What made you realize...?

[Yep, me]

When I was in kindergarten during gym class, they tried to segregate the groups by gender (female and male), and I just froze, I knew something didn’t compute internally, when I grew long hair, people who didn’t know me used she pronouns, but that didn’t internally compute either, like I wasn’t being talked to. Years later, I discovered terminology that kind of clicked, but wasn’t quite right, and eventually I found the right specific term.

[InfiniteNull]

On 3/20/2018 at 6:34 PM, ElasticPlanet said:

@InfiniteNull: Makes sense. I mean, I don't remember ever deliberately adopting a gendered role just to avoid being hassled for not conforming... but gendered presentation, yep, done that and learned to live with it by forcing it to the back of my mind and pretending it wasn't too much of a problem. My experience of "there aren't any girls or women doing this" usually came with a bit of resentment too. As in: why was there no chance of me ever meeting a potential girlfriend at the model glider club? That made no sense whatsoever to me. Aren't *all* kinds of people interested in that which is interesting?

I have to comply with social standards in general. It's how I socialize and live a relatively neurotypical life despite having a brain that is different. It's a lot of work but it's enough that when I tell people that I am on the autism spectrum that they are like "really? I never would have guessed"... but I now have a diagnosis from one of the experts in the field to prove it. This same compliance spills over into gender and gender stereotypes for me because of habit. In cases where I am trying to present masculinely (work, or around intimidating male people) I find myself finding ways to comply with a masculine image. In cases where I am out and myself I find myself trying to express my gender divergence by acting femininely. I am more likely to forget that I am doing it when acting femininely though. It sort of just happens, but then it kinda turns androgynous I've noticed lol... I wish I knew how people see me, I cant really picture it though. 

 

As for why women aren't more engaged in certain hobbies... I just dunno... probably for the same reason that more men don't wear makeup... not because it's inherently gendered... but because there aren't any role models showing how someone within that gender could participate in that activity. 

[chridd]

I... don't really comply with social standards in general.  I haven't really tried being masculine except maybe sort of kind of when I was really young, and haven't really tried all that much to be feminine, either.

 

As for the main question of this thread, I guess there were sort of multiple things that led me to think I'm probably a trans woman:

1. Learning that gender was a thing—though at that point I didn't really understand what it was, and thought I might be agender (but very unsure about it) because I was uncomfortable with the idea that I was cis.  Part of why I wasn't sure was that I thought some particular event in my life caused my gender-related issues, which would mean I wasn't born this way.

 

2. Getting sort of a better understanding of what gender actually is; it helped a lot thinking of gender as something completely unrelated to gender roles and interests and stereotypes, and as more connected to physical sex—i.e., about my brain trying to tell me that I'm a girl, as in, a person with a feminine face and no penis or facial hair, even if it's not doing a very good job of telling me that, rather than about me liking dolls and dresses.  Also learning that medical transition was a thing (besides SRS) and noticing that I found it appealing for some unknown reason.  This got me thinking I was nonbinary...

 

3. One day last year I realized that maybe if I were (physically) female I wouldn't feel the way I do about hiding my gender online, and I thought "Wait, does this mean that I'm actually a (binary) trans woman?"  While at that point I still thought I was probably nonbinary, this got me really thinking a lot about my gender.  I realized that a lot of things from my childhood that I didn't think at the time were related to gender could be explained by my brain subconsciously thinking I'm not male, and that my previous explanation for my gender issues didn't actually make sense with what I actually felt.

 

4. Learning that dysphoria isn't always super strong and obvious and trans people don't always know from an early age.  I'd previously thought that if I were a trans woman then it would be obvious, so since it's not obvious to me I must not be a trans woman, but maybe it wouldn't be quite so obvious if I were nonbinary since feeling like I'm something I don't even know exists is kind of confusing; so knowing that it's not always obvious to trans men and woman that they're trans meant that I might actually be a trans woman rather than nonbinary.

 

5. The straw that broke the camel's and really made me think, yes, I'm trans, and not just questioning, was learning to tell the difference between how males and females talk (in terms of how they use pitch), and realizing that I'd been talking like a girl this whole time without even realizing.  While this is much less direct than other evidence (and if I weren't already thinking I was likely trans and didn't have lots of other reasons to believe I was, this probably wouldn't have convinced me), it's something that I couldn't bias as easily, so it seemed more objective.  (I also found a couple other less-direct-but-harder-to-bias pieces of evidence as well.)

[arden_jay]

21 hours ago, Zenzencat104 said:

When I was in kindergarten during gym class, they tried to segregate the groups by gender (female and male), and I just froze, I knew something didn’t compute internally, 

I'm just realising I had a similar sort of thing! I always wondered why they had to split us up, and wasn't usually happy going on the girls' side, even though I knew I didn't really fit on the boys' either.

[Rhysaerys]

Hello there! I've recently started to consciously question my gender. I've always thought that I was simply a tomboy growing up and never really gave my gender much thought. I saw no need to as long as I was my genuine self. There have been many indications that I was never cis-gendered, such as binding my chest, feeling uncomfortable when my dad off-handedly says that this pair of derby shoes (with a mid heel) was more appropriate for females and being told to sit like a lady even when I'm wearing jeans, just to name a few examples. 

 

But it only really clicked for me a few days before my graduation.

 

To cut a long story short, the thought of wearing a dress and heels, an outfit that I had prepared months in advance, was suddenly terrifying. I can count the number of times I've worn dresses on one hand in the past 5 years but I have never felt this overwhelming sense of dread and panic. The thought of putting on the dress and shoes made me feel like an imposter. I chalked it up to nerves for the big day. Fast forward two days to the graduation ceremony. I'm getting dressed in my dress and heels but there's no dread and no panic. There was the underlying nervousness with the ceremony and trying not to trip in heels getting onto the stage. But I felt ok. I felt like "me". I didn't cringe as I usually do when friends said that my appearance was "beautiful" (a term that my culture tends to associate with feminity). Most importantly, it didn't feel like a performance as it had with wearing my school uniform back in middle school half my lifetime ago. 

 

As I said, I've only recently started to consciously question my gender. But this was a huge lightbulb moment for me that set off warning sirens in my head. 

 

 

[Celyn: The Lutening]

1) Puberty being horrifyingly unpleasant, feeling ill for about 5 years because of how much I hated the changes to my body. (I'm going to reverse them soon)

2) Dresses/skirts and makeup feel like drag

3) Hearing about men crossing their legs ankle to knee, women knee to knee. Sitting "like a lady" is physically uncomfortable to me (I have deformed hips so Idk how much is actually gendered)

4) Women's voice gets higher pitched when angry, men's lower. Mine goes all over the shop.

5) Seeing enby people for the first time. People who look like me, dress like me, act and think like me! Finding a place on the spectrum I belong.

[AniGirl425]

As a AFAB nonbinary/demigirl who likes wearing dresses/skirts, but also blazers and ties, I actually started questioning my gender recently.  I'm not sure how recently though, I feel like it's been on my mind for a couple months...?  But it's only been the past few days that I've really started looking into it.  A few things in the past have kind of seemed off to me, like most girls wouldn't do that/wear that.  I would think, "most cisgender girls don't wear/do this" or "how normal is it for girls to wear/do this?"  Like most girls I know don't wear a flowery dress one day then wear a blazer the next.  Those kinds of things made me feel that maybe I don't really fit into the binary ideas of "female".  There are days when I want to wear clothing that society says is masculine, most often a blazer or the suit vest my dad gave me, and some days when I want to wear a ballgown.  Other days, like today, I couldn't pin point exactly what I felt like wearing and I just throw on a t-shirt and jeans and even others, I wear a dress or skirt with my blazer.  I don't really experience dysphoria and if I do, it's extremely mild and/or subconscious.  The thing that made me start really thinking though was when I felt more masculine one night than I think I ever have before.  The next day I wore the most "masculine" t-shirt (as in it wasn't a v-neck and it wasn't a low-cut neckline) I could find with jeans and a pullover sweatshirt.  I put my hair up to make it look like I had short hair.  I wore a baseball cap.  It felt pretty good.  A week later, a few friends at art class and I were talking about the way we dress as in feminine/masculine kind of thing and I said that it kind of depended on my mood and one of my friends said, "Ani, are you genderfluid?"  I didn't know how to answer because I wasn't sure.  I'd been thinking about it, but hadn't yet decided if it fit my identity.  Though I answered "No," it was more like a hesitant question.  Since then, I started doing research, looking up things like, "What is it like to be genderfluid/nonbinary/demigender."  I decided that for now, nonbinary fit best because, in certain ways, it's an umbrella term and I concluded that it was a starting point for now, whether I stick with it or decide that genderfluid or anything else fits me better than nonbinary.  One of the things that kind of hit me when I was researching was this one person who said that in their research, they found that cisgender people don't spend a lot of time thinking a lot about their gender identity, and it was kind of a "if you've spent months thinking about this, you're probably not cisgender" thing.