Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

Would agender or nongender work for you?

these anti-categorical moves keep becoming identity categories i don't know how to prevent it and feel bad wanting to do so if people seem to get things out of it

the not (gender)queer enough thing is relatable and extremely common. sometimes i feel frustrated that a even lot of LGBT discourse seems to ask for a level of certainty i've never had (as well as upfront disclosures about genitals and sexual behaviour i'd rather not to make right away)

i always hated being gendered but didn't realise it was about gender for way too long. i mostly keep it to myself because few people I know take it seriously or would do so unless i made a big thing of it and then i might be taken seriously in the wrong way. i don't know if agender or nonbinary is the right word, or both, or neither

i feel like among my queer friends there is a lot of pushback against any solidification of nonbinary as a "category," i.e. there is not one specific way to be nonbinary, that goes against the whole purpose of the idea

so i do not personally encounter this idea of what a nonbinary/genderqueer person *should* be even in passing, and boy do i prefer it that way

I guess my problem is that my mental health issues are worse than my gender issues, and I'll never resolve the latter unless the former get sorted, and that will never ever happen

Haha ... definitely feel you on that (sorry for Americanism) ... I think, for me, they definitely go together, like, tied together participating in some existentially draining 3-legged race ... but there's incremental progress, sometimes? Like, I am very far from resolving this stuff for myself, but I feel like I have a better sense of who I am/how I want to express that vs. the assigned gender of female than I did 10 years ago, 15 years ago ... and I have made progress on the mental health stuff too ... but definitely, nowhere near sorted and resolved for either.

xp i have often encountered the idea or implication that nonbinary people should only present in ways deemed to be androgynous or gender-neutral, which is bullshit. or that they(we) should stop messing around and just be binary cis or trans which they/we obviously are anyway (sometimes similar to stuff you hear about bisexuals)

Thanks for all the replies, these are very helpful!

I sympathize with the feeling of not being genderqueer enough, but the fact that it’s weighing on you at all is a pretty big hint that you’ll be happier if you start sloughing off the dead skin of your received gender

the not (gender)queer enough thing is relatable and extremely common. sometimes i feel frustrated that a even lot of LGBT discourse seems to ask for a level of certainty i've never had

I hang out with other asexuals and quite often hear people wondering whether they're ace enough to identify that way, and the answer is that if you're wondering about it then you're probably on the ol' spectrum there. So maybe I should take my own advice and not doubt whether I really belong.

also re: becoming nb for political reasons: a lot of my tiny steps toward identifying as nonbinary were like... me walking through a hair products store, wondering why hair products, of all things, were gendered, like wtf

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Wednesday, 17 February 2021 16:42 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

So if you don't mind me asking, does that mean that it was a gradual realisation for you rather than something you'd known since you were young?

it was very gradual! there are things i can point to in my personal history that are like very loud and enormous signposts but.. for instance i wrote a personal essay that is in retrospect very obviously about being non-binary a few years before i felt comfortable identifying as such

The “knew all along”, “this has always been who I am but I suppressed it” trans narrative is widespread but not universal, and you needn’t measure yourself against it.

I understand why people might want to think of nonbinary as a "third category" but it's not a category at all, it's an umbrella. An umbrella that includes the third category, the fourth category, the fifth, and also identities and people that are mixtures of multiple categories, and also identities/people that fit none of the categories, and in fact defy categorisation at all.

(It it not, however, *solely* that last thing. It's an umbrella that contains multitudes.)

I'm feeling a bit prickly about that right now, because I've seen a ton of discourse recently inside the community, dunking on people who are nonbinary, but do not claim the identity of "trans". Which just rely on the same old tired arguments about "doing it to be fashionable" or "doing it to be different/interesting/whatever". (I think this very common experience of "not feeling trans enough" is driven by this type of discourse. Which is so common inside our own communities! This is one of the weirdest glitches in queer culture, that often it is *other queer people* who will be far crueller, far more exclusionary, than actual transphobes. It's weird like that. Just be prepared.) Trans/Cis is another binary it is perfectly legitimate to be outside of. (And binary/nonbinary is *also* a binary it is... really worth interrogating.)

This idea, of taking on an identity "for political purposes" is kind of fraught? But I think there's a historical reason for that, in that it conjures up shades of Political Lesbianism, which was Very Bad, for reasons outside the scope of this discussion. I come back again and again to the much-misunderstood Butlerian idea that ... ~identities~ (in the queer sense) aren't things you ~are~ in the Scientific Certainty Proveable kind of way, so much as they are things you *do*. Queer as a verb. Are you queering gender? Sure, you're genderqueer.

How do you know for certain, for really-really-real, if you're trans or nonbinary? No one knows for certain, at least until they give it a go. If you try *doing* it, and it makes you feel better, it makes you feel more like *yourself*, if you experience the capacity for Gender Euphoria when you give it a go? That's a sign you're on the right path, and keep going.

I grew up without any particularly direct pressure to perform my received gender in extreme or explicit ways, i had some attraction to the word “genderqueer” as a teen but either was afraid of it or didn’t have the right world around me to explore it, eventually I was in my mid-20s and realizing that if I didn’t feel any particular attraction to my received gender, and in fact felt like it could be hurting me to even pay it lip service, I could simply stop.

But I don’t really think that there’s a truth-of-the-matter as regards what my gender is, including being genderqueer or nonbinary, that was unknown to me and then discovered by me.

However, I do want to add a pretty important caveat, about this idea that "if you are wondering about your gender identity, you're probably trans." This is one of those places where experiences really diverge with assigned gender.

It is very, very UNcommon for cis men to question their gender or gender identity. I know only two people, who went through the process of exploring their genders, and came to the conclusion that they were cis men.

It is very, very COMMON, for cis women to question their gender or gender identity. I cannot think of a single cis woman I know, who has not, at some point or other, doubted their femininity, struggled with gender roles that were opposite to their sense of self, or gone through questioning as to whether they were woman (enough).

Why it is really, really important, to note this? Because this experience - cis woman doubts/struggles with their gender, eventually comes to the conclusion that they were cis all along, therefore concludes that trans people must have got it wrong - is one of the most common paths of cis feminists into the ~Gender Crit~o-sphere. That is the background of many of the Gender Crits, from JK Rowling to Kiera Bell.

Please allow cis people the right to question their genders, explore their genders and interrogate their genders. This process has to become more normalised. It hurts trans and nonbinary people, to deny that this is the experience of many, many cis people, particularly those who were raised as female under patriarchy. And I genuinely think it would be a good, positive, wonderful development in the world, if more cis people *did* question their genders - if that were just a normal thing that cis people did. I think the world would be better for it.

The “knew all along”, “this has always been who I am but I suppressed it” trans narrative is widespread but not universal, and you needn’t measure yourself against it.

all gender is drag, you can try on different ones or make up your own, take them in or let them out or tailor them. no right or wrong way to decide what you want to wear or be, this year or tomorrow or forever.

these days nonbinary is a fairly broad category, to the point where someone just saying they're nonbinary doesn't really explain very much on its own, other than not directly identifying with male or female, but how they actually navigate that is quite varied and ranges from just using different pronouns, presenting in some sort of gender non-conforming way (of course, you don't need to identify as nb or trans to do that), to medical transition etc.

with gq vs nb, the main distinction is really just that gq has fallen out of fashion as a term, it was more popular around the start of last decade but has largely been superseded by nb in popularity since then.

for paolo my advice is instead of first wondering what your identity is, i would suggest instead focusing on wondering what you want, as you've started to do, - do you want your body to be different, do you want others to use different language to refer to you, do you want to be perceived by others differently, do you want to change how you present, etc. - and then going from there. gender roles are obviously frustrating bullshit but just chafing up against them doesn't necessarily mean you have to identify differently, but it's worth thinking about of course

keira bell is actually an interesting case as she's on record as stating that the reason she detransitioned was for ideological reasons after falling for transphobic fear mongering about trans women in changing rooms etc., and that her biggest issue with medically transitioning was that it didn't make her pass well enough as a man. pretty bleak really

hi paolo i think this is where i am now too

finish "him"

xp how's it all going for you?

I would like to finish 'him'. If I could wave a magic wand and live in a society where gendered pronouns, clothes etc just weren't a thing then I totally would.

Ack, I'm sorry, I'm doing that thing again, where I get so caught up in the details (and especially trying to warn people, "ack, try not to make these terrible mistakes that I made...") that I forget to say the basics, like "hello" and "welcome".

Hello! Welcome!

Paolo, I think you're already doing one of the most important early steps, which is to ask yourself those questions: "In a perfect world, without using the pronouns and gender-words, what would YOUR gender (or lack thereof) ideally look like?!??" That's a brilliant question to start with, and it immediately leads to the second question, which is, "OK, then... what does your ~Perfect World~ look like, where you could be that gender?"

Super helpful questions! Amazing, door-opening questions! And exactly what we mean when we talk about "questioning your gender" or "interrogating your gender".

You mention being ace, and it does seem like there is some correlation between being ace, and also being drawn to the agender / nongender / ungender family of genders (but also to the pangender family of genders?) That makes a lot of sense to me, because in the allosexual world, so much of the work that gender expression DOES, is sending out visual signals about what sort of partner one might desire. (That's not ALL that gender expression does, but it is one of the big ones!) So if you do not experience desire for a partner, then WTF is so much of that... *display* aspect of gender even for?

But this is where I kind of flail and go "danger! danger! don't make the mistakes I did!!!" In making this a political statement, there is a danger of universalising your specific needs, wants, desires around gender, in a way that conflicts with the needs, wants, desires of other People Of Gender (that is a shit term, yes, but until someone comes up with a better way of saying "not cis men", that's all I got.)

For many people of gender, especially the ones with identities involving the Femme family of genders, being able to be and express and *DO* that gender is as important to them, as "I want to live in a world completely without gender" is to the a/un/non-gender folks. And that's valid, too.

Just try to bear that in mind? Like, I completely understand and support the exploration of "if I could wave a magic wand and .... X" That's an amazing and important thing to be able to do, in your personal gender journey. But learning not to universalise that is a big part of surviving in THIS world. (And wow, do I tell you this from painful personal experience!)

Also, for any people who are travelling under the nonbinary or "people whose genders are not adequately described, expressed or encompassed by the restrictive gender binary" - it's annual census time. Details here: https://gendercensus.com/

Jump directly to the survey here:

https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/GenderCensus2021/

This year, in particular, they are looking to collect information on people over the age of 30, and ILX tends to slant older than their usual publicity channels, so... you know what to do if that is you.

felt emily's post in my bones - though I take note of both branwell and silby's debunks of NB as an actual category.

I reckon I would've identified as NB if I was much younger and that had been a term available to me then but at this point in my life, I very much prefer not identifying as anything as all.

I also weirdly don't really mind being seen/present as a cishet woman now, despite never having felt like a cishet woman my entire life (still don't), which maybe has something to do with my age, or being married to a partner who is equally sceptical of any kind of gender roles or expectations, or having a first language that has no gendered pronouns (although google's algorithms disagree! ugh!). Or all of the above, idk.

Caveat to a caveat to a caveat...

I think it's worth interrogating what the word "identify" means to different people, because it's one of those extremely slippery weasel words that means so many different things in so many different circumstances. Like, what are other people meaning, when you're using "identify"?

Went back and re-read emil.y's post and I also want to caveat what I mean by "feel better" and by "gender euphoria" too, because "joy" is not always what that means (even though euphoria is a synonym for "joy" most of the time, gender euphoria means *not* gender dysphoria, rather than specifically "joy"?) Feeling "better" is a really relative thing. Sometimes one means better, in the sense that horse shit smells marginally less-bad than dog shit?

(I'm reminded of that cartoon about coming out of depression, where after a long period of no emotions at all, they started to feel... rage? Anger? Fury? And no one in their right mind would think that RRRRAGE was a "good" emotion, but boy was it an improvement on the horrible no-emotion of serious depression?)

And gender euphoria, wow, like... people hear that word and often visualise skipping through clouds of rainbow hearts and unicorns, but sometimes gender euphoria feels more like standing on the edge of a cliff that really scares you, and screaming FFFFFUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKK YOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUU!!!! into the howling wind and waves?

Also yeah, I've heard similar sentiments from a friend who speaks Taglog, like, "WTF google translate, why are you gendering my ungendered language?!" Google is cisheteropatriarchy because Google is capitalism.

I am extremely appreciating this discussion, great posts all around.

Googled "allosexual", marvellously useful word, thank you Branwell

For me it’s closely linked to the word “identity” and I think I just don’t find gender to be necessary or relevant or important to my identity at all? Like it feels way more affirming for me when someone recognises me as a music nerd than when someone accurately senses that I’m queer or not-not-a-woman lol.

Caveat to a caveat lol - that said, part of the reason why that might be is growing up AFAB and being continually dismissed as a music nerd due to being perceived as a cis woman and therefore cannot possibly be a music nerd who should be taken seriously. (ILM for all its flaws (and how!) was a breath of fresh air for me nearly 20 years ago in that it was the first place that didn’t completely alienating for a teenage female music fan.)

Re: “identify”

and

This blasé-ness about gender btw is also prob the reason why I’ve never really participated in these threads or discussions before - I don’t really feel or behave like a woman but it doesn’t bother me if people perceive me as one.

I was just compelled to post today because the part in emily’s post, about how even calling oneself non-binary feels too much like labelling something one doesn’t care to label, really resonated with me.

Hi, FGTI! How are you?

I totally get that, Roz - like, for many years, "music geek" was something that I felt was way, way more integral to my personality and identity, than a gender that had just been doled out at birth, and I'd had no choice in? Like, man, I had to WORK at earning my music geek status! But I slowly realised that "interested in gender and its complaints" was moving up and up the level of importance for me. (While "music geek" was waning, in part due to horrible experiences on music messageboards.)

Trying to think of how to do this without being proscriptive/prescriptive: but I believe it's worth exploring the ways in which "I find the gender binary restrictive and wish to live outside the constraints of cisheteropatriarchy" and "I am trans and wish to be read and treated as a gender other than the one handed out at birth" are NOT a perfect circle as a Venn Diagram. Nor should they have to be!

(Also something about ... the ways in which cisheteropatriarchy is a systemic problem, like capitalism. And just as it is extraordinarily difficult to just "opt out" of capitalism by individual personal choices - (though it *feels* as though it should be easier to do so, the more you belong to class(es) which capitalism favours) - individual, personal choices are unlikely to dismantle cisheteropatriarchy as a whole. That requires systemic solutions. What a "systemic solution" might look like depends on one's position with regards to the different, often weirdly conflicting, power structures of cisheteropatriarchy.)

xp how's it all going for you?

― paolo, Thursday, February 18, 2021 3:06 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

still working through it! trying to figure out how i fit and dont fit into masculinity other than feeling more feminine/softer than the average man. i did buy a couple of tops from the women's section of the thrift store, but they still code p masculine aside from the colors. so nothing groundbreaking, just a lot of self-questioning and imagining other possibilities.

Like it feels way more affirming for me when someone recognises me as a music nerd than when someone accurately senses that I’m queer or not-not-a-woman lol.

Ha, I get this SO MUCH. Though I think because I've been read as cishet most of my life there is a keen desire in me now to be recognised as a queer person who has some kind of non-binary relation to gender - sometimes I do get that anger of "I'm sick of passing, rarrrgh smash it all up smash smash smash".

Lots of posts since I was last on the thread but I did want to circle back to: I understand why people might want to think of nonbinary as a "third category" but it's not a category at all, it's an umbrella. An umbrella that includes the third category, the fourth category, the fifth, and also identities and people that are mixtures of multiple categories, and also identities/people that fit none of the categories, and in fact defy categorisation at all.

(It it not, however, *solely* that last thing. It's an umbrella that contains multitudes.)

I've been trying to pick my words carefully here and saying stuff like "gender roles are bullshit" when my heart deep inside wants to say "gender is bullshit". But I do know people who genuinely feel gendered, and the fact that I can't comprehend that experience does not invalidate it. I also know people who love gender play in all its varieties, and people who are v stereotypically NB-androgynous. So yeah, I'm not advocating for non-binary to solely be "uncategorisable", or anything like that. I just find that our old friend ~~the discourse~~ has kind of made it tougher for the uncategorisable to avoid being categorised.

Ha, I just had this thought, possibly a stupid thought but it sounds good in my head right now. You know when you get to the personal information boxes on a form and you get the box "prefer not to say"? That's actually my gender identity.

Ha! emil.y - Gender of the Day had the perfect gender for you:

Marxist Gender - when you refuse to belong to any gender that would have you for a member!

I do know people who genuinely feel gendered

I was trying to find a specific tweet, because it expressed it far more succinctly and poetically than I ever could.

But a couple of months ago, I saw ~~~discourse~~~ that was talking about exactly this: an ideological divide (perhaps generational?) between those who saw their gender as something unknowable, opaque, unfathomable and utterly indefinable - and those who enjoyed the constant defining and refining of more and more specific microgenres of gender.

I can totally see that both methods have their advantages and detractions. And we'd lose something if we lost either. But I can also see why someone who sung their gender using one form of poetry would feel mystified, maybe even alarmed by the other.

Wait, I found the exact thread:

there’s such a huge difference between a queer gender politics based on refusing classification (think Foucault, “do not ask me who I am”) and a queer gender politics (v common now) based on a infinite proliferation of new forms of classification.

— e. thorkelson (@unambivalence) December 8, 2020

Good thread, and good comments. There's one that mentions the difference between adjectives and nouns (specifically in reference to "queer"), which is something I was thinking about earlier when I was asked if "agender" would work as an identity for me. I feel like I don't fit any of the noun forms, but a variety of adjectives would work okay as descriptors.

I've been trying to pick my words carefully here and saying stuff like "gender roles are bullshit" when my heart deep inside wants to say "gender is bullshit". But I do know people who genuinely feel gendered, and the fact that I can't comprehend that experience does not invalidate it. I also know people who love gender play in all its varieties, and people who are v stereotypically NB-androgynous. So yeah, I'm not advocating for non-binary to solely be "uncategorisable", or anything like that. I just find that our old friend ~~the discourse~~ has kind of made it tougher for the uncategorisable to avoid being categorised.

yes to all of this <3 and to the differences between nouns and adjectives

Gender is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake, my morning mantra

You mention being ace, and it does seem like there is some correlation between being ace, and also being drawn to the agender / nongender / ungender family of genders (but also to the pangender family of genders?) That makes a lot of sense to me, because in the allosexual world, so much of the work that gender expression DOES, is sending out visual signals about what sort of partner one might desire. (That's not ALL that gender expression does, but it is one of the big ones!) So if you do not experience desire for a partner, then WTF is so much of that... *display* aspect of gender even for?

I think this is a good point and not one I'd really thought about. I'd assumed that ace people were more likely to be NB or trans because it feels like us lot (and other LGBT+) folks almost *have* to think about our identities and ask a bunch of questions about ourselves that your cishet types don't, which can lead to people researching stuff and ending up at all sorts of places. The ace people I know are also not representative of the general population - they're more likely to be young and more likely to have been involved in LGBT+ stuff. You love to see it.

Also not having a go at you here, but plenty of ace people do want to attract partners or to look good or present in a traditional way for their own enjoyment. I know you're not trying to say that aces don't care about their appearance or anything like that but some of us like to appear in a traditional gender role way just because we like it. For example, ace activist Yasmin Benoit works as a lingerie model even though she's totally ace. But I do take your point, I think we are less likely to conform to gender appearance norms because we don't conform to sexual norms.

But this is where I kind of flail and go "danger! danger! don't make the mistakes I did!!!" In making this a political statement, there is a danger of universalising your specific needs, wants, desires around gender, in a way that conflicts with the needs, wants, desires of other People Of Gender (that is a shit term, yes, but until someone comes up with a better way of saying "not cis men", that's all I got.)

For many people of gender, especially the ones with identities involving the Femme family of genders, being able to be and express and *DO* that gender is as important to them, as "I want to live in a world completely without gender" is to the a/un/non-gender folks. And that's valid, too.

Just try to bear that in mind? Like, I completely understand and support the exploration of "if I could wave a magic wand and .... X" That's an amazing and important thing to be able to do, in your personal gender journey. But learning not to universalise that is a big part of surviving in THIS world. (And wow, do I tell you this from painful personal experience!)

Thanks for pointing this out. I don't think that I've been thinking that people *shouldn't* be cis or gendered or whatever but yeah I'll bear this in mind gong forward.

Also, categorization is human. Human beings sort themselves into categories. I personally want identities to belong to as long as they are other rather than The Other. I have no problem with non-binary as one of my labels, but I don't have a problem with anyone who thinks differently. This is a big world with lots of space for different types of thinking.

don't forget to vote in the Top 77 Sexualities poll

78: sapiosexual

Also not having a go at you here, but plenty of ace people do want to attract partners or to look good or present in a traditional way for their own enjoyment. I know you're not trying to say that aces don't care about their appearance or anything like that but some of us like to appear in a traditional gender role way just because we like it. For example, ace activist Yasmin Benoit works as a lingerie model even though she's totally ace. But I do take your point, I think we are less likely to conform to gender appearance norms because we don't conform to sexual norms.

No, thanks for the clarification! I agree, it's important to learn and understand the stereotypes and tropes, so one can avoid them, so I appreciate your point.

I also think my message may have gone a little awry? (I'm not sure I phrased it in the best way, there.)

The work I'm talking about, that gender expression does - it definitely can function in the way you're talking about, as a signal *to* potential mates, as to one's availability and interest. But it does a lot more work than that. That even when someone is partnered and/or not looking for mates, gender expression is still used to signal, subtly or overtly, anything from "I'm a femme heterosexual woman" to "I'm a gay leather he/him-lesbian Stud4Stud top". Clothing, haircuts, styling, presentation, it's a highly expressive language, in which orientation and gender and position interplay in complex ways.

It was genuinely mindblowing to me, to learn how much of heterosexual cisman gender expression seems to be about proclaiming, as loudly and obviously as possible, "I'm a man, I'm heterosexual, I'm a heterosexual man!" Which seems so strange - like honestly, cis-heterosexual men are so much the *default* of whole system (especially the white ones!) - why do they need to advertise that identity and signal it so strongly? Well. Because most of the time, it's like it's not even about attracting heterosexual women at all, what it is about is establishing and maintaining their place, as a Heterosexual Man, at the top of the pecking order.

(Transmasculine people, funnily enough, are often trying to express "I'm masculine, I'd like to be treated as a man, but wow, I would like to put some serious distance between myself and Heterosexual Cismen, thank you!")

The thing that it seems to me, that asexual folks and agender folks would share in common (and please correct me or amend if I've totally misread this!) is that much less of the bandwidth is dedicated to expressing "I'm asexual" or "I'm nongendered" - that their presentation is far more likely to be signalling "I'm a music geek" or "I love anime" or "I'm into steam engines and Victorian melodrama" or "I appreciate beautifully designed lingerie"? To choose a gender expression because one likes it aesthetically, rather than because one is trying to *say* something with it?

"How do you signal neutral or non?" is a really interesting question. How to announce the absence of something is an interesting tautology. To signal neutral could be to remove all signifiers. To signal neutral could also be to display contradicting or non-legible signifiers? I am probably not expressing this well; words are hard. I'm stopping typing now.

Gender is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake, my morning mantra

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8uIfLIWflI

Because most of the time, it's like it's not even about attracting heterosexual women at all, what it is about is establishing and maintaining their place, as a Heterosexual Man, at the top of the pecking order.

or because the system is so set up to deride and shame anyone stepping out of the default that billions of cishets who don't actively care about gender, or any place in a pecking order, feel forced to perform masc just to get out of thinking about it

I think it's an interesting point, Branwell! When I present femme I feel this entirely different energy when I'm in public, which I would absolutely describe as one of gender euphoria, but completely devoid of any desire to sexually "attract". I say but, yet these two states are likely related

Maybe "euphoria" is too strong a word, but it's on the spectrum. Somewhere between comfort and elation

Quiet, self-contained sense of "rightness"?

The comfortable sigh of "ah, that's better" when getting home from work and taking the bra off and putting the feet up.

It can definitely take the form of a small, still voice, Ein Leichtes Leises Säuseln, rather than tempests and lightning bolts.

(I have a lot of kinda-angry-kinda-sad feelings myself, about how much of my gender presentation through my life, was about feeling that I'd have to look and act a certain way to get to shag the people I wanted to shag, rather than how I actually wanted to move through the world, because those two states conflicted.)