Or mine either. That’s cis privilege for you: most of us cisgender people don’t need to develop any conscious awareness of gender identity because our form of gender identity is so culturally normalized that it never gets articulated.
It’s like white people in historically white-supremacist societies who declare that their race is simply “human”. They genuinely don’t have any conscious awareness of “feeling” specifically like a “white person” instead of just a “person”. That’s because their racial identity is the culturally normalized default condition of “personhood” in the society they live in.
When you click on this post? Weird. I’ve reported that linked post for moderation to have somebody check out the inconsistent post numbering, which I presume might be a symptom of some sneaky bug in Discourse.
Unfortunatly once a certain amount of people agree on an idioms meaning it becomes a word.
I’m willing to bet you don’t know the original meanings of a lot of words you use.
I took that to mean that even if you previously identified as a “he” you can, through the process of self-discovery, change that identification or even drop it altogether. Of course, this is only a guess because the post seems pretty obtuse to me.
I don’t know what you mean by “click” on the post. When I do that nothing happens. The scrolling counter on the right side of the screen starts off at “1” for the first post and as you scroll that one to the top of the screen it changes to “2” and so on. For the post you are referencing it shows “374” and changes to “375” as I continue scrolling.
iiandyiiii seems to have a strong male identity; one that I don’t share. And yet we’re both pretty clearly male. So I don’t think the fish in water analogy is entirely convincing.
Regardless, that misses the point of the subthread. Kimstu posited that gender conformity is an orthogonal concept to gender identity. A transgender person may not adopt the dress or other social mores of their gender identity, while still feeling that they are in the wrong body.
But other trans people do not suffer physical dysphoria. They may feel that their gender identity doesn’t match their position in society and wish to socially transition without any physical transition (whether surgical or hormonal). As Kimstu noted, others may go even farther and explicitly express their physical sex (say, with a beard) while identifying as a woman (I may have known someone like this, though they may have just been a dedicated cross-dresser).
But… how can these two sets of people possibly mean the same thing when they talk about gender identity? For one, it’s physical, while for the other it’s social. And an individual person may be non-conforming on these fronts.
My later suggestion is that it’s enough that each one feels a mismatch, even though the reasons are different. Still, it’s hard to have a useful discussion on the issues without recognizing the difference. And if neither of these things presents as a mismatch–that is, someone felt no dyphoria or any desire to socially express outside of their sex-assigned-at-birth–then what could it possibly mean for them to have a gender identity other than their assigned one?
To be clear, these are just philosophical questions. I don’t think the example of an obvious male that presents as a man but claims to be a woman (or attack helicopter) is really a thing, or at least it’s not common enough to matter. Certainly none of the answers change how I’ll treat transgender people. But they are, to me, interesting questions.
By this description, perhaps i am a trans man. I don’t mind using the ladies restroom. But I’ve been in all-female social settings, like a woman’s study group, and i felt very much like i didn’t belong there. I’ve obviously never been in a setting restricted to men, but I’ve often been the only woman in a group, and honestly, I’m completely comfortable in those situations. Much more comfortable than at ladies night. And it grates me when people are too aggressive about “treating me like a woman”, such as holding the door for me, but not for men.
But it’s not excruciating, and I’ve never felt the need to identify as a man.
Still, i hate being asked my pronouns. (And yes, I’ve been asked a few times.) Because, of course people usually call me “she”, but it feels very wrong to be “she first” like that.
My signature line at work says “any pronouns”, and i mean that in all sincerity. I look female, but i have a deep voice and I’ve been told i walk like a man. I’m routinely “sirred” over the phone, and I’ve been addressed as a male in person when bundled in a coat. I never correct people who do that. I suppose if it were someone i expected to see regularly, I’d have to do as not to put them in an awkward situation? I’ve also been called “they” and “zi”, by people who know me well and prefer to use gender-neutral language. I’m honest-to-God fine with any pronouns, do long as you aren’t trying to insult me or something.
I’m dubious that @Novelty_Bobble has actually experienced being taken for a woman, as I’m pretty sure he’s said he’s a large, athletic man. But I’ve experienced being taken for both a man and a woman lots of times.
Click on the timestamp in the upper right corner of the post. That produces a popup with “Share Post [post number]” and a link to the post, with a URL that contains the same post number.
That pretty closely describes me. I never felt my biological plumbing was wrong, but neither did I feel like it made me less of the kind of person that girls were recognized and valued (including by each other) for being. Guinastasia once said “So like a tomboy in reverse?” which is totally how I thought of it. I didn’t embrace ‘trans’ as an identifier because in the era when I came out, that was 100% associated with doing a physical transition, and it still implies that for more people than not.
But although I don’t embrace the label, I fit the official definition, since how I identify inside my head isn’t what’s expected based on what the obstetrician put on my birth cert.
It’s exhausting trying to explain my struggle to exist to anyone who takes this ivory tower abstract view of lived human experience. Who views human beings like abstract math equations. I’m not a “philosophical question” or a “linguistic question,” you twit. I’m a person and my fucking human rights are under attack. I explained it to you and you dismissed my explanation. Your cisgender privilege is so all-pervasive that you’re still that fish denying the existence of water.
To all of you who are so blithe about “there’s no such thing as gender identity,” own your cisgender privilege that blinds you to itself. If we’ve had this discussion about privilege, whether white, male, straight, able, we’ve had it a thousand times. You can lead the horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
Also, all that being said, if you ARE comfortable with your gender identity, i encourage you to proactively share your pronouns. It is nice for those whose pronouns might not always be obvious if the simple action of sharing their pronouns doesn’t single them out as “other”. It’s a tiny thing you can do to make the world a better place for your trans friends and coworkers.
