Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
dysphoria is a very common hallmark of transness, sure, but gender euphoria is an almost completely universal and therefore much more reliable signifier and frankly i think we should say ‘if the idea of being a different gender than the one you were born assigned as makes you feel happy/better about yourself you’re trans’ instead of telling people ‘the way you know you’re trans is if your body feels like a prison and your genitals make you hate yourself’
cis people who legitimately questioned their gender and decided they were cis are cis, but theyre not cis about it. i respect that.
exactly!! even if youre cis, examining your relationship with gender closely like that is only gonna help you understand yourself and grow as a person!!!
gender is a social construct. You get to inspect your own construction site to make sure it’s up to code.
Examining my gender led to my conclusion that I am my assigned-gender-at-birth and something else, and figuring out the something else made me very happy, but I’ve also never been happier and more comfortable being my AGAB than since I sat down and decided that yes, actually, I like it, I enjoy it and I’m keeping it. But I am choosing it, I am choosing the ways I want to perform it, and on days I don’t want to, I don’t have to and I am something else.
trans people make mundane things so exciting and new. a trans woman could tell me her name is Sarah and I’d be like oh fuck Sarah is actually a very cool sounding and intriguing name I love it . congratulations on having excellent taste
on the other hand weird trans people scratch all the brain itches i didn’t even know I had. one time I met someone who named themselves Pepsi. I will never forget her for as long as I live. I’ll probably be thinking abt her on my death bed. the energy
sick of other trans people looking like a deer in the headlights when reminded that amabs can be nb too. there are really still people in our own community who think a nonbinary person is like. a woman wearing jeans
i’ve had people treat me visibly different after hearing my voice or seeing my face as if i’m some sort of predator or interloper. this attitude towards amab trans people especially nonbinary people really paints a picture of what the lgbt community thinks of gender in general
Caption: [A stitch with user @/sapphicyuji. The text on screen reads, “ "you can’t misgender cis people!”, you have never had your gender questioned outside of your transness and it shows. sincerely, a trans poc".
I’m actually super glad we’re having a conversation about this. The masculinization of black and brown women, because for years I felt like I endured this unique form of trauma until I realized other people went through the same thing too. And if there’s one thing that I’d like to add to the conversation, there seems to be this misconception that this is something that starts at puberty. Like boys tell you you look like a man to hurt your feeling when that’s so far from the case.
The first time I was purposefully misgendered was in kindergarten. I was constantly referred to by the masculine variant of my name, I was chased out of the women’s restroom, and I had grown adults questioning what my biological sex was before I even knew what the difference was. And those behaviors persisted into adulthood because now if I present as anything less than 100% feminine, people will either compare me to men or animals.
And for myself and for many other brown and black women this is a life long act deliberately intended to humiliate, shame, and other us for the features we were naturally born with and I’m glad we’re having a discussion on how harmful it actually is.]
this is sort of vague because I’m not sure if I can make it make sense but I wish more 101 nonbinary activist materials focused less on just “gender isn’t binary” and more on “the fact that gender is a social construct means it is constructed differently in different cultures and is in a constant state of change like everything else about a culture”
like…it’s not just about updating the gender system to recognize non-binary genders but also about recognizing that the social construction of gender is extremely responsive to time/place and this is true even for “man” and “woman” which means that there’s no reason to invalidate anyone’s expression or feelings about their gender, no matter what gender it is or how familiar it is to you
a further thought: this is also why I don’t think gender abolition is a useful goal, because, as Rikki Anne Wilchins put it, gender is primarily a system for creating meanings, and if you actually tried to totally erase the concept of any gender at all from the world, that would involve erasing a huge amount of cultural meaning, probably without actually fixing inequality tbh
on the other hand, if you acknowledge that there are as many gender systems as there are cultures, and that there are probably as many variations on even the normative genders as there are people in that culture who belong to them, then gender essentialism loses the vast majority of its power because if the meaning of gender changes across cultures (even across relatively small cultural shifts), then that means they’re not inherent moral truths of the universe, they’re ways of performing particular cultural meanings
and this makes non-binary genders, and nonnormative gender expressions, no less concrete than binary genders with normative expressions, not by saying “actually a non-binary gender is a concrete object with xyz characteristics” but by saying “all genders are arbitrary”, which creates room for essentially infinite space and self-determination
I have no idea if any of this makes sense, I just visualize, like, a garden
got bored doing the dishes and designed a little gender fluid alien culture in which no one has a particular set of pronouns but are instead referred to by a wide array of specific pronouns based on how they appear in the moment, and then this culture also has a pronoun that’s basically they (absent), which is different from they (present) that denotes “i cannot see this person so i do not know which presentational pronouns to use”
ALT