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Please help me understand non-binary/agender


BTC

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Hi there! I'm looking for some answers, specifically, what it means to he non-

binary/agender (are they the same?). 

 

I don't wish to be rude or ignorant, however, for me to fully understand I'm going to have to ask some questions that may seem so. I apologise in advance if I offend anyone - this is not my objective.

 

I watched a video about the subject, but most of the people in it talked about freedom of expression (gender expression), rather then identity. In my mind, expression is how you like to be perceived or simply what you like to wear, rather then how you feel as a person.

      This is one thing that confuses me. People who identify as male or female (or anyone) can, or should be able, to wear whatever they want: a female can wear clothes, such as suits etc, that are typically fitted for males. Alternatively, a male can wear a dress if he so wished but this would not suddenly make him a woman if doesn't identify as one.

 

Rather than outward appearance, I feel like gender is something of the mind - it's how we perceive ourselves as a human being, a person.

 

I understand transgender as being typically assigned one gender at birth but not feeling that said gender is correct for themself and thus, transitioning. I believe is it characterised as either female to male or male to female.

 

From what I know of gender fluid, people change gender depending on how they feel on a particular day. While I don't understand it, if this is truly how someone feels then I will support it. 

 

I believe intersex refers to someone who was born with the biological sex organs of both a male and female. People like this were previously referred to as 'hermaphrodites', which is a derogatory term nowadays? 

 

But what does it mean to be non-binary? Does this mean 'no gender'?

What does it feel like (I understand this is a difficult question to answer)?

How do you know you identify as non-binary? 

 

Apologies for the long post, I will likely have more questions but currently I can't think of anymore.

Thank you for your patience.

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1 hour ago, BTC said:

I don't wish to be rude or ignorant, however, for me to fully understand I'm going to have to ask some questions that may seem so. I apologise in advance if I offend anyone - this is not my objective.

Don't worry about it, as long as you are asking questions because you are genuinely interested in understanding the way someone else experiences the world, and not because you just want to poke and prod, people won't be easily offended. Usually it's a good idea to ask general questions, instead of personal ones (e.g. 'Do asexuals still have sex?' instead of 'Do you still have sex?'). You are already doing a good job at that, but I thought I'd mention it so that you're less nervous about asking questions next time? :)

 

I'm first going to copy-paste an explanation I wrote a while ago, because it's a lot and I'm not retyping everything (Ignore any snark you find in there, I wrote it to someone who wasn't nearly as accepting of NB's as you are):

 

Spoiler

Transgender:

Denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex.

But what is meant by 'sense of personal identity and gender'? In this next bit I'll lay out some of the theories around what 'gender identity' means.

  • Sex is whether you’re biologically male, female or intersex.
  • Gender is psychological, not biological, and should be separated from sex entirely. From here on, I’m going to leave sex out of the equation.

There are a lot of different aspects to gender:

  • Gender roles/norms/expectations are unwritten rules society has for how men and women should behave. (Men can't wear make-up. Crying is for girls. Women shouldn't be too assertive.) These are not part of an individual's identity. They are part of a society's culture.
  • Gender expression is what your gender appears to be to other people. (Includes gendered things like clothing, colors, make-up, mannerisms, tone of voice, way of walking, gestures while talking, how intensely emotions are expressed etc)
  • Gender identity is a very complicated concept and it is the core of what we are talking about when we’re discussing trans issues. Before you can know what ‘transgender’ is, you need to know what ‘gender identity’ is. 

So there are two main theories on what 'gender identity' is.

 

First you've got the (in my opinion outdated) theory put forward by Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir and the like. They resist the idea that any aspect of gender identity can be innate. As de Beauvoir says "One isn't born a woman, one becomes a woman." This basically means that you feel like a woman because it's what you're used to. You behave like a woman because that's what's socially acceptable. In this view people act how they're supposed to act according to the gender roles in their culture. The constant repetition of doing what they're supposed to do gets etched into their brains and becomes their gender identity. For Butler and de Beauvoir, gender identity is the internalization of culturally imposed gender norms and expectations.

 

Then there's a newer theory about gender identity. This one builds on the first one and accepts it as partially correct, but asserts that gender identity is also partially innate. If it wasn't, then it would logically follow that trans people simply can’t exist, because your gender identity would entirely depend on what you were raised to be.

Joan Roughgarden, a transgender evolutionary biologist who wrote a whole book on the science of lgbt identities, is a proponent of this one. According to her, ‘gender identity’ is a deep-seated sense of self that's been established from the time you were born. In her book 'Evolution's Rainbow', she writes:

 

I envision gender identity as a cognitive lens. When a baby opens his or her eyes after birth and looks around, whom will the baby emulate and whom will he or she merely notice? Perhaps a male baby will emulate his father or other men, perhaps not, and a female baby her mother or other women, perhaps not. I imagine that a lens in the brain controls who to focus on as a “tutor.” Transgender identity is then the acceptance of a tutor from the opposite sex. Degrees of transgender identity, and of gender variance generally, reflect different degrees of single-mindedness in the selection of the tutor’s gender. The development of gender identity thus depends on both brain state and early postnatal experience, because brain state indicates what the lens is, and environmental experience supplies the image to be photographed through that lens and ultimately developed immutably into brain circuitry. Once gender identity is set, like other basic aspects of temperament, life proceeds from there.

 

So a cisgender female baby instinctively emulates women, a transgender baby with a female body instinctively emulates men, and a non-binary baby instinctively emulates both. Simple. 

 

The innate part of gender identity is the part that decides which of the two genders (or both or neither) you will instinctively emulate during your life. The behavior of that group of people then supplies you with the learned aspect of your gender identity. So the innate part tells you which gender(s) to imitate and the learned part is what kind of behavior you're actually imitating and internalizing.  

 

Gender identity as Roughgarden describes it, is a deep-seated, immutable sense of belonging or kinship to a gender (either to the social construct or to the group of people). A sense of "I belong with those people, or the other group, or maybe both or not really with either."

You can't change this sense of belonging by raising someone differently. There have been cases where a doctor made a mistake while circumcising a baby boy and accidentally cut of the entire penis. For example, there’s David Reimer. That boy was raised as a girl instead, from birth, but still always felt like a boy. They had to tell him when he was 14 because it was just not working.

 

Gender identity is at least partially innate and biological, not just cultural, so the argument that your gender identity can't be anything but 'man' or 'woman' because that's the only two genders that exist in our culture is not applicable. Gender identity =/= gender as a social construct. Gender identity is to which degree you instinctively identify with those two culturally established genders.

 

Some brains are simply somewhere in between male and female. Some people feel a sense of belonging to both genders, and others to neither.

Spoiler

Wm1KqL3.png

 

My guess is agender people don't feel at home in either group, genderfluid babies could emulate their dad during some activities (like boxing) and their mom in other situations (like socializing), and neutrois people sort of feel stuck in between the two groups, but I don't know. The only way to know is to ask them. Our neurobiology science skills aren't advanced enough to read people's minds yet.

Gender Identity versus Gender Expression

Of course everyone has a feminine and a masculine side, but that's not what we're talking about here. For example, a man can be feminine, he can like wearing make-up and dresses, talk in a stereotypically feminine way, and still identify as a man. Is his feminine side a 'deep-seated sense of identity', 'a cognitive lens that determines which gender(s) a baby will emulate from the minute they're born'? I doubt it. I think it's gender expression, not gender identity. For a nonbinary person, that's different.

A nonbinary person is not someone who simply dislikes the gender role they're put into. A guy who likes to break gendered expectations by wearing dresses is a crossdresser, a drag queen or a gender-nonconforming person, not a nonbinary person. Those are terms for people who have non-standard gender expressions. A nonbinary person is a person who has this innate, deep-seated, unchangeable sense of belonging to both genders, or to neither. If their body or the social role people ascribe to them doesn't line up with their inner sense of what they are, this leads to dysphoria. Dysphoria is an integrally important sign of ‘transgenderness’.

 

Gender dysphoria is either a feeling of discomfort/distress with gendered aspects of your body (meaning you'd feel a need to change your body = transition) or a feeling of discomfort/distress because of what gender people perceive you to be (meaning you'd want to take steps in order to be perceived differently = transition).

Gender expression includes gendered things like clothing, make-up, mannerisms, tone of voice, way of walking, gestures while talking etc.

The innate part of gender identity doesn't have anything to do with any of those things.

 

Gender euphoria is the opposite of dysphoria, it's feeling extremely 'right' when you're seen by others as how you perceive yourself. Euphoria can also be the thing to clue people in on their gender identity, sometimes instead of dysphoria.

 

Are NB's trans?

 

                                                                Trans people

                                                       ↙                                  ↘

                                    binary trans people                nonbinary trans people

They're all trans.

 

Nonbinary people can transition, so even if you were (in my opinion incorrectly) basing your definition of ‘transgender’ on whether or not transition is possible, you still wouldn’t have a reason to say NB’s aren’t trans. NB’s can transition medically (through hormone treatment and surgery) as well as socially. Social transition isn't easy. It should be taken seriously. http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Social_Transition

 

An NB transitions for the same reasons a binary trans person transitions, in order to have their body reflect their inner selves more, and in order to be perceived differently. It's true that in this culture NB's won't 'pass' as their true gender, because not enough people know that nonbinary identities exist, so they won't automatically recognize someone as 'Oh, that person doesn't look quite male or female, they're probably nonbinary,' as they would (most of the time) correctly recognize a woman to be a woman and a man to be a man. However, that's a problem with our culture, not with nonbinary people.

 

'Binary trans' and 'nonbinary trans' are two different types of being trans. If individual nonbinary people don’t identify as trans, then there's probably a personal story for why they don't, or maybe they just aren’t aware that nb’s are trans, or maybe they’ve made the common mistake to confuse gender expression with gender identity and they’re actually gender-nonconforming. You won't know until you ask them.

 

NB's not identifying as trans is kind of like black feminists not identifying as feminists. Some black feminists don't identify as feminists because they don't feel represented by white feminism. They feel white feminists aren't committed enough to ending all forms of oppression, instead of just to ending sexism. I believe they call themselves womanists. They're feminists, but refuse to identify as such for personal or political reasons.

 

That's what it's like with nb's too. They're trans, but some refuse to identify as trans for personal or political reasons. These reasons are very diverse. For example, indigenous folks don't conceptualize their genders in the same way western societies do. It's not as medicalized or othered. Personally I could understand why they'd rather identify with the concepts they had before ours came along.

 

Okay, so now for the questions that weren't answered in that long ass essay.

 

1 hour ago, BTC said:

I believe intersex refers to someone who was born with the biological sex organs of both a male and female. People like this were previously referred to as 'hermaphrodites', which is a derogatory term nowadays?

Correct-ish. Someone who's intersex can also be born with XY chromosomes, but androgen insensitivity, which means they developed entirely as female. Or they can have XXY, or XYY, or it can be hormone related, or... There are a lot of different ways to be intersex, and it's not all related to genitals.

A hermaphrodite is, as far as I understand, someone who has both a penis and a vagina, which is not actually possible in real life, because it's the same tissue but in different shapes. So it's a derogatory way to refer to people, but also an incorrect one.

 

1 hour ago, BTC said:

what it means to he non-binary/agender (are they the same?). 

Agender is a type of nonbinary. All agender people are nonbinary, but not all nonbinary people are agender. Some nonbinary people are bigender, neutrois or genderfluid etc.

Nonbinary just means 'not binary'; does not fit within the two boxes society has provided. A cisgender woman has a binary gender identity, and so does a transgender man. 'Nonbinary' is basically the 'other' option in a multiple choice question.

'Agender' means (to me) that I am definitely not a man, and definitely not a woman. Those two words, when applied to me, make me feel dysphoric. 

 

1 hour ago, BTC said:

What does it feel like (I understand this is a difficult question to answer)?

How do you know you identify as non-binary? 

Yep, those are two difficult questions to answer, and the answers will differ wildly from person to person, so I'm going to tell you about my case. Another copy-paste for you! Again, written for someone else, but I have other things to do than retype my ridiculously long answers to questions about gender from random people on the internet :) 

Spoiler

To me being agender isn't feeling like you don't, or barely, have a gender identity, as in 'I don't care about gender, and I don't really feel like a man or a woman so I guess I'm agender,'  and it's also not simply a dislike of gender roles (who on earth likes gender roles? I mean, they're restrictive, and nobody likes being restricted.) Rather, it's a 'negative' gender identity, as in 'I have a very strong feeling of not being a man and not being a woman.'

 

This feeling is strong enough to give me heaps of both body and social dysphoria ever since I started growing boobs at the age of ten. I was convinced they were tumors and made my parents take me to the doctor for it, and after they'd become larger I wore sweaters every day for over two years, even when I could barely take the heat in summer, just to cover them up. I also didn't wear bras, because wearing those meant admitting that my boobs existed, which wasn't something I was willing to do. (To this day I can't go shopping for bras without tearing up). These. Things. Should. Not. Be. On. My. Body.) At the time I didn't understand why I felt this way, but I knew something was very wrong. I saw a documentary about people with some sort of dysmorphia disorder which made them want to cut off their own arms or legs because they didn't feel like they should be there and I thought I had that, except with boobs. (I have always felt like my boobs are just like lego-blocks attached to my real chest underneath, so even though I logically knew that was nonsense, I've still tried to just plop them off more times than I can count, including one painful but ultimately unsuccessful episode involving a pair of kitchen scissors). My parents made some negative comments about those people in the documentary so I kept silent.

 

This feeling is strong enough to make me feel like I don't really belong either with women or with men, because I don't intuitively understand girltalk or guytalk like I should if I was a girl or a guy. It's a fundamentally alienating experience. Ever since I was eleven I made a point out of it to dislike all that was girly and all that was boy'y (why is that not a word?). That wasn't a conscious decision I made, I just suddenly started hating all of that gendered stuff with a passion, even if I'd loved it before. I guess it was my way of distancing myself from both womanhood and manhood and telling the world not to categorize me as 'girl' or as 'boy' without actually having the vocabulary to do so. Being called a 'girl' or a 'lady' has upset me for as long as I can remember (for some reason 'sister' is fine ¯\_()_/¯).  It's sad because I lost a lot of the things I used to like this way. I loved pink, but it's been banished out of my life. I used to adore swimming and the underwater world is still my favorite place to be, but wearing bathing suits in front of people is just about the worst thing I can imagine.

 

The feeling is strong enough for me to not recognize myself in the mirror. I would look in the mirror and think "Who even is that? Shit is that what I look like?!" I've gotten better in the last couple of years, but when I was younger I used to think that I mistakenly lived in someone else's body. I knew it didn't make sense, but I caught myself thinking things like "If the girl who's actually supposed to inhabit this body saw how much I neglected it she'd be pissed!" (because obviously make-up and morning routines were not my thing) I don't tend to have that feeling anymore, thank gosh I recognize my face as my own now, but I still feel a huge disconnect with my body. It's uncomfortable. I wish I could take it off like a piece of clothing, and just exist without it. I want to be able to bike to the train station without constantly thinking of how people see me, without making myself as small and inconspicuous as possible in order to pass unnoticed. I want to stop feeling sick to my stomach whenever I feel my body move in ways it shouldn't be able to according to my inner sense of self whenever I hit a bump in the road. Quite literally, every pothole in the road is a source of dysphoria for me.

 

Most examples of dysphoria and 'feeling agender' will probably sound petty to most people, and I guess they are, but the thing is, they happen every day, all day long, and that builds up. In the end every little thing hurts. The metaphor I've used to describe this is that every little everyday gendered interaction is like a tiny rock that hits my body. By now my bruises have bruises and every new little thing hits a sore spot. It makes me want to lock myself in my room, close the blinds and crawl under the blankets. Being agender makes me feel helpless because I don't feel there's anything I can do to make the world see me the right way. People will always see me as male or female, no matter what I do, and I don't feel like have the right to get angry about that, or even to feel hurt by that, because it's not their fault, they mean well, they didn't know and they couldn't possibly know. Telling them will just open me up to more rocks thrown my way as they inevitably fail to understand, which I also cannot blame them for. It's a whole lot of hurt that nobody is to blame for. Anything I could do to improve my situation would be interpreted as 'militant' or 'pushy' or 'Oh her again, talking about trans people, we get it by now!' so now I mostly just shut up and take whatever comes at me. I'm sure that's not the best strategy, but I'm clean out of options.

 

At age 16 I started pulling myself out of what I think was probably a depression I'd had since I was 11 (yes, that's the same time at which my dysphoria began, but I also started going to a different school at that time, so I'm not sure what caused it.) and at that point I started actively copying girls because I wanted to finally fit in. Being myself hadn't worked out, so I started living by the motto 'fake it 'till you make it'. Well I faked the hell out of it and successfully developed feminine mannerisms that I now can't get rid of anymore, and it worked! People bought it!

 

I did this until I was about 20 - 21, at which point I had started to feel like I didn't even know who I was anymore because I hadn't acted like myself for so long. I felt like I'd lost my ability to be myself and I didn't know how to fix it, or if I even should, because being myself had never worked out for me anyway. At that point I had been questioning my gender for about a year and I'd given myself the label 'demigirl' (even though identifying myself with something that ended in 'girl' made me want to puke), because I knew I had feminine mannerisms/ ways of talking so I didn't feel justified in claiming a label that said I wasn't feminine at all. Realizing that acting like a girl had been just that, ácting like a girl, freed me up to finally feel justified in taking up the label I had actually, secretly in the back of my mind, been identifying with most closely, 'agender.' And I added AFAB (assigned female at birth) in to let people know that I've been raised/socialized as a girl, because that's what feels most fair to me. That's me.

 

The moment in which I finally allowed myself to say 'I am agender' (to myself) was such a powerful moment that I can't even describe it. I cried and wanted to scream with joy and I could barely contain myself. I guess that's what gender euphoria (opposite of gender dysphoria) feels like. It just felt extremely right. It was a eureka moment for a problem I hadn't been able to solve for over a decade.

 

I am now 23 and still not out of the woods. I'm not out to anyone but my sister and a handful of close friends. Being called 'she' feels as alien to me as 'he' or 'they', to the point that I don't know which I prefer so I've pretty much just given up on the pronoun issue. Call me anything. Whatever.

I know I want these things that are attached to my chest removed, but I also know that gender therapists will probably interrogate the heck out of me to prove I'm trans enough to get that treatment, and I know I'll get tons of shit from the 'I identify as an attack helicopter'-crowd if I do get it and I'm just not ready for any of that.

One point of light is that my Chinese name (I major in Chinese and am called by my Chinese name more often than my real name) is gender neutral and I am loving it to bits. I wish I could use that name all the time, but since it's Chinese and hard to pronounce that's a bit much to ask (Laurann is an approximation of that name, but that's still too feminine for my liking), and as long as I get to be in Chinese class it's good enough for now. We'll see what happens after I graduate from my master's program next semester. It's scary, but I guess I can't hide from the real world forever.

 

(This was written about a year ago, I'm now 24, but other than that, it's still accurate. Except, I wear binders now and they help a lot, I'm sort of out to my parents, and I'm actually on the waiting list for the gender team, so I'm a bit less defeatist than I was.)

 

Also, here look, this is fun: 

Spoiler

4bd817362e2c2417236489a81c89eab2.jpg

 

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To me, being non-binary means you don't find the general binary sex/gender to be apt for you. I don't think lacking a feeling of gender always count because plenty of cis people only go by their sex out of convenience and many do say they feel nothing otherwise.

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@Laurann, I just relate so much, there's nothing more to say. Your experience is obviously a bit different than mine, but the overall feeling is the same.

 

About Roughgarden's theory, I think it sounds good; it has the merit of actually answering the 'nature or nurture' fake binary (and don't we hate them fake binaries ;)). I might add that this model must be significantly altered in the case of autistic people (internalisation of social constructs doesn't work well with us ^^') but the lens concept is a very good idea imo. 

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Thank you all for your replies, they are very helpful. It is certainly interesting to read different people's views on the subject and I was surprised at how similar all three of them are to be honest. I must admit, I thought, as the subject of gender can be complex, that there would be more variation in certain areas of the explanation (all of which, of course, would be just as valid).

 

@Laurann 

Thank you for taking the time to find your previous posts on the subject! Your in-depth explanations were extremely helpful, while it is a lot to get my head around, I now feel much better about my understanding of the subject. Additionally, can I just say that you formulated your explanation perfectly; you answered all my questions and even gave me more information on other gender identities. I literally couldn't ask for more, haha.

The theories you included are particularly interesting and I think these are the parts that actually gave me a base of understanding.

 

Gosh, apologies if it sounds like I'm rating your answer; I was just pretty impressed to be honest, I often find it difficult to understand things straight away, but it all made sense to me.

 

@PoeciMeta

Apologies if this is rather forward, I was wondering if I could ask you a potentially personal question regarding gender/sexuality and autism?

I am currently going through the process of being tested for autism as an adult and am on the waiting list for the 'big' test. Things (in general) have always been confusing to me, though especially in terms of sexuality etc, but they are even more so now that I have this potential diagnosis. I understand autism is different for everyone, but I was wondering if I could perhaps get your own opinion on the subject (especially when it comes to asexuality).

 

Again, I apologise for asking. And no worries if you aren't comfortable with it! It is a very personal thing to ask.

 

Thanks again to all three of you! More replies on this thread are always welcome :)

(Sorry I can't seem to avoid rambling).

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Laurann covered the general part of it quite well, so I'll just answer the personal perspective questions, since those vary.

 

What does it feel like (I understand this is a difficult question to answer)? I'm agender, which as covered above is a subset of nonbinary. I feel very uncomfortable whenever I'm put into either binary gender box (being AFAB, I get the female one more often). Not only do I really not like being referred to with female pronouns (or male pronouns), but it has always taken me a moment to realize that I'm meant. Same goes with honorifics. My physical dysphoria is mostly focused around my chest, which I've hated ever since I was in my early teens; from fourteen or so on right up until I went to college I wore nothing but baggy t-shirts over long-sleeved shirts in the hope that I could just kind of forget about it, and refused to go out and get a bra until I was doing more exercise again. These days, I mostly wear sports bras, but I have a couple of binders that I wear whenever I'm going out of the house and having a particularly bad day with that. I can't wear them too long (combination of sensory issues and old injuries), but they help a lot. I'd definitely get top surgery if my insurance covered it and it was 100% safe, and I'm considering it someday anyhow.

 

How do you know you identify as non-binary? It took me a long time. I went through several phases: basically ignoring gender completely as a child (being homeschooled and in the environment I was in, I could do that); wondering whether I was binary trans as a teen, but coming to the sure conclusion that I would feel just as uncomfortable with the other set of sexual characteristics; angrily disavowing everything to do with gender as an elaborate collection of stereotypes (sidenote: even here I still felt being trans was valid, I just wasn't good at explaining it within this framework); and finally realizing that hey, no, gender is a thing, it's just not a thing that I have or will probably ever fully understand. I think realizing that I'm ace and aro was the first step to this, because once I already knew that there were some things that other people definitely experience like that and I don't it was easier to come to the conclusion that gender was one of them. Now that I've finally come out to almost everyone about it, and I'm being referred to neutrally and everything, I feel way better and less stressed in social situations - which in retrospect would, I suppose, be the last bit of confirmation.

 

Autism/interalized social constructs aspect: I've always struggled with the false idea that I'm the normal, baseline sort of human, and a lot of my realizations about myself have come in the form of realizing that I'm actually totally not the baseline human. I don't really have interalized social constructs. I have slowly, over time, built kind of a set of elaborate internal emulations routines for social interaction and thus to some extent social constructs, but they're slow to access and frequently malfunction, so mostly I'm just left not understanding that kind of thing at all. Therefore, my go-to reaction has tended to be "hah, nobody like that, that's a stereotype" rather than "oh, yes, all these other people are doing it and maybe I should to". I'm probably not explaining that very well, but that's my experience of it. I just don't get the social rules or social constructs until they've been explained to me, and people don't often stop to explain them, they just assume that people will pick up on them.

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@BTC

Sure, you can ask me. 

I'm an aromantic ace, agender, and have been formally diagnosed with autism quite recently; and I too find some things about gender and sexuality really confusing. I don't tend to think about sexuality much, since it's kind of a non-issue and in fact I'd rather not think about it for too long (I'm kinda repulsed by it...) but I think about gender a lot because, well, dysphoria. What do you want to know? If you think it might be a bit too personal, PM is always an option. 

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@BTCOh there's one thing I forgot to add to my previous post! It's minor, but I just wanted to say that most intersex people are not nonbinary, so those two identities are not necessarily related. I don't know if you thought they were, but just in case, I thought I should mention it :)

I do not have statistics on percentage of intersex people who are nonbinary, and the percentage could very well be higher than in the general population, but yeah, there are a lot of intersex people with binary gender identities out there too.

 

And don't worry so much, you don't have to apologize for asking questions :) 

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Just so you know, not all trans people actually transition. For many reasons. Health, can't afford it, don't feel the need to, etc. Being trans isn't just binary either. Hence, why non-binary people are under the umbrella. So, it only being mtf or ftm is incorrect. Also, many people are starting to steer clear of those terms and use amab (assigned male at birth) or afab (assigned female at birth) instead. Since they were always their gender; it's simply different than the one that was forced on them at birth. Intersex people don't necessarily have both types of sex organs. There's a lot of variation. I've heard that some seem to have one type, but their hormones may not 'match' or other aspects. Not all intersex people are trans. 

 

Non-binary is someone who is not entirely a man or a woman all the time. This encompasses a lot of people. They could be genderfluid and flow between man and woman, but they are not those all of the time. Genderfluid people can be fluid between many more genders, too. There are bigender people that may be both a man and woman at the same time. Since they're not simply one or the other, they are non-binary. They can also have other 'combos' of genders. There are people who are demigender, meaning they're partly a certain gender, thus if that part is binary, they are not entirely that and fall into the non-binary label. I'm agender myself (afab), which means I don't have a gender. There's nothing there. I see gender in other people, but internally...nothing. I've even asked people what it was actually like to feel a gender, and I either couldn't relate or they couldn't answer. I don't lean masculine or feminine either, which apparently confuses people. I tend to explain how I feel about those as pretty and cool masks. I may like aspects of both, but I don't identify with them. I'm just me. 

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