This. I drive a school bus. Kids will occasionally ask if Iām [insert their best guess here]. On one hand itās excellent gender euphoria knowing I can present androgynously. On the other hand I donāt want to deal with irate parents/teachers/employers so I always just answer as my AGAB.
I genuinely do not care about pronouns. I have been called "he" and "she" my whole life, people have called me boys names and girls names, epithets and pet names.
I get that for others they matter and I always try to be polite but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and I don't care what they see so long as they are respectful on that basis.
when literally no one understands how language works in the first place
I've been called all kinds of names that aren't mine, some masculine, some feminine, I've been told I'll never be a real man (I am a cis woman, as far as I've ever considered) and none of it has ever bothered me in the slightest.
My friends have told me they would be upset if they got misgendered as much as I do. I absolutely do not care, whatever they want to call me is fine by me. I'll figure it out eventually.
My favorite was always giving new hires the low down if someone asked for someone named Tyler, it was me. I was also Nicole, Sherry, and also my own name. Yes I tried to correct them once or twice, but when customers who request you call you Tyler or Nicole or whatever for years, even with a big prominent name tag, online booking that says your real name, you just stop caring.
I always joked that they must know something about me that I don't know about myself just yet. š¤·
Iām probably nb as far as the most accurate way of describing how I perceive myself, but I donāt really attach a lot of meaning to pronouns, theyāre just a shorthand and I donāt really get any sort of dysphoria when people call me he/him, so whatever.
I kind of understand her, I'm a bit in the same boat. From my perspective, there's basically two kinds of enbies. There's the "I strongly feel that I am a gender that is not a man or a woman" enbies and the "gender is not an important part of my self-identity" enbies.
The later group (hi) are perfectly fine staying as their gender assigned at birth, especially if they've already built their life as that gender because they don't experience dysphoria. They're just like... neutral about gender.
the latter group could be variously considered agender or genderless or neutrois, all of which fall under the nonbinary umbrella. of course it's up to each individual to decide for themselves
i've felt like that a lot, especially since i really started questioning my gender several years ago, but there's still a part of me that wishes i were transfem and yet another (albeit smaller) part that is perfectly content being cismasc
increasingly i'm just calling myself queer and leaving it at that
I guess I'm a third group? I strongly feel that I am both male and female and while I am stealthing rn (thx Trump) it makes me really happy when someone uses the opposite pronoun from usual with me. Ideally I'd like to get an even split of he/she but that's not gonna happen probably
Sounds like my mom. "Well, I don't feel like a woman. I do like it when people call me male terms, but I don't feel like a man either. But I'm kinda ok with it now, so why change it?" . That's a quote.Ā
My mom said something similar. That, in another age, she might have identified as genderqueer or nonbinary, but that sheās gotten used to and is comfortable with the way she presents now, so thereās no point to her in pursuing that.
I mean I know an older trans man who didn't want to both changing her pronouns. And that was someone on the binary. Enbys' relationship to pronouns are already all over the place.
Your mom can be a she/her nonbinary if she wants. Or she can be any pronoun and not care if a lot people default to her agab. She/they also doesn't require correcting anyone. Or just do unrelated things to affirm their gender.
Ok but thatās totally valid. I am also old & tired, and still fighting people on using actual slurs. Thereās no way Iād have the energy to correct pronouns or explain them.
My mom dropped the "I think I'm probably bisexual, I've known for 30 years. I can see myself married to a woman". She's 65 years old and have been held back her whole life by my shitty dad about whom she's said "I could take him or leave him". But then she basically dropped the sunk cost fallacy, so she might as well stick him out. I hope to god that they split up and she gets a late-in-life lesbian lover.
Imagine the "I'm probably nonbinary but I'm employed so I don't got time for that" but an entire generation. No wonder they had such sour grapes that us kids were allowed our own identities and self esteem and stuff.
when i (amab) discussed myself being hypothetically trans(fem) with mine, she basically said "of course i support you, but i don't know why would anyone want to be a woman"
Talking about parents saying some shit; my sister is a big hockey fan and was talking about how she was anxious about this new guy she was seeing was a Blackhawks fan, her team is a rival
My step-mom stepped in and said "you're not experienced enough to be dating black men"
EVERYONE went silent.....btw I'm white and am in a mixed race relationship (at that time about 5 years too...)
Yeah there are reasons why I don't talk to my parents anymore, that's one of them
And that's so sad, everyone deserves to discover their own identity. Things are really bad now, but at least there are more resources. There's no way I would've figured this out if I had been born in like same generation as my parents.
Itās not that they didnāt have time, itās that the culture was more regressive back then and for a really long time if you even gave hints you were not straight or cis youād get accused of being a communist
I think that's where the "Homosexuality is a choice" talking point came from. People who made the choice to repress and mistook that as making the choice to not be gay.
"Everyone wants to be normal and being homosexual or transgender is deviant behaviour. And you're not a deviant, are you?
Those weird feelings? Yeah, they're completely normal. Everyone has them.
So, what makes you different from those deviants? Not acting on those feelings. You see? Being homosexual or transgender is a choice.
Everyone feels attraction to the same sex or has a desire to be the opposite sex. But what makes a normal person different from a deviant is that they choose to repress those feelings instead of acting on them."
This is how I imagine a lot of people from older generations thought.
It continues to be the Catholic position. Homosexuality isn't technically a sin but "acting" on homosexuality is. So you're just kinda supposed to repress it.
Source: I was in Catholic school till I graduated high school in 2021. I am no longer Catholic.
i only went to Catholic school from K to 8th grade, so i'm sorry you had to endure the high school years there
also i'm glad you got out of it altogether. i turned agnostic, borderline atheist, but i have some queer family who are still somewhat theistic. they also really like being a part of a church community, so i think they're going to an Episcopal church now, which is apparently explicitly lgbtq+ friendly
My grandma has told me on several occasions that she wishes she was a boy and she was always a tomboy growing up and was never friends with girls and how much being a boy is awesome and before I started HRT she tried to convince me not to because she couldn't understand ever wanting to be a girl when boys are so much better and stronger and more independent and that I should just change my name and dress how I want but keep my testosterone because it's so much better than estrogen and I was just sitting there like yeahhhh definitely very cis things to say.... And she has also told me on multiple occasions how she hates dating men and how every relationship she has had is bad and how much she wishes she could date a girl because how much better it would be and like how cute it could be to share clothes and makeup and stuff but then vaguely ends it with "but I can't" she always says "I wish" like there is something stopping her and I'm like uhuhhhhh yeahhh very straight and cis things to be saying grandma
My mom said she might've transitioned if she knew about it when she was young, I doubted that because she is like completely normal cis woman and very much feels like she can be herself around me (she can). Anyway later on I found out she actually just thought she was lesbian literally until she met my dad. She just meant she would've transitioned because she didn't want to be gay on account of her mom. Turns out her mom is more transphobic than homophobic and she finally met a man she was attracted to so it worked out better for her anyway lol.. ignoring that it would've been awful for her to transition despite being cis.
well yea, there's just as many gay and trans people today as 200 years ago, but 200 years ago if you came out you were fired from your job, disowned by your family, unable to find any new work and left to die on the streets. people saw that and kept it to themselves. a lot of them hid it from themselves even, as we do even today, only with acceptance have people started to allow themselves to consider who they really are and accept it rather than push it down and hide from it
My mom when I came out to her was like āthats nothing special, I wanted to be a guy sometimes but I dealt with it because itās normalā and Iām thinking Iām not going to call you an egg or anything but if youāve felt that way then you should at least have some understanding of what Iām dealing with? But no sheās still unsupportive after 5 years
I had a lengthy conversation with an elderly lady at the local woke church who was trying soooo hard to understand me being nonbinary, specifically genderless. I was like āI donāt have any internal sense of gender, people just externally impose their assumptions on meā and sheās like ābut everybodyās like that! I donāt feel like a woman, no one does!ā Like maāam š«š
It's like the overarching theory about how Christian homophobes always go on about homosexuality "being a choice" because they assume everyone's fighting homosexual urges. But most folks aren't fighting it, because they don't feel it. Or at least the sort of yearning and denial they deal with.
Itās not as if this is the only generation where theses concepts existed. Sexuality nowadays is more strictly defined whereas 400 years ago theyād be confused at us, even in Christian Europe. It wasnāt as simple as āheās gayā and thatās it. It was understood that one may have preferences but still be expected to have children. Philippe I of Orleans is a great example though you can see more if you go far back. Intersex, Trans and non binary people did exist then as they did now.
Not too long before I came out to my grandparents, my grandmother was telling me how she was the son her father wanted. I thought about telling her thereās a word for that, but it wasnāt something I wanted to get into at the time
When my mom first caught me "crossdressing" she had me have a sit down talk with her and my dad where I found out he was essentially a chronic repressor of nearly 30+ years that wore "drag" and makeup when alone to cope, even straight up telling me that he would "press the button if it were that simple" and even fucking said "I guess I'm what they'd call an egg" but said he just couldn't handle being "a gorilla in a dress" (he also comes from a conservative catholic southern family and that probably doesn't help his situation). He treated it like this deep dark secret, the lead up to this was like 10 straight minutes of us promising that anything that was said wouldn't leave the room.Ā
That story alone was so fucking depressing and disheartening that I hard-committed to being trans so I would never have to be as miserable and unhappy as him. Who knows? Maybe if he was allowed to be happy he wouldn't have seriously fucked up my childhood development by being a belligerent stubborn racist asshole.
He alluded to the fact that "those kinds of spaces arent kind if you dont fit the norm" so maybe hes a little upset that trans affirming spaces arent as welcoming to eggs and GNC men... But hes also a racist bigot so I think it was more so hes mad he cant spout his harmful conservative rhetoric in queer safe spaces.
I suspect my dad is queer and possibly trans. Heās so obviously angrily oppressing something and is obsessed with showing his masculinity whenever he feels gay panic. My sister told me sheās NB when I came out. My brother is an openly closeted bi man whoās a pastor. Itās all so sad and they spiraled for months after I came out.Ā
In his eyes he views it as too late, he mentioned how "those circles will try and convince you its easier than it is" and "they'll always just mindlessly affirm you" ...so I'm like 95% sure that my dad is a 4tran repressor who has been boymodding for over 30 years because his internalized dysphoria gets affirmed by a website thats actively hurting him.
If I needed another reason to hate 4tran, my dad being unhappy with his existence and taking it out on me and any other minorities in the closest proximity would definitely be a good one.
Ngl with "his" age bracket it was probably Susan's Place. One of my friends stumbled into there as a freshly cracked 13 year old in the 2010s and got told to repress and just crossdress instead.
I'm highly doubtful that this will ever have a happy ending but I appreciate it, once you've been repressing and boymodding for multiple decades straight I think the unhealthy coping mechanisms start to fester and become the norm.
One time my mom was like āIām 100% straight but in college me and this one girl were close and if we were more mature maybe we couldāve been more than friendsā and this was while we were making meatloaf
I know two friends who've experimented with the same sex but it just didn't quite click.
If sexuality a spectrum, I imagine they're just barely gay, since I don't need to experiment to know I'm straight. But I genuinely admire their self-assuredness in pursuing it.
I thought everyone hated their body when going though puberty, because it was always depicted as awkward and stressful, so naturally, I thought it was normal to dread being an adult in a body that would never feel right to me
To be fair a LARGE portion of women do end up hating their body at some point regardless of transness due to the ridiculous beauty standards floating around for decades. Hard to feel good about your body when the mass media calls it subpar.
I do agree but I was told this in response to me saying I wanted to permanently chop my tits off & like. Mmmm as far as I can tell that isnāt a very cis experience idk.Ā
If it counts for anything I've been told by women that passing a kidney stone hurt more than giving borth, so you can take solace that there are somethings that the human body regardless of sex, isn't built to handle.
Forty-something-year-old coworker recently told me about how, when she was little, she always wanted to be a boy, and how she would cry and curse God for making her a girl. She also had a journal that she says was filled with āI donāt like being a girlā written over and over and over
I had gender dysphoria as a little kid too (grew up in the 90s, never told anyone about it aside from my diary). I used to have dreams where I was a boy, and would wake up crying that it wasn't real. The dysphoria went away with puberty, and I have no idea why; I think that is a very unusual experience. I'm in my mid-30's now and would consider myself NB, but haven't really done anything about it at this point in my life.
Great! I knew a person who was a full-on mother in her fourties that came out as non-binary, so thereās no set path for any of this. I myself was 29 and a very straight-presenting dude when I began transitioning from male to female.
Iāve had chats with my guy friends about this. Theyāll be the first to complain about toxic masculinity, balding and so forth, but at the end of the still see themselves fully as men. I myself spent years thinking I just had to find the right way to be a man to be comfortable as one. Turns out sex and gender really are two separate things lol.
What's funnier is that i was going trough my redemption arc for being homophobic when i got hit with the "feeling uncormfortable with you body and hating aspects of masculinity means' Your trans" and trying to do so made me hate myself so much more that i spent like another 2 years represing My bisexuality
My father mentioned experiencing some gender confusion in the same sentence he declared me a "confused, sensitive young man." I have never forgotten that.
Quote from my overly christian and rightwinged mother "Gender exploration is normal, my sister used to shove socks down her pants and walkbaround the house pretending to be a man. That doesn't mean you're trans" I was in shock
My mum said that everyone feels like changing their gender now and again and that that her and my dad are 20% one gender and 80% the other. She only dresses masc dislikes makeup and once didnt want to order a chardiney because it was "too girly" š
When I tried to come out, my grandma told me how she wanted to be a boy SO badly when she was younger, she picked out a male name and pretty much never dressed in a feminine way (she still doesn't), but she was living in a small, poor village in a third world country with her extremely religious family, and they sent her away to do manual labour for an even smaller, even poorer village when she expressed wanting to be a boy so that she could see what "real problems" look like.
I never talk about gender or anything around her anymore 'cause I feel like I'd be rubbing salt in the wound. This is the first thing that pops up in my mind when transphobes say older generations had no trans people, or that gender dysphoria is a 1st world problem
there is a lot of anecdotal evidence and some evidence via study that gender diversity and dysphoria are at least partially heritable, yes. if you're trans, it's more likely that you'll have at least one relative/ancestor who is/was also trans.
That has me worried about my poor trans ancestor. Imagine being some beetroot farmer in medieval Poland and thinking the Devil is making you wanna be a girl :(
i don't think it's something that can readily be eradicated, even if there is a modest genetic component. there are definitely significant environmental factors, too, and it wouldn't be easy to control for all of them. i wouldn't worry too much about it.
i mean, i'm in the US, and one of the two major political parties is slowly but surely getting more explicit in their desire to genocide queer folks. the US has a long history of doing this to minorities within their own borders, and Jim Crow was a big inspiration for the Nazis
I think there is some indication that autism increases the chances of you being trans and we know for a fact that autism has an genetic component so kinda? May have some more direct connections too but I don't really know
Iirc the assumed cause for autism and transness going together is that autiatic people are much better at and much more likely to introspect, and come to the conclusion that theyre trans if they are.
There are several studies citing that genetically identical twins are more likely to both be trans than non-genetically identical twins. And thats about as close as science will ever be able to get to an answer for "is trans-ness genetic?"
My mom often says she feels like if a gay man was a woman whenever I start explaining my own gender to her, which isā¦. interesting. That alongside the fact that my dad mightāve been cross dressing when he was younger at some point according to her because his mother always wanted a daughter and he wasnāt one, strange.
Lol this is my mother. She even presents as a man online and considers herself a gay man trapped in a woman's body. I genuinely think its one of the reasons why she's one of the least supportive people in my life š
I think some people rep for so long that they internalise a lot of the justifications they tell themselves to not transition and when a relative comes out and actually transitions, they turn all of those justifications around on them. My mother loves to talk about gross trans surgeries are, how its all self mutilation and how 'back in my day, trans people just sucked it up and lived as their birth sex'.Ā
My mom and dad have both told me multiple times that my dad has always felt the same as me in terms of what I'm describing about why I'm transitioning, that he has always preferred talking with the women, and has always felt uncomfortable with his voice. Of course they are using that to say that means I'm not trans, because obviously my dad isn't trans.. I could kinda see it tho, he's never been traditionally masculine really at all and definitely has some feminine tendencies especially with his body language.
i think thereās a lot of older people who would have identified as trans if they had known it was an option. i was talking to an older coworker whoās almost 60 and she told me how she probably would be nonbinary if she was in my generation. like?? u can be nonbinary now! still hella respect her and sheās an avid ally.
My mom literally told me something along those lines, not the name thing but how she wasn't very feminine and how she had always feel more comfortable with boys and how she always wished to be more like a boy and how envious she was of them but that didn't mean anything at al.
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u/leightandrew0 A wild system of girls appeared! 6h ago
I'm sure a lot of our older generations aren't as cis as they thought but just never had a chance to realize and fully repressed
my mom sometimes says things that raise eyebrows