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What it feels like to be trans, genderqueer or genderless


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I just see gender and sex as a social construct I have always thought gender was stupid. I just don't see the point in either. I just described my gender as non-binary as that is kind of the biggest thing I can put in under bit really I just think gender is stupid. I also do get dysphoria though both physical and social. I guess I could describe it as a feeling of ditachment and alienation from my own body, and just panic. 

Ge

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I'm in somewhat of a strange situation, I'm just gonna take a shot in the dark here to see if people can help me somehow.. For context, I've been through the whole "wait am i trans" questioning ordeal years ago, way before I discovered I was ace and came out of it reassured that I in fact wasn't trans at all. Later discovering that asexuality is a thing really cleared all of it up for me and the ace guy identity really feels fitting (after all the months of second-guessing at least lol).

However sometimes, for a couple days every 3-4 months maybe, I experience what I can only describe as body-confusion? Like societally i still want to be seen as a guy, I wouldn't want to wear girl's clothes or anything like that, but i feel like i should have a female body.. It's very strange, looking back on it I sometimes feel like I'm a trans guy who happened to be born into the "right" male body, as weird as that thought sounds. And it only happens sometimes, and then goes away without a trace a few days later. Lately it's been rapidly fluctuating between being firmly cis and wondering where my boobs are, sometimes in the span of minutes.

 

I have no Idea what this means for me, my first thought was that I'm probably Genderfluid in a way, does it sound like that to you? I'm pretty lost and confused here

 

(also sorry if this might be in the wrong thread, i don't wander to this part of aven often)

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On 1/31/2020 at 7:47 AM, Sun444 said:

I'm in somewhat of a strange situation, I'm just gonna take a shot in the dark here to see if people can help me somehow.. For context, I've been through the whole "wait am i trans" questioning ordeal years ago, way before I discovered I was ace and came out of it reassured that I in fact wasn't trans at all. Later discovering that asexuality is a thing really cleared all of it up for me and the ace guy identity really feels fitting (after all the months of second-guessing at least lol).

However sometimes, for a couple days every 3-4 months maybe, I experience what I can only describe as body-confusion? Like societally i still want to be seen as a guy, I wouldn't want to wear girl's clothes or anything like that, but i feel like i should have a female body.. It's very strange, looking back on it I sometimes feel like I'm a trans guy who happened to be born into the "right" male body, as weird as that thought sounds. And it only happens sometimes, and then goes away without a trace a few days later. Lately it's been rapidly fluctuating between being firmly cis and wondering where my boobs are, sometimes in the span of minutes.

 

I have no Idea what this means for me, my first thought was that I'm probably Genderfluid in a way, does it sound like that to you? I'm pretty lost and confused here

 

(also sorry if this might be in the wrong thread, i don't wander to this part of aven often)

That sounds a lot like what I've heard genderfluid people say about their experiences.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Limerence-Or-Longing

me coming out to as brother Non-binary (and Ace) 

 

me: so you know how Legendary Pokémon aren’t male or female? 

 

Older Bro: “They can’t be make babies at the daycare either!” 

 

Me: Dude you’re gonna flip when you hear this. 

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For me it was like a steep hill.

At the top - Society: "You are girl".

Me, rolling down hill: "Well yes, but actually no".

Also me, rolling of the bottom of the hill into the genderless abyss: "I nailed it".

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hello! I liked reading everyone's opinions and perspectives. I was initially raised to be feminine. And for awhile I thought something is wrong with me because I was inherently feminine. I loved to rough house, get dirty, and other things my mom had found too masculine. I didn't believe I could be nonbinary. No one had talked about it or seemed comfortable enough to see the phrase being used. 

 

Currently, I identify as nonbinary, but biologically female. I've begun to express my femininity and masculinity through my clothes and mannerisms and I haven't been happier in a long time. I am happy to be the way I am without society assigning who i am based on their two categories. Thank you all for being who you are and supporting others alike. 

 

source.gif

 

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1 hour ago, RoBoZaKi said:

Hello! I liked reading everyone's opinions and perspectives. I was initially raised to be feminine. And for awhile I thought something is wrong with me because I was inherently feminine. I loved to rough house, get dirty, and other things my mom had found too masculine. I didn't believe I could be nonbinary. No one had talked about it or seemed comfortable enough to see the phrase being used. 

 

Currently, I identify as nonbinary, but biologically female. I've begun to express my femininity and masculinity through my clothes and mannerisms and I haven't been happier in a long time. I am happy to be the way I am without society assigning who i am based on their two categories. Thank you all for being who you are and supporting others alike. 

 

source.gif

 

That's so nice to hear! 😊 I relate to a lot of that, in fact~

Cool gif, too, where does it come from? 

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7 minutes ago, PoeciMeta said:

That's so nice to hear! 😊 I relate to a lot of that, in fact~

Cool gif, too, where does it come from? 

Thanks! I just typed in "non binary gif" on Google and it was one of the images. There were a lot of other great ones but I liked that these characters only smile after they feel comfortable in the body and clothes they switched to. I'm happy to know you are on the site! This is a very straightforward community (badum tiss). I make bad jokes. 

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I'm still trying to find out what gender means. I don't feel masculine or feminine, neither has ever been part of me or my interests. I've just kinda gone along with my body. I cna't even tell what masculine is supposed to feel like, but i don't know that I experience it very strongly at all. So I just kinda plod along with myself in my own world. I don't really care enough to strongly identify as anything, and I guess that is the problem. I feel happier just not participating in the entire mess.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Velvet Eden

I just want people to see me as a person, not categorize me as a girl and treat me in a certain way according to that. I hate that just treat me like a person! My goal is to have people not be able to tell my gender when they see me on the street. Like being called young lady makes me eternally cringe, but being called young woman makes me just want to  puke. The way I feel in my head is not male or female. I hate my chest and I want it gone. At least I have binders to use for the time being. My mind is genderless.

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On bad days, like I'm wearing a giant Mickey Mouse costume and performing as Mickey Mouse for a paycheck and health insurance. 

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51 minutes ago, Sora Lawlight said:

I just want people to see me as a person, not categorize me as a girl and treat me in a certain way according to that. I hate that just treat me like a person

I've been wondering what part of my gender identity is actually effected by my sexual orientation, what is caused by societal expectations of sexes and what is actually "pure gender". A part of me hates "being treated as a woman" since it can have certain sexual expectations (contradiction caused by my aroaceness), or gendered stereotypes (societal expectations). Tbh, I still don't know if I feel better wearing unisex non-reveal clothes due to my body or sexual orientation. My guess, both have effect on it :) 

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  • 1 month later...
On 3/6/2020 at 2:40 PM, naakka said:

I've been wondering what part of my gender identity is actually effected by my sexual orientation, what is caused by societal expectations of sexes and what is actually "pure gender". A part of me hates "being treated as a woman" since it can have certain sexual expectations (contradiction caused by my aroaceness), or gendered stereotypes (societal expectations). Tbh, I still don't know if I feel better wearing unisex non-reveal clothes due to my body or sexual orientation. My guess, both have effect on it :) 

Everything's intersectional.  It's not really possible to dissect your identity and say for certain that "x is due to y".

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  • 3 weeks later...

I feel the exact same total lack of connection towards every gender. Being gendered by others can be pretty uncomfortable to me, and I experience dysphoria around anything that can affect people's perception/assumptions of my gender (body parts, hair, voice etc).

I feel like I was trained to act throughout early childhood, but was given the wrong role when I hit my teens - and now I just have to keep acting the part or it makes others really uncomfortable

 

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Interference

short answer: i've felt like it my entire life, i have no connection to any of the genders presented and i feel more comfortable saying that i'm agender than saying i'm a woman or a man, nonbinary is a term i use for simplification.

 

long answer is below the spoilers.

Spoiler

i dunno how to describe being genderless [as far as i'm concerned] because it's pretty much living without any connection to a gender, men, women, or otherwise. i do share the sentiment some have in this thread of wanting to be seen as a person regardless of my gender - though that also have quite a bit of other, personal issues mixed in.

 

i'm comfortable enough in my own body, but if i had my way and the technology allows it to i'd want something a bit...more in my lower area. my chest is alright, though there are days when i wish it was smaller for a reason i'll list down below. i feel more dysphoric over what society wants me to be, however. i feel really, really glad when i get called 'half-man, half-girl' or a 'man in disguise' because well, it's closer to what i feel in a binary world. like 'yeah, i am that person, what are you gonna do about it?' type of feeling.

 

i've always felt like this growing up, really. my interests have always been mixed gender wise - i'm both into technology and makeup, dolls and robots, farming and homemaking, cutesy and strategy-based games. same as clothes - i regularly shop and wear men's clothes, but when i can find women's clothes in my size i snag them up, i wear men's shoes because my feet are simply too big for women's shoes that are not custom-made here, and generally my fashion sense is neutral. i'm basically a female in physical form only - my personality, interests, and the like are ambiguous enough to make me a male-coded person in online situations.

 

it does distress me a lot that i don't feel 'womanly' enough sometimes - i have the body for it, then why i don't feel like one? there's always a degree of separation from other women's experiences and no matter how much i try i just...can't get being a woman, i guess? i know the social roles, i know the usual stereotypes, and i can do that if i were forced to - but for me they're just, acting. i'm just doing what it takes to make people happy and i can do that, but if i were left to my own devices i will try to mix and match traits and roles of both binary genders to make 'my role'.

 

i guess my issue is that i feel dysphoria for being genderless, not being a woman. instead of proving that i'm agender [that i've felt and then had a word for my entire life], i want to prove that i'm just a woman - suppressing any and all thoughts that doesn't fit that narrative into the deep sea, i tried to just mask those feelings by telling that i'm just a quirky girl, that everyone have these feelings, that i'm being a snowflake and therefore bad - but well, here i am, several years after that attempt, here and facing it once again.

 

perhaps it's time to admit and accept that part as myself.

 

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AmusedSkeptic

For me, female fits like clothes that are a too tight and male fits like clothes that too loose. I don’t want people to see me as my gender, but as me. Being outside of the binaries gives me more freedom to express myself. 

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15 hours ago, Interference said:

it does distress me a lot that i don't feel 'womanly' enough sometimes - i have the body for it, then why i don't feel like one? there's always a degree of separation from other women's experiences and no matter how much i try i just...can't get being a woman, i guess? i know the social roles, i know the usual stereotypes, and i can do that if i were forced to - but for me they're just, acting. i'm just doing what it takes to make people happy and i can do that, but if i were left to my own devices i will try to mix and match traits and roles of both binary genders to make 'my role'.

I used to feel a lot like this in the past. Then one day I just decided I'm done acting and started to present the way I felt right (pretty androgynous & non-revealing). After that decision it was more distressing since it became more visible how much I actually had been pretending to make others happy. I felt like a fake. Nowadays I'm just chill (well, if we don't count celebrations and what to wear ;)).

 

Still, I don't regret the phase when I wore just what was expected. I didn't know better, and the younger me wouldn't probably have been mentally ready to answer all the questions about my deviancy. It was a sort of a latency phase, I was waiting for getting confident enough to show myself to the world. I like to think about it as my "cosplay phase", my clothes felt like a costume. Sometimes it was actually fun, even if most of the time just not motivating. But I sometimes cringe when I think about all the form-fitting women's clothes I used to wear and didn't even realize how sexual they looked in the eyes of others (like, nothing more than normal women's clothes, but still way too revealing for my taste). 

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Celyn: The Lutening

@Interference Internalized transphobic is hard to overcome because society doesn't want us to. 

The "cosplay phase" is tolerable and even fun, but it's necessary to take the mask off and be our true selves sometimes.

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1 hour ago, Celyn said:

@Interference Internalized transphobic is hard to overcome because society doesn't want us to. 

The "cosplay phase" is tolerable and even fun, but it's necessary to take the mask off and be our true selves sometimes.

Yea. Even though you could keep going wearing the mask, it's really not living. It can be bearable and enjoyable even at times, but it also makes you to dissociate yourself from the reality. Which really isn't healthy in the long run.

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Celyn: The Lutening

I found that I could fight the dissociation a little by reframing things, e.g. had to wear skirt at school - "This is a kilt"

Shark week cramps - "I am a Viking warrior who has been stabbed in the stomach."

 

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1 hour ago, Celyn said:

I found that I could fight the dissociation a little by reframing things, e.g. had to wear skirt at school - "This is a kilt"

Shark week cramps - "I am a Viking warrior who has been stabbed in the stomach."

 

Yeah, imagination can bring some aid to deal with stuff. I too actually used the "men have worn skirt-like clothes thorough the history" trope to help myself feel better -_-

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Interference

@Celyn @naakka thanks for the insight! i actually have never really thought that i might be transphobic to myself, though now that it's on the table it kinda makes sense.

 

i have experienced hanging around spaces that are less than positive or even toxic towards trans and nb people especially, so it might've stuck onto me without me even realizing it. this was when i tried to self-deny myself into oblivion a few years ago, wishing that if i can be like them then i'd be happy, that i'd finally be someone that's considered normal and all that things. 

 

my experiences are more social than physical, if that makes sense. i'd begrudgingly wear skirts if i had to, but it's more about practicality and fashion than anything else. my fashion sense have settled on neutral clothes with a bit of feminine clothings here and there [my sleeping clothes are almost all gowns because they're very comfortable]. my parents (who i still live with) are at least resigned to the fact that it's what i like and generally leave me alone. 

 

yet i still feel....dread and general fear from accepting that i am agender, that i don't feel any sort of affinity to my sex's assigned gender. i know there are people out there that hate me for simply existing, and i have to pretend i'm just a quirky woman for them. this whole concept of woman-ness is as alien to me as the concept of male-ness and hell, even gender in general. yet i feel pressured to embrace my womanhood, solely based on the fact i have the 'woman organs' by sex and i'm supposed to love them. which i don't.

 

i don't know what being a woman means in the first place even though i am affected by the issues of it. i generally have neutral feelings about those parts, with the exception of my uterus [i do not vibe with it]. i don't know what makes me different from other girls that actually like being a girl because i'd loathe it if i had to be seen as a cis girl my entire life. and this have somehow manifested into the thought that i'm broken somehow, or indoctrinated, or whatever and to this day it's still there. i guess i am, if we're looking at it from a certain perspective - but i'm trying my damndest to not let it get to me too much.

 

on a lighter-ish note, i do wish i could get a kilt that fits me somewhere, someday.

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16 hours ago, Interference said:

this was when i tried to self-deny myself into oblivion a few years ago, wishing that if i can be like them then i'd be happy, that i'd finally be someone that's considered normal and all that things. 

I think most LGBT people think that way at some point in their lives. I too used to think that I should just try harder to look normal. Even if I didn't feel like I was having the struggle alone; thorough high school and college I seriously thought that no-one really wants to look like a hot girl and it's just an on-going game to prove your talents in representing yourself. I really thought no-one would genuinely want to look like that if it was up to them. So, in a some strange way, I felt the "we're all in this together" kind of peer support, that probably never actually existed - at least not to the extent I tought it did. And in this weird delusional context, I sometimes felt even proud of myself, how well I managed to "play the dress up game".

 

I actually never wanted to change myself (even though back in the days I didn't even know my gender or sexual orientation, I just knew I was different). I just thought I could deal with creating another image of myself. I grew up in very cishet-normative environment, where people only knew gays existing and were hateful or neutral towards them, never supportive. Anyhow, a part of me wanted to remain sheltered by wearing the mask long after LGBT people were better recognized, since I just felt like I personally wasn't ready.

 

17 hours ago, Interference said:

my experiences are more social than physical, if that makes sense.

Well, frankly, my experiences are mostly physical, revolving around my body's appearance and how I look to myself. Only very recently it ever game to my mind how people actually might interpret my gender. I guess that have something to do with me possibly being on the Autism spectrum (self-diagnosed), so the social side of gender really isn't the greatest deal for me. I never really got the idea of "gender is a social construct". Basically I feel like I represent how I do to please myself, and if people around interpret me correctly, it's a nice bonus. 

 

17 hours ago, Interference said:

i know there are people out there that hate me for simply existing, and i have to pretend i'm just a quirky woman for them. this whole concept of woman-ness is as alien to me as the concept of male-ness and hell, even gender in general. yet i feel pressured to embrace my womanhood,

You don't have to change overnight (like I did). You can take small steps, try to represent yourself just a little bit differently, let it be a new haircut, one cloth with your preferred style per outfit etc. By that way you can see how it makes yourself feel, and how the environment reacts, on a more gradual way. About the pressure, I guess just time helps when you've had enough time to process things to be confident enough, no matter what people around you think. Of course if there's a danger of real violence, you should be more careful.

17 hours ago, Interference said:

on a lighter-ish note, i do wish i could get a kilt that fits me somewhere, someday.

That'd be a great start :)

 

17 hours ago, Interference said:

i don't know what being a woman means in the first place even though i am affected by the issues of it. i generally have neutral feelings about those parts, with the exception of my uterus [i do not vibe with it]. i don't know what makes me different from other girls that actually like being a girl because i'd loathe it if i had to be seen as a cis girl my entire life. and this have somehow manifested into the thought that i'm broken somehow, or indoctrinated

I can relate to this, to some extent. I've also felt like broken or wrong, just because I felt like I couldn't meet any expectations people had for me. Though as I said above, I really don't recognize people seeing me as a woman, or I don't pay attention to it, so I don't struggle with it that much. Most of the time I also forget I even have a baby making machine inside me, like it really doesn't seem likely to me that I would be able to reproduce by giving a birth. Rationally I know that's what my body probably is capable of, but it still doesn't seem real somehow. If I think about it as an actual possibility, it makes me cringe. So I guess I still dissociate from my body to some extent, even if from the outside I feel more myself than ever before.

 

Anyhow, I wish you all the best. I believe that eventually things will be alright if you're just patient and are merciful to yourself.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The new Official Gender Selection:

 

Lawful Good

Alkaline

Floral

[REDACTED]

Theropoda

Whole Grains

Earthbender

Goblin

Sponsored by Audible

*Lightsaber noises*

Bees

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Interference

if there's sponsored by audible, then i guess skillshare and squarespace should be up there too

maybe in a sponsored by spectrum?

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Tag yourself, Im Alkaline. 

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Celyn: The Lutening

I'm bees.

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Interference

Definitely [REDACTED]. My pronouns are [DATA EXPUNGED]. 

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This is kinda late but someone mentioned national women day to me at a point and I just couldn't relate o-o Like I felt super disconnected

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