but I can appreciate how that is similar to a white person telling you that they don’t see colour.

I think that this is a misapprehension tbh, and I mean this in a kind way so it’s not intended to be a call out.

To say “I don’t see colour, I see people” to a POC is to say “I am separating a fundamental part of what makes you who you are and which has been your experience in society from before you were old eenough to understand what was going on around you” which is inherently dehumanising and it’s a denial and a whitewash of systems of racial oppression as well as your own position in those systems, whatever position that happens to be.

This applies similarly to saying that you don’t see gender, you just see people to someone (especially if they are trans) as it denies a fundamental part of who they are as people.

But to say “I don’t understand gender (on a personal level, for how I relate to and understand myself)” is not to attempt to erase others’ identities but it’s just an affirmation of how you yourself feel; if I said “I’m gay, I don’t feel attracted to the opposite gender and so I don’t understand what that’s like and what it means” isn’t an attack on heterosexuality or on aspects of sexualities that are attracted to the opposite gender (e.g. bi/pansexuality). It’s only when you start projecting that experience onto other people’s identities that it is a problem.

I’m still very much hashing things out with myself and I’ve spent a lot of time listening to trans experiences of gender and it doesn’t resonate with my own internal experience of gender so, on a fundamental level I don’t get it—and I don’t think I ever will—but that’s okay and I have a genuine respect for those experiences and I “understand” it, insofar as I “understand” something such as history; I understand it as an outsider who is learning about it via external, secondary means but it’s not the same thing as truly understanding what it’s like by living it. It’s gonna sound very selfish, and on one level it really is, but I’m super grateful for the self-advocacy of trans people because it’s really been the only thing that has helped me to understand my own experience of gender, or the lack thereof.

(All of this comes with a massive caveat - I’m not cis and I’ve never felt cis as far as I can recall. By definition that makes me trans and I’m cool with that fact however I understand that my experience of gender is not representative of a large proportion of the trans community’s experience and I feel like it would be really harmful and reckless of me to openly identify to others that I am trans when I haven’t figured it all out internally with myself. And the most scary thing for me would be that openly identifying as trans to others, especially irl except when I’m around people who get it, might give the false impression that simply because I don’t give a damn about what pronouns you use for me or how you perceive my gender therefore it means that all trans people can be expected to feel this way. The prospect of my own experience of gender potentially being used as a rhetorical or ideological justification to harm other trans people or to be used to erase the validity of their gender[s] is what scares me. I don’t want to be the one that they point to in order to argue why misgendering trans people is fine, actually, because that would destroy me to know that my internal experience was misappropriated in service of harming others.

So to me it’s like - if I need to tell you I’m trans then you don’t get it, and that comes with inherent risks to other trans people which I feel is the most important thing to prioritise, as someone who experiences a lot of privilege by my own internal experience of being personally gender agnostic. And if I don’t need to tell you that I’m trans, that’s because you already get that I am and it doesn’t come with those same concerns.)

My best analogy for all of what I’m trying to get at here is that gender seems to be a lot like a shoe. Some people just have shoes that are comfy on them by default. Some people have been forced to wear shoes that are really uncomfortable for them, until they get a chance to slip into a pair that are much more comfy. And some people have always worn extremely uncomfortable shoes all their lives and they don’t even realise it because they never knew that shoes could be so comfortable or, perhaps, they were taught to believe that they were unworthy of wearing shoes that fit them.

Footwear seems really cool and all, aside from when people are being forced into shoes or being made to believe that they are somehow unworthy of comfy shoes, and I can appreciate the different shoes that people have on and how they choose to wear them but, for me, I feel like being barefoot is my normal; I can put on different shoes, and I have throughout my life, and some are more uncomfortable to wear than others but I’ve never put on a pair of shoes and been like “Oh wow, these fit perfectly! I feel so good in this pair of shoes that I never want to take them off ever again!”

The closer I am to barefoot, the less uncomfortable I am but it’s not even a positive sort of feeling to be barefoot for me; it doesn’t feel like barefoot is “home” or “me”, it just feels like no shoes are the least uncomfortable choice in footwear for me.

(I really need to make an alt account so I’m not figuring all this shit out for myself live on main lol)

Absolutely. That’s why I like to stress that gender doesn’t matter to me personally. I will always respect anyone else’s gender identity.