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What is gender, anyway?
Jun. 17th, 2017 01:50 pmA fundamental problem with my gender identity, and related things, is that I don’t really understand what gender is. I imagine this is less of a concern for binary trans people: if you know that you’re “a man” or “a woman” and mean by it roughly what everyone else does, the details of what exactly it means to be “a man” or “a woman” may be less of a concern. But a lot of my worrying about whether I’m “really trans” or what it’s valid for me to think of my gender as seems to really come from the fact that it’s hard for me to figure out what categories I can validly put myself in.
I (think) I know my body, and what I want it to be. Basically, mostly female except no periods, and being able to pee standing is kind of useful. And very small breasts. I’m even pretty happy with how close I can get to this, except for my hair loss. And I can mostly do it without coming out and having to deal with all the risks that entails. I do have some worries about how much of my discomfort of my genitals may come from hatred of the fact that my penis is circumcised, rather than “natural” dysphoria, but the fact that taking testosterone-blockers and estrogen has helped a decent amount is encouraging.
But I have no real idea what to call this. I’ve been considering “eunuch”, given that my main plan seems to be chemical and eventually physical castration. And I used to go with “neutrois,” but besides the fact no one knows the word, I’m increasingly unconvinced I’d really be happy with no genitals, even if I wish I would be.
I don’t understand gender roles. This wouldn’t be such an issue if I also didn’t care about gender roles. The problem is that, on some level, I seem to. It makes me really uncomfortable to be thought of, or think I might be thought of, as “a man”. At the same time, though, I’m pretty worried that I might be “being a man” in terms of behavior or gender roles I participate in. This particularly bothers me because I think a lot of my discomfort with the idea of “being a man” comes from being really uncomfortable with male-coded behaviors and roles.
Basically, I know that I don’t perform femininity, or have much interest in doing so. I’d like to believe that I don’t perform either gender, but that’s obviously false. For one thing, almost everything is coded with the gender binary, and a lot of my behaviors—especially ones related to presentation and appearance—fit fairly well into society’s “male” category. It’s made worse by the fact that I am choosing to present as male professionally to avoid difficulties with employability and safety and such. Anyway, what this amounts to is that I feel like I do experience a large amount of male privilege, and probably do set off many non-male people’s discomfort-with-male-people, so I feel like it is problematic for me to identify too strongly as not-male. I appreciate the fact that my friends largely recognize me as clearly not a man, but I’m not convinced I can describe myself as such to society at large, or even to those segments of society I’d be comfortable doing so with.
I certainly don’t understand relationships or dating or sexuality. My issues with them are definitely tied into gender, given that until recently I identified as asexual for reasons that were mostly due to dysphoria about my genitals. The way I think about relationships and sex still has a concerning amount of connection to gender roles in it, and it’s really important for me to be “female” with respect to any sort of relationship or sex I might ever have. But this is really its own topic.
For all my confusing interactions with gender and sexuality, I think that it’s pretty ambiguous that I count as “queer” or “LGBT” or whatever your term of choice is. That said, I’ve never really felt like the LGBT community was something I could identify with. I’m not entirely sure why this is. Part of it is probably because, by the time I realized I was bi and trans, I’d been burnt badly enough times by identifying with things that I’ve developed an aversion to trusting any community or “official” identity.
I think there’s more to it than that, though. My life has never really followed the “standard” LGBT narratives. I’ve largely chosen to stay in closets so I can be treated as “normal” by society at large. I’ve never dated or had sex with anyone of any gender, so regardless of my theoretical bisexuality, the whole focus on “love” and sexuality that a lot of the community seems to have has never seemed relevant to me. And, well, my attempts to be involved in the LGBT groups in grad school seemed to fail because everyone was either an undergrad much younger than me or else mostly just interested in gay bars and drag shows. (I know some people find drag shows empowering; I just find them triggering.)
So, I don’t know what this means, or how much I should care about not feeling part of the community. I think I largely have enough identity other places, and I do at least feel some connection to other trans people. But I just don’t really identify with rainbows.
I (think) I know my body, and what I want it to be. Basically, mostly female except no periods, and being able to pee standing is kind of useful. And very small breasts. I’m even pretty happy with how close I can get to this, except for my hair loss. And I can mostly do it without coming out and having to deal with all the risks that entails. I do have some worries about how much of my discomfort of my genitals may come from hatred of the fact that my penis is circumcised, rather than “natural” dysphoria, but the fact that taking testosterone-blockers and estrogen has helped a decent amount is encouraging.
But I have no real idea what to call this. I’ve been considering “eunuch”, given that my main plan seems to be chemical and eventually physical castration. And I used to go with “neutrois,” but besides the fact no one knows the word, I’m increasingly unconvinced I’d really be happy with no genitals, even if I wish I would be.
I don’t understand gender roles. This wouldn’t be such an issue if I also didn’t care about gender roles. The problem is that, on some level, I seem to. It makes me really uncomfortable to be thought of, or think I might be thought of, as “a man”. At the same time, though, I’m pretty worried that I might be “being a man” in terms of behavior or gender roles I participate in. This particularly bothers me because I think a lot of my discomfort with the idea of “being a man” comes from being really uncomfortable with male-coded behaviors and roles.
Basically, I know that I don’t perform femininity, or have much interest in doing so. I’d like to believe that I don’t perform either gender, but that’s obviously false. For one thing, almost everything is coded with the gender binary, and a lot of my behaviors—especially ones related to presentation and appearance—fit fairly well into society’s “male” category. It’s made worse by the fact that I am choosing to present as male professionally to avoid difficulties with employability and safety and such. Anyway, what this amounts to is that I feel like I do experience a large amount of male privilege, and probably do set off many non-male people’s discomfort-with-male-people, so I feel like it is problematic for me to identify too strongly as not-male. I appreciate the fact that my friends largely recognize me as clearly not a man, but I’m not convinced I can describe myself as such to society at large, or even to those segments of society I’d be comfortable doing so with.
I certainly don’t understand relationships or dating or sexuality. My issues with them are definitely tied into gender, given that until recently I identified as asexual for reasons that were mostly due to dysphoria about my genitals. The way I think about relationships and sex still has a concerning amount of connection to gender roles in it, and it’s really important for me to be “female” with respect to any sort of relationship or sex I might ever have. But this is really its own topic.
For all my confusing interactions with gender and sexuality, I think that it’s pretty ambiguous that I count as “queer” or “LGBT” or whatever your term of choice is. That said, I’ve never really felt like the LGBT community was something I could identify with. I’m not entirely sure why this is. Part of it is probably because, by the time I realized I was bi and trans, I’d been burnt badly enough times by identifying with things that I’ve developed an aversion to trusting any community or “official” identity.
I think there’s more to it than that, though. My life has never really followed the “standard” LGBT narratives. I’ve largely chosen to stay in closets so I can be treated as “normal” by society at large. I’ve never dated or had sex with anyone of any gender, so regardless of my theoretical bisexuality, the whole focus on “love” and sexuality that a lot of the community seems to have has never seemed relevant to me. And, well, my attempts to be involved in the LGBT groups in grad school seemed to fail because everyone was either an undergrad much younger than me or else mostly just interested in gay bars and drag shows. (I know some people find drag shows empowering; I just find them triggering.)
So, I don’t know what this means, or how much I should care about not feeling part of the community. I think I largely have enough identity other places, and I do at least feel some connection to other trans people. But I just don’t really identify with rainbows.
