I think I'm agender or something, but what's the point of that?
October 15, 2018 11:41 AM Subscribe
First of all, I really don't mean to be disrespectful of anyone else's experience with my thoughts here. It's one of those things where my doubts about being "valid" only apply to me, not anyone else. Rather, I'd love to hear from people who have felt this way, or can recommend resources for me, because I am having a hard time wrapping my head around my own gender issues.
About me: I'm 33, AFAB. I was a stereotypical tomboy as a kid; no one in my life had any issues with this (for example when I chose to play on boys' sports teams instead of with the girls, that was fine with my parents, coaches, and teammates). Hated wearing dresses, not interested in "girly" things, etc. I never thought "I am a boy," or that I wasn't a girl. Gender wasn't on my or anyone else's radar where I grew up the way it is now. It baffling was and upsetting when I hit puberty and suddenly the guys didn't want me to be one of the guys anymore. I became a relatively "regular," hugely insecure (mostly about my looks) teenage girl.
Now, I clearly present as a woman. I feel like "if I could get away with it" (ugh) I would dress and act in a more gender-neutral way. By "if I could get away with it," I mostly mean how I look, I'm 5'4" and fat in a semi-"acceptable" (ugh, sorry--I know better but my brain tells me these things) way, meaning, hourglass shape, large breasts. It is super easy to find clothes that are "presentable" and "professional" and fit me well if I'm getting dresses from Loft. I now work in a conservative profession, in a mixed liberal and conservative bubble in a very red state, and fear that if I am fat AND wear unfeminine clothing AND act like my natural personality (a personality that I massively had to adjust to get by here) it will negatively affect my career.
It massively grates on me when people treat me "like a woman," either in a well-meaning way or not. (I'm also bisexual/pansexual and so over dating straight dudes because of this.)
And I experience dysphoria about my body in that I think it prevents people from seeing me and treating me as I am. It would be so nice to be thinner and have smaller breasts and be able to "pull off" menswear. I know there is some clothing out there for plus-size butch women but money is an issue. Also I just hate that my body looks so feminine. I'm trying lose a little weight and one big motivator is that I know when I get down to a certain weight again a short haircut will look good on me again.
On the other hand I have some reservations about my thinking here. If I say "I'm not a woman because I'm not into girl things/don't like being treated in a stereotypical way/wish I could wear different clothes," aren't I also saying something pretty offensive to women? Like, women can only be one thing, women have to like "girl things" and being treated like a princess and have long hair or they are not being a woman in an "acceptable" way? Clearly, women who don't match a certain set of stereotypes and/or are masculine women exist and they are still women. Maybe I'm just a masculine woman who is overthinking it and over-influenced by the love of fine-grained labels the queer community has. Or a woman who still believes on some level that fat acceptance is great for other people but not really for me.
I also think "what's the point" about any kind of imagined transition. I definitely wouldn't want to be on hormones or have any surgeries. I don't think I would be more comfortable having people call me "they" instead of "she," and I don't feel going around coming out to people (as whatever I am). I could introduce myself to new people with a shortened, more gender-neutral version of my name. But otherwise it's like...what's the point of being genderqueer or agender if I'm not going to do anything with this information/make excuses not to change my life?
I'm sorry if there is not really a question in here. I am hoping for personal stories, links, anything that could tell me about other people who have worked their way through these issues.
About me: I'm 33, AFAB. I was a stereotypical tomboy as a kid; no one in my life had any issues with this (for example when I chose to play on boys' sports teams instead of with the girls, that was fine with my parents, coaches, and teammates). Hated wearing dresses, not interested in "girly" things, etc. I never thought "I am a boy," or that I wasn't a girl. Gender wasn't on my or anyone else's radar where I grew up the way it is now. It baffling was and upsetting when I hit puberty and suddenly the guys didn't want me to be one of the guys anymore. I became a relatively "regular," hugely insecure (mostly about my looks) teenage girl.
Now, I clearly present as a woman. I feel like "if I could get away with it" (ugh) I would dress and act in a more gender-neutral way. By "if I could get away with it," I mostly mean how I look, I'm 5'4" and fat in a semi-"acceptable" (ugh, sorry--I know better but my brain tells me these things) way, meaning, hourglass shape, large breasts. It is super easy to find clothes that are "presentable" and "professional" and fit me well if I'm getting dresses from Loft. I now work in a conservative profession, in a mixed liberal and conservative bubble in a very red state, and fear that if I am fat AND wear unfeminine clothing AND act like my natural personality (a personality that I massively had to adjust to get by here) it will negatively affect my career.
It massively grates on me when people treat me "like a woman," either in a well-meaning way or not. (I'm also bisexual/pansexual and so over dating straight dudes because of this.)
And I experience dysphoria about my body in that I think it prevents people from seeing me and treating me as I am. It would be so nice to be thinner and have smaller breasts and be able to "pull off" menswear. I know there is some clothing out there for plus-size butch women but money is an issue. Also I just hate that my body looks so feminine. I'm trying lose a little weight and one big motivator is that I know when I get down to a certain weight again a short haircut will look good on me again.
On the other hand I have some reservations about my thinking here. If I say "I'm not a woman because I'm not into girl things/don't like being treated in a stereotypical way/wish I could wear different clothes," aren't I also saying something pretty offensive to women? Like, women can only be one thing, women have to like "girl things" and being treated like a princess and have long hair or they are not being a woman in an "acceptable" way? Clearly, women who don't match a certain set of stereotypes and/or are masculine women exist and they are still women. Maybe I'm just a masculine woman who is overthinking it and over-influenced by the love of fine-grained labels the queer community has. Or a woman who still believes on some level that fat acceptance is great for other people but not really for me.
I also think "what's the point" about any kind of imagined transition. I definitely wouldn't want to be on hormones or have any surgeries. I don't think I would be more comfortable having people call me "they" instead of "she," and I don't feel going around coming out to people (as whatever I am). I could introduce myself to new people with a shortened, more gender-neutral version of my name. But otherwise it's like...what's the point of being genderqueer or agender if I'm not going to do anything with this information/make excuses not to change my life?
I'm sorry if there is not really a question in here. I am hoping for personal stories, links, anything that could tell me about other people who have worked their way through these issues.
Caveat: I am a cis het woman and haven't navigated this myself.
Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote is a beautiful memoir about people all over the "tomboy" spectrum. It's definitely more on the "personal stories" side, rather than the "advice" side. It also made me cry - Ivan's a wonderful writer.
You may also be interested in Ivan's other memoirs: they're AFAB and non-binary.
posted by MangoNews at 11:58 AM on October 15, 2018 [3 favorites]
Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote is a beautiful memoir about people all over the "tomboy" spectrum. It's definitely more on the "personal stories" side, rather than the "advice" side. It also made me cry - Ivan's a wonderful writer.
You may also be interested in Ivan's other memoirs: they're AFAB and non-binary.
posted by MangoNews at 11:58 AM on October 15, 2018 [3 favorites]
It would be nice if we could live our whole lives as if there was no social definition of womanhood. In theory, that "anything can be feminine, anyone can be a woman" is something I support very strongly. But you're, correctly, identifying some of the practical problems that dealing with something that is both a theoretical construct and a complex set of social practices can bring. I think it's okay to say that you are less interested in things that are "traditionally feminine" as long as you don't disparage them. I don't think it's contradictory to say that you don't feel like conforming to our rigid constructions of femininity while denying anything is "inherently" feminine.
what's the point of being genderqueer or agender if I'm not going to do anything with this information/make excuses not to change my life
Your label should not be driving your life choices. There is a tendency, I've noticed, for people to feel like they have to pick nine adjectives from the set and then construct their lives strictly according to what they think those adjectives must mean. I understand that for some people choosing a bunch of categories is affirming and encouraging, but if it's not for you you don't have to pick boxes and then feel that you have to do things to fit into them.
The thing is, you don't have to do some kind of formal "transition" to present yourself in ways that correspond more closely to your own sense of identity. Sounds like you and I have similar builds (though I'm more on the far upper end of what society would call "not fat") and, yes, it is hard to deal with such a traditionally feminine build when you don't feel very interested in femmeness for yourself. (I don't think of myself as non-cis but gender is, under most circumstances, more work for me than it is fun.) Honestly, in a somewhat more socially conservative profession I tend to leverage a modest femmeness for practical purposes. I do have hair slightly past shoulder-length, I do wear subtle makeup, I do wear modest earrings and sometimes a necklace or scarf, my clothes are partially chosen to emphasize the hourglass figure (because that's what seen as desirable). But I wear pants unless it's way too hot for them, I refuse to wear heels (and the shoes I go for are more menswear-y, loafers or oxfords), I never wear a prominent floral, the color palette of my clothing runs masculine, and I think it's fair to say that I put myself forward in conversations/for projects/etc. in a way that reads fairly masculine. There are all these variables, and you can tweak them to make yourself more comfortable. There are definitely professional risks, especially for heavier women, and I certainly couldn't tell you how to manage your own specific ones, but with confidence you can carry off a lot more than you may think.
posted by praemunire at 12:15 PM on October 15, 2018 [12 favorites]
what's the point of being genderqueer or agender if I'm not going to do anything with this information/make excuses not to change my life
Your label should not be driving your life choices. There is a tendency, I've noticed, for people to feel like they have to pick nine adjectives from the set and then construct their lives strictly according to what they think those adjectives must mean. I understand that for some people choosing a bunch of categories is affirming and encouraging, but if it's not for you you don't have to pick boxes and then feel that you have to do things to fit into them.
The thing is, you don't have to do some kind of formal "transition" to present yourself in ways that correspond more closely to your own sense of identity. Sounds like you and I have similar builds (though I'm more on the far upper end of what society would call "not fat") and, yes, it is hard to deal with such a traditionally feminine build when you don't feel very interested in femmeness for yourself. (I don't think of myself as non-cis but gender is, under most circumstances, more work for me than it is fun.) Honestly, in a somewhat more socially conservative profession I tend to leverage a modest femmeness for practical purposes. I do have hair slightly past shoulder-length, I do wear subtle makeup, I do wear modest earrings and sometimes a necklace or scarf, my clothes are partially chosen to emphasize the hourglass figure (because that's what seen as desirable). But I wear pants unless it's way too hot for them, I refuse to wear heels (and the shoes I go for are more menswear-y, loafers or oxfords), I never wear a prominent floral, the color palette of my clothing runs masculine, and I think it's fair to say that I put myself forward in conversations/for projects/etc. in a way that reads fairly masculine. There are all these variables, and you can tweak them to make yourself more comfortable. There are definitely professional risks, especially for heavier women, and I certainly couldn't tell you how to manage your own specific ones, but with confidence you can carry off a lot more than you may think.
posted by praemunire at 12:15 PM on October 15, 2018 [12 favorites]
I've commented about my own experience coming to recognize that I'm nonbinary before. Very little has changed externally, beyond that I now wear a binder instead of struggling with a bra I hate (which was all bras). I'm still married to the same person, I still work at the same job and have not said anything about being nonbinary so my coworkers still call me by the same name, I still use she/her pronouns (might've switched to they/them if I'd figured this out earlier, but at this point I'm used to she/her and they don't chafe badly).
Overall, even though the only other people who know about it are my spouse and close friends, I feel much happier and less burdened now that I know I'm nonbinary.
(It does still tick me off when men hold the elevator door for me because they perceive me as female. It's an elevator: closest to the door should be first to exit. Stop with the ridiculously gendered behavior in settings where it makes zero sense. Argh.)
posted by Lexica at 12:16 PM on October 15, 2018 [13 favorites]
Overall, even though the only other people who know about it are my spouse and close friends, I feel much happier and less burdened now that I know I'm nonbinary.
(It does still tick me off when men hold the elevator door for me because they perceive me as female. It's an elevator: closest to the door should be first to exit. Stop with the ridiculously gendered behavior in settings where it makes zero sense. Argh.)
posted by Lexica at 12:16 PM on October 15, 2018 [13 favorites]
Ohhh hey so much of what you've written resonates with me. I'm AFAB, was a tomboy/gender-non-conforming problem who found no problem with their gender until puberty. My dysphoria is almost entirely social, which sometimes makes me wonder if if it's just anger at the patriarchy. I'm disinterested in surgery (my top dysphoria is also social--I like my boobs, but not the expectation that I can never walk around without a top or the frillyness with bras; I do have bottom dysphoria sometimes but dislike the surgical options available and, hell, like what my genitals can do anyway even if I'd also like them to be able to sometimes do other things). On top of that, I'm bi and partnered with a cis man so I don't even feel like many modes of butchness are available to me as an identity.
But a bunch of things coalesced last year (google "trans egg") and I came out as genderqueer anyway and all I can really tell you is that gender euphoria has made all the risk worth it to me. I feel like myself in terms of presentation and power dynamics for the first time in my life. It's given me the freedom to break out of gendered patterns I couldn't even articulate before. It's not without cost. I know that my presentation is less mainstream palatable. I lost my relationship with my mother just after this, and I am certain it is a factor (she called me ugly during our last meaningful interaction). It is scary. It remains scary. I can't tell you if you should come out or whatever but. For me, coming out--it's felt really, really good. Like I am regaining a small part of me true self, my pre-pubescent self.
You deserve that. Even if it's just privately, to yourself. You--the real you--is worthy of recognition and love.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 12:35 PM on October 15, 2018 [14 favorites]
But a bunch of things coalesced last year (google "trans egg") and I came out as genderqueer anyway and all I can really tell you is that gender euphoria has made all the risk worth it to me. I feel like myself in terms of presentation and power dynamics for the first time in my life. It's given me the freedom to break out of gendered patterns I couldn't even articulate before. It's not without cost. I know that my presentation is less mainstream palatable. I lost my relationship with my mother just after this, and I am certain it is a factor (she called me ugly during our last meaningful interaction). It is scary. It remains scary. I can't tell you if you should come out or whatever but. For me, coming out--it's felt really, really good. Like I am regaining a small part of me true self, my pre-pubescent self.
You deserve that. Even if it's just privately, to yourself. You--the real you--is worthy of recognition and love.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 12:35 PM on October 15, 2018 [14 favorites]
In a related recent question, a woman worried that being a woman meant that it was "my job to lady up." You clearly already know that is incorrect, but some of the responses there might be helpful to you.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:38 PM on October 15, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:38 PM on October 15, 2018 [4 favorites]
Hello, I'm an AFAB nonbinary person, and before I came out, before I asked people to use a different pronoun for me, before I started binding, before I had top surgery, before I started T, at all of those points I twisted myself completely up in knots trying to convince myself that I wasn't trans enough, that I would actually be doing a disservice somehow to REAL trans people, that I was reinforcing gender roles and that it behooved me to instead take a more expansive view of gender, etc. etc.
Ultimately, in each case, I realized I absolutely wasn't treating myself with any of the compassion that I'd show anyone else who was questioning their gender. In my case, I felt like what it boiled down to was a feeling that I didn't deserve it: comfort, happiness, care. If you are having any feelings like that, here is me, an internet stranger, telling you that you deserve those things, for what it's worth.
posted by ITheCosmos at 12:40 PM on October 15, 2018 [13 favorites]
Ultimately, in each case, I realized I absolutely wasn't treating myself with any of the compassion that I'd show anyone else who was questioning their gender. In my case, I felt like what it boiled down to was a feeling that I didn't deserve it: comfort, happiness, care. If you are having any feelings like that, here is me, an internet stranger, telling you that you deserve those things, for what it's worth.
posted by ITheCosmos at 12:40 PM on October 15, 2018 [13 favorites]
Hey, I’m sure other people can and will talk about this in greater detail, but I just wanted to assure you that feeling like your gendered preferences like short hair and butch presentation are innately tied to your gender identity does NOT invalidate people who have a very strong different gender identity but the same presentation style. Your place on the nb or trans* spectrum, whatever that turns out to be, is not offensive to butch women who strongly identify as women. It isn’t contributing to the patriarchal juggernaut of compulsory femininity. I know it’s really hard as someone who has grown up AFAB and identified as a feminist to not feel like your personal presentation choices are either shoring up or letting down women as a whole, but they really are not. That guilt and individualist blame game interpretation of “the personal is political” is outdated and toxic, please don’t let it shackle you.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 12:46 PM on October 15, 2018 [35 favorites]
posted by moonlight on vermont at 12:46 PM on October 15, 2018 [35 favorites]
hahah i was about to post what moonlight on vermont said so i will just +1 moonlight here.
also "if only i could pull off menswear" - my friend there are short and lumpy men out there pulling off menswear, go try out some menswear, swear to god
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 1:45 PM on October 15, 2018 [13 favorites]
also "if only i could pull off menswear" - my friend there are short and lumpy men out there pulling off menswear, go try out some menswear, swear to god
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 1:45 PM on October 15, 2018 [13 favorites]
Just a quick note here to say that as a bi cis-ish man dating nonbinary people of all stripes really rocks. A lot of the baggage of how I'm supposed to treat women or supposed to treat men falls away and we can be more fully ourselves together. So hopefully you will also find lovers that help you become more fully yourself, particularly because you will naturally help them without even trying.
posted by poe at 2:02 PM on October 15, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by poe at 2:02 PM on October 15, 2018 [7 favorites]
(long and rambling, sorry)
I'm an agender non binary trans person who rolls in the world as a "cis appearing trans woman" because of luck of the draw with genetics and effectiveness of HRT that affords me that privilege. I am very uncomfortable with anything gendered at all and I most of all just want to be comfortable in clothing.
How you are read into gender is a separate channel from how you internalize gender signals being broadcast at you from both people and media. How you relate to your body is a third axis on top of all that.
There is an external world of gender that the internal self has to navigate. That is the default of how we are forced to navigate an externally gendered experience. In my case being agender, I don't feel comfortable in any gendered space and I don't feel comfortable with any pronouns at all, and I don't like that my name has any gendered connotations to it at all. This goes for masc and feminine appearing clothing. That said, feminine appearing clothing feels less crappy to me, and given how the world reacts to non binary and GNC appearing folks, I just roll with feminine because it meets me best where I am at inside myself and what I need to do just to put food on the table.
the tension between who you are inside and how the world treats you on the outside is a dysphoria that you can work with, but really no matter what you do, that dissonance will always be there to some degree because the world as a whole is fundamentally gendered towards cis folks as the overwhelming default. So I guess what I'm saying is, you're agender, it doesn't matter how you express that on the outside because the world defaulting to cis is gonna antagonize you no matter what you do, so please don't be too hard on yourself and feel like you aren't "agender enough" because you are agender enough. You are valid exactly where you are and you don't have to do anything else to prove anything to anyone.
Basically just knowing that you're agender is enough. Beyond that all us folks on the trans/enby/GNC spectrum are just trying to survive as best we can and figuring it out as we go.
Start small and work your way out. That may mean starting out by exploring what all this means alone in your bathroom to working your way out into the kitchen, then working up to walking out the front door, around the block, to the grocery store, etc.
posted by nikaspark at 2:34 PM on October 15, 2018 [8 favorites]
I'm an agender non binary trans person who rolls in the world as a "cis appearing trans woman" because of luck of the draw with genetics and effectiveness of HRT that affords me that privilege. I am very uncomfortable with anything gendered at all and I most of all just want to be comfortable in clothing.
How you are read into gender is a separate channel from how you internalize gender signals being broadcast at you from both people and media. How you relate to your body is a third axis on top of all that.
There is an external world of gender that the internal self has to navigate. That is the default of how we are forced to navigate an externally gendered experience. In my case being agender, I don't feel comfortable in any gendered space and I don't feel comfortable with any pronouns at all, and I don't like that my name has any gendered connotations to it at all. This goes for masc and feminine appearing clothing. That said, feminine appearing clothing feels less crappy to me, and given how the world reacts to non binary and GNC appearing folks, I just roll with feminine because it meets me best where I am at inside myself and what I need to do just to put food on the table.
the tension between who you are inside and how the world treats you on the outside is a dysphoria that you can work with, but really no matter what you do, that dissonance will always be there to some degree because the world as a whole is fundamentally gendered towards cis folks as the overwhelming default. So I guess what I'm saying is, you're agender, it doesn't matter how you express that on the outside because the world defaulting to cis is gonna antagonize you no matter what you do, so please don't be too hard on yourself and feel like you aren't "agender enough" because you are agender enough. You are valid exactly where you are and you don't have to do anything else to prove anything to anyone.
Basically just knowing that you're agender is enough. Beyond that all us folks on the trans/enby/GNC spectrum are just trying to survive as best we can and figuring it out as we go.
Start small and work your way out. That may mean starting out by exploring what all this means alone in your bathroom to working your way out into the kitchen, then working up to walking out the front door, around the block, to the grocery store, etc.
posted by nikaspark at 2:34 PM on October 15, 2018 [8 favorites]
Yeah, I'm the one who sucks; if you'd like to laugh at my bad wording (which I did apologize for) my question is here.
However, I am not a tomboy; the Recitation of Gender Bonafides that you do here is exactly what I lacked. So the answers I got are not going to apply. Everybody loves a pile-on, though.
posted by cage and aquarium at 2:50 PM on October 15, 2018
However, I am not a tomboy; the Recitation of Gender Bonafides that you do here is exactly what I lacked. So the answers I got are not going to apply. Everybody loves a pile-on, though.
posted by cage and aquarium at 2:50 PM on October 15, 2018
But otherwise it's like...what's the point of being genderqueer or agender if I'm not going to do anything with this information/make excuses not to change my life?
For me, I've largely just left those things to people who have stronger opinions about stuff. I know I belong in that space, but I feel like my having public opinions about my own gender is just more performative than my feelings about it are actually worth. But even just knowing that gender identity is a spectrum and that people experience wildly varying levels of gender has been useful for me being more comfortable with myself, especially around people whose stronger opinions about their genders I want to support. So, there's that. It's never completely nothing that you'll do with it. It'll influence you, either way. The bigger question is whether these are changes you genuinely want to make for your life, so things where you would be happier if you and people you care about could work on removing the things blocking you from doing that... or things you can picture doing but don't actually have strong enough feelings to bother about, which is where I am and therefore I am obligated to believe that it must be fine.
I would suggest that whether or not you actually do anything re: transition or changing what pronouns you prefer or how you identify, it sounds like a lot of what's chafing is that you exist in a space where you don't feel like you can be yourself. You aren't stuck there forever. I changed cities and careers in my mid-30s and it did a lot for my happiness. I will probably move again at some point, though I keep waffling about that, but part of why I'm waffling is that there's a lot of cool stuff where I am and I'm not sure I need to leave. It is not too late to make the moves you need to make to get to a life where you can be you, regardless of the labels you choose for that person.
(I love these threads, it's so nice to see so many people who are like me but also have their own completely different variations on the sorts of things I experience.)
posted by Sequence at 3:33 PM on October 15, 2018 [8 favorites]
For me, I've largely just left those things to people who have stronger opinions about stuff. I know I belong in that space, but I feel like my having public opinions about my own gender is just more performative than my feelings about it are actually worth. But even just knowing that gender identity is a spectrum and that people experience wildly varying levels of gender has been useful for me being more comfortable with myself, especially around people whose stronger opinions about their genders I want to support. So, there's that. It's never completely nothing that you'll do with it. It'll influence you, either way. The bigger question is whether these are changes you genuinely want to make for your life, so things where you would be happier if you and people you care about could work on removing the things blocking you from doing that... or things you can picture doing but don't actually have strong enough feelings to bother about, which is where I am and therefore I am obligated to believe that it must be fine.
I would suggest that whether or not you actually do anything re: transition or changing what pronouns you prefer or how you identify, it sounds like a lot of what's chafing is that you exist in a space where you don't feel like you can be yourself. You aren't stuck there forever. I changed cities and careers in my mid-30s and it did a lot for my happiness. I will probably move again at some point, though I keep waffling about that, but part of why I'm waffling is that there's a lot of cool stuff where I am and I'm not sure I need to leave. It is not too late to make the moves you need to make to get to a life where you can be you, regardless of the labels you choose for that person.
(I love these threads, it's so nice to see so many people who are like me but also have their own completely different variations on the sorts of things I experience.)
posted by Sequence at 3:33 PM on October 15, 2018 [8 favorites]
I don’t have any advice that hasn’t been said above, but in case another person saying “I get it. I could have co-written a lot of this, and in fact thought about writing a similar ask.” helps you feel less alone, you got it.
posted by greermahoney at 4:23 PM on October 15, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by greermahoney at 4:23 PM on October 15, 2018 [1 favorite]
This morning, I was talking to a friend who just came out as asexual*, and we were reveling in the fact it gave them a framework to feel less alone in this world. There are so many people in this world like them, there’s a word for it. There are communities of people who share that experience and can talk about how they navigate the world.
*not the same as agender.
posted by advicepig at 4:50 PM on October 15, 2018 [2 favorites]
*not the same as agender.
posted by advicepig at 4:50 PM on October 15, 2018 [2 favorites]
Hey there, AFAB nonbinary person here, I go through a lot of this stuff over and over in my head. You're not alone. And what I've settled on at least for now is...
"I'm not a woman because I'm not into girl things/don't like being treated in a stereotypical way/wish I could wear different clothes," aren't I also saying something pretty offensive to women?
I think it's not offensive. The same things that affirm my identity, to me, as not-a-woman, might be the set of things that affirm someone else's identity, to them, as a woman expressing her womanhood in non-stereotypical ways. It's so personal that there are no absolute rules. There's no rule that says "if you don't want to be treated as a woman or do stereotypically feminine things, you're not a woman", but there's also no rule that says tough luck, you ARE a woman. We're in Outback Steakhouse territory--there are no rules, but if it feels right, it's just right.
what's the point of being genderqueer or agender if I'm not going to do anything with this information/make excuses not to change my life?
For me the point of being genderqueer/agender/nonbinary is that it grounds me in my own reality. What matters the most is that I know who I am, and I finally have the name for my feelings.
posted by capricorn at 4:51 PM on October 15, 2018 [5 favorites]
"I'm not a woman because I'm not into girl things/don't like being treated in a stereotypical way/wish I could wear different clothes," aren't I also saying something pretty offensive to women?
I think it's not offensive. The same things that affirm my identity, to me, as not-a-woman, might be the set of things that affirm someone else's identity, to them, as a woman expressing her womanhood in non-stereotypical ways. It's so personal that there are no absolute rules. There's no rule that says "if you don't want to be treated as a woman or do stereotypically feminine things, you're not a woman", but there's also no rule that says tough luck, you ARE a woman. We're in Outback Steakhouse territory--there are no rules, but if it feels right, it's just right.
what's the point of being genderqueer or agender if I'm not going to do anything with this information/make excuses not to change my life?
For me the point of being genderqueer/agender/nonbinary is that it grounds me in my own reality. What matters the most is that I know who I am, and I finally have the name for my feelings.
posted by capricorn at 4:51 PM on October 15, 2018 [5 favorites]
Can you MeMail me?
posted by masquesoporfavor at 4:53 PM on October 15, 2018
posted by masquesoporfavor at 4:53 PM on October 15, 2018
Start small and work your way out. That may mean starting out by exploring what all this means alone in your bathroom to working your way out into the kitchen, then working up to walking out the front door, around the block, to the grocery store, etc.
Just wanted to second this. This is how I discovered I love wearing exclusively men's underwear, love packing, but dislike binding. But ohhhh the thrill of wearing a suit. You can carry things or wear things that signal your gender expression to yourself, too. A pocketknife or a watch. Men's pants, with huge pockets. You can stop wearing a purse if it's what you want, start carrying a Costanza wallet instead. You can quit shaving your armpits or legs and change your mind later, if you want, too. No one else needs to know until and unless you're ready.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 5:14 PM on October 15, 2018 [10 favorites]
Just wanted to second this. This is how I discovered I love wearing exclusively men's underwear, love packing, but dislike binding. But ohhhh the thrill of wearing a suit. You can carry things or wear things that signal your gender expression to yourself, too. A pocketknife or a watch. Men's pants, with huge pockets. You can stop wearing a purse if it's what you want, start carrying a Costanza wallet instead. You can quit shaving your armpits or legs and change your mind later, if you want, too. No one else needs to know until and unless you're ready.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 5:14 PM on October 15, 2018 [10 favorites]
Hello! I too hold the opinion of "what difference does it make if I'm genderqueer/agender/non-binary", almost more strongly than any opinion about what my gender could be. For me it's mainly about material changes - a lot of spaces don't really have room for something outside the binary (at best I am a "failed woman"), and even those that do don't see me as one because I'm not actively transitioning/look too "normal". It doesn't really affect my Immigration status, my healthcare (I go to an LGBTQ+ clinic but haven't really had to deal with any gendering anywhere), my job prospects, whatever.
Yet socially, no matter how I dress or look or act, people's perceptions of my gender run the gamut. I've been "Sir"ed multiple times in very femme dresses, for instance, and I am of a similar build to you - 5'5", hourglass, large breasts. I've been raised & living in multiple cultures with very different ideas of what is "masculine" and "feminine", so even the idea of "non-binary" makes little sense because whose binary am I comparing myself against? My gender is ambiguous, and unlike other facets of my identity (which are also perceived as ambiguous) I don't really have much in the way of concrete "proof" (e.g. a passport, my medical history, my parents), it's entirely socially constructed.
I semi-seriously call my gender "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" (shrug emoji). I don't know what gender dysphoria or euphoria really feel like, it's more like gender apathy. Every word carries particular connotations that don't quite fit. I prefer my name to pronouns. Gender? Meh.
As for pulling off menswear with a "feminine" body like ours: I've rocked these outfits, all of which was obtained at thrift stores (so super cheap), without binders (just a sports bra which does make some difference, but even that sports bra came from a clothing swap). I had gay boys dancing dirty with me and some others called me a "lesbian Gatsby". It's entirely possible to do it on a budget and make it work!
posted by divabat at 6:16 PM on October 15, 2018 [9 favorites]
Yet socially, no matter how I dress or look or act, people's perceptions of my gender run the gamut. I've been "Sir"ed multiple times in very femme dresses, for instance, and I am of a similar build to you - 5'5", hourglass, large breasts. I've been raised & living in multiple cultures with very different ideas of what is "masculine" and "feminine", so even the idea of "non-binary" makes little sense because whose binary am I comparing myself against? My gender is ambiguous, and unlike other facets of my identity (which are also perceived as ambiguous) I don't really have much in the way of concrete "proof" (e.g. a passport, my medical history, my parents), it's entirely socially constructed.
I semi-seriously call my gender "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" (shrug emoji). I don't know what gender dysphoria or euphoria really feel like, it's more like gender apathy. Every word carries particular connotations that don't quite fit. I prefer my name to pronouns. Gender? Meh.
As for pulling off menswear with a "feminine" body like ours: I've rocked these outfits, all of which was obtained at thrift stores (so super cheap), without binders (just a sports bra which does make some difference, but even that sports bra came from a clothing swap). I had gay boys dancing dirty with me and some others called me a "lesbian Gatsby". It's entirely possible to do it on a budget and make it work!
posted by divabat at 6:16 PM on October 15, 2018 [9 favorites]
Plenty of women don't like being treated differently from men - sexism is infuriating, even the so-called benign variety. It makes me really angry to be treated extra-nicely by someone who wouldn't treat a man the same way. It doesn't make us less "female-identifying" to want to be treated as a person rather than as a woman.
I don't know what's going on in your head or what your "true" gender identity is, but your post describes feelings that I have heard from many different women. Certainly I feel the same way, and I don't consider myself on the trans spectrum. If I could magically switch genders, sure, that would be amazing, I would go back and forth all the time for fun, but not because what I am now feels "wrong". It doesn't feel anything. I get that gender is a big deal for some people but it's not for me and if it isn't a big deal for you, that's perfectly fine. There is no rule that says your life has to revolve around whatever gender you are. By all means play around with gender expression/identity/whatever if you feel like it. Just don't feel obligated to spend a bunch of time and energy on it if you don't feel like it. You can dress as masculine or as feminine as you want without needing to identify as cis or trans or anything in between.
posted by randomnity at 7:09 PM on October 15, 2018 [9 favorites]
I don't know what's going on in your head or what your "true" gender identity is, but your post describes feelings that I have heard from many different women. Certainly I feel the same way, and I don't consider myself on the trans spectrum. If I could magically switch genders, sure, that would be amazing, I would go back and forth all the time for fun, but not because what I am now feels "wrong". It doesn't feel anything. I get that gender is a big deal for some people but it's not for me and if it isn't a big deal for you, that's perfectly fine. There is no rule that says your life has to revolve around whatever gender you are. By all means play around with gender expression/identity/whatever if you feel like it. Just don't feel obligated to spend a bunch of time and energy on it if you don't feel like it. You can dress as masculine or as feminine as you want without needing to identify as cis or trans or anything in between.
posted by randomnity at 7:09 PM on October 15, 2018 [9 favorites]
Clearly, women who don't match a certain set of stereotypes and/or are masculine women exist and they are still women. Maybe I'm just a masculine woman who is overthinking it and over-influenced by the love of fine-grained labels the queer community has.
This is something I've thought about a lot. I'm a cis queer woman who almost always presents in a pretty masculine way - always pants, never heels, rarely makeup, super-butch haircut. On the rare occasions when I wear makeup and skirts and heels, it honestly feels like I'm in drag (in a fun way, but still). I also have a lot of stereotypically masculine hobbies and mannerisms.
It took me a long while to go from feeling like I was "failing at being a woman" to embracing myself as I am and leaning into my preferences, and I'm sure that journey isn't over. I took it slow - ditching the skirts and heels came years before I cut my boob-length hair, for instance.
I've considered many times whether I would "qualify" as genderqueer or transmasculine or something. I think that by some peoples' definitions, I do. But personally, I've never felt uncomfortable with being a woman, completely aside from all the cruft that supposedly comes with being a woman in our society. I can't even really explain what that means, it's just a feeling.
I can't tell you what your gender is - but I can tell you that if I worked in a conservative workplace where I had to wear dresses and makeup every day, I would be super uncomfortable even though I identify as cis. Your discomfort with your presentation - particularly since you feel trapped in it - is its own issue, worth addressing regardless of your gender.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:30 PM on October 15, 2018 [5 favorites]
This is something I've thought about a lot. I'm a cis queer woman who almost always presents in a pretty masculine way - always pants, never heels, rarely makeup, super-butch haircut. On the rare occasions when I wear makeup and skirts and heels, it honestly feels like I'm in drag (in a fun way, but still). I also have a lot of stereotypically masculine hobbies and mannerisms.
It took me a long while to go from feeling like I was "failing at being a woman" to embracing myself as I am and leaning into my preferences, and I'm sure that journey isn't over. I took it slow - ditching the skirts and heels came years before I cut my boob-length hair, for instance.
I've considered many times whether I would "qualify" as genderqueer or transmasculine or something. I think that by some peoples' definitions, I do. But personally, I've never felt uncomfortable with being a woman, completely aside from all the cruft that supposedly comes with being a woman in our society. I can't even really explain what that means, it's just a feeling.
I can't tell you what your gender is - but I can tell you that if I worked in a conservative workplace where I had to wear dresses and makeup every day, I would be super uncomfortable even though I identify as cis. Your discomfort with your presentation - particularly since you feel trapped in it - is its own issue, worth addressing regardless of your gender.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:30 PM on October 15, 2018 [5 favorites]
As another data point, I'm a cis queer woman, I always wear pants cos nothing else is comfortable. Always wear men's shoes because women's do not fit. Tops run the gamut from gender-neutral to kinda femme. I would love to rock more masc clothing but as a tall, fat woman with big boobs and hips, there really isn't anything suitable. I have tried, and when I was younger and a bit smaller I could do it sometimes but can't do so comfortably anymore. Given I also have chronic pain, wearing comfortable clothing is really a key consideration, and clothing you would not expect to be painful is for me (buttoned shirts, for example, pull on my back and shoulders which already hurt most of the time). Anyway, I do not wear makeup, ever, except sometimes a tiny bit of pimple cover when I am feeling self-conscious about my perimenopausal acne. Don't shave my legs or armpits.
I identify as a woman and feel comfortable with that gender. I didn't always; I went through a phase in adolescence where I would definitely have been happy to be a guy. I presented more agender and was incredibly pleased if someone mistook me for a boy. But for me it did not last. What did last was not feeling comfortable with most "traditionally femme" aspects of femininity, ie makeup, high heels, pink, frilly things, blah blah. When I was younger, this used to bother me more probably because there was more social pressure to conform. The older I get, the less of a fuck I give. There are plenty of other women out there who are not into those things. There are plenty of women who are, but also might like power tools, fly fishing, motocross, wrestling or any of a whole raft of other stereotypically masculine things which I don't like. Of course I don't like being treated differently because of my gender, especially if that is hurtful or damaging or annoying, but to me that is not because my gender is wrong but because society is wrong and the patriarchy is wrong. For me, gender is not my main dysphoria.
Because oh do I have dysphoria, but for me it is related to my size. I also would love to be able to accept my fatness (seriously, even tolerance would be great) and although I will verbally challenge assumptions and statements that are fatphobic, I am aware that on some level I think those things about myself. On some level, I really think that as a fat person, I have less value and even a questionable right to exist. I do not think this about other fat people, just me. The self-loathing borders on crippling sometimes, honestly it's ridiculous and years of therapy and reading and attempts to hack my self-talk have only barely managed to achieve a kind of armed neutrality at best. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As far as resources, I recently read a graphic novel memoir you might enjoy called Tomboy. Again, not really answers - I think everyone has to find their own - but you are definitely not alone. My best advice would be to do what feels right for you, and if defining yourself as agender gives you some internal relief, do it! That is reason enough, you don't have to cross some kind of finish line or meet anyone else's criteria.
posted by Athanassiel at 12:18 AM on October 16, 2018 [4 favorites]
I identify as a woman and feel comfortable with that gender. I didn't always; I went through a phase in adolescence where I would definitely have been happy to be a guy. I presented more agender and was incredibly pleased if someone mistook me for a boy. But for me it did not last. What did last was not feeling comfortable with most "traditionally femme" aspects of femininity, ie makeup, high heels, pink, frilly things, blah blah. When I was younger, this used to bother me more probably because there was more social pressure to conform. The older I get, the less of a fuck I give. There are plenty of other women out there who are not into those things. There are plenty of women who are, but also might like power tools, fly fishing, motocross, wrestling or any of a whole raft of other stereotypically masculine things which I don't like. Of course I don't like being treated differently because of my gender, especially if that is hurtful or damaging or annoying, but to me that is not because my gender is wrong but because society is wrong and the patriarchy is wrong. For me, gender is not my main dysphoria.
Because oh do I have dysphoria, but for me it is related to my size. I also would love to be able to accept my fatness (seriously, even tolerance would be great) and although I will verbally challenge assumptions and statements that are fatphobic, I am aware that on some level I think those things about myself. On some level, I really think that as a fat person, I have less value and even a questionable right to exist. I do not think this about other fat people, just me. The self-loathing borders on crippling sometimes, honestly it's ridiculous and years of therapy and reading and attempts to hack my self-talk have only barely managed to achieve a kind of armed neutrality at best. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As far as resources, I recently read a graphic novel memoir you might enjoy called Tomboy. Again, not really answers - I think everyone has to find their own - but you are definitely not alone. My best advice would be to do what feels right for you, and if defining yourself as agender gives you some internal relief, do it! That is reason enough, you don't have to cross some kind of finish line or meet anyone else's criteria.
posted by Athanassiel at 12:18 AM on October 16, 2018 [4 favorites]
Hey, I'm another AFAB person of a similar age who is grappling with some of this stuff right now. I feel increasingly non-binary but keep hitting roadblocks inside my own mind about what that means and what the implications for the rest of my life might be. Non-binary feels better than genderqueer right now, as I don't have any interest in queering gender; it's more that I want gender to be something that exists over there and doesn't get applied to me.
I didn't have any meaningful gender rejection when I was younger, but I did consistently feel like I was failing at performing my assigned gender, particularly around adolescence/puberty when I was suddenly supposed to be fixated on boys and clothes and makeup and I...just wasn't. I suspect I'm on the autism spectrum and there was a lot of black and white thinking along the lines of "well girls are supposed to have female genitalia and I've got female genitalia, thus I'm a girl" without really going beyond that into the social construct aspect of gender.
Also at that age I was very much a social outcast and I remember strongly wanting to develop secondary sex characteristics at the appropriate age because at least then I would be normal among my peers. Now I look at the bodies of intersex people who didn't go through puberty at that age and I wish my body looked like that, but that ship has sailed. Even if I'd had the self-knowledge I have now at that age, though, I doubt it would have translated into doing anything about it (and I would inevitably have been blocked from doing so by my abusive parents).
I find it incredibly hard to unpick what about the way I feel now is not wanting to be associated with femininity by default because I don't feel at all strongly gendered, and what is just straight up internalised misogyny. I have a lot of thoughts along the lines of "well of course I find it gross and demeaning to be a woman, society tells women they're gross and inferior 24/7", but then there are clearly a lot of women who are like "I hate how society treats us but I don't find it inherently gross or demeaning to be a woman", and there's also a significant part of me that finds it inherently gross and demeaning to be a person, like having a body full stop is profoundly undignified and unpleasant.
I realise my choice of words here is not great and I want to state really explicitly that I don't think it should feel gross or demeaning to be a woman, and that I really don't want other people who feel comfortable in that gender assignation to think that that's how I see them or how I think they ought to feel. Also, my entire life has been massively impacted by significant childhood abuse from my primary caregivers - I feel like it's gross and demeaning to be me at all because they did such a good job of teaching me I'm revolting and worthless in a way that I still can't fully shake. And all of this complicates various lines inside me that feel like they're crystal-clear for other people - how much of this is gender stuff vs trauma stuff vs generally crappy self-esteem stuff, and how the hell am I supposed to pick all of this apart?
I've also had a lot of "well so what" feelings about my gender, particularly if I'm in a place where I don't actively want to do a lot about it. "What does it matter if I'm non-binary if I'm not going to tell anyone about it/change my name/change my appearance/change my pronouns?" is a common thought pattern. When I first had explicit thoughts along the lines of "hey maybe I am not the gender I was assigned at birth", I felt panic more than relief - panic that if that was true, then I would HAVE to change my pronouns and cut my hair really short and change my wardrobe and I would have to do all that RIGHT NOW or else it wouldn't be real or meaningful. And I really didn't want to make radical change on that timeline.
The idea of coming out, especially at work, fills me with horror because I hate having attention drawn to myself, particularly around my appearance/presentation. Right now I feel like it would be better to have people misgender me and only me notice or get hurt by that, than to come out and have at least a few supportive friends (people I already know I can count on to be sensitive about this) who will be horrified and embarrassed on my behalf if someone else misgenders me in front of them. That feels like a weightier burden than just sucking up being misgendered and not having anyone know about it - but I very much prefer to keep my problems to myself and not to bother anyone else with them (again, as part of a legacy of childhood abuse). If I think about changing my pronouns, I immediately imagine a composite of my abusive dad and my unpleasant ex-boss in my head asking why I have to be so difficult all the time, why I can't just cram myself back into the box marked "female" quietly and not make all this fuss about nothing. That's a huge barrier, and I assume I will need to do some work on this in therapy before I feel confident tackling it. I might not get there for a long time, or at all.
But at the same time, in spite of all of these internal barriers, the idea that my gender might not be female-by-default feels like something I can't cram back into the box it came from. I'm reminded of Daniel Mallory Ortberg's coming out essay, especially the line, "It felt like a demon snuck into my room in the middle of the night and said, ‘What if you were kind of a guy?’ and then just left and was like, ‘No follow-up questions!’" - that resonated a lot, except replacing "kind of a guy" with "kind of not any specific gender". And I've been trying to get over the panic that stems from the idea that not being able to cram this back in a box also means I have to DO EVERYTHING ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW.
So I guess where I've got to is that I'm taking it slow. I'm focusing on the steps I have already taken, long before I consciously thought I might be non-binary, to make my body more comfortable. I haven't menstruated in more than five years thanks to birth control and I hope never to again in my life. That was the most significant area of dysphoria and I already dealt with it a long time ago. I haven't shaved my legs for 5+ years and again never plan to in the future (I do shave my underarms, but only because I have a skin condition there that gets worse when the hair is allowed to grow). I haven't worn any feminising makeup or decorative jewelery for years. Instead of feeling like I'm forever condemned to fail as a woman - and this is something other women have explicitly let me know is happening since puberty; I am genuinely terrible at performing certain social and appearance-based aspects of femininity - I now feel like maybe I can do an okay job at being something that isn't a woman. I've never felt like I passed as a woman even though I'm biologically female and at least some of this is giving myself permission to stop trying/stop berating myself for failing.
And the more space I give it inside my head, the more it takes root. I cut my hair a lot shorter recently, but still in a way that reads as female, and half of me is like "it is rad to have less hair" and half of me is "I wish it was even shorter and more masculine". That's probably going to be a future step. My therapist called my new hair "pretty" last week and I felt super weird about that and probably need to bring it up at some point, but for now this journey is incredibly private and lives inside me - I want to read about it and explore it without my partner or my therapist for now, though I assume that will change at some point. Aside from a conversation along the lines of "how much of your attraction to me is explicitly predicated on me performing femininity" with my partner (fortunately the answer was "basically none at all" and the admission that they'd probably be less strongly attracted to me if my presentation was more female-coded), I haven't really talked about it with them.
I completely get where you're coming from re: body shape as an additional barrier; I've put off experimenting with masculine clothing because of my body shape and the fear that I will look lumpy in all the wrong places (my fat distribution looks very biologically female and I don't really like it). And again it's been really hard to disentangle what about my body I don't like because of gender and what I don't like about it because a lot of my dad's abuse towards me when I was a kid was explicitly about him disapproving of my body type and physical appearance. It's a big clusterfuck. I like the advice people have given above - short fat dudes still get to wear clothes. I spent a long time thinking "well of course I'd make my look a lot more androgynous if I had the long, lean body of my dreams" and what I'm trying to do now is see how much of that I can make possible without my body having to be perfect before I even try.
My planned next steps are to experiment with binding and more masculine clothes - this is hard for me as I hate spending money, especially on myself, double-especially on my body (again for reasons to do with trauma and abuse) but I am intending to set some budget aside for this later in the year. I may well get that shorter and more masculine haircut. I still have no idea how I feel about pronouns (it felt weird the other day when I called myself "she" in the third person but it feels less weird when other people do it habitually) or my name. I have no idea where I stand re: surgery or hormones, other than knowing that this feels fraught and will likely be difficult to access on account of being non-binary rather than binary-gender trans. I have very low trust in the health service in my country because of numerous bad experiences of seeking mental healthcare and gender feels way too close to that for me to want to medicalise any of this right now.
I have been spending time watching people of all gender presentations - what clothes do they wear, what accessories, what does their hair look like - to give myself a range of options, as I think my internal assumptions about "what masculine clothes consist of" are quite narrow. I still have no intention of publicly coming out with a big bang about any of this - I think it's much more likely that I'll start to shift the way I present and field questions as and when they come up. Some things have started feeling too much like drag - stuff like singing at the top of my natural range, and the idea of wearing female-coded formalwear to my office Christmas party this year. These have been small nudges to keep doing things that make me feel more comfortable in myself rather than keeping doing the same things and just sucking up the discomfort.
Another thing that has helped is spending more time with non-binary people. I spent last Friday evening in a house where two out of three of the people who live there identify as non-binary and it was a nice opportunity to reprogram some of my more black-and-white thinking - both were AFAB, neither had bound, both were wearing clothing that could be female-coded on another person, one had hair that would likely be female-coded on another person and none of those things invalidated their non-binary identities. This is useful stuff for me to see when I have a brain that tends towards "LONG HAIR AND BOOBS MEANS YOU'RE A GIRL NO EXCEPTIONS" sometimes.
This is a long and rambling personal essay and I don't have a thesis beyond "this stuff is hard, it's okay to take it slow, it's okay to be something on the inside and not have the outsides match and that doesn't automatically invalidate the insides". I think I'm low gender overall, which helps make it feel less like a "GOT TO DO EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW" kind of pressure and more like something that I'm fine to sit with for a while longer and figure out slowly. It's never going to be the most important thing about me, the key facet of my identity, the driving force of my life...but that doesn't mean I have to ignore it or pretend it doesn't exist, and it's okay if I want to take some steps to address this, but doing so doesn't commit me to totally socially or physically transitioning.
posted by terretu at 3:34 AM on October 16, 2018 [6 favorites]
I didn't have any meaningful gender rejection when I was younger, but I did consistently feel like I was failing at performing my assigned gender, particularly around adolescence/puberty when I was suddenly supposed to be fixated on boys and clothes and makeup and I...just wasn't. I suspect I'm on the autism spectrum and there was a lot of black and white thinking along the lines of "well girls are supposed to have female genitalia and I've got female genitalia, thus I'm a girl" without really going beyond that into the social construct aspect of gender.
Also at that age I was very much a social outcast and I remember strongly wanting to develop secondary sex characteristics at the appropriate age because at least then I would be normal among my peers. Now I look at the bodies of intersex people who didn't go through puberty at that age and I wish my body looked like that, but that ship has sailed. Even if I'd had the self-knowledge I have now at that age, though, I doubt it would have translated into doing anything about it (and I would inevitably have been blocked from doing so by my abusive parents).
I find it incredibly hard to unpick what about the way I feel now is not wanting to be associated with femininity by default because I don't feel at all strongly gendered, and what is just straight up internalised misogyny. I have a lot of thoughts along the lines of "well of course I find it gross and demeaning to be a woman, society tells women they're gross and inferior 24/7", but then there are clearly a lot of women who are like "I hate how society treats us but I don't find it inherently gross or demeaning to be a woman", and there's also a significant part of me that finds it inherently gross and demeaning to be a person, like having a body full stop is profoundly undignified and unpleasant.
I realise my choice of words here is not great and I want to state really explicitly that I don't think it should feel gross or demeaning to be a woman, and that I really don't want other people who feel comfortable in that gender assignation to think that that's how I see them or how I think they ought to feel. Also, my entire life has been massively impacted by significant childhood abuse from my primary caregivers - I feel like it's gross and demeaning to be me at all because they did such a good job of teaching me I'm revolting and worthless in a way that I still can't fully shake. And all of this complicates various lines inside me that feel like they're crystal-clear for other people - how much of this is gender stuff vs trauma stuff vs generally crappy self-esteem stuff, and how the hell am I supposed to pick all of this apart?
I've also had a lot of "well so what" feelings about my gender, particularly if I'm in a place where I don't actively want to do a lot about it. "What does it matter if I'm non-binary if I'm not going to tell anyone about it/change my name/change my appearance/change my pronouns?" is a common thought pattern. When I first had explicit thoughts along the lines of "hey maybe I am not the gender I was assigned at birth", I felt panic more than relief - panic that if that was true, then I would HAVE to change my pronouns and cut my hair really short and change my wardrobe and I would have to do all that RIGHT NOW or else it wouldn't be real or meaningful. And I really didn't want to make radical change on that timeline.
The idea of coming out, especially at work, fills me with horror because I hate having attention drawn to myself, particularly around my appearance/presentation. Right now I feel like it would be better to have people misgender me and only me notice or get hurt by that, than to come out and have at least a few supportive friends (people I already know I can count on to be sensitive about this) who will be horrified and embarrassed on my behalf if someone else misgenders me in front of them. That feels like a weightier burden than just sucking up being misgendered and not having anyone know about it - but I very much prefer to keep my problems to myself and not to bother anyone else with them (again, as part of a legacy of childhood abuse). If I think about changing my pronouns, I immediately imagine a composite of my abusive dad and my unpleasant ex-boss in my head asking why I have to be so difficult all the time, why I can't just cram myself back into the box marked "female" quietly and not make all this fuss about nothing. That's a huge barrier, and I assume I will need to do some work on this in therapy before I feel confident tackling it. I might not get there for a long time, or at all.
But at the same time, in spite of all of these internal barriers, the idea that my gender might not be female-by-default feels like something I can't cram back into the box it came from. I'm reminded of Daniel Mallory Ortberg's coming out essay, especially the line, "It felt like a demon snuck into my room in the middle of the night and said, ‘What if you were kind of a guy?’ and then just left and was like, ‘No follow-up questions!’" - that resonated a lot, except replacing "kind of a guy" with "kind of not any specific gender". And I've been trying to get over the panic that stems from the idea that not being able to cram this back in a box also means I have to DO EVERYTHING ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW.
So I guess where I've got to is that I'm taking it slow. I'm focusing on the steps I have already taken, long before I consciously thought I might be non-binary, to make my body more comfortable. I haven't menstruated in more than five years thanks to birth control and I hope never to again in my life. That was the most significant area of dysphoria and I already dealt with it a long time ago. I haven't shaved my legs for 5+ years and again never plan to in the future (I do shave my underarms, but only because I have a skin condition there that gets worse when the hair is allowed to grow). I haven't worn any feminising makeup or decorative jewelery for years. Instead of feeling like I'm forever condemned to fail as a woman - and this is something other women have explicitly let me know is happening since puberty; I am genuinely terrible at performing certain social and appearance-based aspects of femininity - I now feel like maybe I can do an okay job at being something that isn't a woman. I've never felt like I passed as a woman even though I'm biologically female and at least some of this is giving myself permission to stop trying/stop berating myself for failing.
And the more space I give it inside my head, the more it takes root. I cut my hair a lot shorter recently, but still in a way that reads as female, and half of me is like "it is rad to have less hair" and half of me is "I wish it was even shorter and more masculine". That's probably going to be a future step. My therapist called my new hair "pretty" last week and I felt super weird about that and probably need to bring it up at some point, but for now this journey is incredibly private and lives inside me - I want to read about it and explore it without my partner or my therapist for now, though I assume that will change at some point. Aside from a conversation along the lines of "how much of your attraction to me is explicitly predicated on me performing femininity" with my partner (fortunately the answer was "basically none at all" and the admission that they'd probably be less strongly attracted to me if my presentation was more female-coded), I haven't really talked about it with them.
I completely get where you're coming from re: body shape as an additional barrier; I've put off experimenting with masculine clothing because of my body shape and the fear that I will look lumpy in all the wrong places (my fat distribution looks very biologically female and I don't really like it). And again it's been really hard to disentangle what about my body I don't like because of gender and what I don't like about it because a lot of my dad's abuse towards me when I was a kid was explicitly about him disapproving of my body type and physical appearance. It's a big clusterfuck. I like the advice people have given above - short fat dudes still get to wear clothes. I spent a long time thinking "well of course I'd make my look a lot more androgynous if I had the long, lean body of my dreams" and what I'm trying to do now is see how much of that I can make possible without my body having to be perfect before I even try.
My planned next steps are to experiment with binding and more masculine clothes - this is hard for me as I hate spending money, especially on myself, double-especially on my body (again for reasons to do with trauma and abuse) but I am intending to set some budget aside for this later in the year. I may well get that shorter and more masculine haircut. I still have no idea how I feel about pronouns (it felt weird the other day when I called myself "she" in the third person but it feels less weird when other people do it habitually) or my name. I have no idea where I stand re: surgery or hormones, other than knowing that this feels fraught and will likely be difficult to access on account of being non-binary rather than binary-gender trans. I have very low trust in the health service in my country because of numerous bad experiences of seeking mental healthcare and gender feels way too close to that for me to want to medicalise any of this right now.
I have been spending time watching people of all gender presentations - what clothes do they wear, what accessories, what does their hair look like - to give myself a range of options, as I think my internal assumptions about "what masculine clothes consist of" are quite narrow. I still have no intention of publicly coming out with a big bang about any of this - I think it's much more likely that I'll start to shift the way I present and field questions as and when they come up. Some things have started feeling too much like drag - stuff like singing at the top of my natural range, and the idea of wearing female-coded formalwear to my office Christmas party this year. These have been small nudges to keep doing things that make me feel more comfortable in myself rather than keeping doing the same things and just sucking up the discomfort.
Another thing that has helped is spending more time with non-binary people. I spent last Friday evening in a house where two out of three of the people who live there identify as non-binary and it was a nice opportunity to reprogram some of my more black-and-white thinking - both were AFAB, neither had bound, both were wearing clothing that could be female-coded on another person, one had hair that would likely be female-coded on another person and none of those things invalidated their non-binary identities. This is useful stuff for me to see when I have a brain that tends towards "LONG HAIR AND BOOBS MEANS YOU'RE A GIRL NO EXCEPTIONS" sometimes.
This is a long and rambling personal essay and I don't have a thesis beyond "this stuff is hard, it's okay to take it slow, it's okay to be something on the inside and not have the outsides match and that doesn't automatically invalidate the insides". I think I'm low gender overall, which helps make it feel less like a "GOT TO DO EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW" kind of pressure and more like something that I'm fine to sit with for a while longer and figure out slowly. It's never going to be the most important thing about me, the key facet of my identity, the driving force of my life...but that doesn't mean I have to ignore it or pretend it doesn't exist, and it's okay if I want to take some steps to address this, but doing so doesn't commit me to totally socially or physically transitioning.
posted by terretu at 3:34 AM on October 16, 2018 [6 favorites]
I'm amab and pass professionally for now.
A big part for me is that I feel I was misdiagnosed for about a dozen years of treatment under a "general anxiety" label, and switching to a gender and sexuality affirmative therapy model has made a huge difference. Dealing with trauma, anger, and what I want without trying to fit that against masculinity really helps.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 6:04 AM on October 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
A big part for me is that I feel I was misdiagnosed for about a dozen years of treatment under a "general anxiety" label, and switching to a gender and sexuality affirmative therapy model has made a huge difference. Dealing with trauma, anger, and what I want without trying to fit that against masculinity really helps.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 6:04 AM on October 16, 2018 [2 favorites]
I cut my hair a lot shorter recently, but still in a way that reads as female, and half of me is like "it is rad to have less hair" and half of me is "I wish it was even shorter and more masculine".
I've discussed this aspect of it with friends who are going through similar questioning and exploration. How it feels to me is that it's something like following a path through a very foggy forest, foggy enough that I can't see more than a foot or two ahead of me. I start walking in one direction until something makes me realize I'm going off the edge of that path, then correct my direction back the other way until I bump into something else that makes me realize "too far this way this time" and I shift direction again, back towards the other angle I was on. But I'm still moving forward.
To someone else it might look like I don't know what I'm doing. "You cut your hair so short and butch, and now you're letting it get softer again? You wear a binder but still wear makeup and it's not even dramatic or fun makeup, it's get-through-the-day-at-the-office makeup? How can you like both those plain button-down men's-style shirts and also want shoes painted with pink and red hibiscus?"
To me, it's "this was feeling okay but now feels not right, let me decrease some of what I'm doing and increase some other things until I feel comfortable in my skin again."
posted by Lexica at 2:54 PM on October 16, 2018 [3 favorites]
I've discussed this aspect of it with friends who are going through similar questioning and exploration. How it feels to me is that it's something like following a path through a very foggy forest, foggy enough that I can't see more than a foot or two ahead of me. I start walking in one direction until something makes me realize I'm going off the edge of that path, then correct my direction back the other way until I bump into something else that makes me realize "too far this way this time" and I shift direction again, back towards the other angle I was on. But I'm still moving forward.
To someone else it might look like I don't know what I'm doing. "You cut your hair so short and butch, and now you're letting it get softer again? You wear a binder but still wear makeup and it's not even dramatic or fun makeup, it's get-through-the-day-at-the-office makeup? How can you like both those plain button-down men's-style shirts and also want shoes painted with pink and red hibiscus?"
To me, it's "this was feeling okay but now feels not right, let me decrease some of what I'm doing and increase some other things until I feel comfortable in my skin again."
posted by Lexica at 2:54 PM on October 16, 2018 [3 favorites]
I love the responses here but did ask for resources. Here are two books I have found helpful: Kate Bornstein has a series of books, I have only read My Gender Workbook which has a "welcome to this awesome club of self discovery" vibe, though she is not everyone's taste. I also recently got How to Understand Your Gender by two trans academics.
posted by shothotbot at 8:01 AM on October 17, 2018
posted by shothotbot at 8:01 AM on October 17, 2018
Just wanted to let you know that you're not totally alone in your gender-related feelings, or in your metacognitive thoughts about those feelings. I've never experienced gender dysphoria, and I am totally fine identifying as a woman, but... I've never been all that attached to that part of my identity. It's way down the list of identities I am proud of and not something I spend much time thinking about. I don't particularly enjoy being part of a group referred to as "girls" or "ladies", or the "girls' night out" social dynamic, and I never felt comfortable as part of girls' sports teams. On the other hand, I've definitely never wished I was a boy or a man. I too have a hourglass figure that I have never particularly enjoyed; I find it more of a nuisance that prevents me from finding adequate training swimsuits than a feminine asset. Like you, I've definitely wondered whether there's any place for these feelings given that I don't feel there's anything I need to fix about my life or my body and I don't feel the need to find an appropriate label or group to join. I guess where I've landed with all this is that, since I'm fine with being a woman, then I am one, and all this stuff is a legit part of being one, at least for me. If somebody else feels differently, that's equally valid for them.
posted by Cygnet at 2:02 PM on October 17, 2018
posted by Cygnet at 2:02 PM on October 17, 2018
I'm a not-very-feminine woman, maybe not entirely binary but far from figuring out exactly what that means. What you said about wanting to lose weight until short hair looked good on you resonated so hard with me. I spent years growing my hair long because I felt like I was supposed to, thinking it probably looked better on my giant head and fat face... and I always hated it.
A few weeks ago I got a very short cut and I'm really really happy with it; it just feels right to me. Would it look better on me if my face were thinner? Maybe, but who cares? I'm okay with how it looks, and it feels awesome. Highly recommended!
posted by beandip at 2:31 PM on October 18, 2018 [4 favorites]
A few weeks ago I got a very short cut and I'm really really happy with it; it just feels right to me. Would it look better on me if my face were thinner? Maybe, but who cares? I'm okay with how it looks, and it feels awesome. Highly recommended!
posted by beandip at 2:31 PM on October 18, 2018 [4 favorites]
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I was listening to a panel on trans representation in science fiction, and one of the panelists said (I am paraphrasing, probably not 100% accurately) that her transition was as much about being in control of her body as it was about matching a particular gender. And for some reason, that worked for me - I don't want to transition to anything specific, but you know what, if I wanted smaller (or no) boobs, I can exert that control over my body for my own comfort and happiness. I don't need to pick a label, but I can wear what makes me feel comfortable. I've come around to identifying as somewhere closer to agender than cis in the last couple of years, but that's just rhetoric - I wear clothes I like and that fit me, I act how I act, I married someone who doesn't care in the least what category I put myself in, and I'm pretty happy, on that front.
The much more intransigent thing is sexism in the workplace, and that... well, there's no magic bullet for that, either. If you need to keep your work wardrobe feminine to manage it, and you're comfortable with that tradeoff, then that's the tradeoff you make. If you want to start wearing slacks and blazers and cut your hair short and prefer dealing with what static that brings you, then that's a valid choice too. Neither are likely to be frictionless, but you do what you can, and, as a friend says, work for the liberation of all sentient beings.
posted by restless_nomad at 11:56 AM on October 15, 2018 [11 favorites]