A major (a)gender revelation!

[Dawning]

I had a major (a)gender revelation today! I was sending a Facebook message about how I got a ton of sleep last night, and felt like a whole new, I started to say "person," and then I realized that it would be more typical for someone to say that they felt "like a whole new man/woman,"  and further realized that I basically ALWAYS refer to myself as "person," and virtually never as "woman." I had literally never consciously noticed this before! I've seen many people posting here referring to themselves in ways that did not indicate gender, and had not made the connection to myself until just now.

 

As an experiment, I chose to say "woman" in the message instead and see how I felt about it; it felt WEIRD! It felt like I imagined it would feel if I had referred to myself as a man, for example on a forum where no one had a way to automatically assign me a gender label and so I could say that I was any gender I wanted. "Speaking" to someone who sees me as female because that's what I look like (big boobs and hips, long hair, feminine facial features), it felt like; "Wink wink nudge nudge, yeah you know what I mean but not really." As if referring to myself as "woman" was some sort of a game, you know like one of those role-playing games where you call yourself a wizard or an orc or something? Except it's not really role-playing, because I don't even act like a woman; if anything, I act and speak more like a man. It's just the idea of a label that has been put on me that everyone is accepting refers to me, but like it's being done as a joke; because deception is foreign to me, I can't think of any real-life examples, but I know that most of you understand what I mean anyways.

 

This is more than just the total lack of feeling of gender, or the total detachment from and lack of understanding of even the concept of gender, that I've always been aware of and have been telling people for decades; I've actually been subconsciously avoiding the "woman" gender label for myself my entire life, and just now realized it! I know that this probably qualifies me for the prize for least self-aware person of 2018, LOL, but I wanted to share this aha moment because there might be some people reading on here who have the same experience and haven't yet realized it, or realized what it means.

[Anthracite_Impreza]

I realised this a few years ago, congrats on noticing?

[Dawning]

Better late than never I guess, right, LOL? This makes me wonder if there is anything else gender-related that I've been subconsciously doing and never noticed.

[Anthracite_Impreza]

42 minutes ago, Dawning said:

Better late than never I guess, right, LOL? This makes me wonder if there is anything else gender-related that I've been subconsciously doing and never noticed.

Do you slouch or wear baggy clothes to hide your top? I do.

[Dawning]

Have you tried binding your breasts to see how that would feel? I do wear loose tops, not to conceal my breasts per se, but to conceal the fact that I'm braless, and then these days also to conceal the middle-aged spread, LOL. I do wear a clunky shoes, though, kind of like these, and they are the only kind I have:

 

[Anthracite_Impreza]

2 minutes ago, Dawning said:

Have you tried binding your breasts to see how that would feel? I do wear loose tops, not to conceal my breasts per se, but to conceal the fact that I'm braless, and then these days also to conceal the middle-aged spread, LOL

I've tried wearing tight clothes as a start and I just hate the feeling, but then I hate going au naturale too; I just hate my chest. Entirely. I've felt like taking my dad's saws to it many times.

 

I just have trainers, the ones I have right now I hate but my comfy ones got thrown away because I'd wore them down almost to the sole. Yay for having a dodgy gait to go with my flat feet and uncoordinated legs.

[Dawning]

Wearing a denim or leather vest can make you look like you don't have boobs at all; would that work?

 

I don't have flat feet, but I am definitely graceless and uncoordinated, lol.

 

 

[Anthracite_Impreza]

1 hour ago, Dawning said:

Wearing a denim or leather vest can make you look like you don't have boobs at all; would that work?

 

I don't have flat feet, but I am definitely graceless and uncoordinated, lol.

Nope, sensory issues :c

 

I impressed a physiotherapist with my fallen arches.

[Dawning]

I have sensory issues as well. If I accidentally touch anything with wool in it, I will shriek, yank my hand away, and frantically rub my fingertips to remove the sensation. Also, water that seems lukewarm to anyone else can feel boiling hot to me.

 

I have arches that a foot fetishist would love. It's a very weird feeling, sometimes, to be in a body with parts that would interest people sexually!

[ElasticPlanet]

On 7/15/2018 at 1:40 AM, Dawning said:

I basically ALWAYS refer to myself as "person," and virtually never as "woman."

I do that too, although my assigned gender is different from yours. But... as far back as I can remember, I've always been aware that I was doing it, when talking about myself and about other people. It never used to occur to me that I might be unusual for doing that. I rarely use the word woman, and even more rarely the word man because it would remind me of the thing I never wanted to have to be. I identified as male (reluctantly) my whole life until 2 years ago, and in that time I have never called myself a man. There's so much about that word that bugs me, whereas for some reason 'boy' only started to become a problem word while I was searching for my nonbinary identity...

 

On 7/15/2018 at 1:40 AM, Dawning said:

As an experiment, I chose to say "woman" in the message instead and see how I felt about it; it felt WEIRD!   ...   As if referring to myself as "woman" was some sort of a game   ...

Now that weirdness is an experience I've never had. The idea of me as 'man' has always been so alien and hideous, it could never be a game. Luckily I've very rarely been called that, so not had to deal with the shock of it very often.

[Dawning]

I guess we pretty much always assume that everyone else thinks, feels and functions the way that we do, barring evidence to the contrary, don't we?

 

I've been thinking about it, and my autism makes me so different in so many ways that I think I might not have paid attention to the ones that don't actually affect my life skills and social functioning, and maybe that's why I'm just now realizing that I haven't been referring to myself as a woman.

 

I don't think I experience any gender aversion, especially now that I'm post-menopausal, if you see what I mean. Is this why you had thought at some point that you might be trans?

[ElasticPlanet]

8 hours ago, Dawning said:

I guess we pretty much always assume that everyone else thinks, feels and functions the way that we do, barring evidence to the contrary, don't we?

I've certainly been doing that, and not always noticing that I was doing it. I'm not sure how close I am to the autism spectrum but this is one of the many things about it that I really relate to. Not noticing you're different until the evidence is so overwhelming it would have been beyond obvious to everyone else.

 

That's probably why I never thought it was unusual to want the whole male/female thing to just go away - or be deliberately abolished by science and technology. Whenever I heard someone saying they liked being a-man-and-not-a-woman or vice versa I just wrote them off as a hopeless edge case. Never occurred to me that it was me who was the odd one out.

 

15 hours ago, Dawning said:

I don't think I experience any gender aversion, especially now that I'm post-menopausal, if you see what I mean. Is this why you had thought at some point that you might be trans?

I'm glad you don't have a noticeable amount of dysphoria to deal with. Mine is, er, complicated... Some years ago I basically asked myself whether I was a trans woman, although I'd have used slightly different words for it at the time. I definitely didn't have an idea of social dysphoria and body dysphoria as separate things. Probably hadn't heard of nonbinary, and it wouldn't have made any sense to me anyway because I thought the binary genders were things you were supposed to put up with, not supposed to want. Just in the last few years, as I've started to see for the first time how most people understand gender and especially the binary, my social dysphoria has gone from something I could ignore so well that I forgot I'd learnt to ignore it, to an Actual Problem.

 

Now I finally have some kind of a clue, I can say I have some minor amount of body dysphoria about some specific male things but not others. If I'd had periods instead, that would have been sucky for me in gender terms on top of all its other usual suckyness. Basically whichever set of chromosomes the genetic lottery was going to give me, it'd be wrong, but seemingly not wrong enough to justify medical transition. Whichever binary gender I'd been assigned, I'd have still needed to distance myself from it, at least on a social level, and that's why I do now identify as trans.

 

Phew, that took ages to write, but it helps me to see and organise my thoughts better - so thank you again for making me think!

[Dawning]

It would be an interesting study to find out how many edge cases we would have to think we had found before we realized that we ourselves were the odd ones, wouldn't it?

 

 I'm glad that I made you think, since it helped you organize your thoughts! Because of my autism, I automatically have a certain amount of social struggle, and if there is any gender-related struggle mixed in with it, I'm not discerning enough to see it.

 

Have you started identifying as trans "male" to female, or "male" to agender? Is there such a thing?

[ElasticPlanet]

5 hours ago, Dawning said:

an interesting study to find out how many edge cases we would have to think we had found before we realized that we ourselves were the odd ones

A lot of variables though! Might be hard to get good statistics out of it but would probably give a good general idea...

 

I think the problem with anything-to-anything trans labels is that they give so much credence to your assigned gender, despite that being not your actual gender. I'm not male to agender; I'm just agender. In the past, people told me I was male without giving me enough knowledge of the subject to be able to figure out that they were wrong. I identified as male because I had nowhere else to go, but I have never actually been male. My gender feelings haven't changed; I've just moved out of ignorance. I don't really want to use a label that has my wrong assigned gender written all over it. It's not that I don't want people to know my assigned gender - I think anyone who met me would guess that correctly. Just that it doesn't belong in my label.

[Dawning]

That's some very clever thinking there! 

[ElasticPlanet]

@Dawning Er, well, thanks... but I didn't think of it myself. I first learnt it from a trans woman I know, and then found out it applied to me too in a different way. I was trying really hard to explain it in a way that works well for us nonbinary people.

[Dawning]

We need people who can describe and explain the different aspects of the non-binary experience, so I'm glad you shared that!