Of course, there are so many possible permutations of physical sex (and different aspects of physical sex, at that), mental gender, and societal expectations, at different points in one’s life, and in different contexts, that it would be impossible to have a distinct word for all of them.
ETA: I like the phrase gender variant for the best catch-all.
/ETA
Yeah, I’d say your description of genderfluid is accurate. I identify as genderqueer and spend time on genderqueer boards and groups. Genderfluid people are probably the largest single subset within genderqueer, which is yet another big-tent all-encompassing identity. Unlike “transgender”, I use “genderqueer” because it doesn’t invoke a bunch of meanings that don’t apply to me. It doesn’t invoke a whole bunch of any kind of meanings, in fact; I joke that “genderqueer” means “no that’s still not it, it’s something else!”
I don’t fit into genderfluid myself, not really, not as the people who embrace it describe it. They consider who they are, their gendered self, to vary over time. For me, my understanding of my gendered self may fluctuate a bit (I have days when I think of myself as just another male-bodied person in a sea of sexist generalizations about males, and I’m just more vocal about disliking them and considering them to be wrong; on other days the most critically central aspect of my identity is that I am a male-bodied person who has always identified with the girls and women, hence totally genderqueer and Different from other males with a capital D), but not my gender itself.
That seems to work reasonably well. It’s rather difficult to find vocabulary that doesn’t either have a lot of historical baggage (e.g. -queer), have pejorative connotations, or require potentially tiresome explanation. I guess “gender-atypical” is the underlying sense, but atypical maybe has a slight negative connotation of abnormality, so variant seems a better word.
Transgender doesn’t necessarily imply MtF or FtM though, even taking into account intersex people. Nonbinary and agender people seem to generally be fine being under the trans umbrella, and while the movement needs to put more focus on them since it’s almost all on binary transpeople (and even at that almost exclusively MtF), but we have a ton of the same issues. Most of the enbies I know either get hormones or surgery. My agender friend is getting top surgery but not hormones. They suffer from actual dysphoria.
That said, they’re still distinct from GQ and genderfluid people, generally.
Una, you’ve come a long way and even if you still have a lot of baggage you’re actually pretty confident in who you are. I think that makes dealing with vocal mis-steps or even outright bigotry easier than if you were not so well grounded.
Locally, my knitting group has a person transitioning from presenting-male to presenting-female. She turned up at work when I was running the jewelry counter and I think she found it a relief to see me there, knowing I wasn’t going to treat her badly and she could just be herself, referring to both having to learn all the girly stuff in her 50’s and just, you know, being girls talking about jewelry and knitting. In an ideal world, transwomen and transmen would be accepted to the point that people aren’t constantly questioning who/what they are, which, I suspect, would make talking about their pasts and the transition a lot less painful than it has historically been.
Happy to say that, unlike prior work experiences, there wasn’t a lot of whispering or hushed “that’s really a MAN!!!” afterward. Definitely a change from a decade ago, or maybe I just work with a better crowd of people.
Una Persson, as already mentioned (including by Una) was born intersex. She’s the most out. There has been at least one other poster who was here briefly who was (and presumably still is) intersex.
On another board I know two women born with Klinefelter Syndrome who have completed their transitions - Klinefelter may or may not be seen as intersex by some people. Another transgender person there has stated she is intersex but has not specified in what manner (we have a lot of out transgender people on that board because the owner and admins are adamant about maintaining a non-hostile environment so it’s become something of a safe space).
Yes, you probably have met more than one intersex person in your life, especially if you live in a big city. It’s not like they’re glow-in-the-dark purple. Intersex conditions are a lot more common than people realize because it’s so easy to hide the difference under clothing. Some of them aren’t apparent even with clothes off, especially with modern surgical techniques.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not and never has been a documentary and I pity anyone attempting to learn anything about sexuality from it. It’s a farce, a comedy, and never intended to be a serious tutorial of any sort. Might as well say it’s promoting incest because of Riff Raff and Magenta, or cannibalism (meatloaf for dinner again?).
Recently I was told after lecturing to a group of young transgender persons on transgender history that I was “not allowed” to even use the word “transgender” because it was “hate speech.” Because it implies that one must “transition,” is their argument.
One of the reasons I hate the lumping is that I work every day as an “out and proud” transsexual woman in an industry that is known for being ultra-conservative and where transgender women at my career level are nonexistent to vanishingly rare. In fact, I don’t know of any others in the United States at my level in my industry. But what I do get are a LOT of comments whereby people are “confused” and don’t understand why I’m different than RuPaul, or Nathan Lane in The Birdcage, or some random cisguy going out to clubs to play dress up and suck people off in the tiki lounge. And they want me to try to “prove” I’m different from someone wearing clothes as a kink.
I love crossdressers, I am good friends with many of them. But I am not them and I detest being treated or viewed as if this is a kink or a thrill.
I’m guessing a lot of them hang out at tumblr – I hope you didn’t take it personally.
Heck, cisgender women engineers are already pretty darned rare.
They may, but there is a very large, very angry group of non-binary offenderatti locally who absolutely detest binary transgender people, especially those over age 35.
This is sadly true in my field; in other fields it’s much better.
Wait I understand they want to be able to identify as non-binary, fair enough thats up to them. But why would they detest transgender people that want to identify as binary? Whats the possible logic here?
Their logic appears to go like this:
-
All evil in the world is caused by heteronormativity, which forces the gender binary, a manifestation of that evil, down our throats.
-
Transgender persons who transition but “choose” to be binary want to adhere to heteronormativity, and thus support evil.
Essentially, these activists claim that the only true gender is non-binary gender, and binary transgender persons are actually worse than cisgender people because we could be accepting our “true” gender diversity by transitioning from binary to non-binary. But instead, we are “choosing” to adhere to heteronormativity, which causes puppies to cry and kittens to mew in sadness.
There is a very large overlap between their groups and the surge in groups in the KC area which are focused on “all white people, everywhere, no matter what, are racists who commit hate crimes by taking a breath.” One of these mental midgets claimed to my face, and in front of witnesses, that the theory of gravity was “white science” and was inherently racist because Sir Isaac Newton was white. It also was wrong, because like the ancient Egyptians had airplanes made out of hemp that could fly to China to trade for spices (“now departing the pyramid of Giza, flight serpent-ox-man-with-ankh for Cathay…”)
No, I’m not kidding. He has a Bachelor’s degree and was honored by Oprah, FWIW, for his “great wisdom.” :dubious:
Aha, the same “logic” that you can disregard anything a while male cis hetero says because they’re “one of the oppressors”… got ya…
Hell, that sure sounds like they think anyone who is cis is actually also horrible. And so, anyone different from them is evil. That’s bigotry.
I almost never run into these people in real life. I agree that there are various reasons a legitimate transperson may not be able to medically transition, and may choose not to socially transition if they can’t do so medically.
However there’s an… odd strain of people mostly on the internet who doggedly argue that they’re trans yet experience no dysphoria and aren’t transitioning and every transperson I’ve met in real life rightly calls bullshit on that. For whatever insane reason being trans has become trendy on certain corners of the internet. Like, even I wish I wasn’t trans, what the fuck people?
I think another point is they’re not even mutually exclusive. My best friend is a transdude who wants to be a drag queen and sometimes-crossdresser after he transitions.
Most of the enbies I know are sweethearts and fine with binary trans people, but yeah, these people exist and are really annoying. And I did give, serious, serious consideration to being non-binary or agender when I was exploring my gender identity. It was a bit confusing for me because I’m a bit of a tomboy and in the media you only really encounter the girly girl transwomen; even all the marketing towards us has to do with your ~inner femininity~ and that’s just not me. Eventually I accepted being a binary, albeit a bit gender non-conforming, transwoman, but I absolutely accept my NB friends and I don’t see why the concept of binary and nonbinary transpeople can’t coexist. It’s all a spectrum.
I dunno… is “mentally identifies as female” necessarily the same thing as “thinks one’s body ought to be female”? It seems to me that it should be possible for some people to have a body of one gender and a mind of the other, and to not have any problem with that. Which is not, of course, to say that nobody should have a problem with such a mismatch, but there are so many different permutations of sexuality do show up, I’m not going to be the one to say that that one doesn’t.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but it almost sounds like you had a choice to be non-binary or agender? Am I reading that correctly?
The two are different, and that is the problem. Like Jragon says, there are these folks who call themselves transgender and try to wrap themselves in the attention and sympathy, while experiencing no actual dysphoria or distress, and not transitioning in real life. Their “outness” is thus situational and entirely to their benefit - they can tell people they’re “transgender” when it will benefit them, and keep it quiet when it won’t. And they experience no distress in having to hide.
I don’t have that choice. I had to be me, or I would have died.
No, not really. I was mostly pointing out that I did a lot of exploration of my gender identity. I AM a binary transwoman, but I don’t feel like I really had a choice, it’s just what I discovered about myself. It’s mostly just that I had seriously considered whether or not I WAS non-binary and rejected it. It just makes me mad when some flavors of enbies act like I made a bad choice.
I understand. My gender identity and sexuality both sort of dragged me along, and although it makes some flame in rage, I believe that nurture has some influence on both, albeit temporary.
When I was very young I felt like a girl (about 8), but didn’t know what transgender was. Growing up in the mid-70’s with no access to resources I had no idea what gender identity was, nor did my parent. In my start of Junior High I thought I was gay, and I just thought that all gay males felt like they were really women (remember, I was about 11-13 and had never even met another gay person, nor had any resources). But that didn’t make sense, because if all gay males felt like women, but desired each other, then all gay males were really lesbians…what?
When I was raped later on in high school, then I was met with a conundrum - I still felt like a girl, although I also hated myself for being a girl because it had led to my victimization. And I also learned I was attracted only to girls, which confused me. The manifestation of my intersex condition added to the confusion.
A mental conversation at age 16 would have gone like “Oooooooo…Kay. I know I’m a girl inside, but I have some boy parts and my parents are raising me as a boy, but my body looks female and I have breasts and don’t grow hair (but my parents said I can never talk about it), and I thought I liked boys but now I only like girls…so I’m a girl trapped in the body of a half-boy-half-girl who likes girls…WTF?”
It’s a wonder I made it at all.