ask-an-enby

[ask-an-enby]

probably not. as transgender representation because i haven't "transitioned enough" and there were no super obvious signs of gender variance, let alone dysphoria, before i came out. i use a specific and uncommon label for my gender, i talk a lot about exorsexism, both of which people think is "unrealistic". i'm neurodivergent, which means of course i couldn't possibly know what gender i am. for most of my journey, i was isolated and not surrounded by other queers at all, which apparently is also "unrealistic". in some ways i'm the nonbinary stereotype which people would be mad about. i've been with my partner, a cisgender person who considers themself het with me as the exception, since before i've come out.

I personally see myself as being judged as not good queer rep, as aroace who dates, "feminine" trans, "emotionless" trope, alien/robot/outsider coded, etc.

This poll is because i am often thinking about characters that are considered bad rep, but I know people in real life are LIKE THAT and identity is messy! In my opnion bad queer rep would be the ones that are shown or touched upon on screen. Idk, just wondering.

Edit: lmao i wrote hood isntead of good and tumblr didnt let me edit

[ask-an-enby]

when i socially changed my name i felt like a fraud calling it my deadname because i still had to use it for legal purposes, this was especially true in the early stages where people would call me by that name more often. it never felt like my name, but for a while i just called it my birth name. i only started considering it my deadname when i legally changed it, and even moreso when i moved abroad where every new person i meet doesn't know what i was originally called. the more foreign and distant it feels, the more it dies.

[ask-an-enby]

i had two people with my deadname i went to school with, so shortly after i came out with my new name, i always felt dysphoric until i was sure they were talking to/about one of the other two and not me. now that my deadname is either unknown or feels very foreign to the people in my life, i no longer have this issue because except for very specific contexts, i know people aren't talking to/about me.

[ask-an-enby]

my main kind of physical dysphoria isn't about something visible, but i get jealous when i hear people get surgery for it, tbh, but not really for people who just are like that naturally.

*or HAS it in the past, prior to achieving that body?

[ask-an-enby]

"transambiguous" is the closest thing i can call myself without ending up misgendering myself.

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[ask-an-enby]

for about five minutes i believed that you at least need social dysphoria to be transgender. i discarded that belief quickly and thankfully it didn't go beyond that.

(any pro trans-medicalist bullshit will be deleted and blocked :3! don't be transphobic, they won't pick you)

[ask-an-enby]

Is it considered tri gender to be three different nonbinary indenties at the same time. If there's a different term for this, pls tell me.

hi!

that would indeed be considered trigender. more general terms are multigender or polygender, too.

[ask-an-enby]

probably somewhere in between. i don't decide that a character is transgender randomly, but i also don't create entire backstories. there's usually just some signs, particular ones i recognise from myself.

*OP's full original question: Do you imagine the in-depth full timeline of their trans journey from realizing theyre trans to coming out and so on, or do you just look at them and decide theyre trans? or do you go about it another way?

[ask-an-enby]

my sexuality is asexual. romantically i'm demiromantic, but in terms of compatibility with/attraction to nonbinary people, bi. although it's kind of a whole thing right now because being aroace & tertiary attraction and eh. either way, i don't really use more specific words like enbian for this.

[ask-an-enby]

i changed my name twice and my first chosen name was definitely more common, especially in transgender communities when i still lived in my home country. since moving to the UK, i've met one or two people with that name. my current name i've only seen online from maybe two people and never in person.

[ask-an-enby]

Hey, im looking to understand more about non binary people. I am strongly feminist and support equal rights etc, but im stuggling with understanding an aspect of people being non binary.

What is the difference between being able to present and exist freely in any way one wants, while still being male or female, and being non binary?

I have been wondering if it is the standards and expectations of each gender that is too limiting, making people feel like they have to break out of the gender to be the way they want. It seems i might get pushback on this, which is okay. But i wonder what the difference is between being a man or woman who dresses and acts in any way they like, and a non binary person?

The one worry i have about the internet "culture" of different and specific gender labels is that especially girls who dont feel like they fit in society's very limiting definition of "girl" will remove themselves from the gender rather than be a part of widening the definition.

Could you give me your thoughts on these things?

hi!

the difference is that one is about expression and gender roles, and one is about gender itself. a feminine man and a nonbinary person aren't the same because the man is a man and the nonbinary person is nonbinary. a masculine woman and a nonbinary person aren't the same because the woman is a woman and the nonbinary person is nonbinary. you get the idea.

if you look at the nonbinary community, you'll find us to be a diverse bunch, with many of us actually strongly embracing masculinity or femininity, even in accordance with what's expected of their AGAB, i.e. a nonbinary person who was assigned female at birth being very feminine. this should be proof enough that this is about something deeper than presentation and gender roles. it's about our internal sense of who we are, which unfortunately is something that can't really be explained. it's one of these "if you know it you know it" things.

it's not that uncommon for nonbinary people to have interests, follow gender roles, express themselves in a way that traditionally aligns with the gender we were assigned at birth. this argument is already operating based on the misconception that all nonbinary people are "masculine afab people" and "feminine amab people" when this couldn't be further from the truth.

if you can accept transgender men and women as their gender because that's who they say they are, that's how they feel, the same logic should be applied to nonbinary people, but we tend to be held to even higher standards of having to explain and justify our genders because they're even less comprehensible.

the vast majority of the "girls" who remove themselves from girlhood/womanhood simply aren't girls and you shouldn't call them that. most of the time it has nothing to do with limiting definitions but with simply not being a girl. this argument implies that nonbinary people are women (or men) who change into something else, when we were never women or men in the first place. nonbinary people aren't removing themselves from womanhood or manhood - we were never really there in the first place. society said we were because of gender stereotypes that go as deep as the very bodies we live in, but there's that difference again between gender stereotypes and actual gender.

there are plenty of women and girls out there already who are widening the definition, cisgender butches very much exist but are invisibilised. someone who is actually a gender nonconforming woman or girl rather than a nonbinary person will be more than happy widening the definition of femaleness. these are usually the people who are the most confident in their gender because they thought about it and explored it more than your average gender conforming cisgender woman - and came to the conclusion that they are very much female. there is no shortage of GNC cisgender women. nonbinary experiences are very, very different from that.

i can tell you're coming from a good place, but you should really try unlearning that last part, as that is treading awfully close to TERF territory.

TL;DR: the difference is that men and women are men and women, and nonbinary people are nonbinary.

[ask-an-enby]

of course you can. if you feel nonbinary is the best word for your gender, then you're probably nonbinary, and that's queer, regardless of what gender you're attracted to.

I do often find it hard to believe and difficult to accept. It sometimes feels almost disrespectful. But as someone who is (technically) a female, who (as of my experience) likes only males. I feel like non-binary best describes my experience with gender, and I was utterly shocked to find out that there was a special specific way that existed to perfectly describe how I feel attraction, demisexual. Can I consider myself part of the queer community? I may appear hetronormative, but I have never felt it.

[ask-an-enby]

PSA for people who only want a deeper voice and nothing else: you can go on T and take finasteride alongside it so you don't get bottom growth and more body hair. you'll still get the voice and the fat redistribution.

also, voice training to get a deeper voice is also an option!

I know that HRT gives you secondary sex characteristics in one direction or another, but we HAVE to stop telling nonbinary people that they “can’t pick and choose.” Of course, you can’t tell your testosterone that you’d rather not grow chest hair, but there are things you can do!

You could go on T so your voice drops and start shaving so you don’t grow a beard. You could start HRT and then stop once you get the permanent changes you like. You can pursue sterilization instead of bottom surgery. You can get top surgery without being on T. You can go on E and work out a bunch to bulk out your muscles. You can pursue laser hair removal or electrolysis to remove unwanted hair, with or without HRT. You could even just start hormones to see if you like it and then stop if it isn’t to your taste.

Obviously, you can’t order secondary sex characteristics a la carte, but we have to stop being so awful to nonbinary people. We should discuss the options we have, not shut down the conversation with “that’s what you get.”

[ask-an-enby]

me as an egg when my classmate was like "i don't even know what you have down there"

[ask-an-enby]

no. bi definitely started out with a binary understanding of both gender and orientation. either it was attraction to "both genders" or it was being "both heterosexual and homosexual". even "attraction regardless of gender" or similar definitions pretty much meant "regardless of the two genders we think exist". it's both exorsexist and bimisic to erase that part of bi history, and our evolution towards inclusivity.

that said, the bi community has been inclusive of nonbinary people for a long time. the bisexual manifesto spoke about there being more than two genders that bi people can be attracted to and that has been the consensus at least for bi activists for a while before that. it was a long time though before that understanding of bi reached general communities beyond activists. now most bi people use a definition that is nonbinary-inclusive, but even now there are still bi people who are exorsexist.

"bi has always included nonbinary people" is erasure of erasure, ironically. it's erasure of nonbinary erasure both in queer communities and in society in general. i mean let's be real. most people don't know or think nonbinary people exist today. do you really think bi people were magically super aware of us when the term became popular? surely more than the general nonqueer population, but not to a great extent at all.

why can't we just celebrate our evolution as a community rather than pretending it was always perfectly inclusive?

people always bring up this eternal nonbinary inclusion when bimisic people claim that the term bi is outdated and exorsexist. like in order to be valid now, the inclusion had to be present since forever. "bi has included nonbinary people for a long time" or simply "bi includes nonbinary people" somehow isn't enough, but really should be. what matters most is our community understanding of bi now. and while not free of exorsexism, the general consensus is that bi includes nonbinary people. that should be enough. no need to erase that part of our history.

as a bi enby, i find the lack of nuance in this conversation really tiring. it's either "bi was always inclusive" or "bi isn't inclusive and can never be inclusive".

[ask-an-enby]

i don't really understand the difference between the first two options, but i genuinely considered not socially transitioning at school and just wait until i graduated. being in the closet was unbearable so i did it anyway. i guess in a way social transition never really stops if you're nonbinary and have to come out to everyone to be seen for who you are and i don't always do it out of fear for people's reaction. it's not really a "doing it once and it's done" situation. it kind of never ends when social transition as an enby means always having to fight for people to even know your existence is a possibility and it can be scary.

[ask-an-enby]

putting "i like it" and "it's gender affirming" isn't quite accurate for me. i like it because it's the most basic respect you can show me and anyone else. but merely the act of asking for my pronouns isn't affirming my gender - actually using them is. being asked immediately makes me feel more seen as an actual person though.