#gender nonconforming/nb people who consider their relationship ‘straight’

[rivetgoth]

I don’t ever mean to be like. “No fun allowed” about gender I REALLY don’t. I’m an anarchist I don’t care what you call yourself I don’t care about gender jokes I truly honestly genuinely believe in informed consent and the right to body modification and self identification and I completely understand that the majority of gender jokes are like, good faith humor, but I do feel like sometimes people end up cycling back around with their “gender jokes” to just replicating gender roles or the gender binary or even just run of the mill transphobia because they aren’t analyzing the actual root or implications of what they’re saying…

The other day a goth musician I really really adore who is NOT that famous, I’m talking “he has found my posts about him on other sites where I did not tag him just because I mentioned his band by name” levels, who is also openly queer/not straight, posted a selfie in eyeliner and there was this 17 year old they/them in the comments who was like “What are your pronouns lol” and like… idk man, I get it’s a joke and it’s good natured but I feel like it is SOOO incredibly weird to implicitly suggest that this queer man in eyeliner is “less of a man” because he’s, what, somewhat gender nonconforming? Like come on. He’s never shown signs of not identifying as a man but even if he did come out as trans or nb, worst case that joke is weirdly prodding at outing him. It feels so out of line to say that publicly on someone’s personal social media account, even if they are a small scale celebrity.

And it frankly does happen to me not unoften, I post selfies and get these comments or asks about how “my gender” is so crazy and epic and cool and it very obviously suggests that I am not being perceived as a man, I’m being perceived as this like, aesthetic or this caricature or the embodiment of “gender nonconformity,” rather than just being a gender nonconforming man. And fucking of course my relationship to gender is complicated, I’m trans I’m a cuntboy I’m a bihet I’m a creature I’m a creep I’m a weirdo fuckin whatever, it’s all in good fun when the subject of the joke is actually apart of the joke and engaging with it, but I’m sorry some of you need to learn boundaries with these jokes and/or evaluate what it is you’re actually implying with them. “A man being gender nonconforming makes him less of a man” is not a good look especially when it’s being said about individual people to their faces. And that’s x100 when it’s “a trans man being gender nonconforming makes him less of a man.” Like omg. At best it’s replicating really bizarre transphobic and homophobic gender roles, and at worst it could be overtly transphobic or outing somebody against their will. Jfc.

I’m a trans man. I’ve fought incredibly fucking hard to live as a man and express gender nonconformity as a man, to be able to present how I want and live my life how I want, I’ve undergone surgeries & I’m on hormones 4 the rest of my life, I’ve dealt with transphobia and homophobia and rejection from family and friends workplace harassment slurs bullying ostracization religious trauma etc…. I love who I am and I’m proud of who I am and I’m proud of the man I’ve become thru my own blood sweat and tears and of COURSE I consider myself good natured and down for jokes and humor but some of y’all seriously will see a man in eyeliner and immediately tell him that it makes him less of a man and act like that’s a reasonable comment and not genuinely just blatant repackaged far right conservative bigotry.

[ciaran2020]

i feel like gay/lesbian can include attraction to all nb people without misgendering, the same way 'lesbian' can include attraction to men and 'gay' can include attraction to women. not everyone uses it that way, and some use it in ways that would be misgendering to some nonbinary people. but saying that they just point blank can't seems reductive. if someone defines their lesbian identity in a way that includes attraction to all nonbinary people i think it's possible for that to be earnest

I mean...yeah, I wasn't trying to be reductive it's just that my angry ranting actually gained notes. I've made better posts about that in the past and they didn't get notes lol.

but also like, I'm really suspicious of the impulse to rush to the defense of binary-gendered people and give them a pass on all their behaviour pertaining to nb people, because nb people (whether or not we're willing to admit this) occupy a fragile and tenuous gender position, where the amount of privilege we're seen as having / the way our gender is parsed, is totally up to whoever is talking to us (unless we have the means to enforce our own gender, which we commonly don't + there is little blueprint for it) and is often based on our agabs but always based on what's convenient for the person who wants to discount our views (someone tried to tell me, an nb person, that I have male privilege because I'm not a woman).

like if I saw a straight cis woman dating a trans woman I would be deeply suspicious of her motivations and I would worry about the trans woman in question, whether she's being misgendered or abused, even though there probably are people with that relationship pattern who are perfectly healthy or happy! I can think of many reasons why that might happen. that doesn't mean that if I heard this story out in the wild, statistics and information and anecdotes from trans friends wouldn't come to mind when I heard this. I would think about how trans people face a great deal of violence in personal relationships. I would perhaps not do anything, because it's not my place and if I heard this story at random chances are I couldn't do anything anyway, but I would be worried. because it's a worrying position.

we don't live in a world where queerness and gender / sexuality nonconformity are the norms. I can't assume that that's what's happening until I'm sure of it, when the other option is the real possibility that a trans person is being hurt.

you see where I'm going with this, right?

like just because something can be good doesn't mean it is, and frankly? most afab lesbians (even the nonbinary ones, sometimes) would not even consider dating an amab nb person, or a no-op trans woman. we can't talk about these things because they've labelled themselves nonbinary-inclusive (even though in terms of attraction that means Nothing by itself) and made it impossible to critique their transmisogyny or their biases which are specific to amab nbs.

like.... if you're attracted to nonbinary people as a gender class (which is totally possible) then you are attracted to people of so many varying gender presentations and identities that using the word lesbian for it is stretching it past its limit and also completely useless. which is fine! it's fine. you want what it has, or whatever. I'm happy for you and I'm not going to stop you.

but I don't really think you get to be pissed about other nonbinary people looking at you using a word that means, essentially, wlw, and thinking you might not be the safest person to date.

again, I think it's possible to be attracted to nonbinary people of all genders and presentations. and I think it's possible to be a truly nb-inclusive lesbian. I'm just questioning whether the majority of people calling themselves that are actually nb-inclusive or just eliding responsibility for examining their relationship to the potential gender of their partner, when that relationship is often misgendering. and I'm just not interested in giving that a free pass so easily.

[catlesboy]

hi yes hello nb people who identify as male and/or female are valid

nb people who use he/him and/or she/her pronouns are valid

nb people who don’t use they/them or otherwise gender neutral pronouns are valid

nb people who identify with their agab are valid

nb people who don’t identify with their agab are valid

nb people who don’t identify with the trinary are valid

nb people who identify fully somewhere within the binary are valid

nb people who don’t present as androgynous are valid

nb men and nb women are valid

femme aligned men and masc aligned women are valid

straight, strayt, etc. nb people are valid

mlw and/or wlm nb people are valid

bisexual and other multisexual nb people are valid

male/female nb people are valid

multigender nb people are valid

ace and/or aro nb people are valid

nb people with zero interest in relationships are valid

nb people who consider themselves trans are valid

nb people who consider themselves cis are valid

nb people who consider themselves to be neither (or both) are valid

nb people who id as nb due to their gender role nonconformity are valid

nb people who id as nb due to identifying with neither binary gender are valid

nb people who id as nb due to identifying with both binary genders are valid

nb people whose identity and expression, experiences, or alignment don’t align with each other are valid

any other nb (and genderqueer!) people who don’t get enough support or validation are valid

all! nb! people! are! valid!!! and their identity and experiences don’t need your support or understanding for them to be completely valid!!! we all live on the same planet and should respect each other and support each other, even if we don’t understand!!!

[bullyfemme]

“Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” and Bad Transphobic Pop Science

Many people engaged in discourse on this website, especially with truscum, have probably encountered their concept of “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria”. Those who have the fantastic shinigami eyes extension enabled and search for the topic will often find a litteny of red sites when you look for anything involving the term from sites that often spout anti-trans rhetoric and are constantly looking for pseudoscience to back up their beliefs. 

“Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” as defined by the official website for it (yes, really. Don’t click here if you’re triggered by transphobia) run by the transphobic parents of young trans teens, goes as follows: “A type of adolescent-onset or late-onset gender dysphoria where the development of gender dysphoria is observed to begin suddenly during or after puberty in an adolescent or young adult who would not have met criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood.” 

There are obviously flaws with this, even on the surface level of just this definition, without looking at the actual study conducted itself (though we will get there, trust me). 

First of all, you have to assume that you require gender dysphoria to be trans. There’s evidence quite to the contrary in that professionals and groups dedicated to assisting trans people agree that dysphoria is not a requirement for identifying as trans, and actual (read: not pop science) that has found that the brain is not sexually dymorphic and that there arent “male brains” and female brains”, that very few people actually regret transitioning (roughly .6% of trans women and .3% of trans men, please note the decimal and that both of these, when accounting for the fact that both groups only account for roughly half of all binary trans people, equal less than half of 1% of all trans people).

Pretending that evidence doesn’t exist, let’s pretend that the assumption that gender dysphoria is needed for being trans is correct. Even in that world view, this definition is poor and tenuous. When you describe “not having met criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood”, you are going with the assumption that the child didn’t experience and hide it very well out of shame. Or that they did express it and their parents dismissed it and continued to dismiss it throughout childhood. Or that the child did not force themselves to perform hyperfemininity or hypermasculinity in order to try and “make it go away” in the same vein of a gay person forcing themselves into relationships and situations with straight people. Or that the child is not gay and gnc. Or that didn’t experience adolescent or adult dysphoria which the dsm-5 does define as legitimate experiences, as do MANY ACTUAL TRANS PEOPLE IF YOU TALK TO THEM, SOMETHING THE AUTHOR OF THE STUDY HAS FAILED TO DO. 

Many trans people who experience dysphoria don’t experience it until they hit puberty and their body undergoes changes associated with the wrong kind of puberty for them. Which, for the trans children of the parents surveyed (yeah, we’re getting there, they didn’t actually survey trans kids), allows them to say “well you weren’t like this before!”

There is one, single study conducted with regards to “Rapid onset gender dysphoria.” Lisa Littman, the woman who conducted the study, isn’t even a professional in gender studies. She’s a fucking gynecologist and obstetrician (pregnancy doctor). This is not her field of study. Much of her research is focused on detransition and her coined “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” despite, again, no experience in those fields of study. She’s a cis woman obsessed with making trans people identify as cis again, or as “normal” by her standards. If she would have done actual research, she would have found just how few trans people want to detransition after transitioning in the first place, or how many people who do detransition are trans people, often trans women, forced to detransition in order to survive every day. 

Beyond this, the study itself: where do I even begin. 

I have defined Ms. Littman as coining ROGD, and that’s not quite fair. The actual people who coined it are well-known terf website 4wavenow.com, conservative website Transgendertrend.com, and YouthTransCriticalProfessionals.org which is an organization of conservative scientists (theres an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) who hide behind degrees while they churn out anti-trans propaganda. In fact, that’s what all three of those groups do. 

Now, finally, with all that out of the way. Let’s talk about this study, posted in the non-peer reviewed journal of academic health.

First of all, as alluded to previously, it was conducted by talking to the parents of these kids, not the kids themselves. This opens up a whole host of things to talk about, and trust me - we will. It was a 90 question quiz posted on the three websites mentioned previously: 4thwavenow, transgendertrend.com, and youthtranscrticialproffessionals.org. So, the survey is already poisoned, placed on websites with deliberate anti-trans agendas, with no way of verifying who the fuck was taking that survey. So if Tammy Terfbangs, mother of absolutely no one, gets on 4thwavenow and sees that a ~super scientific survey~ about those evil 14 year old trans kids, there is quite literally nothing stopping her from filling it out. I cannot even begin to describe how shoddy the foundation for all of this is. Or if, per say, a popular terf blog linked to this, there’s quite literally nothing stopping dozens or hundreds of terfs from filling this survey out. 

As a scientist, the methods in which she procured the “””evidence””” on anti-trans websites run by the parents of trans children makes me fucking furious. Imagine running a study about, per say, autism, and how sensory overload feels, instead of asking the autistic person, they asked the parents of the autistic person, and posting it on “TheCureForAutism.org” and “DontVaccinateEducate.Com” and then posting it in a shitty non-peer reviewed journal. Essentially, thats exactly what this is.   

This idea isn’t even new. The WPATH standards of Care, published in 2011, hosted a section called “Phenomenology in Adolescents”. This section had the following to say. 

“Yet many adolescents and adults presenting with gender dysphoria do not report a history of childhood gender-nonconforming behaviors (Docter, 1988; Landén, Wålinder, & Lundström, 1998). Therefore, it may come as a surprise to others (parents, other family members, friends, and community members) when a youth’s gender dysphoria first becomes evident in adolescence.”

The idea that the internet made your kid trans, the backbone of all of this, is just so ridiculous that the fact that I have to even talk about it is stupid. Many kids who understood they were trans when they were young but didn’t know what that meant and couldn’t put their identity into words. Fun fact, if you explain to someone a concept that they didn’t understand but felt before, they might in fact realize that it applies to them. The fact that resources are now available to them to give them information about their identity, and that trans people are more visible now than a decade ago when this generation of trans and nb people were growing up, is a good thing. 

Besides, considering just the quantity of shit like “transgender people DISPROVED by ben shapiro” and “NONBINARY CRINGE COMP #400000000000000000″ available on youtube being fed directly to toddlers with ipads, it’s not like all exposure to trans people has been framed positively, nurturing, or encouraging, and it would be beneficial to talk about the ways in which this is going to affect the trans and nb people who will be around a decade from now. 

There’s so much more I could talk about here, but I don’t think I need to. Instead, I will link to this amazing article that was the backbone of much of what I wrote. The author is a bisexual trans women with a degree in biochemistry, she knows what the fuck shes talking about. 

[laundryandtaxes]

No reblogs///// because I’m not starting this fight with anyone but it is so wild to me that so many people are very willing to acknowledge there is a current massive wave of detransitioning women, there have been these waves before, and we will probably have another one, or at least waves of reidentifying/reidentified women like myself, like huge numbers, to where you can’t be involved in any lgbt scene and not know a gnc cis woman who at some point identified as trans or nb or both, etc, but NOBODY is interested in an honest discussion of what forced so many women into disidentification in the first place. Like even if you thought all these women were just stupid and “got it wrong” for themselves, you’d think you would at least honestly acknowledge that this happening in scenes all over the country means soooooomething must be connecting them. Couldn’t possibly be the way we think about gender nonconformity right? Couldn’t possibly be unattainable standards of femininity for people to not stop telling you to consider that maybe you’re not really a woman after all. Couldn’t possibly be politics in queer scenes explicitly stating that it’s both cooler and more politically radical to be something other than a woman. Couldn’t be discomfort with adult gnc women.

I find both the idea that women are biologically defined but somehow also have the same relationship to patriarchy (like I guarantee you Buck Angel and I do not have the same experiences of walking around the street, although I think we were on a good path in the 80s with some solidarity between butches and trans men because have a loooooooot of the same experiences and sometimes the exact same ones and just use different words to describe them, even though our bodies started in physically similar state) and the idea that it’s wrong to say your body has anything to do with your womanhood (like, my experience of womanhood has been shaped by being raised in a world intending to shape me into a woman, and my all the things that come from menstrual stigma, and when I disidentified nothing materially changed about my life, as is often the case for women who don’t pursue a lot of transition measures) to both be preposterous. They are both ways of evening out experiences that are the same in places we may not want to acknowledge, and of totalizing in ways that write other people out- like trans women are obviously not walking the streets making huge paychecks or safe from violence from men, but also for a lot of women there’s nothing we feel like a gender identity (I do not have one, I do not need one) and the idea that all women relate to womanhood that way is demonstrably false, and the idea that all should is deeply offensive.

It is no surprise that so many women who reidentify at least temporarily claim really easentialist politics that I object to myself, when their bodies are sometimes the only thing they can offer up in the face of gender identity politics as legitimizing their womanhood, and often bodies to which we have done permanent, physical changes in ways some of us are happy with and some of us find traumatizing. I think (I hope) that most eventually find their way at least a good bit from those politics, which attract them because they genuinely make much better sense of their experiences than many other popular alternatives (like those that pressured them to transition to begin with) but just don’t hold much political weight. Either womanhood is a material class or a biological category or a mixture of the two, but radfems who want to have their cake and eat it too there by saying those are the same thing are just kidding themselves- gay trans men and I do not have the same life experiences, especially if the guy in question is able to go stealth, and our paychecks will be different, and our odds of receiving male violence on the street will be different, even if we have a lot of the same feelings about our bodies.

But I saw a post the other day saying some nonsense like “Anyone who says there is pressure on gnc cis women to transition is a terf” and like, alright, pull the wool further over your eyes if you want, but more women are going to get hurt in the meantime and also, just literally ask those you know, and also I guess all these dykes having the saaaame experiences and experiencing the same pressures are just making it up and we are crazy and not to be listened to! I guarantee you they’ve also been straight up told they should call themselves nonbinary for liking ties and not liking pink and shit, I guarantee you they’ve told someone to use she/her and had that person use “they” repeatedly, like this shit will straight up make you feel like you are literally going insane. This is why I don’t touch those scenes anymore. But many women are still in them and okay, we can put the conversation off. But girls and women are going to get hurt in themeantime. I don’t even think there is anything wrong with new terms popping up to describe experiences, but the idea that there are natural lines to be drawn between them is very harmful and encourages us to pick a side. And when one side gets you respect from your friends, you pick that one.

[peppersbian]

June 17 2021

Posted to the Crockercore Instagram

Pronoun update lmao. Not that you specifically may care but i figure maybe me talking about my feelings will help other people with theirs

I've been struggling to identities what exactly has been my recent disconnect from my gender presentation. He/Him has always been atrocious, She/Her feels like a threat, and they/them feels empty.

I've been going by she and they pronouns for four years. I have been confident in these pronouns for four years. And only recently they've felt wrong and bad due to everyone saying shit like "cis she/they".

That's probably enough to make someone feel invalidated. I am not cis woman. I never have been. And to be perceived as such is wrong. But that's what people do now. As much as people will say "well obviously nb she/they's aren't included" the damage is already done towards people's reception if she/they pronoun users.

In addition to this, comes the extra intersection of being a lesbian. I don't enter men in my life or my identity what so Ever. This inherently separates us from traditional womanhood because of how the standards and perceptions of womanhood revolve around men.

Gender nonconformity is a major and intrinsic part of my identity. It may seem like an oxymoron to be both nb and gnc, bear with me. My nonbinary identity stems from this disconnection. I am not a ""woman"" therefore I am other.

But lately I have considered recently is if I have been using the label of nb to deflect from having to explain and face the loneliness that comes from no one truly understanding my experience and relationship to gender unless they too are a gnc person. And even then!!! I have met so many gnc people who can't understand and straight up disrespect my gnc identity in relation to my lesbian identity.

But adversely, I have considered if my attempts to distance myself from the terms "nonbinary" is a result of most people's perception of nb people as transmasculine agender people.

(Which is an extremely small portion of the nb umbrella that is totally chill and I love them but I'm incredibly frustrated that's what people think all nonbinary is).

I not am transmasculine. I am not agender. But because of my masculinity and lack of woman-ness, this definition will fill the gap in the eyes of other people. I do not want that.

Its frustrating. I do not want to be perceived as something I am not, but continually my identity will be pushed away to satisfy other's comforts.

I have been feeling this disconnection because I just hurt and feel alone. I've been scrambling to change my presentation because I want people to understand who I am. But that's never going to happen lmfao. It hurts when no one understands your experience. It hurts when they deny your attempts at expressing it.

Inherent aloneness. This is the birthright of butches. To paraphrase Stone Butch Blues: "when I looked in the mirror I wondered if I was brave enough to become the person I saw in it".

I am a butch lesbian. A dyke. That is my identity, holistically. A Gender and sexuality all rolled into one beautiful bundle that cannot be expressed separately from one another.

I wish I could say it doesn't matter how people perceive me. Because I care. I wish people would not see my as a woman for my agab. I wish they wouldn't see me as a "man" for my masculinity. I wish nonlesbians and even just generally nonbutches could understand what makes me fundamentally me. But they won't! Never have, and probably never will!

And this might sound like a complete bummer, but I see this as a *not* bad thing. Gender nonconformity is defiant. It has existed forever. It will continue to exist. And it currently exists in me. People's rejection of my presentation only indicates their lack of understanding.

And this essay probably cleared nothing up for no one! Hell, who knows maybe I'll get a few "nb lesbians can't exist those aren't real" reply's in my DM's. Yawn, get a life. But this is for me. This was cathartic.

Tldr: I don't give a shit any more, and I never should have. Pea brained motherfuckers just can't understand how ridiculously sexy I am.

Tldr^2: Lesbians hmu Awooga

Tldr^3: I'm going by They/She pronouns, and prefer masculine terms.

Tldr^4: read stone Butch blues by Leslie Feinberg (after checking content warnings)