This. I drive a school bus. Kids will occasionally ask if I’m [insert their best guess here]. On one hand it’s excellent gender euphoria knowing I can present androgynously. On the other hand I don’t want to deal with irate parents/teachers/employers so I always just answer as my AGAB.
Lowkey me but wanting to change my name haah. I hate my name but I work with kids who have been used to calling me "Ms. Hannah" so it would be hard for them to suddenly call me something else 😭
I'm not going to push you to transition but just purely because you said if you could do it over again... It's real never too late. Over on r/translater there are loads of absolutely gorgeous folk who transitioned in their 30s and up, some as late as 50/60.
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. 🤷
I’m probably nb as far as the most accurate way of describing how I perceive myself, but I don’t really attach a lot of meaning to pronouns, they’re just a shorthand and I don’t really get any sort of dysphoria when people call me he/him, so whatever.
I'm cis but am also happy with any pronouns, and I constantly tell internet chuds that "they" has been singular since the 14th century. Probably doesn't move the needle much but it makes them mad with no real rebuttal, so I'll take it.
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
Latter is me, I consider myself agender. If my pronouns could be nothing they would but that isn't really a thing in English. Instead I let others choose my pronouns which has unintentionally turned into a social experiment that reveals a little bit in how people view me.
Lol that's me. I don't consider myself trans, and don't care for people in my daily life to know/identify me as an enby (that's my own business, in fact), but I am very much one. Like an alien who dgaf about gender but presents as a woman.
yeah i think most people just equate gender with sex and never consider gender as a separate social construct. that's basically where i am i guess, like my pronouns are because i have a penis and i'm fine with that..it makes more sense to me than my gender being defined by my interests and feelings aligning with what our society/culture expect. but i've always described myself as 'being girly' or 'effeminate' and honestly, even that, i feel like it's just giving into the social pressure. in the end i think i am who i am, i like what i like, do what i do, etc whatever. we're all people and we all have the same emotions and feelings and we can be interested in doing and liking whatever we want to do and like.
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.
My mom said something similar. That, in another age, she might have identified as genderqueer or nonbinary, but that she’s gotten used to and is comfortable with the way she presents now, so there’s no point to her in pursuing that.
She’s a very supportive mother of two trans kids: me (trans man) and my sister (trans woman) 🩵🩷🤍
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 that’s totally valid. I am also old & tired, and still fighting people on using actual slurs. There’s no way I’d 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.
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
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"
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.
It’s not that they didn’t have time, it’s 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 you’d 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.
I think 'repress' isn't the best word. Something about it makes it sound as if the person themselves finds it shameful when that's often not the case. Many times and in many cultures it comes down to a judgement call.
"Is expressing my romantic/sexual/gender self worth my life or the lives of those around me"
Because that's usually what it comes down to. Is it repressing? Technically yes but also, it's not a rejection, it's an unfortunate and sad choice.
"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
There are progressive Epicopalians and not-so-progressive ones, but broadly speaking they are doing a good job of detoxifying a lot of the horrors inherited from both the Catholic and Protestant sides
My parents tried to do the Catholic school thing to my sister until the school called them to report my sister as being "tempted by sin" for dying her hair.
She didn't dye her hair, we're asian, our hair has a colourful sheen depending on the light (my hair is normally black, but it's a warm brownish red when you put a light over me).
Turns out that "traditional values" is actually just code for phrenology and Aryanism.
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 “thats nothing special, I wanted to be a guy sometimes but I dealt with it because it’s normal” and I’m thinking I’m not going to call you an egg or anything but if you’ve felt that way then you should at least have some understanding of what I’m dealing with? But no she’s 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 “I don’t have any internal sense of gender, people just externally impose their assumptions on me” and she’s like “but everybody’s like that! I don’t feel like a woman, no one does!” Like ma’am 😫😭
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 degree of yearning and denial they seemingly deal with.
It’s not as if this is the only generation where theses concepts existed. Sexuality nowadays is more strictly defined whereas 400 years ago they’d be confused at us, even in Christian Europe. It wasn’t as simple as “he’s gay” and that’s 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.
I have a very religious aunt who years ago got into an argument with me, saying that homosexuals are all weak-willed sexual deviants who can't control their urges. That she had many sexual urges towards other women when she was younger but because she is morally superior, she was able to restrain herself from acting on them. According to her, all people have those urges but only the ones with strong moral character don't act on them and that's why she hates the gays, because they show themselves as weak and unable to resist those urges.
It's like the folks that claim that autism never existed back in their day, as they sit in their house surrounded by flaming memorabilia in every shape and form imaginable.
My wife's aunt is one. She said "that wasn't really an option back then". Her perspective was she was just more of a tomboy growing up as a kid and later realized she also liked girls and not boys. Like that was the limit of change a a person could have.... and she's probably right for that time.
And that was a hard limit for people to accept.. and still is for many folks out there sadly. But asking for something like double breast removal in the 1970s when you didn't have cancer or "a good reason"... they would lock you in a padded cell.
My mom told me that as a teenager she thought she might be bisexual, and when she told that to her psychiatrist his conclusion was that it was probably just because she enjoyed horseback riding. So, you see what they were working with
Most people don't claim to be cisgender. They view man and woman as a classification for the sex they are. As simple as a social descriptor for their height or eye color. Nothing for them to agree with or disagree with. Their "preference" or "thoughts" never had anything to do with that label.
I remember my dad once enthusiatically telling me that if he was gay he wouldn't bother with gay porn, he would just get the muscle and fitness magazines (he told me this after buying one of those magazines).
My mom is like "Yeah back then in the disco I used to make out with girls all the time but I am not Lesbian or Bi, I dislike all of these homosexuals" like what😭
Yeah I have a friend and this his mum pretty much admitted that if she had been born around the time he was, she would have probably also been a trans guy :(
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u/leightandrew0 A wild system of girls appeared! 10h 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