asking for advice

[nerdflighter]

One of the things I do on my discourse blog is talk about the nature of binaries and how they erase a lot of grey areas. And recently, I was talking about how it's possible for cis people to be dysphoric, and how cis people can benefit from having access to the narrative around dysphoria.
And I got this message, in the form of a submission.

wanted to i guess vent about my personal experience w/ feeling dysphoria (maybe?) without being trans. you don’t have to post this; it might be better if you don’t since it would be weird to have people debating my Validity:tm: but idk it might be good as food for thought for your theories or you could just not read it. your posts just made me Think and i wanted to get the feelings out. sorry if any of this is weird or bad to read haha…
so personally i don’t consider myself trans in any way but i do experience something that at least to me seems like really really mild gender dysphoria. i might just be wrong about what dysphoria is so i’m gonna try to explain the exact feelings, where i think they’re coming from, and why i don’t think i am trans. for reference i am afab and don’t have any other brain stuff going on as far as i know (never been to a doctor for that kind of thing) aside from getting panic attacks sometimes.
so firstly i experience what is, as far as i know, social dysphoria. i don’t like being called “she” (when i was younger i used to dislike being called “he” too but i think that was mostly because i was offended by male being the default - so for logical reasons instead of emotional ones.) i don’t like being treated as female or the expectations associated with being viewed as female, although admittedly i think most women don’t regardless of if they’re cis or trans because of like misogyny and stuff. you know how it be… society. anyway in general being thought of as a woman makes me uncomfortable in most contexts including ones that are obstensibly positive. i also experience like… physical or sex dysphoria (not sure what the right term is.) i’m gonna avoid being graphic but in general i dislike my genitalia and wish i had a penis and usually imagine myself with one in sexual fantasies. i don’t have the same feelings towards my breasts though but i don’t especially… like them or anything.
so in my opinion the reason i feel like this despite not being trans is that i was (and am) really physically unattractive and socially inept and got bullied for it a lot as a kid. but even when i wasn’t being directly bullied i was still treated differently from female peers with more acceptable appearances and behaviors. when i would wear feminine clothes or makeup i was treated badly for it, because i was not a “real girl” to my peers. obviously this isn’t at all the same as what trans people experience but it created a disconnect for me between my technically assigned sex and how i was gendered by others. since i wasn’t seen as or treated as a girl but as some degendered/desexed other (and also i am still treated that way irl most of the time) so being treated as one pretty much solely online feels disorienting and upsetting and i feel some level of compulsion not to have the physical attributes that make me afab.
i have no desire to transition through surgery or hormone treatment so i think i’m not trans. it’s not for practical reasons either i just don’t think it would fix my dysphoria in any way. i don’t think socially transitioning would help either.
again i realize this isn’t the same as what trans people experience and it’s extremely mild but idk what to call it except dysphoria. not sure if i am cis or maybe some kind of non-trans nb?
whew long wall of text… anyway have a great day. you are cool!

this person reads as trans to me, and yet? they never would have come forward if I hadn't talked about cis dysphoria. and I can't justify labeling them as something they don't identify as, but at the same time I don't know how to weigh that out against their distress and the possible comfort they would find in a *trans label.
I don't know what I'm doing, basically, and I'd like to know what y'all think.

Comments

[melannen]

Huh, okay, I hope you don't mind me popping in from a link, because a lot of what's in that sounds really familiar to me - except without the bullying/not-a-real-girl parts, because I never really experienced those. But I don't have any strong inner feeling that I'm female, I feel weird being described by others as 'female' or 'a woman', and the times I encounter myself being referred to as 'she' in a marked way it's kind of a weird double-take (not because I particularly object to the pronoun, it's just relatively rare that I do hear other people talking about me in third person, and I don't think of myself internally as a 'she' so it's like a sudden reminder, oh right, you're a she.)

I've generally been okay with femme stuff (although I grew up in a family that really didn't push the gendered child-rearing, so a lot of what I hear other people describe as part of being socialized female isn't stuff I got) but I'm also okay with butch stuff - I tend to rotate between 'lacy sweater, prairie skirt' and 'men's corduroys and polo' for my work clothes. And I'm fine identifying as female. But I've always kind of had a sense that 'female and proud of it' was a thing I chose and worked on (because the alternative was siding with the boys who thought girly stuff was gross, and no) rather than because femaleness was some kind of inherent part of me.

(It's also really hard to untangle from my sexual orientation, because so much of explicit femininity, especially for young girls, is still tied to wanting boys and love and romance, and I never did, and never even wanted to want to.)

I feel a sort of joy whenever I get misgendered because I love the idea that I can be, that I'm not locked in to female, and I feel most at home in spaces where I don't have to declare a gender. (The least comfortable I have ever been with being female was when a trans woman friend of mine told me she had always taken me as her model of cis womanhood and my entire soul recoiled at the idea that anybody thought I was a model of cis womanhood and I wore ties and Timberlands for a week because looking at my skirt collection made me feel like I was unintentionally lying.)

And similar to your correspondent, I have no particular feelings about my breasts except being glad they're small enough not to get in the way, and my positive feelings about my genitals I feel like are mostly the result of a conscious process of reclaiming them from the patriarchy; in fantasies I have all sorts of different genitalia.

...spelled out that way that doesn't sound very cis. And yet. I don't have any particular objection to being female or a woman? Whatever, it's fine, it's not worth the trouble of trying to change, and it'd feel weird to push on it next to people who do actually have strong feelings.

Which I think is where your correspondent is coming in repeating that it's "extremely mild". Because yeah, that's it. I don't really feel that strongly about it, or like it really matters that much. It just doesn't feel like it would matter that much if I was amab or anbab either. It's not important?

Probably if I'd lived in a time where binary was the only option, I would have never even questioned being a woman, or a man if by some odd turn of events I'd wound up amab (...except for the bits where it intersects with my sexuality). Probably if I'd lived in a time where nb was unremarkable and required no effort, I'd be that. But I don't live in either of those times, quite. I feel like there's probably more people out there with that total lack of strong inherent gender feelings than most people realize, because the cultural signal overlying it is so strong, and because "I have no strong feelings either way" is not the sort of thing that makes one shout about it in the streets. And those people get really left out of the gender discourse that's all about knowing your 'true' gender that you 'identify' with.

It feels wrong to claim the trans or enby label because... that's not what I've experienced, at all. And because I know if I tried to claim I wasn't cis in the current wider discourse I would be shouted down immediately. But the way people (both trans and cis) describe being cis isn't really me either. So. IDK?

That feelingsdump is probably not helpful to you! But probably the best answer there is something like "It's okay - you should feel what you feel and label it how you want to label it. None of us know what we're doing, basically."

Yup

[wellthisisnice]

So, first, on a personal level: Big yup. I'm not really interested in being "female and proud", as i define my body issues not as "reclaiming my womanhood from the patriarchy" but as "reclaiming my body comfort from the patriarchy", but everything else is something i can see myself in. Especially the part about recoiling at the idea of being perceived as a model for cis womanhood, that's... so very uncomfortable... no no no.

On a more... general? theoretical? level: As far as i can tell, you're correct in that there's way more people out there with that total lack of strong inherent gender feelings than most people realize, but that they're not talking about it because of gender binarism, both the woman/man dichotomy and the cis/trans one.

An example: There's a paper about a study done in Israel with about 2000 people, called "Queering gender: studying gender identity in ‘normative’ individual" [pdf]. Here's the graph on the part where they asked how strongly respondants they felt "as a woman" and "as a man" (note that "Queer" here means non-cis):



Another example, related also to what hellofriendsiminthedark said above about the internet discourse on being cis/trans: A couple years ago i did a little study in my local ace community, with just about 60 participants, and aboult half of those who id as some non-binary gender (25% of the total) said that they weren't weren't cis, but also weren't trans. So, you know, fuck binaries of any and all type, basically.

Re: Yup

[melannen]

Yep, honestly, "fuck binaries" is as far as I get, most days.

Most of the stuff I said up there about "a woman and proud of it" and so on I phrase that way deliberately because it's very contingent on when and where I grew up (a second-wave-feminist but not super lgbt-aware family & community in the 1980s and early 1990s.) So I got a lot of my early gender awareness via "Girl Power!" sorts of things. If I was twenty years younger and growing up on Tumblr, I'm pretty sure I would have done a lot less work around owning the idea of woman-ness and be a whole lot more wavery about maybe being nb and genderqueer. (Which goes back to the idea of feeling like I'm sort of stuck between a world where femaleness would be default enough to feel fine - which is going away - and a world where nonbinary would be default enough to feel fine - which feels like it's coming - but not really being there either way.) (I've started using "lawful neutral" as my gender when it's fill-in-the-blank.)

That graph is really interesting! Although honestly I have no idea where I would put myself on it, absent cultural factors.

Re: Yup

[wellthisisnice]

Lawful neutral XD And yeah, gender is such a cultural thing, you literally cannot separate identity and presentation from context, which i... don't think is something Internet Discourse quite get.

Another interesting thing in that graph: No one seems to have put themselves in a 5 in either category.

[satsuma]

“I wore ties and Timberlands for a week because looking at my skirt collection made me feel like I was unintentionally lying”

Honestly I feel like I’m doing drag anytime I venture too far into Femme territory, not in like, a necessarily upsetting way - it’s usually actually pretty fun but I am very conscious of it being ‘an act’ but it’s SO hard to coherently explain why

[melannen]

I kind of feel like that every time I get dressed - standing in front of the closet thinking "Who do I want to dress up as today". I had always kind of thought that was mostly a 'socialized female' thing, tbh, - the idea of personal style as performance, of always thinking about how you will be looked at - but then I read things with other queer people talking about gendered clothing and drag and so on, and I remember that my closet is basically sorted on a femme -> butch spectrum, and I wonder.

[satsuma]

Yeah same! I mean, I’m sure female socialization does play into it some? Like, beinf aware of yourself as an Image vs as a person. But I think for 100% cis women maybe they feel like they’re expressing something rather than preforming something if that makes sense.