#because it meant you didnt fit the gender spectrum. but you can be gnc AND trans u know

[snobgoblin]

in retrospect it's really funny how long it took me to realize I was a guy and not nonbinary bc I would always be like "they/them pronouns just feel so impersonal when they're about me. like they're fine for other people they just sound wrong on me" have you considered they're not right for you buddy

[cock-holliday]

hey not rly a question just saying i appreciate your 2cents on things generally. i am a gnc transfem but am really a boy more than anything so someone looking out for those of us who arent palettably feminine is rly cool of you. a lot of the stuff you mentioned in your long post just now hits at some of the stuff thats making me feel uneasy around some of my transfem friends. i fear if i was fully myself i wouldnt be accepted. i hate to feel too queer for fellow queers, but. but yea anyway most of the time ive known i was trans most of my friends had actually been trans guys so when i hear this anti transmasc rhetoric going around it makes me rly uncomfortable im sick of the idea that trans guys have it easy. its not true and not fair do you fear being not accepted by others like you too? is this normal? idk. i didnt feel this when i came out 5 years ago this is new to me

I’m really sorry you’re dealing with that, and I can relate. Essentially I came out as a binary trans person a decade ago and raced to transition as quickly as possible (it was not fast, it was slow and frustrating) and when I finally got there then I had to endure Gender Crisis 2 where I realized I wasn’t this binary gender either.

It was very difficult to sort out. Did I just not feel special enough as Gender 2? Was I faking this whole time and was really just cis? Was I detransitioning? It took a lot to figure out what I wanted, how I wanted to be seen, and to grapple with the idea that it will continue to fluctuate.

I am masc but do not consider myself a man. Boy, maybe. Do I see myself as a woman? Also no. Girl, maybe. But a masculine girl. I think my boyness is more feminine than my girlness…but still both…butch.

I am trans but not a trans woman or a trans man. While figuring myself out in round two I flirted with transmasc/transfemme as labels, but neither fit better than the other. Or maybe neither fit. I know some use transfemmemasc but idk that I like it for me. I use trans women’s shaving tips. I use trans men’s voice training tips. There are members of both camps who wouldn’t consider me one of them.

I currently work a full-time job. I cannot present or fluctuate in my presentation when I want to. We have gendered locker rooms, gendered bathrooms, my ID badge has a photo that doesn’t look like me. I think a lot about that post that’s like “I might be nonbinary but I have a job so I can’t worry about that right now.” Only, I already know I am nonbinary. I’ve already been out to a lot of people IRL. How do you put that cat back in the bag? Can you? If I was allowed to present how I want now and everyone was cool…will they still be understanding when it swings back the other way? I don’t want that sort of pressure at work.

I am lucky I have a partner who understands and likes my presentation—and spectrum of it. I have trans friends who understand or try to understand, and genderweird friends who get it. It is a bit isolating—how everything is split into one camp or another. Things I supposedly couldn’t relate to I do, things I am not meant to have experienced (or acknowledge I experience) are not welcome topics in trans discourse.

It is difficult! There are huge Boy v Girl (but make it progressive) pissing contests on tumblr and it’s very irritating how deep the anger goes. Carve room for yourself and you’re accused of belonging to the other camp, as if it really even is ‘the other’ camp, it’s the same fucking camp.

I started to identify with the word butch only in the last few years, and because my gender exploration had taken me back to the trans folks of yore. They were brash and bold and contradictory and I liked that! It made me yearn for vague labels and defiant privacy while also being unabashedly authentic! Then I learned that it still exists. It’s small, and got pushed to the fringes, sure. But I’ve only had access to the books and zines and tales of the genderweird from the internet, and to hear it resonate with so many others proves to me we’re still out there.

It’s very tough to want to be true to yourself when there is a constant pressure to conform to something. It’s doubly tough when that pressure comes from other trans people. But finding more and more people who live this way and feel this way makes me feel surer in my choice to just loudly be what I am, fuck the rest, whenever I can.

I cannot always look how I want or be seen how I want, so the spaces where I do have control I refuse to be anything other than what I am 110%

I really hope you can find more and more space that lets you exist in the grey. I hope your friends become more accepting. In the meantime and hopefully continuously in tandem—you are not alone in this experience and others out there understand what it’s like. ❤️

[t4tdnf]

don't even worry about it like

"He's inherently masculine because he's a man" IS gender essentialism. Literally by definition. If I'm being charitable they could've meant that to them, masculinity is undefined so a person being a man is enough to call them masculine, but that has its own set of issues, mainly the fact that nonbinary people can identify with masculinity or femininity without being either binary gender. And also the fact they got so high and mighty about it would imply that the, whether consciously or not, see applying feminine traits to men as in some way degrading. Which is. Weird.

Dream does perform some elements of femininity as well as a lot of non-traditional masculinity. George also performs elements of femininity, you could say (eg: "mermaid sit", certain mannerisms) but to a lesser, and it seems, in a more unconscious way than Dream does. To say this is just an observation. You can say what you want about how useful these descriptors are, but you weren't applying a use case to them, anon just invented that out of nowhere to get mad at you for... saying gender roles are a thing and its cool that Dream steps across the boundaries they espouse on occasion.

no literally that so much. like maybe they meant that like the masculinity-feminity thing isnt real (which is. a whole other debate) but even then i dont think its gender essentialist to acknowledge that people do fit into societies masculine and feminine traits like. theyre still real things that a lot of people fit into

but yeah 100%! like idk it kind of. inherently excludes any gnc/trans people, i know so many people who identify as masculine women/feminine men or either and nonbinary who would take so much issue with this

FR ACTUALLY like i can get if they just didnt agree with my opinion thats whatever but i think acting as if its inherently immoral is so weird. especially considering dream being more feminine than george (imo) wasnt even my main point and definitely wasnt written to be derogatory at all

yeah! its all a spectrum i just think george leans more to the masculine side of the spectrum than dream, not even in a gender identity or gender role thing its just how i think they display themselves

ty though anon this is very appreciated

[ace-experience]

So its non binary people's day ^^ and as someone who is non binary and demifluid I want to share my experience,even if not many people see it

Gender was always a complicated topic for me,since I was young I never fit in, Im afab but I never acted like society expected me to act I never knew why though this was just the way I always was,even if I was raised in a catholic and strict household with "traditional" gender roles

So I was called a tomboy,told I was always acting "like a boy", forced to wear dresses because I didnt like them and told to "act more like a girl"

There was a point that I said well fuck you I wanna act or be who I wanna be,fuck everyone else, and that is the idea that I have since then. When I found out what "gnc" meant I of course adopted the term but there was still something that didnt fit, I still felt out of place identifying as a gnc woman but also identifying or being addressed as a man. There was something about that binary that didnt feel right to me personally

At that moment I was already in lgbt+ circles because of my other identities (asexual and biromantic) so I knew about non binary but I had this misconception that non binary meant genderless/agender , androgynous ,people who used they/them pronouns and nobody else.

Thankfully I did more research on the non binary identity (after finding posts and memes talking about how being non binary was a really diverse experience) and I found the label "demifluid" which is part of the non binary spectrum under demigenders , and something really clicked, I finally felt complete . For those who dont know demifluid is an identity where a part of your gender is fluid and another part is static, the static part of my gender being non binary and the other part everything else (I cant always point out which gender that part is) this was also probably influenced by the fact that I am the host (or possibly a shell) of a (possibly OSDD) system and this made it more difficult for me to identify my gender because of passive influence from other alters

This is how everything was for me, I dont have much support irl since my family is really traditional so I can just share this here and in other social media they dont know about,but I want to thank my friends and my partner for being so supportive with me when I came out 💜