I’m a cis-gender man which basically means that, when I was born, the doctor went “It’s a boy!” and when I was old enough to understand I agreed with him.
The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man. I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little. I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests. I never cared about sports or cars or guns. I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts. I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.
It’s not physical either. I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard. If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume). I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.
I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me. I’m a man. I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated. I feel like a man because of something beyond that. Something ephemeral. So, why couldn’t others feel the same? Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?
And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one? Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?
Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form? If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap? If so, why? Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?
Why do people feel like they are the gender that they are?
I don’t enjoy having tits but i honestly can’t always tell how much of that is gender related and how much is just “this is inconvenient & uncomfy. poorly executed concept 2/10”
reminder there’s no wrong way to be nonbinary! discovering that you’re nb doesn’t mean you have to change things about yourself & your appearance. you can just…identify as nonbinary.
experimenting w/ clothes & hair & gender nonconformity is fun & validating for many of us! but it’s not like, required. fuck around w/ gender expression if you want to, and only if you want to. you don’t owe the world conformity to any idea of what nonbinary or binary looks like.
do cis people not realize that trans people will often go through a period, before we come out to ourselves, where we lean into presenting as our assigned gender? is that not something cis people realize?
like we might try to perform as the gender we were assigned by using makeup/facial hair/gendered clothing or whatever to affirm that yes we are very much cisgender like we are expected to be, thank you very much. we might lean into gender stereotypes to convince ourselves & other people that we aren’t trans. and sometimes we present this way for years before transitioning.
some of us use it to quiet our internal doubts about our identities. some of us use it to feel safe, to fit in, whatever. and some of us are very successful at passing as our assigned gender. and it still always sucks, bc being closeted is an innately terrible experience, no matter how “good” we are at the performance.
which is why “i never would guessed” and “you don’t seem trans” are, in fact, shitty ways to react when someone tells you they’re thinking about transitioning.
i want love that’s warm and sickeningly sweet like honey… the kind that makes your insides all gooey and causes your heart to flutter uncomfortably and causes heat to blossom on your cheeks… but i also want the cool and calm kind of love, the love that’s quiet and steady and stable, where they make you feel like you’re coming home.
as someone who’s never experienced gender, watching cis people argue about it is bizarre and dystopic in a way i cannot in begin to convey,,,, please im crying just let me go home & put on my adult onesie i don’t even go here
dysphoria is a very common hallmark of transness, sure, but gender euphoria is an almost completely universal and therefore much more reliable signifier and frankly i think we should say ‘if the idea of being a different gender than the one you were born assigned as makes you feel happy/better about yourself you’re trans’ instead of telling people ‘the way you know you’re trans is if your body feels like a prison and your genitals make you hate yourself’
if you rest a lot because you are chronically fatigued, that’s okay. if you find it hard to focus or accomplish tasks because you are always tired or always in pain, that’s okay. you are not a bad person for requiring more rest than most. you are not a bad student or bad worker. it is not your fault. you do not deserve the hate you aim at yourself.
I’m like at a weird spot right now with pronouns tbh.
I started introducing myself to new people on the internet with they/them as my primary pronouns but tbh i’m fine with ANY pronouns. maybe if i say Any, people will just default to they/them anyway??? that’s what i would do.
but i really only feel the need to use they/them pronouns bc i feel like using the nonbinary/agender labels means that i should use those pronouns more (because they/them seems gender neutral) which is a stupid feeling i can’t get out of my head because the point of being agender to me is that i don’t see a point to gender. and because of that, i feel like pronouns aren’t inherently gendered so whatever pronouns gets tossed at me is literally whatever because i don’t care???
but i feel the compulsive need to try to fit in with the community because most of it seems to try to fit into this “androgynous ideal” including the use of these pronouns so i’m like, “maybe i should try going by they/them pronouns more.” and tbh it does make me happy! but i honestly don’t care too much about pronouns even though i lowkey really do in this weird gender exploration i’m doing.
and also these labels don’t mean that there will be much of an exterior change of me so people irl will probably keep using she/her pronouns unless they ask me what’s up which is probably never.
ANYWAY i think the point is that i’d love to get used to using they/them pronouns for me but only for the right reasons which is my own satisfaction. but all in all, i don’t care what pronouns people use for me. it would be easier to state that any pronouns is fine for me but i think i would love it if more people used they/them pronouns for me first before i declare something like that.
wow sorry for the rant, it’s almost 5am so i just wanted to spill my guts on this text post.
There is no actual, tangible reason why we allow people to starve, to be homeless, to suffer and die needlessly. Food is plentiful. Empty homes are plentiful. Medicine is plentiful. It’s hidden away behind constructs and we pretend those constructs mean something. There is an empty home and a homeless family, give them it. There is a sick child and common medicine to treat it, give it to them. There is a starving person and so much food wasted by corporations or hidden behind a dollar sign, feed them.
When I was a kid I had a reputation for faking sick because nothing much seemed to be wrong with me. Years later I found out my symptoms were psychosomatic due to the constant stress of untreated mental health issues. I spent 20 years in chronic pain because the adults around me just saw a child who didn’t want to be in class
Listen to your goddamn kids.
…i just lost a lot of leftover guilt from missing so many days in elementary school.
Children SHOULD miss school when they are feeling unwell, physical or mentally. And every child is going to get sick sometimes. That is normal. It’s a bad sign if a child never misses a day of school–that is often a sign of neglect or abuse. Children are children, they do not have the same stamina, authority, or the same communication skills to articulate their needs that adults have.
Normalize giving kids days off for their mental health.
Every month my mom allotted me and my brother one mental health day. If we aren’t feeling well emotionally or physically we can say we’re cashing in our day and roll back into bed no questions asked about school. School is no longer on the table its, “are you okay”, “ whats going on”, “would you like space from me right now” “is something going on I should know about”, etc. I’m so glad she did that for me and him, especiallu with us both having mental health issues as kids.
literally it’s like neon Genesis evangelion says even though being alive is so painful and submitting to the fact that you cannot control other people’s perceptions of you is so cruel and navigating relationships with other people is the hardest thing in the world… You have to do it bc living a safe existence where you isolate yourself and try to control your surrounding is a death in itself… You have to keep trying everyday even when you know it will result in so many humiliating failures because there’s no other option bc other people are the only thing worth living for
