So first of all, I’m going to recommend some reading if you’re really interested in this topic.

Beyond Pink and Blue by Leslie Feinberg is a great and approachable text, and part of the canon around here at Hexbear.

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler is a more academic and theoretical examination of gender, but not the easiest read

I can also speak for myself as someone who started identifying as nonbinary and including preferred they/them pronouns in the last couple of years. For a long time, I felt the same way that you do: “I’m not the most manly of the men, since I think the stereotype is unrealistic. I just do what I do, and no one really questions it or treats me different as I get older.” I thought, well, I don’t agree with most of the expectations people put on me due to my gender, but it is what it is. I don’t experience gender dysphoria about my body or physical appearance, fortunately, and I’m comfortable with myself.

But what I realized is that beyond just not fitting gender stereotypes, I don’t want people to treat me as a guy and trying to be one has always felt false. It has always felt like a box everyone else wanted to force me into regardless of whether or not I fit inside it, and I never really questioned if I wanted to go in the box in the first place, because that wasn’t an option when I was growing up. But I can make that call now, and I’m happiest as a nonbinary person.

And that’s what it really comes down to, I think. What are you happiest as? What makes you the most comfortable? It sounds like you’re comfortable with yourself as you are, as a straight cisman, and that’s great. But for me that was not what made me the most comfortable.

A miserable pile of secrets

I just picked up my phone, so I have a lot of posting energy and will try my best to answer your questions. I am a transgender woman on hormones, and also in a homosexual relationship with another transgender woman, so like I’m doing a bunch if the lgbtq letters at once. But, actually, I’m pretty confused about some of this stuff as well.

Basically, modern lgbt theory says that people have a different assigned sex at birth, physical sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation. You understand a person’s gender expression can change easily. Like if you started wearing makeup and dresses you’re doing a more feminine gender expression, but you’re still a man. Butch lesbians wear mail clothing and sometimes and talk in a more masculine way, but they’re still women. But, you’re probably used to thinking physical sex, assigned sex at birth, and gender identity are the same. Physical sex and assigned sex are different after a person undergoes a medical transition, but also in the case of intersex people who often get randomly forced to live as one gender or another. Gender identity is pretty much what makes trans people transition, in cases when it doesn’t match their bodies or assigned social roles. There have always been lgbt people, and in the past they had different theories about themselves than we do now, but, like, we’ve got what we’ve got.

I can totally see why people learn about this stuff and don’t believe it. Obviously, there are conservatives who hate anybody who acts different than them, but also there are more liberal people who get dismayed at ideas like gender confirmation surgery (you know, T HE S U R G E R Y) or male lesbians or neopronouns or whatever. I might even agree that it doesn’t make sense, except that I have to acknowledge the reality of my own life, which pretty much fits the ideas above.

I was seriously depressed starting from almost the moment I began puberty. I didn’t understand what was happening, I just know I suddenly felt sad a lot, and doing things other than lying in bed was hard. Im pretty smart, and had a good supportive family, so I sort of coasted on inertia as a teenager. I finished school and had friends and stuff, I was a functional person on paper, but I hated almost every minute of it. Because I felt awful all the time, especially about my body, I learned how to dissociate really well. I could walk and talk like a normal person, but it was like I wasn’t even in my body, and I was watching myself run around in a video game or something. I knew I was bisexual because I had crushes on girls in my classes, but also my male best friend. But, when I tried dating both girls and boys (well one boy, and it was a secret because highschool was still a pretty homophobic place at that time) it always felt wrong or gross somehow.

I figured out I was trans in college, because I met another trans woman my age, which I never had before. She was very friendly, and we would talk a lot, not about gender but just general stuff. She made me really, really jealous. I just wanted to be like her, but I wasn’t sure why. Also, I stared seeing psychologists and psychiatrists at that time, because I was so depressed I could barely get out of bed sometimes. None of them were very helpful, and nobody tested me to see if I was trans. One said I had ADHD (I don’t think so?), another said I’m an alcoholic (I’m not?), that kind of thing. Very long short, I hit a low point where I was doing absolutely nothing with my life and had no plans or goals, so I decided to start estrogen.

When I started estrogen, why depression went away immediately. Clinical depression is a life long struggle for many people. But I was suddenly interested in doing things, and I felt alive. Obviously, a lot of other stuff happens when you abruptly switch sex hormones. Some of it was kind of alarming. But, I felt so much better that it was worth it. So, basically, if there’s no such thing as gender identity, why do I feel happy, motivated, and content for the first since I was a child? If gender expression isn’t important, why I am really happy now that my body is more feminine and I can wear woman’s clothes?

Also, on the topic of the memes you saw: nobody actually thinks that if a little boy paints his nails, or a little girl plays with her toy truck, they are secretly trans or non binary. I don’t believe that all children should be raised gender free or anything, just that you should let them make their own decisions when they get older. But, when you’re trans, looking back at the stuff you did as a kid that was, like, really gay is funny, wholesome, and a little sad.

As another vanilla cis dude, I’ve come to see it like this: Gender is something i don’t really have to care about, as it doesn’t really affect me. But it does both affect and mean a lot to some others, so I try to be accomodating when it comes to things such as pronouns.

I don’t have to fully understand something to be understanding about it.

Some people post in communities like on Hexbear and idk if they’re joking but they mention how they should’ve known they were trans because they did something feminine or masculine or whatever the opposite their assigned gender is.

Those people are usually talking about how they felt doing those things

My life really wouldn’t really feel that different if I was born or identified as a different gender identity.

It almost certainly would. The way you relate to societal expectations are shaped partially by the expectations themselves. Cis boys and men in particular are usually able to use what I’ve heard called the belligerent masculinity loophole: That is, they can often do something feminine without being seen as more feminine for it, if it’s done with an unashamed and sometimes confrontational attitude. That was my experience anyway, and it meant that almost nothing I did ever came under gender-based scrutiny. My masculinity could consist of almost anything I wanted it to, but only because I fit the masculine stereotype well enough to begin with. No such loophole exists for femininity

I feel like most people who are interested in this type of thing are already in the “LGBT-space”. I never felt that way.

Well yes, they’re the ones who want to talk to other LGBT people about shared experiences and such

I was wondering why some people use they/them, she/them, he/them, or even both she and he.

Broadly speaking, that covers people who don’t identity fully or at all with masculinity or femininity. Everyone’s reasons are their own, and that’s as far as it can really be summarized tmk

I just think it’s cool to have non-conforming people existing around and feeling comfortable with who they are, since it lifts a lot of strict gender norms on people like me who just chill.

It is, and that includes xenogender folks. Be aware though, that the stakes for trans issues are incomparably higher for trans people than they are for gender-apathetic people like I used to be. This means that expressing apathy beyond describing how you personally relate to your gender can be disrespectful. To people who may have gone through serious shit for expressing their gender, it can rightfully piss them off to imply that they’re taking it too seriously

gender’s what ya do when there’s nothing good on TV

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From an ontological standpoint this is a difficult question to answer cleanly because the language we have to work with without getting into academic stuff is a bit incomplete and there are multiple things going on:

• socially/culturally gender is a large collection of roles and aesthetics that get gendered. This is all very fuzzy stuff and runs into a lot of problems with how specific things are coerced vs tolerated, and because this is all artificial in the sense that it’s entirely constructed culturally any given facet of it may or may not take hold in any given person and so there can be massive variance between individuals.

• individually and at the surface-most level gender is how one slots into that framework both in roles and how one’s self image has developed. This is generally where definitions stop: with regards to gender people are where they place themselves because the stuff that makes them place themselves somewhere is gender, for all that that’s tautological. We can only “measure” gender through self declaration because generally whatever gender is it tends to make self descriptions that don’t align with it unpleasant for the individual: a cis woman and a trans woman will both experience some amount of distress if self describing as male, for example. Usually, and with the caveat that “some amount” may not even be noticeable in a given case unless it’s stacking on top of other exacerbating stressors.

• internally it’s something that somehow controls how someone develops alongside that framework, along with things like how the brain responds to sex hormone levels. This is the most controversial level for reasons that are difficult to explain quickly, from the political questions of gender and liberation to the fact that on a neurological level we don’t actually know what the fuck is happening because we can only observe that something in our brains usually makes an individual’s gender slot into the category associated with their assigned sex but some percent of the time larger than 1% (which doesn’t sound like a lot, until you start thinking about how very many people that is; note that that floor of 1% is also in reference to something that’s difficult to diagnose and which has been heavily stigmatized socially, and so represents the people who were able to understand what was happening and able to overcome fear and repression, meaning the actual figures are completely unknowable) it actively, painfully does not. This is why I argue for a rather soft “clearly there is something innate here that helps to filter all the artificial cultural stuff and how it relates to the individual, alongside the other clearly innate stuff like how one responds to hormone levels” explanation of this, although even that can be controversial depending on who you ask.

So to try to bring that all together to answer your specific questions, gender isn’t really what someone does but how one relates to it. Someone can transgress cultural gender roles without being trans for any number of reasons: they didn’t internalize that particular thing as gendered, they don’t care, they’re actively pushing boundaries as a statement, they’re curious, etc. Taken as a whole, though, how one relates to gendered things is what informs their gender: if overall things related to one category make them uneasy and things related to another make them happy, then they’re probably in the category that’s more pleasant for them; it can be difficult, however, to disambiguate unease that’s from learned fear and unease that’s dysphoria from a conflict between someone’s identity and actions/assigned role/appearance.

And just to be clear, when I talk about “actions” or “gendered things” or “what someone does” there I don’t even mean like extremely overt gendered activities or the like, but everything from little bits of self image, idealized self image, mannerisms, vague aesthetics, actual actions, things that exist purely on a sort of meta level with how one relates to others, etc, but I don’t have any neat and concise word for that that would be immediately clear nor specific enough to what I’m talking about.

It’s another social construct, like race, and some people build their cultural identity around it. Personally I’d like to leave it all behind it seems to be holding us back but from my point on the spectrum i don’t understand lots of things others seem to fixate on. I have noticed the human nature to want to categorize others and be categorized. I have a strong aversion to that. I find comfort in the freedom to live in the in-between. Sometimes it doesn’t feel so free, we should all work to make it so!

A male goose.

It’s what makes you gay (I’ll make a more serious response later)

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