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To expand a bit, it’s clear to me at this point that I do have dysphoria, physical and socio-emotional, but I don’t think that I’m trans in any meaningful sense.
Becoming a guy emphatically does not feel like a solution or a goal. It feels like a whole other giant sack of trouble I don’t want. One which would be even more difficult to execute on and maintain because I don’t have the experience or expertise or fluency in it that I do with this one, and I’d have to outsource key infrastructure which would involve a lot of overhead and basic insecurity,.and let’s not even get into the brand equity, personal, professional, relational, etc costs of transition like holy fucking shit, and I don’t even want this? I don’t have this vision of how if things were just different I could be a guy and it would be right-feeling and comfortable and authentic. It wouldn’t. It’d just be more performance, and I’d be considerably worse at it.
That doesn’t make it any more comfortable to be permanently trapped in a Jessica Rabbit flesh-and-bone costume, but you don’t get to fix that unless you want to be a guy and frankly the available technologies for it aren’t that goddamn great even if you do..
What I really-really want is to not have all this unbelievably extra anatomy. It’s wrong-feeling, infrastructurally unsound, painful, inconvenient, unaesthetic and a huge pain in my ass. (Secondarily it would be nice to not have my gender be the screamingly obtrusive most noticeable thing about my body so the misogynists can tell from 200 feet away who to de-agentize and make jump through extra hoops and I can’t go outside at night without fear and etc, but if it were just that and not any of the physical stuff I think I could write this off as internalized misogyny. Unfortunately the physical stuff is worse.). And if I thought transition would really solve all of those problems and I could magic it by hitting a button, then yeah, it’d be the least-worst option, but I don’t think it would, and there isn’t a magic button, and “least-worst” just doesn’t feel like grounds for pursuing it.
@limnaia asked on the other thread:
Seriously, though, have you considered perhaps you’re non-binary gendered and just want a body that reflects that?
I think it probably does net out to nonbinary. But “nonbinary” doesn’t seem to pull much problem-solving weight semantically or practically. Then what? Do solutions follow?
I know how this plays out. I’m bi/pan, and in my actual life that has washed up mostly as “not entitled to claim to be gay so living a superficially straight life while feeling bad and stuck and angry and bitter about it but also still alienated from queerness so whatever,” and I can already feel this going the same way but I don’t know what to do differently. Trans stuff in 2017 is about where sexuality stuff was in 1987 and there’s a reason that that went the way it did for me. And it feels higher-stakes to act on anything or claim a label wrt gender than sexuality, and we’ve established that I am a wuss.
And again, what’s the prize? There are no super great solutions out there to go claim. Hip reduction surgery doesn’t exist, T is a goddamn injectable because FDA said no to pills and all the effects I want are reversible, late, require major effort to support etc and all the effects that are permanent and reasonably quick are the ones I’m meh or wary of, and I probably couldn’t even get it on a nonbinary basis, IDK. (I talked to someone on here who has T gel and also E and an endocrinologist sympathetic to hormonal experimentation and was like, ooooh, but that’s a rough fucking goal to target, like, Endocrinologist Georg is an outlier adn should not have been sought)
This resonates with me very strongly. Particularly the “I think I would not fit in in exactly the opposite way if I lived as a man” part.
I feel like if I lived in a society that had a “female masculine” gender, like some cultures do, I would uncomplicatedly consider myself that gender. I’d probably at least try hormones IF the society would still recognize me as that gender.
I do not think I want to be seen as a guy. I think I want to try masculinizing my body to see if it brings my body more in line with my internal map, because I think it might.
I know that in my current culture I have the option of calling myself nonbinary, and I did for a while. But my mind associates nonbinary with a particular kind of cultural/social role (and most especially a role tied to a youth culture that I don’t identify with) that doesn’t match what I think I am very well.
all of @fierceawakening‘s comment. so much.
i’m lucky to have a body that fits my gender feelings pretty well and a cultural background that – doesn’t exactly have a “female masculine” gender but makes that easier to pull off than it is here? by being more tied to embodiment, which i know isn’t good for trans people who reject the idea that the body has to match the gender, but –
i feel more complete, there, than i ever could here, where “trans” and “nonbinary” don’t describe my feelings at all (i feel you so much with nonbinary feeling like a Specific Role that i don’t match – even though it’s supposed to be a catch-all it’s never felt like one, it feels like a specific model for exploring gender that is super useful for some people but isn’t what i feel), and the alternative is “cis” – but cis what, because “cis masculine woman” isn’t a role that people understand as distinct from “cis woman”, and there’s the implication that your gender experiences aren’t Complicated and –
the closest i have is “butch”, which makes me lucky i’m a lesbian because i don’t even wanna imagine the tumblr bullshit i’d have to go through to defend that if i wasn’t, but even then there’s a set of assumptions about butchness and – idk.
the part of me that’s paranoid of the Identity Police tells me i’m overcomplicating this and trying to be a ~special snowflake~, when i should just accept my cisness and not try to act like i’m some kind of gender minority. but like… i don’t even want to be a “gender minority” in the sense of fitting in with the tumblr nb community, or i’d just call myself nb. i just want to have words for the simplicity yet complexity of how i relate to my womanhood, and the parts of me that are more physically masculine but belong to a woman, nonetheless.
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