the radar of a lot of street harassers who assume that women exist in public for their entertainment.

[cosmolinguist]

And similarly but sort of the opposite, binding doesn't keep people from thinking I'm a woman, because I am fat. I don't bind for other people or the aesthetics, I do it because I prefer the feeling of my chest loving around as little as possible (I'm very fortunate that I don't find binding uncomfortable, or certainly less so than my other options of wearing a bra or nothing).

[yrieithydd]

My gender is complicated, but bits of this resonate. Girls are encouraged to do things historically coded masculine far more than boys are encouraged to do things historically coded feminine. The male as superior is deeply rooted (and I think it's at play in a lot of transphobia - people can't understand why trans women would "opt" to join the inferior side, so look for an ulterior motive of some kind). I prefer skirts to trousers (though they should have pocketses) but often identify more with "male" stereotypes. My gender is not fully female, but politically I still identify as a woman, so that I can work against the patriarchy as a woman rather than by trying to escape it. But that's not to say I think all enbies/agender people should react like that.

Can we stop coding things as masculine or feminine, and use more accurate terms? So rather than "boys toys" can we say "construction toys" or "vehicle toys" and instead of girls "crafts" or "imaginative play" or whatever is actually under consideration?

[cosmolinguist]

politically I still identify as a woman, so that I can work against the patriarchy as a woman rather than by trying to escape it.

An (agender) friend of mine once said "I caucus with the women" and that's been my go-to line for this ever since. You also express it so well here!

[ambyr]

I like this. My internal gender is agender, but if the world is going to perceive (and discriminate against) me as a woman, then that's the team I'm fighting for.

[cosmolinguist]

Yep! Part of the reason I like the "caucus" language as it applies to me is that I'm not always or only perceived (and discriminated against) as a woman, and this seems to suit the temporality/instability by making it something I'm doing rather than something I am (and, thus, at other times, would have to not be).

[switterbeet]

"Can we stop coding things as masculine or feminine, and use more accurate terms? So rather than "boys toys" can we say "construction toys" or "vehicle toys" and instead of girls "crafts" or "imaginative play" or whatever is actually under consideration?"

^^^Yes this! For everything! Clothing, mannerisms, etc.

[serriadh]

If it helps at all, a girl at my son’s nursery has a pink swirly dress with lots of different types of dinosaurs on it.

I was not dissimilar to you, I think, though less so. (I was at an all girls school which was very supportive of “girls can do STEM degrees!” but I didn’t want to do STEM I just wanted people not to think the things I actually liked were girly and shit and I was “being girly” by liking music not science. Which they totally did despite the cheerleading for girls in STEM.)

[crystalpyramid]

It's funny because the music industry can be an incredibly male-dominated place, especially technical parts like recording and playing guitar, according to my sister the guitarist. The patriarchy is embedded everywhere.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes! Like cooking or art…

[sorcyress]

Finding the phrase "femmes can be thems, darling" was extremely important for my "how I do this" around my gender.

As things stand, I am professionally fairly masc, because I recognize that as a non-medically-transitioning long-haired faab person, I'm never ever gonna be taken seriously as nonbinary if I don't visibly flag "not girl". In queer spaces, or safe spaces, or places where I'm with my friends who recognize me correctly, I tend to wear a lot of skirts and poof and makeup and jewelry because that's the style I like.

~Sor

[syderia]

Well, my inner view of gender is that I don't understand what gender even is, while at the same time understanding that some people feel very strongly about belonging to one so I feel like I get what you're saying here, but coming from the precisely opposite direction.
And, putting like that makes me realize that my conception of gender is very much like supporting a sport's team. I mean, I generally support the French team because of an accident of birth, and there are some people who don't care about it at all and French-born people who specifically support other teams for a variety of reasons. And sometimes you support more than one team. And some people go and buy all the merch and others are a lot more sober about it.

Moving on from the metaphor, I do think that one's gender is whatever they feel/say it is, and that no one should have to justify or perform their gender.
But also, coming from the AFAB side of the aisle, depending on how I choose to dress, people are either going to perceive me as female (when I'm not being obviously nb) or male (when I am), because the global perception hasn't been updated with the fact that people exist in-between / outside the female/male choice. And so it means that for me, choosing to perform being nb mostly means shifting my presentation to male. The link is actually the other way around but that's not how it's seen.
Taking into account, also, that I don't think we can have a discussion about gender and gender presentation without taking the patriarchy into account. Because the images of what a woman is and what a man is are shaped by it, and I don't know of anyone can build an image for it that would not be influenced by that. (And we're back to *deep down, I can't make sense of what gender even is").

[crystalpyramid]

I suspect you and I have similar relationships to gender. I would like to be a person, and sometimes gendered pronouns hit me funny in the way they are such an incredibly marked state, why should I need a special pronoun just to indicate that I am female? And I'm not super-femme, makeup can be exhausting, sometimes skirts are fun, it's nice to wear things that make my body look streamlined in a curvy or not-curvy way. But there is absolutely nothing about being a man that's appealing to me, and as a woman in science I don't want to give in and let the male team have an inch of claim on me.

I do wonder, though, how it would look from the other side of the aisle -- I get the sense that maleness can also be incredibly hard to shed, in its own way. But it would be nice if there was more of an effort to try from people who aren't trans, especially at the little-kid level. And that's probably coming from entrenched homophobia.

[silveradept]

A fair amount of the effort I'm seeing from cis men trying to get other cis men to work on their conceptions of masculinity goes into "My dude, it is entirely okay for you to have emotions outside the Acceptable Palate, and if you do have them, you don't have to engage in self-and-other-destructive behaviors to try and get rid of them or to prove that you're still a man." Which is right and good, but progress in the bigger picture is pretty slow, because it's trying to create definitions of acceptable masculinity that don't require comparisons. "Having a gay/trans son is not a referendum on your masculinity" is still only tenuous, and there's a lot of work still to be done on "you can be house husband and stay at home dad and your masculinity is not in question".

And then there's the entire snarl around sexual prowess as an indicator of masculinity…. So, yes, not a lot of effort is being made at the small child level to change perceptions. (Here in the States, it would be massively more helpful if all the churches decided to put aside their patriarchy investments, but alas, it's still profitable for them to perpetuate hypernasculinity.)

[cosmolinguist]

I'm probably not even masculine enough to be agender.

For the record, you don't have to be masculine at all to be agender! I am saying this as someone who enjoys a masculine presentation but I'm still agender. Agender doesn't have to mean "a sufficient distance in the 'opposite' direction to your assigned gender that they cancel each other out." It can mean that you don't feel attached to any particular gender or indeed the concept of gender at all. When you say you want to be seen as a person and not a gender, that could easily be a thing an agender person says. None of which means you have to embrace agender as a label, but it's there for you if it's useful to you.

I don't think anything you've said is bad or unfair or transphobic. I've talked a lot with my (cis male) partner, as my own gender presentation (but not gender identity) drifts towards masculinity, about the perils of masculine being seen as the default. And the kind of gender introspection you're doing is one reason some of my trans friends or acquaintances make jokes about how being trans is "better" than being cis; I think most of them don't mean that in so many words but they mean that this very kind of introspection is at the current time usually only undertaken by trans people. Because the motivation for the introspection is some amount of unhappiness with their assigned gender.

But there's nothing at all stopping cis people from thinking about themselves and their relationship to gender in exactly the same way, just with the differing result that they come out of it still content with the gender they were assigned at birth. The process is often driven by suffering now, but there is no reason it needs to be. I have every hope that in future generations it'll be understood as a regular part of healthy development that anyone can do, and become more widespread. I recognize your struggles with the language as some I had, and I think this too will become easier in the future as we find words for more gradations (and evaluations) of gender experience than "tomboy" or "bloke in a dress."

You say you "don't even have any dysphoria" as if that means you haven't earned this journey, but dysphoria and suffering aren't necessary parts of the trans experience or indeed the experience of reifying one's gender in the world. You don't need to suffer to have these thoughts or to share them. Indeed I am very glad you shared them.

[kaberett]

Very quickly, on my way to bed:

The issue of "masc-as-default/neutral" is absolutely something that gets talked about (and criticised, and engaged with thoughtfully) in trans spaces I'm in.

For me, top surgery wasn't about how other people perceive my body shape -- it's about the part where I did in fact as a pre-pubescent child look at myself in the mirror and think "I need to remember what this looks like, because it's going to go away", and I did have proprioceptive dysphoria around the shape of my chest. On the other hand, my hair is long and it's staying long: I know (from wearing wigs a couple of times) that I'd get gendered by others in a way that's more mixed and less... heavily weighted towards "female" if I cut my hair short, and I don't want to. There are all sorts of reasons for it, but one of them is in fact "expanding the space in which we get to be considered neutral". If it helps, I do know genderqueer and agender people who've gone through oestrogen-based puberty and have zero desire to make any changes whatsoever to their chests, and I feel very strongly and am willing to have the fight that someone who was assigned female at birth is just as non-binary and neutral-presenting with tits as someone who was assigned male at birth.

I am sorry that it sounds like you've been feeling so isolated and unhappy about this, & that you are so convinced you will receive (& deserve?) rejection for it. You shouldn't & you don't. I see you, & you're not alone.

[cosmolinguist]

I feel very strongly and am willing to have the fight that someone who was assigned female at birth is just as non-binary and neutral-presenting with tits

Agreed! "Passing" is a problematic concept also much-discussed in (my) trans circles. And I said on Facebook just this morning that I'm delighted I can wear as little clothes as possible in this heat and delight that no one at my home or work is struggling to call me "he" or anything, even when a stranger probably never would call me "he" when I'm dressed skimpily.

[lilacsigil]

I think of my gender as "fuck off none of your business". I liked being mistaken for a boy as a child because that read as the neutral option to me at the time, but I don't want to be a man or masculine because I'm an adult and I now know that it isn't neutral at all!

In the last few years, though - and I live in a very conservative rural area - I have seen things start to change. Boys are allowed to wear nail polish now, rather than being told off by parents for liking girly things. Some men play netball. Little boys are allowed to like purple, aqua and pink again.

[flippac]

There's a whole pile of extra complication involved for me as you might imagine, but I think I empathise with your younger self's frustration - having been too generally dissociated to experience it that way at the time.

I don't know that I've got anything else to contribute that's not been said at least as well by someone else here, but sometimes we have to express the specific unfair thing happening to us - and this sure doesn't read transphobic to me.

[lnr]

What everyone else said, and double so on default-person-is-a-man.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Very good point about all children being encouraged to like traditionally male-coded things but not traditionally female-coded things.

See also: Scouts and Cubs becoming mixed but Guides and Brownies staying girls-only; Paw Patrol and Thomas the Tank Engine adding female main characters (and some people saying it's not enough and they should have a 50/50 mix) but My Little Pony having all female main characters. You get the "everyone" stuff and the "girl" stuff.

I definitely identify with this bit: "I had to have short hair which I hated [...] I wasn't at all masculine, I felt strongly that I was a girl who liked football and hockey better than rounders and netball, I liked robot toys and action figures better than dress-up dolls, but I also wanted to wear totally impractical frilly dresses and take the girls' side in girls v boys face-offs." But I don't identify with the bit about questioning my gender as an adult. I'm a woman with a strongly systematising and decoupling thinking style, who likes logic and maths and computers and strategy games, but I'm definitely a woman, and I actually find the idea of me being (perceived as) male or nonbinary quite distressing (in a way that I think helps me empathise with trans people's strong desire to be perceived as a particular gender, where cis-by-default who-cares-about-gender-anyway people might find that more difficult to understand).

Why do you think you're "bad at being a girl"? I think your or my way of being a girl is as valid as, idk, Kim Kardashian's, and I don't like the suggestion that "girl" or "woman" should be restricted to a certain type and the rest of us should make do with something like "demigirl". (I am not attributing this suggestion to you; and I don't mean any criticism of anyone who actively chooses "demigirl" as a description of themselves that they're happy with.)

[naath]

I think personally my gender is "no" but politically it's "f" because at 5' and curvy I'd have to try really really hard to not be read as woman (even to get as far as 'butch woman') and I just don't wanna bother trying (or cut my hair). I try to care equally hard about women doing IT and men doing midwifery, but since I am ish one and not at all the other it's hard to make equal efforts. I have dresses with dinosaurs, and I love that such things exist.

[cesy]

I found some of this very relatable and I hope we can expand the options in the general space of gender. I think there are others exploring this space, too.

[highlyeccentric]

I'm probably not even masculine enough to be agender.

For the record, you don't have to be masculine at all to be agender!

My dataset may be biased, but fwiw 'not masculine, not gravitating toward any particular gendered vibe, but weirded out by the while gender thing' maps fairly well onto my mental model of agender, based on some DW pals and my BFF, and a little bit on my own sense of 'my gender is weird but it is neither agender nor "nonbinary-as-trinary"'. Like... we have some common stances here ('fine with woman but why is it so important' is definitely a point on my map, although I might be trending away from it), but whatever the fuck is up with me I am very into gender.

I believe you have a fair bit in common with matsushima. Her journal's locked, but I might ask her if she has time to come over here and chip in.

[worlds_of_smoke]

gravitating toward any particular gendered vibe, but weirded out by the while gender thing'

I like this.

I will never be read as male, seeing as I have a Venus of Willendorf body and can't afford (either financially or health-wise, with all my comorbid conditions) to have surgery to fix that. And, honestly, I don't want to have top surgery or a tummy tuck. (Now, an arm tuck, that's a different thing.) I'm also not out as agender at work, mainly because I don't want to deal with having to do agender 101. I think I've said enough for people to assume I'm a lesbian, though.

I definitely lean towards pants and t-shirts, just because the idea of dressing feminine and reinforcing people's reading me as the wrong gender is very distasteful for me. Being actively read as female triggers my dysphoria badly, so it's in my mental health's best interests to dress neutrally.

(By "actively" I mean being in a situation where it tends to be heavily transphobic, like the ob/gyn or mammogram suites, as opposed to someone calling me ma'am when I'm checking them out at work. That last one can bother me, but not nearly as bad as the former.)

I struggle a lot with feelings of not being "trans enough" to say I'm trans, though I'm intellectually aware that I am part of the trans community. But I will never read as masculine or even androgyne and I feel that makes me a "lesser" trans person.

[highlyeccentric]

My current operating analogy is: If cisgender is to transgender as Cisalpine Gaul is to Transalpine Gaul, then I'm in the fucking Alps, eating cheese, or, on a particularly teeth-bared day, then Rome is overdue for a sacking. I mean... these are terms that are lines on maps. Culturally, practically, even economically (despite the best efforts of Rome), the people actually living IN the Alps had (and to a great extent still have) more in common with each other than with the key concern of Rome, 'are these people easier to rule from our bases in Lyon or our bases in Italy?'. The division stops even making any SENSE once you get up into the Swiss Alps, which is why Roman history books listing "passes known to us" miss out any number of passes here used to get between Roman settlements because they didn't go between Rome and the central Roman administration in now-France.

Which is to say: there are going to be people in the category of trans who have more in common with people in the category of cis, indeed perhaps nigh-identical experiences, who just happen to fall one way or the other in The Official Map of Things. And it probably isn't surprising that those people tend to all feel a bit out of place dealing with people not from the "alps" in this analogy.

[yrieithydd]

Mine tends to be I'm mid-atlantic rather than trans-atlantic! But that puts me out of link with either, so is sort of the opposite of what you are saying.

[highlyeccentric]

Ed: forgot to note I'd pulled the second line in the quote above from someone else's comment - cosmolinguist, I believe.

[bella_luugosi]

I have no brain or energy right now to say anything much, but a great deal of what you say resonates with me and my where-i-am-with-gender and I am very glad you wrote this as I feel a little less pretend now.

[ewt]

This makes some sense to me.

I am grateful that my father explained gender stereotyping to me when I was very young (so young I thought he was talking about some kind of sound system -- I knew what a stereo was), and that when he did he made sure to point out that it was fine for boys to like flowers or dolls or playing house, just like it was fine for girls to like cars and robots (though he didn't really think anyone should be too interested in the violent stuff). I'm also grateful that he was a musician (in a culture where little girls often took music lessons, but little boys less so) and that my two grandfathers were schoolteachers (in a culture where small children were mostly taught by women); and that his favourite colour is pink and he made a point of saying so. I don't think I got quite the same "male is the default" training that many children of my generation did.

I do wish my perceived/assigned gender mattered as little to other people as it does to me.

I have been toying with the term "agender woman" for a while now, because it seems to capture both the degree to which I really can't be arsed with gender, and also the degree to which my life is lived as someone who is perceived as a woman and therefore expected to behave in certain ways, and penalised if I do not.

It seems contradictory, but... I dunno. I love dresses and skirts and sparkles and kittens, but I don't think that makes me particularly womanly. I don't perform femininity very well in some other ways. I am regularly perceived as an AMAB trans woman, or perceived as somehow failing at being a woman, probably through a combination of being tall, physically relatively strong, and neurodivergent -- which also gets coded as male by default -- and I've never experienced what I would recognise as gender dysphoria, regardless of which pronouns people use for me or what I wear. I shave the hair off my neck because it's easier than attracting yet more unwanted attention to the ways I don't fit in, and if I didn't see other people, I probably wouldn't bother.

[yrieithydd]

I too have pondered agender woman. I've had some online discussions which make more sense if the other person was assuming I was a trans woman, which I feel like is completely wrong in so many ways. In person, the most common comment is the "that woman/lady's got a beard" (or something like - "look at that, she's got a beard") rarely said to me, just as I walk past. Felt more common in Newcastle than elsewhere but it does happen here. I think Boobs trump facial hair in their perception of me.

[silveradept]

The man as the unmarked default is absolutely a pervasive issue, made worse by the accumulation of power to men, which can make some people have a headscratch when they learn about the idea of binary trans women, because they can't imagine why a man would give up his power and go be a woman.

Something that's been annoying for me is that a lot of the (popular, toxic) conception of masculinity seems to be rooted in "don't be womanish," and there's no way of pinning down what exactly that means, apart from "if a man declares it's womanish, then it's womanish." It's a maddeningly shifting landscape.

At my current point, I've decided that until masculinity can get its act together and start working out widespread definitions for itself that don't require comparisons to not-men, I'm not identifying as one. I'm not changing my presentation, because I don't want to (and, secondarily, because there are advantages to being someone who looks like me in a profession where most people don't).

If you're having an entire aggravation about gender roles and the constructions of gender, I'd say you can opt out of identification with any gender at all (which might not be "agender", if agender is more "WTF" than "Nopenopenope", but is probably close to that in the gender cloud) and that should be a valid and respected identity in its own right, regardless of what people think about your body type or your interests.

[warriorsavant]

I like your take on "why is traditionally masculine stuff (color blue, trucks) gender neutral whereas traditionally feminine stuff (color pink, dolls) evil gender stereotyping."

My feeling on toys is "if a boy is playing with it, it's a boys' toy; if a girl is playing with it, it's a girls' toy; no matter if it's the same toy." A.K.A. play with whatever you want, and everyone else mind your own business.

[lokifan]

If it helps, this doesn't sound remotely transphobic to me! I think the idea of someone very masculine in a dress as 'degendering dresses' is more meant to be spreading out the idea of who can wear dresses, rather than saying a very male gender presentation is neutral, but I 100% agree male as default can sink in everywhere. It's def an issue discussed in my queer circles (I'm cis myself but with a lot of trans friends, both binary and not) and especially where you do see afab people struggling with gender stuff being given a lot of 'maybe you're not a girl!' Which I think can be helpful to a certain degree, because that being an option is still such a new concept to so many people... but it's not necessarily the right answer for everyone, or even always a relevant answer to the question being asked, and that can be so alienating.

Will def agree with everyone that being masculine isn't required for being agender or non-binary. But I also think that that is 100% true but doesn't always reflect how gender can be both an internal sense of yourself and a performance/relationship with society. IDK. It's tough.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you for writing this. I don't think it's transphobic at all, and I share your frustration with masculinity being neutral and femininity marked.

But it feels like non-binary people who might be misgendered as men can counter that incorrect assumption fairly straightforwardly, by painting their nails pretty colours or wearing a bit of make-up or wearing any clothing at all that is not totally boring.

And of course this has the frustrating-to-me side effect that men who are femme and/or feminine end up getting misgendered as non-binary in some circles.

[finding_helena]

I admit I can't help but feel like "man" and "woman" are what we make of them. Being a woman or being a man doesn't have to mean any one particular thing. It seems unfair for people to have to say they're not a particular gender because they feel restricted by that notion, rather than being able to say that this umbrella totally encompasses them too, even if they don't match the stereotype. Like why not redefine what being a woman means rather than having to define yourself as not one because the idea is too narrow. Idk, I feel like there's something about the whole thing that I don't really get.

[lavendersparkle]

A few thoughts in no particular order.

I think in Nice Liberal Parent circles there's less of a masculine=good/feminine=bad bias nowadays. Josiah has some bright pink trousers and generally I find parents like me preferring more 'girlie' kids shows because, as well as combating androcentric biases, they tend to have better diversity representation generally and better messages about positive behaviours. Still, the difficulty finding clothes cut for boys in colours other than a narrow muted pallet suggests that the market for pink boys trousers is still a bit niche.

I also felt like I was rubbish at being a girl when I was in my late teens/early 20s. I'm not graceful and I'm terrible at performative sexiness. My attempts at a lot of performative feminity, like makeup or glitter, always made me feel a bit like a drag queen or a glam rock boy. Not in a bad way, just I always experienced some aspects of my femininity as camp rather womanly.

Now I feel a lot more comfortable in my identity as a woman and I think it's because I found a mode of doing 'being a woman' that works for me. I really love being a mum and I feel like that is now quite central to my gender identity. Looking back I can recognise that I had a tendency to 'mother' people long before I had children. (Which isn't to say that not being motherly is unwomanly or only women can mother.)

I think the point I'm trying to get to is that when I felt like I wasn't good at being a girl, it turned out that I wasn't good at being particular type of girl and now I've found a version of girl that works really well for me.

[lavendersparkle]

I keep realising that on paper my life could sound like someone from an awful Conservative Christian advert for conversion therapy:
"I used to be a slightly gender fluid lesbian, but then I stopped wearing trousers, married my cis het vicar husband and found fulfillment in being a mother."

[lavendersparkle]

I think that a lot of women have a slightly complicated relationship with their gender because it's both their gender identity and a locus of oppression. It's so difficult to escape your gender because it's so embedded in our language. It's quite difficult to naturally talk about someone without revealing their gender.

The range of socially acceptable ways of doing being a woman is a lot broader than the range of socially acceptable ways of being a man, at least in middle class English culture. A woman could only wear clothes marketed for men, have short hair and love football and, whilst she might occasionally get misgendered, she can still be perceived as a woman. A man with long hair in a feminine haircut who always wore womens clothes would find it a lot harder getting people to accept that he was a man. It gives people a lot more options for doing being a woman than for doing being a man, but the flip side is that AFAB people need to do a lot more for others to recognise them as something other than a woman.

[rosefox]

I'm catching up on many days' worth of scroll, but I hope it's not too late to say: I hear this, and you're not alone in thinking and feeling these things.

I'm genderqueer of the "give me all the genders! all of them! more gender, more!" variety. I spent a long time being self-consciously masculine as a way of trying to earn the label of "trans", but once I realized that I was never going to be read correctly in the peri-allo-cis-het world no matter how I parted my hair or shined my shoes, I stopped trying and started dressing for my own comfort, and it really liberated me to be feminine. Sometimes I like a mix of gender signifiers—I get haircuts and manicures in the same week so I'll have extra-butch hair and sparkly femme nails—but there are many days when I want to wear a dress and a long wig. I'm grateful to all the trans people who have talked about and embodied gender complexity with me and helped me find that grounding within myself, because I sure wasn't going to find it anywhere else. There's no way to "pass as nonbinary", so nothing to be done for it but wear a pronoun pin or decide not to care. I mostly decide not to care, because I've got enough stressing me out without that. I know within my own heart that I'm trans no matter what I'm wearing, no matter that I'm not getting surgery or taking hormones or wearing a binder (usually), and if other people can't see that, oh well.

It's funny you talk about being "bad at being a girl"—I was and am quite good at being a girl, and was happily female-identified for many years. I'm still genderqueer! Being good or bad at being traditionally feminine isn't the same as having a female or feminine identity. It's a social thing, not a who-you-are thing.

Untangling all of this from living in an indisputably misogynistic world is time-consuming and complicated. But I've seen a lot of people make an attempt at it, and it can be done, whether the answer you get out is "I'm female and mad as hell at the patriarchy" or "I'm nonbinary and mad as hell at the patriarchy". If you'd like support on that journey, I'd be glad to help any way I can.