Core or Innate Gender Identity: Do You Have One?

I think this is an interesting question.

I have never felt like my gender was in question; all my life I have been male.

^^^

I feel that my masculinity has been questioned, but it's always been in terms of gender norms or specific roles I was supposed to fulfill as a man but had no interest in. Never have really felt anything other than male.

while it's quite hard to work out where one's sense of gender ends and where socially constructed gender roles/traits begin, my sense of being male feels definite because of what i don't feel - ie the deep need to get away from my assigned body that i assume trans people feel. set alongside that, whether my behaviour or personality variously codes as stereotypically masculine/feminine/gay seems kinda superficial

(xp) ^^^

thanks for creating this, I'm curious about the results, and the discussion that might follow from that.

I too have always felt male, but being gay meant that presenting maleness was a fraught enterprise anyway because in Kentucky in the 80s I had a secret worth keeping- and queerness makes you think about the possibility that people feel and desire otherwise than the gendered selves that they present, so even though gay male psyches are not necessarily like transfolks, there are certain narrative parallels.

I mean, I dunno, it's hard to talk about whether any part of an adult's psyche is "innate" because they have to think back to formative moments and they may falsify the memory of certain experiences based on who they turned out to be, narrating a compromise as if it was a conscious choice and thus an expression of who they really are/were when really things are more contingent and determined from outside by cultural scripts and frames of expectation. Often things in our past wind up being narrated as if they were choices/votes-for-normativity when really we are responding to an environment in which norms are encouraged and deviation discouraged. So the decisions people make about gender presentation have that shadow of compromise or misgiving or "faute de mieux" about them- years of a compliance/reward cycle tend to upstage fleeting moments of resistance or counterfactual imagining about what would have happened if someone had chosen to gender themselves otherwise (if that possibility was even legibly available to them in their environment).

(I don't think the rambling above are really about gender at all so much as about the nature of retrospection as a rear-projection of qualities whose "innateness" might be a bit tendentious- we trail behind us all the selves that we might have been but weren't but we don't necessarily relate to those versions of ourselves, and stories about innateness tend to reify who we are right now at the expense of the counterfactual-but-possible versions of ourselves)

I feel that my masculinity has been questioned, but it's always been in terms of gender norms or specific roles I was supposed to fulfill as a man but had no interest in. Never have really felt anything other than male.

otm

I have usually felt male except when [REDACTED], but this is important & there is no option for it: I feel fluid, like I could be female any time I choose. Obviously I'd need to take behavioural steps to achieve this, but I do feel that if I choose to perform as woman then can be one

maleness

assigned female at birth, am comfortable identifying as a woman although i have tomboyish traits and my doc tells me i have high testosterone.

what do all you guys mean by "feel male"?

is it just that you conceive yourself as being men or is it

idk

maleness

for me, being gay - once i was out - meant that, in comparison to how my str8 peers seemed to feel, whether i conformed or deviated from a social gender norm was less of an issue. there was less to prove, to myself and to the world - when many of the str8 men around me fell short of some threshold of masculinity they'd perceive it as a failing, something they needed to correct or compensate for, whereas i felt like i could act "masculine" or "feminine" as i pleased.

what do all you guys mean by "feel male"?

i don't really know tbh, apart from vague and nonsensical stereotypes of masculinity. performance of either gender feels like drag most of the time (to paraphrase rupaul). but i don't think it's as simple as that when you take into account what trans people experience.

i guess i feel cocksome usually

I don't feel the slightest bit female, but I find the vast majority of accepted male gender norms completely baffling/off-putting.

No, I don't feel like I have an innate gender. Every construct built up around "my" gender seems purposefully designed to make me feel disgusting, useless and alienated. It is not me, it has little to do with me. I can't identify with it. But nor can I identify with any other gender. I am a floating brain in a vat.

on the one hand i'm afraid of feeling like i'm stepping on "real" trans people's toes because i don't have a significant history of performing female. ultimately tho i think that's wrongheaded and would find it hard to deny how often i feel more like a woman than a man, even if i'm not quite sure what i mean by that.

TWS also otm in that the troublesome word here might not be "gender" so much as "innate"

Assigned female at birth and have a sense of feminine gender.

it's quite hard to work out where one's sense of gender ends and where socially constructed gender roles/traits begin

Truest truth. There was a time in my life, from about puberty to 13 or 14, where I intentionally presented as far more masculine, including preferring men's clothes. If I'd had the vocabulary for it, I may have talked about it in terms of gender identity. Looking back, though, I think it was more about rejecting the trappings of feminine gender as a way to try and reject the bullshit that comes with being a pre-teen and teen girl (which totally did not work). I've always felt comfortable with my assigned gender. Any discomfort has been with the socially constructed gender roles.

(Just in case, I am in no way shape or form suggesting that discomfort with socially constructed gender roles is at the heart of anybody's gender identity. I'm speaking to my experience only, and this was accurate for me. It would be gross and horrible to suggest that trans people just need to reject gender roles and I am not saying that!)

feel like this fluctuates from situation to situation, i don't ever really "feel" one gender or another though, i don't feel a lot of solidarity with humans so i suppose i see gender as a made-up thing, or yes, a performance. i mean... it's all stereotypical isn't it?

what do all you guys mean by "feel male"?

i feel male in the sense that my experiences in life, the way people treat me (positively, negatively, or otherwise), the expectations people have of me, the feelings i have about myself as a consequence of all that, etc., are inextricably linked to my gender

drew's post there is str8 queer fire

Every construct built up around "my" gender seems purposefully designed to make me feel disgusting, useless and alienated.

oh yeah. sometimes i forget that i'm supposed to feel this way, and when some tv show or magazine reminds me, it just sends me into a deep pit of despair.

No, I don't feel like I have an innate gender. Every construct built up around "my" gender seems purposefully designed to make me feel disgusting, useless and alienated. It is not me, it has little to do with me. I can't identify with it. But nor can I identify with any other gender. I am a floating brain in a vat.

― emil.y, Wednesday, December 11, 2013 3:22 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel p similar to this

the constant media reinforcement of gender constructs is so relentless that it almost feels like propaganda (and as someone lucky enough to be able to duck under feeling like it's aimed at me, it really is the most contemptibly stupid bullshit in every single way)

i've definitely had that feeling that emil.y describes, but obv it's different, since, you know

everyone otm, in fact

Relentless reinforcement of gender norms totally is propaganda. There's this sense of real terror/threat when people start questioning gender binary, and that terror/threat has been around for every challenge to traditional gender roles (and challenging binary gender is like the ultimate challenge to gender roles), cf just for one fun example anti-suffragette propaganda suggesting that if women get the vote, they will start acting like men by going to bars, and leave men to take care of the house and children (THE HORROR).

oh yeah. sometimes i forget that i'm supposed to feel this way, and when some tv show or magazine reminds me, it just sends me into a deep pit of despair.

follow-up: most of the time i just feel like a person, not any innate or socially constructed category. it's only biological functions and outside stimuli that make me remember i'm a woman. the stuff that goes through my head when i walk down the street usually has nothing to do with gender/sex -- but then some street harasser will comment about my boobs and i'll be thinking "oh riiiight, you're never allowed to forget, are you?"

Voted born male/feel male with a tiny feeling of guilt over not voting born male/feel no innate binary gender, not because I feel like I'm suppressing any kind of non-binary gender feelings (whatever those would be, and the fact that I don't know probably means that I'm not), but because of (as lex pointed out so well) my inability to understand exactly where innate vs. socially constructed ideas of gender begin and end. For me, being gay meant being very defensive about these things when I was younger; bring this up in front of my boyfriend and he will probably relay some since-regretted instances of me wincing at the sight of drag queens while we were out at a bar, or one long ill-advised rant I once went on about how the "T" in LGBT didn't really mesh with my conception of "LGB" (trans-peoples experiences were unlikely to resemble mine, I rather ignorantly argued, and thus should be considered as a separate thing--needless to say, I was politically naive enough at the time to fail to understand any possible relation between various strains of class, gender, racial and sexual politics). I had some need to assert the fact that *I* didn't want to be a woman, I just wanted to be with other men (like anyone gives a shit, I know).

A recent issue of Rolling Stone had an article on a child (now 7, though the issue began when the child was 3) who was born a male but who felt, and wanted to express herself, as female (it apparently became something of a high profile case when the child's school, under pressure from squeamish parents, wanted to ban her from using the girl's bathroom, though I must say I cannot recall hearing of the case previously). I found it very interesting that the "representative" that the writer interviewed from Focus On The Family (any guesses on where they stand on this issue?) identified himself as "proudly ex-gay" and blamed homosexuality on, I'm not kidding, a mixture of "poor parenting, molestation and original sin." It was a little disquieting for me to recognize something of my own previous transphobia in his idiotic homophobia; both, I would argue, that arises out of a severe discomfort with one's own sexuality, and one which, I hope, that I at the very least have mostly gotten over. Hence, I suppose, my guilt over how I voted here.

I'm too fucked up in this area to know what to say. Agender, genderqueer? something like that I guess.

xp to get bent: In fact my personal definition of street harassment is when I'm in public not specifically remembering that I'm a woman and then someone does anything that reminds me. Saying "Good morning" or "How are you?" isn't necessarily sh but it can been when it's gender attraction-coded, like "Ooh, good MORN-ing" or "How are YOU? Mmm."

xxxp ^yeah. like

i guess i feel cocksome usually

with the exception of one or two things I never have a strong feeling that my attitudes or experiences are determined by my genitalia or hormones, I just go about my day and if I feel any particular way I don't go "oh that's my testicles doing that", but then again I never really have to think about any of this cause prillij

bah drunk that is a response to gb that somehow is a response to quoted imago text also

yeah I mean *when* I consider my gender I usually feel irrevocably cocksome (or I feel that the presence of cock is significant & must guide my attitude to one of privilege-acceptance yeah), but there have been some liberating moments when I haven't, eg drag

usually I like to sublimate any sexual feelings into a cerebral realm where my own gender matters less than the excitable synthesis of attractions I can feel towards somebody

i also encourage active subversion of gender-normative function at all times, except when playing contact sports

It's funny, I don't feel bad about BEING female, and I suppose I'm pretty feminine--petite and have feminine physical mannerisms like putting my hands and feet in graceful positions, sitting w my knees together bc I wear skirts, smiling a lot, making an effort to be "nice." But when men insist on treating me in a way that's coded for female, whether it's come ons or excessive "politeness because LAYDEEZ" or smarmy flirting, etc, I'm disgusted and hate dealing w them.

I mean, female-ness, which is not to say "femininity," can never be neutral because it's defined by what masculinity is not, for some people. These are probably the same ppl who can't just treat you like a person because you're a woman and they have to have different rule for that.

I feel like those poll options are still too binary. I think there are biological factors that fall along a spectrum and social factors that fall along a spectrum, and all of those factors combine to create a person's identity in a complicated way that can't be mapped onto two genders or nine poll options.

i also encourage active subversion of gender-normative function at all times, except when playing contact sports
― veneer timber (imago)

So wtf is wrong with co-ed floor hockey or rugby or ultimate frisbee then?!?

also XP I agree with wk.

https://www.genderspectrum.org/understanding-gender

Trans people that I have known have talked to me about very strong feelings that they are in the wrong body, feeling alienated from their genitals and longing to not be in that body, with the complicated and painful overlap of this kind of challenge stacking up alongside puberty and the entrance into sexual awareness making for a really tortured period in their lives. By contrast, when I was in the closet as a gay teen I certainly remember thinking to myself "man having these feelings would be SO MUCH EASIER if I was just a girl, because then I could flirt and date cute guys etc.", i.e. very much a pipe dream about not having to deal with the awkwardness of homophobia and the reduced chances of reciprocation that come from being in a tiny minority (and now I do of course see that this very thought exercise is itself a kind of preposterous fantasy that 'being a girl' would magically mean 'being an attractive / desirable / popular / normal girl' to boot, with her pick of the jocks etc.)- but this was not a desire to have ladyparts or to be, physically, female. So I think there's some kind of virtual trans aspect to this kind of construction of a me-in-fantasy-as-another-gender, but it's way way off from the kind of 'bodyswitch' sensation that actually trans people describe quite frequently. I mean, not all trans people are the same either, but this narrative is pretty common, and it's different from our various complicated feelings of identifying with certain aspects of the cultural scripts for maleness and femaleness and wanting to opt out of others.

what do all you guys mean by "feel male"?

I mean that when I ask myself the question "what gender am I?" I always answer without hesitation "I am male" with little introspection and no doubt. This isn't tied to particular interests or behaviors, at least not consciously; it's just what I am.

I feel this so strongly that I can't imagine what it would be like for me to feel doubt or fluidity about my gender. It is one of the facets of my being that I consider incontrovertible, like my ethnic background.

sorry in advance for big image:

http://th01.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2011/226/2/2/gender_spectrum_blank_by_prettyfrog-d46km6h.png

interesting chart, but I'm not so sure I can imaginatively fill in the "agender" section- like I've seen people who present as genderqueer, but wouldn't a perfect sort of androgyny wind up being genderqueer? (I'm thinking here of, say, Genesis P'Orridge's Pandrogyne identity)

The Genderbread Person (also seasonally appropriate)

the notion of co-ed rugby i gotta say tests even my own post-gender fluidity. i am all for women playing in traditionally male team sports, but when the contact is so physical & strength-based....idk. i guess there are a few women who maybe could. i guess the most you could say is that gender wouldn't be a factor in which players got thwacked hardest or injured, but size/prowess

i only made that facetious addition because i play football & need to act in v traditionally 'masculine' ways in order to thug ppl off the ball & retain possession. nb i am NOT saying that these are things women can't or shouldn't do, but i am saying that they're socially 'archetypical' masculine traits. otherwise i don't think i perform in any way to type

surely agender ppl are those who simply don't want to engage with codes of masculinity or femininity, as opposed to pansexual genderqueer types who want both (and i'm much more in the latter camp myself, as twere)

like, say, rocks are neither male nor female, they're just rocks, and every rock is as much a rock as every other rock- so I guess to cash out "agender" i have to imagine a humanoid that is just "human" in a generic sense but neither male nor female (in which case androgynous people are both-at-once, and hence genderqueer and not agender)?

I know someone who goes by the name P3rson and I think P3rson is trying to live a truly genderless life, and the name is part of that opting out of both systems.

i don't think i perform in any way to type

you certainly do on ilx though!

I'm not sure that name needed googleproofing haha xp

On ilx he types to perform

love the genderbread man!! that's much better than my pixelated chart...

Oh hey, yeah, I am well aware that I should have separated out agender from non-binary gender, and I did think about how to do that ("I have no gender" vs "I don't have a *binary* gender" is an important distinction) but it was already unwieldy at 9 options and I was losing track. I recognise it's an omission and a gunnysacking of 2 different things that are both not-masculine and not-feminine. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Should have carried on cutting and pasting options! Too late now.

xp man

i think i need to think v hard about what it feels like for a boy before i can answer this

lie back, close your eyes, and think of imago...

i definitely know what my sexuality feels like, i can identify that. i think i know what being me feels like in a general way, accepting that i can be very different from day to day. i find it much harder to identify what feeling male feels like, except in degrees of conformity or nonconformity to societal versions of maleness?

I only identify as male out of convenience/complacency/a generally non-revolutionary spirit

figuring out what my sexual identity is came much easier to me than gender... I guess for some people its just all default and natural and not needing to be questioned or teased apart but that's not the case for me.

Yeah, I had pretty much got to "floating brain in a vat (that people tell me means something)" a couple of years ago, until taking my gender identity/sexuality out of the box I'd banished it to and interrogating it. And discovering/remembering that I have been many other ways.

I was raised in a v v feminist, totally hippie "you can be anything" household where gender was no big deal, and I don't really remember myself ever having one. (Though family and family friends have reported that at the ~age of gender differentiation~ I used to get quite stroppy about insisting that I was going to grow up to do societally gender-inappropriate careers.) Puberty was a mind-fuck and was horrible, and really felt like a narrowing of my options. All of the people I idolised and wanted to be were men - except, luckily, it was the 80s and there were gender bending pop stars enough for me to realise this was a *thing* I could be. I experimented, a lot, trying one gender presentation, then another, braving detention for flagrantly violating the dress code by wearing an "inappropriate" uniform until the dress code was finally changed.

My first serious lover, at the end of high school, was the same sex as me, and as they were initially uncomfortable with homosexuality, I started to pretend to be the other gender, liked it, and it kinda... stuck. We went to the kind of gay bars where it didn't matter if I was a butch lesbian one night or a pretty twink the next; I was convincing enough as either. At this point, had transitioning been an actual thing which was available and I'd heard of, I'd almost certainly have done it. Fortunately or unfortunately (I'll never know which) what came into my life instead was a friend giving me Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook, and another lover showing me the film Performance. Here was a world where it was A-OK to be a freaky, genderqueer, pandrogynous ambisexual and that's what I lived. Dressing gender-appropriately for work felt like drag, but hey, drag was a performance. The 90s were like that, and it was fine. Second-wave feminism looked like it had won and the idea of gender-appropriate careers was out the window, I just followed the career I was interested in, and the brave new world of the internet was going to be a place where ~gender just didn't exist~ and we could all just be genderqueer aliens from planet Bowie where everyone has perfect hair and impeccable shoes and it would be fine.

And then a door slammed shut near the end of the 90s. Part of it was personal, after a quite frightening experience with stalking/identity that I won't go into. And part of it was societal, where it felt like the Gender Police just ramped up a gear and New Laddism and Backlash culture and suddenly you had to pick a gender identity and you had to pick a sexuality and stick with it, so boom! I picked Cis! and Straight!, and everything else went into this iron-bound box that I locked and wrapped chains around and piled stuff on and then SAT ON. Because I was STRAIGHT, did I mention I was TOTALLY STRAIGHT and how! dare! you! impugn! that I might be anything else (no matter how I act when I'm drunk) and lots of defensiveness and shouting. And lots of weird crushes that weren't actually about wanting to be with that person, but actually wanting to *be* that person, because that shit, that doesn't stay locked up in a box, it seeps out into everything.

Yet the more I discussed gender from a feminist perspective, the more it just seems to be patent, obvious bullshit, just the propaganda that many of you have mentioned. Which didn't make me feel better about my creaking, ironclad Cis!-Het! identity, it just made me feel more and more like a failed human (let alone a failed girl.) And also, this constant sense of, well, my *body* doesn't feel wrong, because I've never thought of my body as being *me* it's just this thing I walk around in. So if my body isn't wrong, but I still feel all this dysphoria about it all, well, it must be the whole fucked up system of Gender itself which is totally wrong. But no, it really wasn't just about rejecting societally proclaimed gender roles (even though yeah, I totally reject them) - it was that the whole concept of bullshit, and if other people said they had one (I thought) they were just lying, or brainwashed, because I never had one. And when my friend said she had one, I was like "ARGH! PANIC! INNATE GENDER IDENTITY? AM I SUPPOSED TO HAVE ONE OF THOSE?!?!? WHERE WOULD I FIND IT IF I HAD ONE. FUCK, I THINK I WAS ABSENT THE DAY AT SCHOOL THOSE WERE HANDED OUT."

So it's this slow process of taking things out of the box and examining (well, what's left of them that hasn't rusted away) and going "Am I neither? Am I both?" And overcoming a lot of self-loathing and a lot of self denial (and let's be honest, the ~LGBT community~ has not always been great about accepting the B and T parts of LGBT so I've always felt very alone on this) and coming to the conclusion that I am both neither and both. But I guess other people have them, and that's fucking weird?

(Sorry, this is so long, I'm not ignoring you guys, I've just been typing a very long time, and I've already x-posted with myself to get the agender vs genderqueer dynamic in and p.s. that Genderbread man is actually *totally* wrong on what bisexuality is in a kinda gross and self-defeating way that has negated everything else it's trying to say IMO.)

tl;dr - fluidity in gender and sexuality! It is a thing! And totally complicated. But necessary.

At birth everyone decided I was male. I have never had any reason to doubt the appropriateness of this decision. I do think that everyone's personality invariably has room for traits traditionally considered male and also for those considered female. It's just that each of us experiences a different mix of these two sides.

Assigned maleness feel male,I guess,am not some alpha pantomime of masculinity and currently mainly socialise with women,though most of my life my friends have been almost exclusively male.

I'm female and I', comfortable with my body, and I'm comfortable with some of the gender-performance stuff I'm expected to do, but I voted for non-binary because I really don't think I would care if I had a different body. What I would care about is that the externally-applied gender expectations are even stricter for men, so in that regard I'm glad I was born with innie-genitals.

Basically, nothing with me seems to be default, or natural, or easy or not-needing-to-be-questioned, and is often the opposite of whatever I thought I'd nailed down. And living the life of trying to pretend to be otherwise nearly... nope, *did* drive me insane. Phew.

I identify as male for the same reason I identify as white and straight - it's true enough and super convenient for me

xps

As soon as you get away from gender as physically expressed sexuality, the whole subject becomes much more nebulous and the discussion more theory-driven.

Oh! yes! Zora brought up a good point - which is one of the "tests" for non-binary-ness (in my opinion, but also others) is the idea that if you imagined yourself waking up in a different body, would that feel odd and unusual and "whoa, WTF, get me out of this" or would you imagine yourself being "ho, hum, no big deal."

voted 'I don't particularly have a sense of innate binary gender' before reading the rest of the answers itt. I guess I don't spend my time thinking 'I feel so *female*', I just feel like what I feel like, and like LG says, that changes.
I tend to be quite passive/disengaged from feeling like I have to identify with one gender or another. However, I also feel kind of a fraud for voting that now, as I am a straight, fairly stereotypical woman, who doesn't feel uncomfortable in her own body or feel the need to go DO MALE THINGS or whatever so as I've never had to question it, maybe that's what happily identifying as female *is*.

but I voted for non-binary because I really don't think I would care if I had a different body

that's a weird test xp

i guess i'm reasonably comfortable within the body i've got - except for its excesses and creakiness and all the bits i want to look like photoshopped movie stars - so in that sense i'm comfortable in my masculinity? i've never looked at my cock and balls and thought "you know what? that ain't right" nb i cannot vouch for what other people may have thought

sometimes tho - and please, no Marc Loi - i have felt a frustration, an intellectual or existential frustration i think, with the idea that i'll never experience what it's like to feel like a woman. purely cos there's part of me that wants to experience everything i think

I think that "it's true enough and super convenient" thing is exactly what my friend was getting at when she was talking about people "not having to really think about it."

You'd just assume it matched up, until you were given a reason to question it.

And two groups of people are especially given reasons to question it - gay, lesbian, bi, trans people for obvious reasons - and also women, because when you are being defined solely in *opposition* to the default gender, well, you're going to headbutt up against questioning it.

BB, how does core gender identity play into the entire Innocent Smoothies aesthetic?

I do not know what an innocent smoothie is. Is that like the milkshakes with the hats?

sometimes tho - and please, no Marc Loi - i have felt a frustration, an intellectual or existential frustration i think, with the idea that i'll never experience what it's like to feel like a woman. purely cos there's part of me that wants to experience everything i think

― shillelagh law (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 11 December 2013 23:35 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you may never make the physical change to female genitalia

but you can certainly be a woman if you want. give it a try imo

p much! xp

go totally crazy
forget you're a lady

NV, what's really unfair, is that *I* will never get to experience what it is like to have a penis! And not even just in the sense of "magical key to the boardroom/instant 30% salary increase" having a penis, but getting to mooch around penetrating things? That is so not fair! Men have a very definite way in which they can experience *being* penetrated in a sexual sense if they so desire, but actually having external genitals that I could insert into people? So not gonna happen! So unfair!

strikethrough post

^

Branwell i completely agree, on some cosmic level it is v. unfair. i guess when i think about this stuff it is mainly in terms of childbirth, of all things, or parenthood, but also sex yeah, also some sort of Tiresias thing

getting to mooch around penetrating things?

yeah, sure, i'll confirm that it's nice, but it's probably not all that you imagine it to be.

Try this thought experiment: Put your hand in a glove. Imagine one of your fingers feels sexually arroused by the friction. Repeat as necessary.

tbf tho i can and have experience(d) penetration but it's not exackly the same as penetrable genitalia. i don't deny there's an inequality in the ways in which biology closes out swathes of imaginative experience but the phenomenon exists across all sexes

Also there are several ways in which you can experience penetrating in a sexual sense, it's a false binary to limit it to genitals

xpost

again i feel like my self-definition as a man comes down to what i don't feel more than what i do - the idea of having a different body doesn't freak me out but neither does it hold any real fascination/attraction for me (apart from what TWS said, "i could pull more hot boys woo", which probably doesn't count). so yeah the fact that even though as BB says i'm someone with reason to question gender identity and norms i haven't really done so all that extensively w/r/t myself...that is probably as cis as one gets

Kinder, this is just kind of an aside, but if you woke up in a male body, why would you feel like you would have to fancy gurls?

And *I'm* fine with you voting "don't have a particular sense" because I feel like that's the agender bit of the spectrum - not feeling the need to be "masculine" which is an option of its own, but just feeling distanced from feeling "feminine" either. It's not even about feeling discomfort or not in your body, it's just the sense of, have you got one?

I was raised in a v v feminist, totally hippie "you can be anything" household where gender was no big deal

^^^ I kinda want to do a poll about this subject because I totally was not raised in this kind of household & I get the feeling that a lot of ILXors were raised by more feminist/hippie/left-leaning parents than I was. It definitely wasn't as conservative as it could have been, but my brain always goes back to things like my dad calling me stupid for crying at a baseball game, my mom picking out the prettiest blond girl in my 4th grade class on a field trip and telling me "she should be your girlfriend!" (lord help), my parents' fretting over my brother's idiosyncracies which I eventually realized was their anxiety over his emergent gayness, etc. A great deal of my ideas about feminism & gender are things I picked up from the media + ILX + the Internet.

xpost

here's where a Lacanian would gloomily / sardonically point out that "the penis is not the phallus", i.e. tiny or not-so-tiny bits of external genitalia (penises) are always in the shadow of this Big Symbolic Placeholder of Power (the phallus), and having a penis can't ever quite add up to "having the Phallus"- precisely because that's something that gets projected onto others, other people who are somehow imagined to enjoy/hold phallic power in some deeper, more absolute sense that one never quite gets to. (The Phallus as the football that Lucy always pulls away just as Charlie Brown's about to really kick it this time).

So in this schema of things men, too , always individually fail to live up to the symbolic standard implied by the thing they have between their legs which supposedly demonstrates their masculine position of privilege/authority in the rigged hierarchy that is the sex/gender system.

I have never identified with the more muscle-headed, knuckle-dragging versions of maculinity and I was fairly rebellious gender-role wise as a teenager but I'm not sure I have any real meaningful sense of what maleness (or femaleness) feels like having been stuck inside my own body my whole life. I mean, NV can be a woman for a day, but I kinda feel like being a 'man' and being a tolerably socialable human being in public are hats I wear more than anything innate.

ttws otm

the Phallus is an illusory construct though - why not the Vagina as power-centre - reason being patriarchal predomination in recent cultural history - it constructs its Phallus as code for male-derived power, but is a self-justifying fallacy as twere

trouble is, this Phallus still screams down on us from the heavens. what will come first, apocalypse or total gender deconstruction?

Hey, with this whole "sometimes a penis is just a phallic symbol" thing... y'know, I get it. And it is one thing to strap on a dildo and penetrate your boyfriend to experience "what it feels like for a boy" and it is another thing to have an organ with as many nerves endings connected to pleasure centres concentrated in one place and stick it in another human being. Because the "having a phallus" stuff is what I was talking about with the "key to the boardroom" thing, which I can in some places experience, when "having a phallus" means having power and having control. But having an external sex organ you can stick in warm wet places in another.

RIGHT now I am officially no longer going down this alley (fnar) because this is getting silly!

this thread's moving pretty fast... people talking about bodies. I feel like I wish I could be Ranma 1/2... able to switch sexes at will, or be completely androgenous with a cloaca. I'm kinda fucked up I guess.

trouble is, this Phallus still screams down on us from the heavens.

a cum shall rain

Tiresias to thread

"On Mount Cyllene in the Peloponnese, as Tiresias came upon a pair of copulating snakes, he hit the pair a smart blow with his stick. Hera was not pleased, and she punished Tiresias by transforming him into a woman. As a woman, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including Manto, who also possessed the gift of prophecy. According to some versions of the tale, Lady Tiresias was a prostitute of great renown. After seven years as a woman, Tiresias again found mating snakes; depending on the myth, either she made sure to leave the snakes alone this time, or, according to Hyginus, trampled on them. As a result, Tiresias was released from his sentence and permitted to regain his masculinity. This ancient story is recorded in lost lines of Hesiod."

sorry to drag us into Lacan-land, it's not mandatory by any means, though I'll just quote one more gnostic pronouncement that is relevant here: "Sexuality is a hole in truth." I think this means that it's hard for us to unpack and articulate desire by definition, it's slippery and won't hold still, it's what is in us and in a weird sense it *is* us, but it's also built out of cultural crap that precedes us and early childhood memories that we can barely reconstruct and parents we keep misrecognizing as we grow up and away from and fantasies about what other people get to feel that we feel excluded from and envious about, and this trickles into the gender assignment drama insofar as the door we don't open is going to be part of that "hole" in our "truth" about who we wound up becoming.

voted Assigned male at birth; I have a sense of being masculine gender, but like BB my ma raised me as a genderless free spirit & am somewhat frequently reminded by ppl that i have very "feminine" affectations

i wanted to dress in drag for a performance i did recently but a friend of a friend said that it was "gender rape" for straight cis guys to dress up as women. so just to be safe i toned it down to a glam sheen, some lipstick. is that true tho? have been wondering about it ever since

See, I'm kinda interested in what crut was saying, of wondering if this is a third dynamic of "stuff that makes you confront this" being not just 1) queerness 2) femaleness but also 3) being raised in a hippie/feminist/leftie environment? It must be really hard to be raised in an environment where ~no one ever talks about this stuff~ and how much harder that must make it to bump up against the stuff, if/when you ever are forced to?

Sorry, it's after midnight, and I've still got a chapter of Godel Escher Bach to read, so please try not to trash the place in the meantime...

x-post why Tiresias? Why is it that the Ur-Narrative of changing gender is a man who becomes a woman (and back)? Yet another case of masculinity defining "gender" the same way "cock-fancier" defines sexuality? Is there a Greek (or other) myth of a woman who becomes a man? More saliently, that person to thread.

well, there's Caeneus but it's a sad story:

"Caeneus' legend is found in Metamorphoses, where he is mentioned briefly as a participant in the hunt for the Calydonian Boar. A while after this appearance, Nestor tells the story of Caeneus to Achilles in fuller detail, describing his transformation from female to male. In Ovid's retelling, placed in the mouth of the aged Homeric hero Nestor, Caenis, the daughter of Elatus (a Lapith chieftain) and Hippea, was raped by Neptune, who then fulfilled his request to be changed into a man so that he could never be raped again; he also made Caenis invulnerable to weaponry. Caenis then changed his name to Caeneus and became a warrior, traveling all over Thessaly, and later taking part in the hunt for the Calydonian Boar."

I mentioned Tiresias because of male posters upthread speculating about what it might feel like to be a woman, not trying to privilege that perspective here.

as a dude, i didn't get the fuss about football and baseball. then i started betting on it and that hole in truth was filled. if you ever feel cut off from the truth of essential male-ness, it's basically just compulsive gambling.

Wow, OK, coz I was a massive myth nerd when I was a child, and I am totally familiar with Tiresias but had never heard of Caeneus/Caenis before today? So I don't think you're trying to privilege that perspective, but it is still a common slant and omissions speak volumes.

Anyway! Godel Escher Bach!

so: assigned male, voted for don't particularly have a sense of innate binary gender. i think "sense", "innate" and "binary" are leading me to that decision

Assigned female and apart from childhood tomboyishness never presented any non-female identity, and yet...

I don't really have a sense of innate gender but as a kid I (thought I) "felt like" a boy and disliked being reminded that I wasn't. I remember daydreaming about the future and realising "but when I'm a grown-up I'll be a woman and my concept of Future Me is totally incompatible with this, wtf?" (even though nothing in the daydream was particularly gender-tied) and feeling really... shut down.

Later I went to an all-girls school and got more comfortable with the spectrum of Girl and myself as one, but puberty still felt a little like the daydream was over: I was growing up into a woman, and the boys I used to feel like One Of could now only see me as Other and a particularly bad and risible example of one at that. And yet here I am as the cis-est straight-est adult.

(Yes, I occasionally wonder how I got here. Maybe a little bit of cowardice/resignation and a bit more not being skinny or good-looking enough to fit my gamine ideal of How Androgyny Should Be Done, but I don't feel I've been untrue to my core self.)

But I don't know if my tomboyishness was because of any innate sense of gender, or just a socialised sense that being a woman was inferior, or came with unappealing baggage. My parents were fairly open-minded about such things so it's not their fault that I added up their message of "you can wear dungarees and build Lego space stations if you like, because those things are awesome" and everyone else saying "that stuff is for boys" into "boy stuff is awesome, you have to be a boy to be awesome".

sorry to drag us into Lacan-land, it's not mandatory by any means, though I'll just quote one more gnostic pronouncement that is relevant here: "Sexuality is a hole in truth." I think this means that it's hard for us to unpack and articulate desire by definition, it's slippery and won't hold still, it's what is in us and in a weird sense it *is* us, but it's also built out of cultural crap that precedes us and early childhood memories that we can barely reconstruct and parents we keep misrecognizing as we grow up and away from and fantasies about what other people get to feel that we feel excluded from and envious about, and this trickles into the gender assignment drama insofar as the door we don't open is going to be part of that "hole" in our "truth" about who we wound up becoming.

nah I like this a lot. nothing really against Lacan's Phallus tbh except to strongly confirm beyond ambiguity that it is a construct if anything even more illusory than gender

this latest quote is brilliant - sexuality as an ontologically violent decision - a route taken often on culturally-conditioned pretexts through the approaching-infinite miasma of experience and choice available - and thus a hole in the approaching-infinite nature of Truth

"boy stuff is awesome"

boy stuff is generally only incidentally awesome and even when it is awesome, it's on the stupid side of the awesome. when it's stuff like sports, it's completely dreadful without that hormonal/adrenaline kick.

But I don't know if my tomboyishness was because of any innate sense of gender, or just a socialised sense that being a woman was inferior

btw I was thinking about this earlier, because of hearing some guys make fairly nasty remarks about a barmaid with quite a deep voice (although by no means unusually deep, despite all their horrible "leaves the seat up" "couldn't tell which person was talking when she was talking to a dude" wisecracking) and thinking about how as a teen I wished I had a deeper voice, and wonder why I would want a deeper voice when there is really no benefit at all, except bcz I thought deeper voice = less feminine = yes please I would like that, and why did I hate my own sex/gender so much

uhh it's way past my bedtime, goodnight interesting thread, hope you are still alive and not too clusterfucked tomorrow morning

she was talking about people "not having to really think about it."

yeah i tend to think of myself as just myself, without really considering the categories into which i may or may not fit. but it is easy for me to do so, because i'm pretty much at the top of the privlamid

from the OP:

theorised that most people *did* have a sense of innate gender identity, and if people thought that they didn't, it was due to their never really having to think about it.

When it comes to the conscious experiences of others, you have no good alternative to using whatever they report. It is sometimes possible to analyze those reports at a level of detail that teases out information the person was not entirely aware they were reporting, but this is still based on whatever report they made. Once your theory envisions an experience that never becomes either conscious to the person experiencing it or observable in terms of their actions, then you've lost your tether to reality. It may sound plausible, but it is just as unreliable as any theory without evidence.

i don't know about building an entire identity of it, but it doesn't strike me as unreasonable to assert that people in general experience hormonal behaviors that code as one gender or another with at least the same amount of certainty that people taste flavors that code as sweet or sour (which can break down at some phenomenological level but who lives there, really?)

You know what would be really great? If people continued to talk about their *own* experiences of gender and what it means to them, rather than trying to theorise what (e.g. "hormones") does or doesn't code to gender in others. Because the former has been really interesting and elucidating. The latter is really exclusionary for those of us who have experiences which don't code neatly down your ~hormone~ lines, and really tends to lead to clusterfuckery.

It is *really* crazy-making, when someone tries to make a land-grab for some supposedly gendered behaviour (gambling, competitiveness, enjoying playing sport) and extrapolate ~boy hormones!!!~ from it. I can't even begin to explain the dysphoria produced when one thinks, as a woman "Hey, *I* do/experience that..." with the accompanying doubt-cloud of "am I a failed girl, or is this gender stereotype actually kinda bullshit?" - and then there's a whole nother layer of dysphoria produced in me (and people like me) where I have *another* cloud of doubt going "wait, am I finding this bullshit because it's an invalid gender stereotype, or because I'm a non-Cis not-a-girl genderqueer person?" And you know what? Dysphoria, if you've never experienced it, is actually really *really* unpleasant, and it's actually a shitty thing to induce in other people, if you can avoid it.

You have every right to say stuff like "gambling makes me feel like a man" - that is your lived experience, so own it. But when you extrapolate from your experience to generalisations like "girls can't get a kick out of sport, because they don't have the right ~boy-hormones~ for competitiveness" (what? women don't ever experience adrenaline? really?) <- please. Do not insult biology as well as logic.

Sharing your own experiences is great. Extrapolating and generalising and assuming what is like-you and not-like-you, in other people, is precisely what this thread is trying to *counteract*.

Spacecadet, I have so much to say, but tomorrow.

I'd rather not discomfort other people, but the idea that other people are closed-off walls of experience that can't be equated, that we can't experience the same sort of thing, or at least call it that, means that they can't be shared, which is disturbing and alienating, at least to me.

when i say "getting" masculinity in the form of gambling, I mean that pretty much anyone has access to it, and in fact that it's nothing particularly special, and often pretty gross and stupid. I mean to say that no one's missing anything, because that's it.

Saying that anything at all "makes me feel like a man" seems faintly ridiculous. I could more easily say something makes me feel good, or powerful, or mellow, or angry, because these are feelings I understand and communicate something identifible to other humans. But the feeling of "being like a man" doesn't communicate anything afaics. I am not "like a man"; for my own purposes and those of most of society, a man is simply something I am, in that I have the proper genitals.

Because human experience is so multiform and multifarious, my perception of the province of what is 'reserved' to men is that it is quite small, if we speak only of what is innate rather than socially imposed. That is how I experience my male identity. It came with the penis, but it is not especially important or interesting when it is decoupled from the penis.

the idea that other people are closed-off walls of experience that can't be equated, that we can't experience the same sort of thing, or at least call it that, means that they can't be shared, which is disturbing and alienating, at least to me.

Of course you're entitled to your feelings about any phenomenon, but there's another kind of truth to the fact that a person who hasn't experienced something like being female in a world where the default setting is "male" can't claim that they have been through the same thing. No matter what you call it.

You can, of course, say that you've experienced a different kind of marginalization, which ought to make all of us MORE sensitive to the lived experiences of other people, not less. But it's never going to be true or accurate to say it's the same.

Also it's a false conclusion to say they can't be "shared" in the sense of communicating about them with other people, because of course they can. But it has to be be with respect for differences felt by the other.

i think Philip was just responding to Aimless' critique of the methodology about self-reporting and how reliable and consistent that is ...?

xp
But it's never going to be true or accurate to say it's the same.

I believe PN said the "the same sort of thing".

I haven't even started unpacking Aimless' posts, but there's no need to assert other untrue things while you do it.

But on topic, I want to highlight this post which I thought was really interesting at the time and still do:

i just mentally associated myself with a series of bright and brittle young english literary men despite the yawning knowledge that i was not in fact going to grow up to become one.

― thighs without a face (c sharp major), Wednesday, December 4, 2013 4:14 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think that resonates for me bc when I was young I believed a lot of Christian religious dogma that excluded me or marginalized me because of my gender, but I didn't feel marginalized in my daily life, so I figured it would all make sense somehow when I "grew up." Yeah, well, I grew up, all right, and then almost literally one day realized, This is NEVER going to make sense because it's wrong! and 86ed Christianity from my life. I didn't feel less female during this whole process, though, which is an important distinction, I think?

this is a v good thread.

nah I like this a lot. nothing really against Lacan's Phallus tbh except to strongly confirm beyond ambiguity that it is a construct if anything even more illusory than gender

why's this something to hold against it though? Constructs are real! and Lacan's Phallus is maybe the most precise take on what 2,500 years of thinking about sexuality and gender have constructed for us. And I wonder if you could say more about yr comments like "but you can certainly be a woman if you want. give it a try imo"? Cuz I think that this kind of gender playfulness and subversiveness doubtlessly has a lot of good to it, but until we have universal genderqueering it maybe underplays or undermines just how those constructs work and the kind of struggles that are taking place on this terrain. I dunno if I'm saying what I want to say (TIRED) but I think this great Terre Thaemlitz interview has a lot of what I'm getting at, e.g. "I consider myself more "beat this way," my queer identity being primarily informed by material ostracism and harassment than by some mythological self-actualization and pride" - it's a profoundly negative view but it seems a very necessary counterbalance to the two poles of 'born this way' and utopian anarchic gender freedom.

my own take is that while I don't think myself 100% male I couldn't really justify proclaiming myself anything else. If I was still a small town lad hanging out with blokes in the boozer then it could be a different matter, but as it is my social circles are heavily queer and I feel that branding myself queer when I'm a more-or-less straight more-or-less male person would be kinda making a mockery of their struggles for identity (or non-identity).

Assigned male at birth; I have a sense of being masculine gender
Never had any question of gender or sexual identity.

Kind of weird though? I definitely carry a litany of masculine cliches with me (war movies, collect guns and knives, watch combat sports regularly, tend toward not talking about feelings, quasi-obsession with competence, etc.) but the majority of my friends have always been female, I'm as apt to enjoy supposedly 'feminine' cultural and social, um, things, as the macho bullshit I equally enjoy.
I've been (jokingly) called a lesbian by three different trans dudes in the last couple of months.

'there's another kind of truth to the fact that a person who hasn't experienced something like being female in a world where the default setting is "male" can't claim that they have been through the same thing.'

I'd agree that differences defined by scope and detail will often be uncrossable (e.g. a specific kind of marginalization), but that also means they can't really be shared. Relating it to a different kind of marginalization would only provide insight where they overlap.

But emotive responses to things coded as "dude" are of a type, and pretty interchangeable, and non-exclusive to "being a dude" which is why I can see where Aimless is coming from with this:
'But the feeling of "being like a man" doesn't communicate anything afaics'

It is *really* crazy-making, when someone tries to make a land-grab for some supposedly gendered behaviour (gambling, competitiveness, enjoying playing sport) and extrapolate ~boy hormones!!!~ from it. I can't even begin to explain the dysphoria produced when one thinks, as a woman "Hey, *I* do/experience that..." with the accompanying doubt-cloud of "am I a failed girl, or is this gender stereotype actually kinda bullshit?" - and then there's a whole nother layer of dysphoria produced in me (and people like me) where I have *another* cloud of doubt going "wait, am I finding this bullshit because it's an invalid gender stereotype, or because I'm a non-Cis not-a-girl genderqueer person?" And you know what? Dysphoria, if you've never experienced it, is actually really *really* unpleasant, and it's actually a shitty thing to induce in other people, if you can avoid it.

otm.

otoh let's continue by all means to blanket state that men can experience penetration *just like a woman* any old time they want but the world shortchanged u because the penis is magic.

Because that'd be let fly if aimless said the reverse, right?

is your penis magic or not?

like on a pitchfork ratings scale, ppl with penises, rate the magical-ness of your members

Let's maybe just agree that nobody can experience having body parts they don't have, before this gets too stupid eh

The Phallus is magic, the Yoni is magic, I totally believe in magic of all differing sorts and kinds, symbological and otherwise; this thread is about constructs and symbols and personal conceptions so why should magic be any more or less valid than any other symbolic symbol? I so don't have time for this kind of tedious ~banter~ so if you have something to add about your own experience add it, else go away, darraghmac,and play nicely somewhere else.

I don't want to stop before this thread gets "too stupid" but I do want to stop before this thread gets too boringly heteronormative and literal because: yawn.

The thing is, I do think that many (most?) people carry around with them a set of conceptions about what "gender" is, and a symbolic dividing of the world into "masculine" and "feminine" according to how their particular culture and/or subculture splits them. (These conceptions are really only loosely based on biological sex or whatever, much like a map is based on a territory, and intended to represent that territory, but different kinds of maps show or omit different kinds of things - like conceptions of "Gender" can vary person to person and culture to culture. Anyone who's taken a Philosophy 101 course knows that the map is not the territory, but people continue to conflate gender with sex, blah blah feel like I'm insulting people with such basic stuff. And anyway, "Gender" is far more like a schematic than a map. It's really distorted and over-simplified)

Most people seem to walk around with a mixture of "feminine" and "masculine" coded traits that surface or express themselves in different contexts, without compromising their essential sense of "Maleness" or "Femaleness". e.g. a person who is "Hard as balls" (I always assumed an ironic phrase given how sensitive actual balls are) in the boardroom will go home and be nurturing to their family.

But it's the land-grabs and the propaganda that make this completely natural process really hard for some, and impossibly difficult for others. When someone insists "X is a masculine characteristic, only men X!" - if you are a female-person who does X all the time, you are faced with this dilemma: Either I am Not Really A Woman, or the gendering of X is a false dichotomy. I can't imagine what it's like for male-persons, because the rules about "Y is a feminine characteristic, only women Y" are so much more viciously enforced because, ugh, women are so awful amirite lads nudge nudge (but totally not in a gay way)

I have been thinking a lot about what "codes female" and what "codes male" and why I'm so much more comfortable with the latter. Is it because "coding female" has been so degraded and downplayed for so long - it's not even the idea that male-coded stuff is "awesome" or whatever, but the idea that female-coded stuff is *icky*. I am forever interrogating, is this really how I am, or am I reacting to internalised misogyny? Like all that stuff Spacecadet posted, I really relate to, and we have discussed this on the Girl Thread a lot in the past. I felt like "A Person" until I suddenly hit puberty, and was informed that I was not A Person, but merely a woman, and that was always portrayed as the lesser option. How can one *not* internalise that?

But it's also about environment and exposure and role models and all that ~society~ stuff, and when Culture is telling you that Maths! And Science! And Computing! are male-coded, and you have one granny who was a mathematician who actually wrote the textbooks about the stuff, and the other granny was not just a scientist but ran the life sciences department of her nation's university, and your great-aunt worked at Bletchley Park, I feel perfectly entitled to say "culture is RONG on this one." But then again, also, correlation != causation, and I've spent so much of my life in male-coded space because of my male-coded interests, am I just more interested in presenting male-coded aspects because that's what makes it easier to inhabit those spaces, to the point where inhabiting female-coded space can sometimes feel weird and awkward and alien?

I dunno. I need a cup of tea.

Great thread this. With DJP at the very top of the thread on this. I'm a 'man' and have never really considered even thinking about viewing it any other way. Which probably shows a lack of imagination or curiosity on my part. I have four younger brothers though, so that kind of gives you a certain mindset on things, I think. My mum and dad have very recently adopted two biological half-sisters (who are...21 and 23 years younger than me which is...scary?) and it's a shame in a way that I'm now an adult so don't get to experience growing up around girls.

I've been thinking about the gender of others, more, recently. I work an SU and we've recently begun work on changing all our bathroom facilities from binary male/female ones to gender neutral ones. I can see where the objection from certain quarters comes from (at a recent student assembly one of the bar supervisors explained that from his position, these facilities will cause problems in that you'll be subjecting women to lecherous, drunk, horrible hormonal boys without any space for respite. Which I thought was fair. He was asked if he identified as female, said no, and was told he was transphobic and boo'd out of the room. There's also the matter of it being a disruption of social convention (which is why it's a good thing)...people don't necessarily want to shit next to someone of the opposite gender) but it's something I agree with on the whole. On of my colleagues is a self-defined queer transman. His boyfriend is also a self-defined queer transman. I'd be very interested to ask about how one realizes, or is made to feel aware, of not fitting the gender they've biologically been assigned...i've got lots of questions but I don't know to raise them without seeming like I'm asking for reasons that are either piss taking or prurient. Any advice?

Asking questions of your transmen friends? Or asking questions of this thread?

Of this thread: ask, but in a respectful way that shows you are interested in other people's experiences, not trying to impose your own.

Of your transmen friends? Don't. When/if they're comfortable enough with you, they may raise it themselves. I don't really know how men talking among themselves raise the issues of masculinity, (though I do think it's pretty important to try.) but I do know that people feel perfectly entitled asking questions about gender, sex, "so what genitals do you have?" and "but what dooooooo you do in bed?" with Trans people in a way that they would NEVER in a million years do with their cis friends. Don't be that guy is all I can say.

(Or rather, if you are describing your own experiences, make it clear you are describing your experiences, not trying to make generalisations. I've found that "I am like X, what are you like?" is a good way to ask those questions because you are making yourself as vulnerable as you are asking the other person to be.)

or reading what trans people have written about their own experiences - i highly recommend juliet jacques' guardian series on her transition http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/transgender-journey

"Assigned male at birth; I have a sense of being masculine gender."

I grew up in a very masculine environment - everyone in trad gender roles: hairy hard drinking industrial working men with stay-at-home wives. No-one was openly gay. Tomboys were tolerated or affectionately mocked, effeminate boys were very much frowned upon. I'm not sure if my masculinity is innate or was a result of my environment. I pushed the boundaries with my appearance as a young man, attempting to look androgynous and subversive but I always felt male underneath it.

I think this bit of the world is a bit better now, - there are still traditionalist values and a whole bunch of homophobes but there is generally much more acceptance of differences with sexuality but there's a long way to go with gender issues. Trans people are something of a rarity and are seen as an exotic mystery. I remember a few years ago news that a "man" would start using the "ladies" at work as part of "his" reassignment was met with equal parts ridicule and outrage.

I find it difficult myself - I'm all for equal rights and opportunities and believe all people should be treated with respect and should be free to be whatever gender feels right for them but I've still got a deeper part of me that doesn't quite get it. Maybe because of the prejudice I was brought up with or maybe because I've never had such difficulties and can't understand the issues properly idk. I don't think I'm guilty of any outright prejudice but I definitely can't yet take people with non-traditional gender in my stride, like I'm still identifying the assigned birth gender as the "correct" one. I should think more about why that is and try to fix it.

I'm with you on that onimo. Like, with my colleague, I'll occasionally catch myself slipping up and referring to him as "her" or using "she", not because I don't recognize him as a 'man' but because for whatever reason, I associate his mannerisms etc with women. Does that make me a bad person? Genuine question.

the inverted commas nestling the word "man" there aren't meant to imply that I don't think transpeople 'are' the gender they have chosen to be.

Being a decent human who's respectful of others is always going to be a job of work? Slipping up doesn't make you a bad person, not in the way that angrily refusing to use correct pronouns is -- or indeed defending your slip-ups in a way that makes it sound like it's the other person's fault for asking too much, rather than a mistake on your part. There is always the chance that it might make a bad day worse, if you do it at a bad time, but there is also always the chance that it will just pass under the bridge as your good will's already been shown and registered.

(I call everyone I know "dude" on the regular, and I've noticed that when I do it to trans women I know I will then hypercorrect and subsequently address them with some ridiculously feminine title to make sure they know that I do not think of them as "a dude", and it is a hugely embarrassing thing to have done more than once, at more than one person. but all I can hope is that they'll be tolerant of my flailing idiocy, and I can try to not do it again.) (& these are all people i have only known post-transition so they've always been women to me)

Does that make me a bad person? Genuine question.

it's not about you? and it's not about being able to call yourself a good or bad person (this is a perennial affliction among liberals who define themselves as the former and take that as the starting point for every discussion they have about racism, sexism, transphobia etc). of course making mistakes accidentally doesn't make you "bad", why would it? just apologise/learn/don't do it again.

what IS annoying is when people are pulled up on a mistake they sort of parrot "but i'm not a bad person i'm not a bad person" defensively as if that has any relevance to how that mistake made the trans person they interacted with feel.

xp

CF lily allen parroting "but i'm not a racist i'm not a racist"

literally not the point

Assigned male at birth; I have a sense of being masculine gender

But I have never spent any time thinking about gender tbh. Don't know what it is to not feel like a guy.

Well, my pad is very messy
And there's whiskers on my chin
And I'm all hung up on music
And I always play to win

I ain't got no time for lovin'
'Cause my time is all used up
Just to sit around creatin'
All that groovy kind of stuff

But I'm a man, yes I am
And I can't help
But love you so

But I'm a man, yes I am
And I can't help
But love you so

Well, if I had my choice of matter
I would rather be with cats
All engrossed in mental chatter
Movin' where our minds are at

And relatin' to each other
Just how strong our wills can be
I'm resisting all involvement
With each groovy chick we see

Well, I'm a man, yes I am
And I can't help
But love you so

But I'm a man, yes I am
And I can't help
But love you so

I got to keep my image
While suspended from a throne
That looks out upon a kingdom
Full of people all unknown

Who imagine I'm not human
And my heart is made of stone
I never had no problems
And my toilet's trimmed with chrome

I'm a man, yes I am
And I can't help
But love you so

I'm a man, yes I am
And I can't help
But love you so

Assigned male; sense of masculine gender.

Really interesting thread, though anything I could add to it would just be my own talk therapy, and I'm not prepared to do that right now.

Lex and Cis OTM x1000 as usual.

And also, the "Dude!" thing is v v funny because I do that, too, though when I'm using "Dude!" it's more usually in the sense of an affectionate way of saying "you numbskull" usually appended to "Dude, WTF?" or some variant, it's ungendered in that I apply to it to women and men equally, but yeah, it's gendered, because Dude-ishness is something I definitely associate with a certain (super-annoying) way of performing "masculinity." It might probably be better to use the term "Lady!" with trans women friends and colleagues, because it has the same attention-grabbing quality - however, because of the gendering of "Laaaady!" and its association with brassy NYC cab drivers etc. "Laaaaady!" I think has a much more negative association and lacks the friendliness and affection that "Dude!" used in the same way, i.e. that "Dude!" can just be used to express surprise or for attention-grabbing, without the negative connotations which "Laaaaady!" always carries. (Unfortunately, almost *all* female-gendered terms have at least one negative connotation, it's super-interesting from a linguistics point of view and a feminist point of view, but super-annoying from a "talking to your friends" point of view.)

This stuff is so interesting, and thank you so, so much for participating and being open and honest and friendly, BTW.

ugh, sorry for x-posts but my internet connection is being so sketchy right now

Assigned female, feel female? I guess?

I have no siblings and didn't go to school with boys until 8th gr. Up until then, my world was almost entirely women/girls with occasional adult men. I didn't have any regular contact with boys my age (or thereabouts) until I changed schools after 7th gr. Grew up with a sense that there was a wide stratification of types of girls because girls were all I knew but boys were always really mysterious. Have always felt like a person (not a strictly gendered person) even when I wasn't being treated like one. Growing up without boys was weird, but I think in the long run it gave me the courage to be myself, which is not as easy as it sounds. That's the short story.

I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But if I say I am I get it

I associate "Laaaaaaady!" with Jerry Lewis.

I tend to use "dude" and "guys" as non-gender-specific words, which is of course silly when you think about it. As a result, I've started consciously switching to using "folks" as a collective noun but I don't really have a good replacement for "dude" yet. (Also I notice I do this default-to-male thing a lot more when writing than speaking, where I tend to use "people" and "folks" more often than "guys" and don't really need a replacement for "dude".)

OK, also, it's probably not fair to just leave this here and walk away, but I really do have to go out for the afternoon:

http://takingsteps.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/fair.html

(content warning for abuse, bullying, rape and some fairly nasty stuff)

Because I read this post, and had a pretty "NOPE!" reaction to it, which I had to go back and interrogate, asking myself, is my reaction transphobia, is it transmisogyny specifically, am I not taking this woman at her words, what is my problem with this piece? Because I agree that her experiences are pretty fucking nasty and horrible, and I'm outraged, and do agree that it should never have happened.

BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT!!!

My disagreement is based on two magical assumptions which, on re-reading, I'm not sure are in the text or in my head, but they are this:

1) do you think that the shaping of cissexual little girls, as done by other girls and also adults is some wonderful process of flowers and kittens and wonderfulness? It also involves violence, and though they violence may mostly be relational rather than physical (though as a gender "variant" girl, I can report that it was certainly physical, too) don't pretend that relational and emotional violence doesn't leave scars long, long after bruises and scrapes have been forgotten. This is probably YOUR POINT I AM PROVING IT as far as her point is concerned. I don't doubt that gender-non-conforming male-assigned-at-birth people probably do get it worse, physically, than female-assigned-at-birth but it is the whole process of enforcing gender norms that often relies on violence, and I don't know how to say this without turning into "but what about teh cis womenz" but I am not a cis womenz, and I just want to say there is no magical world where people don't have to deal with the violence of gender-role-policing because you're female-assigned-at-birth.

2) THE GLARING ASSUMPTION THAT THIS VIOLENCE IS SOMETHING THAT IS A-OK TO DO TO CIS BOY CHILDREN. Like, yeah, I get it. It is a super-horrible thing to do a trans girl or a cis girl. BUT FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, I AM GOING TO LEGITIMATELY SAY, WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ?!?!? Why the assumption that this violence is terrible for girls but A-OK for boys? That whole "boys will be boys, it's what they do" is part of the whole mess that men should be addressing when they talk about "masculinity" and "what it feels like to be a man." IT IS NOT OK TO TREAT CIS BOYS LIKE THIS EITHER. THIS IS AN ASSUMPTION THAT NEEDS INTERROGATING, POST HASTE.

Like, I know I spend a lot of time talking about Male on Female violence because yes, it's a huge problem, and yes, it's one i have personal experience with. But at some point, can you guys just go and sit in a room and talk about male on male violence and the equation of masculinity with violence, and the use of violence to enforce and patrol the boundaries of masculinity? Because in all the manboobz moaning, that is, like, one serious complaint that you people have, that you could address and talk about and do something about? I have (another) friend who works in probation, and her job, every single day, is to go and talk to monsters, to actual violent criminals to try and work out what makes them tick and how to make them stop ticking. And she comes back from so many sessions going "What this guy seriously needs more than anything is a course of 'adjust your shitty ideas about gender, dude'."

So. Anyway, that is really throwing down the gauntlet before I disappear for the afternoon, but often, I really wish you guys could have a thread to talk about this stuff the way that we talk about gender on the GURL thread. I fully expect to come home to clusterfuckery tonight!

I really wish you guys could have a thread to talk about this stuff the way that we talk about gender on the GURL thread

haha, i was thinking about how most of the male-identifying people itt don't really have any idea, or have never thought about, what maleness entails - whereas the reverse seems to be true of the female-identifying people.

and just by observing discourse among writers, friends etc, it seems par for the course for women to discuss "what it means to be a woman" - whether in terms of social norms or in trying to dig deeper than that. and this is basically a conversation that does not happen among men or regarding maleness - specifically, among str8 men and regarding heterosexual maleness. i mean, the irony is that there are at least two active threads on maleness and masculinity on ile, and i think one of them is just sarcastic one-liners and the other is mocking dumb adverts. there seems to be a bit of ~avoidance going on. i guess partly this is because the few examples i see in the media of str8 men discussing masculinity are kind of gross and reactionary.

LIke, I am totally convinced that 9/10 of the problem of the current "Crisis in Masculinity" or whatever is the inappropriate false binary "Be a Man! And not a Woman!" as definition of manhood for the older, wiser "Be a Man! And not a Boy!" but jesus christ, why are your ways of turning little boys into men invariably so fucking gruesome and dehumanising?

My niece, who turns four next week, comes home from her very good day care advising me that "girls wear pink, boys wear blue" and I'm like wtf seriously? in 2013?

my tl;dr contribution to the thread:

i wanted to be boyish as a child, was proud of being mistaken for a boy, associated myself with male characters and authors and writers without any sense of dissonance, wore men's clothes, considered things that were conventionally "girly" beneath me, am interested in a lot of things considered blokey, have quite a male social group. Despite all of this I think of myself as female - maybe it's the female socialisation that happened between the gaps of the previous sentence's litany of boy stuff, maybe it's growing up with feminism, maybe it's my life spent being socialised with as a woman, maybe it's biological, maybe it's ~spiritual~, maybe it's some core femininity that i'd just shoved aside while i went through my massive pash on masculinity.

for me, if it is the case that i consistently and unthinkingly consider myself a woman, despite all of the ways in which I am masculine and have admired and longed for masculinity -- then it must also be the case that there are other people who consistently and unthinkingly consider themselves women, despite being masculine in ways that include "having that gender assigned at birth"; and it must also be the case that there are people for whom growing up as a female child with a complicated relationship to masculinity resulted in the discovery that their femininity was after all a part of a self that was basically male, the way that i discovered that my masculinity was a part of a self that was basically female.

But also to a great extent I'm just a lucky person who can afford to not consider my gender very important. We live in a world in which it is significantly easier for a "woman" to incorporate masculinity into her self-presentation than it is for a "man" to incorporate femininity into his. I don't get a lot of push-back for being into boy stuff: if people think anything of it, they mostly seem to treat it as charming rather than offensive (obviously as a child it was a site of bullying but, seriously, what isn't). It isn't just that passing as the gender I present as and have always been associated with means that I don't really have to think about gender very much, so it seems to me that gender isn't "important" - it's also that specifically, historically, right now, in this place, it is easy for me to inhabit gender the way that I do.

My niece, who turns four next week, comes home from her very good day care advising me that "girls wear pink, boys wear blue" and I'm like wtf seriously? in 2013?

my little cousin, whose parents are feminists and who goes to a nice left-wing north london day care, went through an extended pink-is-for-girls-blue-is-for-boys phase, to everyone's mild horror. i was once present for a tantrum because she'd had to have a "pirate" party bag after someone's birthday and that was for BOYS and she would not have it. I'm fairly sure it's not the day care, it's the kids themselves: they love classifying things, their whole life is about discovering the rules of the world, of course they go through a gender essentialist phase.

xpost to that blog post BB posted:

I haven't read the entire post yet but I had an incredibly negative reaction to the thought experiment, largely because of the assumption that boys know what they're doing and girls don't. It's a difficult thing to grapple with because I instinctively want to reject the premise as a flawed construction but that flawed construction is a metaphor for an actual lived experience which is, of course, perfectly valid share and discuss.

This goes into one of the problems I have with identity discussions, pretty much the exact opposite of what I complain about when I talk about "special snowflakes"; the sum total of a person's experiences are unique to that specific person and one must be very careful/judicious about how they extrapolate what has happened to them into what happens to everyone. The "girl thrown to the rabid boys" example given doesn't ring true to me because it presumes helplessness and confusion on the part of the girl.

That being said, physical violence does inform a lot of youth interaction, in my experience. I would not consider all of that violence negative; things like the hand-slapping game shouldn't be lumped into the same category as fist fights.

It is *really* crazy-making, when someone tries to make a land-grab for some supposedly gendered behaviour (gambling, competitiveness, enjoying playing sport) and extrapolate ~boy hormones!!!~ from it. I can't even begin to explain the dysphoria produced when one thinks, as a woman "Hey, *I* do/experience that..." with the accompanying doubt-cloud of "am I a failed girl, or is this gender stereotype actually kinda bullshit?" - and then there's a whole nother layer of dysphoria produced in me (and people like me) where I have *another* cloud of doubt going "wait, am I finding this bullshit because it's an invalid gender stereotype, or because I'm a non-Cis not-a-girl genderqueer person?" And you know what? Dysphoria, if you've never experienced it, is actually really *really* unpleasant, and it's actually a shitty thing to induce in other people, if you can avoid it.

much as it pains me to engage with a real-life female, I'll extend myself to this

the reason I made that halfassed quip about being resistant to conditioned gender performance except during contact sport is that I'm fully aware of the reductive & retrograde codes teeming in that discourse. I've always said that sport & my love of it is the stupidest part of my life, the most unconscious of my mental processes, and yet I cannot abandon it - it is almost a Jungian archetype of its own, the Sports Fanatic

now, I accept entirely that coding contact sport as a masculine or gender-determinative phenomenon is a bigotry & a trigger for dysphoria - *anyone* can run, tackle, scream at teammates to CLOSE 'EM DOWN etc. I *know* this - and yet I find it hard, in the moment of engagement with that discourse, to escape it entirely. I was facetiously acknowledging my own deficiencies in this regard. these debates are really wonderfully tricksy, though - when the asides are more problematic than the main thrust! I like it that way, though - we can't allow for any margin creep. I am, would you believe, fully committed to erasing any & all prejudice from my thought, so civil reminders that I'm not quite there yet are always gratefully received.

if you were playing rugby with someone for a few hours and they told you later over some beers, "I'm sorry, you're mistaken, I'm a woman" would that change your experience?

no. if i found out DURING a game that they were a woman, i'd TRY to make it not change my experience, but i'd be coming from a conditioned position of needing to try

i wouldn't be playing rugby in the first place anyway though

the hilarious-to-me thing about this hypothetical is that 90% of the rugby players I know are women

I'm getting stuck on the same things as BB and Dan, and for the added reason that we're supposed to feel horror and revulsion at this scenario bc girls are delicate and fragile and to be protected, and to do otherwise is naturally horrific? I mean, not protecting CHILDREN is horrific, but too much added protectiveness about sullying girl-/womanhood here is problematic.

Although I'm sure we can all agree, children are amoral monsters and will take to any form of torment that's suggested to them and permitted.

Ah but Dan, do they play against/with men? If so then that's progress of a wonderful sort (that I'd have to actively battle against finding strange, hence the ambient prejudice that needs challenging)

Although I'm sure we can all agree, children are amoral monsters and will take to any form of torment that's suggested to them and permitted.

oh yeah no doubt

Ah but Dan, do they play against/with men? If so then that's progress of a wonderful sort (that I'd have to actively battle against finding strange, hence the ambient prejudice that needs challenging)

Not that I know of, which doesn't change the fact that my main interface with practitioners of this particular sport that often gets held up as being super-manly-mannish are women and that gap between image and personal experience makes me chuckle.

The first thing you need to understand is that masculinity, maleness, is inculcated and enforced with violence. It's either actual violence, or the threat of violence, or the implied threat of violence.

And yeah, again following on BB's heels here, I do think the passage above is insightful, but maybe doesn't try to go far enough--isn't almost everything, at base, enforced with violence? Aren't social codes and laws and the existence of states and governing bodies and civil order and...pretty much everything enforced with implied violence?

i wanted to be boyish as a child, was proud of being mistaken for a boy, associated myself with male characters and authors and writers without any sense of dissonance, wore men's clothes, considered things that were conventionally "girly" beneath me, am interested in a lot of things considered blokey, have quite a male social group. Despite all of this I think of myself as female - maybe it's the female socialisation that happened between the gaps of the previous sentence's litany of boy stuff, maybe it's growing up with feminism, maybe it's my life spent being socialised with as a woman, maybe it's biological, maybe it's ~spiritual~, maybe it's some core femininity that i'd just shoved aside while i went through my massive pash on masculinity.

for me, if it is the case that i consistently and unthinkingly consider myself a woman, despite all of the ways in which I am masculine and have admired and longed for masculinity -- then it must also be the case that there are other people who consistently and unthinkingly consider themselves women, despite being masculine in ways that include "having that gender assigned at birth"; and it must also be the case that there are people for whom growing up as a female child with a complicated relationship to masculinity resulted in the discovery that their femininity was after all a part of a self that was basically male, the way that i discovered that my masculinity was a part of a self that was basically female.

But also to a great extent I'm just a lucky person who can afford to not consider my gender very important. We live in a world in which it is significantly easier for a "woman" to incorporate masculinity into her self-presentation than it is for a "man" to incorporate femininity into his. I don't get a lot of push-back for being into boy stuff: if people think anything of it, they mostly seem to treat it as charming rather than offensive (obviously as a child it was a site of bullying but, seriously, what isn't). It isn't just that passing as the gender I present as and have always been associated with means that I don't really have to think about gender very much, so it seems to me that gender isn't "important" - it's also that specifically, historically, right now, in this place, it is easy for me to inhabit gender the way that I do.

― if you're happy and you know it, it's false consciousness (c sharp major), Thursday, 12 December 2013 14:35 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gonna reply to another woman. what a fucking turn-up!

this is a brilliant post. "maybe it's the female socialisation that happened between the gaps of the previous sentence's litany of boy stuff, maybe it's growing up with feminism, maybe it's my life spent being socialised with as a woman, maybe it's biological, maybe it's ~spiritual~, maybe it's some core femininity that i'd just shoved aside while i went through my massive pash on masculinity" covers the intangibility of gender & sexuality - the personal & subjective nature of it that should NEVER be challenged from without unless very, very carefully & respectfully indeed & with as broad a knowledge of the target psyche as possible. in a way it's liberating having no single determinant for gender - it allows us to escape codes of 'should' or 'ought' and discover the possibilities of 'will' and 'do'. and the great thing about intangibility is that it can apply to anyone in any way should they sincerely feel it. obviously I'm not going to impose gender qualities onto another being, be they a person, a car or a brick, but if they have the capacity to make a gender claim then I am not going to deny their agency in this regard, especially as gender is like all wisdom a performed/manifested reflection of one's surroundings & engagements & thus my business to receive and not ask for

obviously there are a lot of surroundings & engagements that feed into gender, from hormones & genitals to other forms of social conditioning to ~spirit~ etc - and obviously there are a lot of directions that they can feed into. the conversation must be perpetually about prejudice & its elimination, because without these things there wouldn't be a conversation at all, just a wonderful realm of experience & free gender adoption. we must tend towards the Ideal, even if it can never fully be reached because society & demographics & determinative roles relating to stuff like procreation & physical strength & whatnot

gonna reply to another woman. what a fucking turn-up!

I think you may be laboring under the mistaken impression that these preludes are charming.

based on a horrifying anecdote i heard involving cleats, i think anyone with testicles, regardless of how they identify/express themselves in terms of gender, should be barred from playing rugby

xp yeah LJ you might wanna tone it down

these preludes are predicated on the truth that if you inaccurately abuse me unbidden on Twitter you're gonna get snarked

io riding the ontological violence train...it's a difficult argument to resist, but it could be said that if all action is a violence of inflicting choice or determination upon the free realm of possibility, we need to come up with a word other than 'violence' for the imposition of a certain brand of socially-coded masculinity - perhaps 'phalloviolence'? :P

if all action is a violence of inflicting choice or determination upon the free realm of possibility, we need to come up with a word other than 'violence' for the imposition of a certain brand of socially-coded masculinity

I cannot figure out what this means--can you make it less roundabout?

the phrase 'ontological violence' implies that every action is violent - where violence is the denial of possibility. each action taken means an infinite number of other actions were not taken - so everything is violent, albeit, practically speaking, in different ways & with different intentions & effects

so far come up with 'cocksome' and 'phalloviolence' - reckon we need some good female & neutral coinages now. i'll leave those to the appropriate folk

lord

anyone remember the awesome period of the 1980s when neon pink (well, any "neon" color) was relatively gender-neutral? one of my favorite t-shirts was a neon pink/white striped one when I was a little kid. I think I actually had two of them

would totally wear such a shirt again

i think it'd be okay to just use the word 'violence' with an appropriate qualifier without having to invent any cute little neologisms.

yeah, but the 'appropriate qualifier' is the important bit, and according to the rhetorical slippery slope will occasionally fall away, be elided...i'm more comfortable with the appropriate qualifier being linguistically wedded to the loaded-n-dynamited term 'violence'

c sharp major, I really liked your post, and it occurs to me that I have probably been through similar processes of self-definition and yet not framed them in such a positive way as you, and maybe I should think about doing that.

(Also, yes, that it has mostly been easy for me not to consider gender important, and instead of being aware of and grateful for that privilege I have just balked twice as hard at the minor incidents where I'm reminded that it is still a thing.)

I uhh might have some thoughts about the tone of the blog post and whether I can recognise even my own comparatively cushy childhood in the dichotomy it paints but maybe I should just take lex's advice that "this isn't about [me]".

where violence is the denial of possibility.

Nope, this is your read, not mine. I mean that because of law enforcement and other state forces, compliance is either literally enforced by violence, or by the threat of it.

oh I know, were you not also talking about an institutionalised masculine violence - violence as a definable act & physical tool of oppression is one thing, but a systemic, notional violence, a code of violence already has an existential significance & I think it'd be useful to modify it when referring to this specific sort

Stop trying to be the smartest person on the thread, dude.

plenty of smart ppl here, just trying to keep up tbh

i think this is tricky because "innate" is shorthand for a confluence of processes & influences we don't understand well enough to talk about instead. obviously the majority of gender-coded behaviour across cultures & history feels alien, & i'm inclined to see conceptions of gender as being evolving macro-processes that individuals work with/around to various degrees.

personally, i feel i have learnt to be comfortable inhabiting maleness to some extent. i've gone through periods of being more or less aware of my gender. it feels somewhat imposed in a way that my sexuality doesn't. sometimes i have resented being lumped in w/ the boys & i have often seen gender primarily as a barrier, especially growing up. maleness sometimes feels like a set of expectations. i am sometimes conscious of performing a bit more 'male' when talking w/ older men, almost as a sort of etiquette. the maleness i value most is the invigorating reckless energy & fraternity of the guys i grew up with, tho when i've glimpsed the equivalent sense of sorority it also seems v attractive. i think the [mb, sometimes] less polarizing power/sexual dynamics in same sex groups can be help people drop their guard, especially in adolescence. sometimes i've been aware of a weight to straight male sexuality, not necessarily sexual tension, but just a sort of potentially intrusive ~presence~ that has to be negotiated. i've occasionally worried if i enjoyed female company or female attention. occasionally i've been surprised by how low a woman's expectations are and felt a gulf. a lot of the time, of course, i don't feel how easy i've got it.

...dynamics in same sex groups can be help people...

also obv the maleness thread is to be viewed not as insincere but as a performance of maleness through image bombing

I never felt societal pressure to image bomb!

I love that thread and see it as a quite incisive tour of masculinity and its discontents

its a swirling together of celebration and shame/abjection

I guess it's kinda lacking some guts in not objectifying male beauty much, but then I'm a big fag so I'd say that lol

outsourced to wdyll iirc

We have friends/neighbors a few blocks away whose daughter is in fifth grade. She was born male but has identified as female for several years, certainly before she started public school, in terms of dress, interests, even name. I can only imagine how hard that must be on the parents, where you are in a position of control over your children - legally and practically - but at the same time must rely on your child's feelings and opinion to an extreme degree. And it will only get more difficult when their daughter starts exhibiting secondary sex characteristics, or lack thereof. I'm not even sure how you handle friends and sleepovers and the like. Do you tell the other parent that your daughter is technically a male? You must, right? I live in a very understanding place, but that must still be very hard to understand.

I'm not even sure how you handle friends and sleepovers and the like. Do you tell the other parent that your daughter is technically a male? You must, right?

Er...no? Don't you rely on your children's feelings to know what their interests are, their favorite friends, whether they're happy or sad or scared or not, how they experience everything? Don't you have a hunger to KNOW them and cherish their developing personality and worldview? Their felt gender isn't different, I don't think.

I'm not sure I understand you, or maybe you didn't understand me. If you have a daughter who was born male who is invited to an all-girls sleepover, it is not safe to assume that the parents in charge know your daughter has a penis. Or her friends, for that matter.

Yes, but why is having a penis what makes her "male"? And does it inherently present a...danger? to the other girls somehow?

I remember being worried that playing "Light as a feather, stiff as a board" at sleepovers would damn my eternal soul, but I don't remember anyone showing anyone else their vagina.

If anything, it could pose a danger to her. If it came as a total surprise, it could cost her friends, safety, security, comfort, etc. What makes it tricky, I imagine, is that she is still a child, and like I said, as a parent you are in charge and still very much responsible for her well-being. It therefore becomes a bit of a gamble just when and where and why you decide to go totally hands off when the child is unable to do much for themselves, like I said, both legally and practically.

i'm male and have a total sense of masculine gender but at the same time, i'm p different now from how i was raised. well, different from my environment. grew up in a conservative 'burb which was 95%+ white (and i never really saw the other -5%) and vv christian/catholic/protestant what have you. went to church, loved sports, played tackle football with the bros and shot hoops and got into a few scraps here and there. and i was raised w/a definite sense (from my friends, mind you, not necessarily from my family) of a strict separation between male and female cultures. i didn't have any friends who weren't white until i was 18, which sounds insane. didn't have any jewish friends until then, either. of course, i lived among dudes who cracked jokes about non-whites and jewish folks and polish people and women on a day to day basis, so that was to be expected. i really hope i didn't make any of the same jokes but i probably did.

i wouldn't say that this has changed my innate gender identity at all but as i've grown older i've kind of lost the fear of appearing soft or embracing my enjoyment of anything considered less traditionally masculine. i think music probably changed it for me somehow. idk, i can probably trace my awareness of the feminine perspective to my mom and her love of joni mitchell and poring over some of her lyrics, and my awareness of gay culture to being blindsided unexpectedly by my love of the album 'very' by pet shop boys and reading up on it. i think that helped to kickstart me into psychologically leaving behind childish notions of masculinity, to the point that while i still kinda go through some of the motions (tough to kick some of them) i do so less frequently.

There's a more than average chance the other parents are going to flip the fuck out. See re: parents flipping the fuck out about a transgender girl (trans girl?) using the girls locker room and bathroom.

So do you tell the parents and risk them rejecting your kid? Or not tell and risk them finding out and then god knows what happens. (I'm taking a really dim view but something I read recently put the life expectancy for trans people at thirty-fucking-three years and also people can be terrible.)

xp

Is having a trans child in some ways analogous to having an LGB child? If your child identified as gay or lesbian, would you feel you had to inform other parents of kids your child knew? I don't know if we've had out and proud youth in the spotlight, as a society, for a long enough to have a range of healthy narratives about parenting LGBT kids, models for parents to align themselves with, apart from radically loving them and knowing that you're pioneering something.

At slumber parties I attended we definitely peed in front of each other, put each other's training bras in the freezer and other stupid shit that could result in outing a trans kid.

If my daughter decides she is male I will have his back 100% and probably never let him out of my sight.

xp maybe like having an LGB kid in the 60s when being gay was considered a dangerous mental illness and had a good chance of getting you killed if the wrong person found out under the wrong circumstances.

Being trans today is dangerous. 33 years life expectancy. That's not natural causes.

33 years life expectancy is chilling

and i agree with josh in that in that situation i'd be mostly terrified for the trans child: not just physical but mental safety

I mean are the parents going to murder your child at a slumber party? Probably not but it could lead to the kind of brutal bullying that results in suicide attempts.

Sorry. This is triggering I'm sure and I'll drop it. I made my point as much as I want to.

xpost I think it's fundamentally (physically) different. You can be gay or lesbian, but you are still physically one gender or the other. It's a good question, though. I suppose that if you are gay and lesbian in fifth grade, you either are hiding it or not, and if not, everyone knows. But if you are trans, there could be more of an element of secrecy? I honestly don't know how many people know my neighbor was born male. My kids certainly have not mentioned it, and you'd think they would have by now.

Also my small-town-ness is showing bc I only knew the same like 100 kids for 13 years so I didn't realize there would be school friends who didn't already know! Sorry about that.

TTWS, do you think the mainstream is beginning to view culture and the way people interact through some kind of post-queer filter, where people who aren't directly involved with queer culture nevertheless know its signifiers? Thinking about this a lot since the untimely demise of a certain queer theorist...

The easiest part of this to answer is the poll question: female at birth, sense of feminine gender. Have definitely been othered or told I'm not part of group x, but I attribute that to the group dynamics in play at the time and not to anything innate within me. Although I present female and am heterosexual, I have a lot of affinities with queer culture because I find certain 'required' interactions and rituals absolutely baffling, or ridiculous. Why have people arrived at this way of living that looks more surreal the closer you examine it? Hetero-normativity is just weird to me. I used to call my take 'another dissatisfied customer'. I've always been fairly relaxed about my gender identity, but TBF I wasn't raised with an expectation of GIRLS MUST DO THIS NOT THAT. I'm unusual in that family members have never pressured me about childbearing or marriage, possibly because of how their own choices played out. For ages, the only male in the house was the dog, so how men actually lived day-to-day was a bit of a revelation when I eventually started sharing flats and houses with them. The only time I was mistaken for a boy, it was by old people and I was in uniform, bussing dishes, with short hair and a mandatory visor.

poll answer for me: female at birth, feminine gender.

also this is a great thread

^ yes. good to have Branwell Bell back imo

loving this discussion

I grew up with 3 sisters (also feminine), a very feminine mother, a sort of mysterious, aloof father, had mostly close female friends, mostly female coworkers. I feel like "masculinity" is totally mysterious to me, and as a result, I tend to put men on a pedestal.

scuse me, 2 sisters. jeez.

What's mysterious about it?

generally speaking, the ability to answer that question renders the subject unmysterious

female/feminine I think

I grew up with a very feminine mother and was surrounded by girls as a student at an all-girls school. In HS I adopted a lot of boyish stuff (skateboarding, boyish clothes) and rejected, or adopted only in an ironic way, things that I thought of as girly (make-up, the color pink). How I mostly love girlish things but I'm still most comfortable in jeans and sneakers and oh I have no idea what I'm saying. I think because I'm tall there's always been this part me that's felt a little mannish which I don't think I am overall but I definitely lack any delicateness or something of that sort that I associate with being feminine. Also, I sit weird. Right now I'm sitting on my office chair in a full on lotus position. I don't think that's feminine or masculine but it's definitely not normal. I guess while I've never questioned my gender, I've not felt entirely comfortable with it either. I apologize for all this if it doesn't make any sense. I've had A LOT of coffee, am trying to do a million things at once, and haven't had time to read this whole thread which does, in fact, seem very interesting.

I've always been fairly relaxed about my gender identity, but TBF I wasn't raised with an expectation of GIRLS MUST DO THIS NOT THAT.

This is absolutely true for me too and God am I glad that it is. I can't imagine having been raised otherwise.

I was taught how to "sit like a lady" and silly things like that (my dad still hates it when women drink from beer bottles) but they were very relaxed in terms of careers or expectations in terms of marriage and children etc.

Many, many x-posts but regarding that story recently where the parents "flipped the fuck out" coz a trans girl was using the gender appropriate bathroom and locker room for her - someone bothered tracing the story back to the source, and actually, it was not the parents who flipped out. The parents at the school were for the most part supporting. If I recall correctly, it was manufactured and planted as a scare story and picked up and run without verification. (Cant remember if it was actually TERFs or right-wing crusade shit-bags; same difference really.)

I'm not saying being trans isn't dangerous, because very clearly the stats show it is.

But just showing that the story can be picked up, manipulated and completely warped. Many people are a lot more accepting and open-minded than they are represented as being.

xp to ENBB Isn't that funny? I mowed the lawn and helped change brake fluid, was allowed free rein in the woodworking shop and forced to strip paint over summer vacay, but was told again and again to behave like a lady, that sarcasm and a critical nature were unbecoming, and that it was inevitable I would eventually have to submit to my husband per god's plan.

me and my brother used to get told off a lot for "giggling like a pair of little girls"

gah not with it being trans "being dangerous" = being dangerous to one's own physical safety in a transphobic society. Rather than implying trans people being, I dunno, radioactive or something! blergh. x-posts now

The expectations placed on me mainly boiled down to YOU ARE THE OLDEST, SET A GOOD EXAMPLE.

I was def warned by my paternal grandmother that I better hurry and finish playing dolls with my sister but I think it's because the doll was ugly.

i'd to do all the feckin housework ffs

L - Yeah, see I can totally relate to the manners thing there but the later is just so foreign to me. My parents were more like hey you can go do/be whatever the hell you want to as long as you sit up straight with your legs are together, your hair is in place, your lip gloss applied and your beer poured into a nice glass (or even better some other beverage because beer p unladylike in and of itself). I guess we weren't religious at all (I mean I was raised Catholic but lol) and my mom had put herself through college and had her own career years before she even met my dad so maybe that's where it came from - their strange mix of messages. She always definitely wore the (neatly pressed and perfectly tailored) pants anyway.

fwiw, all these anecdotes of social conditioning and social pressuring are worth discussing, but it is my sense that something which is "innate" is also something which cannot be eradicated or even signifigantly modified by outside forces. At most these pressures may impose a filter upon one's actions, so that one's innate tendencies are repressed, but if they are innate they will persistently continue to arise, though fail to be publically expressed. So, to put it another way, an innate identity is what you're stuck with no matter how many times you're told to be otherwise.

x-post - I hated dolls as a child which disturbed my mother quite a lot. I stripped them naked and chopped off all their hair as soon as they came out of the box then never played with them except when I wanted to play vampire dolls and gave them all weird makeup and injuries with some markers I found lying around.

to be fair, drinking beer from a glass really opens up the aroma of the beer, taste and smell being interconnected and what not. and then of course there's the choice of drinking from a tulip, a snifter, a chalice, etc.

lol

yeah that's right, and it's interesting trying to tease it out. i can say my sexuality is innate because there's an obvious manifestation of it that i'm conscious of: i'm attracted to men, not women. but in terms of gender as distinct from sexuality, i don't know what that manifestation would be, apart a feeling of comfort in my body, which i do have.

because one strong conclusion i'm drawing from our various personal experiences is that deviation from externally imposed social norms of gender mean less that i am the wrong gender and more externally imposed social norms of gender are wrong.

xp to aimless

when i worked in a pub i was always amused by the couples who buy two pints and then get a half-pint glass for the lady to drink out of, by topping it up from one of the pints

something which is "innate" is also something which cannot be eradicated or even signifigantly modified by outside forces.

Yeah, the reason they told me over and over was that it never took.

but in terms of gender as distinct from sexuality, i don't know what that manifestation would be, apart a feeling of comfort in my body, which i do have.

Every time I've tried to think of a more complicated, numinous answer to the gender question, I land on what you just said.

I know this is controversial and probably one for another thread, but I don't feel my sexuality is innate. It's proved itself time and again to be super-fluid and highly influenced by the people I'm around. It's not like I have a choice over it - it seems to move around of it's own accord. I can choose what attractions to pursue (or LOL rename attractions that don't conform to the "I'm totes str8 now honest!" narrative. I have always felt like such an insane weirdo coz I'm the only person I know who's had to "come out" like 3 times before giving up and each time going "nope that previous sexuality was wrong, THIS is the true one" until I read Sexual Fluidity by Lisa Diamond and that was like "holy shit this is actually normal?"

I know other ppl do have innate senses of sexuality but that's another case where I kinda have to say "nope can't say that I do."

perhaps the fact that i don't feel like i'm playing at maleness means i'm comfortable within my gender, in ways other than the physical. but again when i try and latch onto what that maleness is, it seems to manifest in what other people think of me, or in my own sense of "i yam what i yam", which is a circular argument i think

xp i think if i say my sexuality is innate that needn't be the same as saying that it's fixed?

i feel like my early upbringing (up to middle school) was freakishly lenient in terms of gender roles. I was allowed to wear and do whatever I wanted, which was tons of tutus and bear costumes and carpentry/balloon animals/stilts/reading/playing my keyboard/listening to music/other solo activities. I was never told that girls are like THIS or that girls could/could not do things. I grew up in an all-girls school surrounded almost exclusively by women with the exception of my dad and his colleagues/coworkers who mostly ignored/embarrassed me.

Something stands out in retrospect, though -- aside from my mom, the only person I could consider an early role model was a man, my parents' friend Jim, who used to always spend holidays with us and showed movies at his house because he owned a film projector. He had a house full of cool stuff (grandfather & cuckoo clocks, comic books/picture books, records, cooking implements) and would let me explore for as long as I wanted. To this day he is one of my favorite people. But I never thought about him as a man, he was Jim.

like by innate sexuality we're referring to some Cartesian undoubtable truth - "this arouses me" - but that arousal can still be contingent, situation-specific, not subject to repetition at all times and places

My parents were gloriously, uselessly hands-off: no one taught me how to cook or do laundry, no one taught me how to do woodwork with tools or change tires or whatever, and neither of them expected otherwise of me. And I sort of resent them for it every time I see a neighbor building something in the garage or a friend whipping up an awesome meal with no recipe. Thanks a lot, mom and dad. You should have been thinking of my future struggle to identify with certain cliched gender expectations for personal benefit!

I do think I might have gained something positive thinking of my mom as the competent, capable of anything one, and my dad as the useless one. Ironically, that seems like a
"traditional" husband/wife dynamic - like in the antiquated housewife/worker sense - but come to think of it, it seems sort of inadvertently progressive: dad goes to work, mom gets things done (*and* goes to work).

My wife, btw, had the hilariously familiar tale of being gifted a set of construction toys by her progressive mother, only to have her Barbies drive the tractors and dumptrucks before retiring to play tea party.

He had a house full of cool stuff (grandfather & cuckoo clocks, comic books/picture books, records, cooking implements)

Sounds fascinating! And much like the home of someone else I know....

i know! he's my hero. he did exactly what he wanted. he's the one who lives next door to his wife!

Kinder, this is just kind of an aside, but if you woke up in a male body, why would you feel like you would have to fancy gurls?

a sexuality that moves around of its own accord sounds half super-awesome and half super-inconvenient. the fluidity or otherwise of one's sexuality, and the social norms surrounding that for men and women, could be its own entire thread

No, NV, I think some people *do* report having a Cartesian undoubtable truth of "I like penises, that's what I like, maleness does it for me, I wouldn't even know what to do with a vagina!" and it's also really implicit in that whole "Born This Way" ethos (which has kept me away from the continent of Queer for years because, y'know, I wasn't born this way it's mutable and fluid, that's not bad, that's not "failed lesbian" it just is. And that mutabity is... amazing is what it is. Or that's how I'm trying to view it.)

That's kind of an interesting thought experiment, especially in regards as to whether sexual preferences are more heavily linked to biology or socialization. If it's biology, and you were suddenly in a (non surgically-modified) male body, would your mind continue to express the same interests, or would it be a matter of whether that body was genetically more likely to be straight or gay? How much would your existing experiences and desires weigh in the equation?

There's also nothing saying you can't be born mutable and fluid xp

So many x-posts. So many typos. ("it's" for possessive? NO) Stupid iPhone I hate this thing.

yeah, as mh says mutability cd be another innate trait. plus even if somebody's sexuality feels clearly drawn to one gender only, it's not as if anybody of the appropriate gender will do, there's far more going on beneath the surface than "penises arouse me, vaginas arouse me"

like on a pitchfork ratings scale, ppl with penises, rate the magical-ness of your members

― sarahell

10/10 I never thought I'd enjoy chamber pop penis again but this penis is downright magical. It could be the most magical penis of the decade, and I'm not even joking.

or perhaps to be more real : "the prospect of a penis arouses me, the potential for vagina arouses me"

We are getting into dangerous semantics here with fixed mutability but I just feel like... nope. That concept doesn't feel like it fits me.

oh i wasn't suggesting it as a universal or applying it to you - more pondering exactly what is the essence of what we desire, when we experience desire?

Sexual attraction is such a odd thing when you look at it on its own, especially divorced of societal expectations and gender roles. I've known a few people who have identified as straight or gay but have pursued other avenues due to more psychological than sexual needs? Not that you can really divorce sexuality from the rest of the mind.

if the essence is a gender or a type of genitalia then the causes of fluidity wd lie elsewhere perhaps, but if the essence of what i desire is not inherent in a (perceived) gender then what i perceive of as mutability might be me mistaking the nature of my own desire

FWIW to BB, I think there are many, many people in the world who are just looking for their Other Person, and when they find that Other Person, s/he could be anywhere on a spectrum of attributes of which assigned gender is not the main attractor.

My parents split up early on and my mom made a HUGE effort to make sure I had 'positive male role models' around: mentors, neighbourhood people, plus relatives.

I don't know that I was implying a "fixed mutability" at all! If the spectrum runs from A to B, and different people fall along that line (or can move varyingly along that line), who is to say there aren't people who are not on the line at all?

better said by suzy, it seems

yeah suzy expressed what i was driving at much more clearly. tho i'd want to allow for the possibility of their being a multitude of Other Persons and of them having different roles to play, or different desirable attributes

FWIW to BB, I think there are many, many people in the world who are just looking for their Other Person, and when they find that Other Person, s/he could be anywhere on a spectrum of attributes of which assigned gender is not the main attractor.

The ultimate example of this is a woman I know who, for as long as I've known her, has self-identified as a lesbian; several years ago she married and had a child with a man, to whom she is still married.

I wonder if that happens that way rather than the other way round. I bet that it does though whether or not that's true and, if so, why is another thread entirely.

It's certainly a lot more common among certain groups. I have a few friends who have gay dads (no drummers, though) that had cookie-cutter church-going rural or suburban lives until their kids were grown, when they got divorced and came out.

I have another friend who's told us that the first person he dated in college after coming out was a woman; their relationship lasted something like two and a half years and, when he was describing it, he got this super wistful "I should have married her" demeanor.

Yeah but I think that's something else entirely or at least I think that when that happens it usually is.

There's also nothing saying you can't be born mutable and fluid xp

― mh

I think this is a big ol' truth bomb.

Many xps - thanks for the clarification, BB! I'm pleased to know the media and not parents are the monsters here.

Or more rather, to xp that whole thing I guess it's more like "I've always felt this way and it's always been all over the place and sometimes been in places not male and not female whatever those are supposed to mean"

Just personally, I'm not too bothered by the concept of "fixed mutability" because it seems to describe my experiences, but it does kind of sound like an oxymoron I guess.

The nice thing about an innate sexual identity is that it is connected directly to one's sexual arrousal or lack thereof. Gender considered entirely apart from sexuality always seems to fall back to socially prescribed gender roles and whether or not one felt comfortable within those roles. But those roles are not innate and the source of one's discomfort or comfort with a prescribed gender role doesn't seem to sort out the question of an innate, non-sexually defined gender identity at all.

I conclude that we are all, to coinn a phrase, free to be you and me.

It's not just the oxymoron of it; it's just that birth-biological-determinism thing is proving to be so wrong-headed in so many ways in other parts of human behaviour. People are not just bundles of complete DNA instructions at birth. This is an oversimplified way of looking at how genetics works - many conditions / ways of being etc. require both a genetic component or predisposition AND some environmental trigger. (There was a great round-up of this in Aeon Magazine recently) so it's entirely possible that sexuality and gender, fluidity, could also be the result of these and/both configurations.

Why would environment be exempt from a determinism POV? We really don't have much control over that than our DNA

Really? Um, no.

*gets up and turns thermostat down*

I just think there's this other side of the issue where I feel offended being told that my own "innate" feelings about who I am are merely reactions to social constructs... like, well sure there's some of that but then is nothing real??? Evopsych positions piss me off too because they don't take into account the reality of social constructs and it's all environment and genes and bio-truths and the World of Gor but I don't really know where I'm going with all this. Gonna leave off for bigger brains to think that through.

This is funny because I'm wrapped in 3 blankets right now.
I mean more like we don't choose our upbringing, how to the manor born we are etc

DNA is not deterministic in itself. There was a good article recently summing up the idea that genetic expression is widely misunderstood. It's not that certain adaptations and traits occur due to the presence or absence of a gene, but in concert genes are expressed depending on a number of factors.

The major example was that grasshoppers and locusts are genetically identical, but in certain environmental conditions, the insect grows to have much different physical characteristics and behaviors.

Yeah but both as individual - and as societies - we can and do exercise huge control over our environments. People can choose to work towards creating a less sexist or transphobic environment.

Take something known to have both a genetic component and an environmental trigger, e.g. alcoholism (now I am not comparing being cis to a disease but hey I know the cisses are touchy!) People need a genetic susceptibility and an environmental trigger - access to alcohol.

Someone can have the DNA, grow up in an alcohol-imbibing society, and become an alcoholic and claim perfectly legitimately it was in their genes.
Someone can have the DNA, grow up in an alcohol-shunning society, never become an alcoholic, never even know they had the potential to be one.

Neither of these people have control over the environment, that's true.

But a third person has the DNA, grows up in an alcohol-drinking society, but comes from a family full of drunks and rejects drinking, becomes a teatotaller and in the process never experiences the environmental trigger. How much control does he have over his environment?

I'm trying not to make this a question of "choice" because that word is so loaded, but the idea that one can resist the deterministic bullshit and make an environment that is more friendly and less harmful to the wide variation of human genotypes and phenotypes, I think that's a better project than just shrugging and going "DNA, man."

This has taken forever to type because: iPhone and the conversation has probably moved on, but there is my clumsy ill-fitting metaphor anyway.

loving this thread and all the gender talk.

i voted for Assigned male at birth; I don't particularly have a sense of innate binary gender

though that doesn't mean i haven't spent much of my inner life since puberty desiring maleness somehow, to be it or to have it, because i wasn't it / didn't have it, and it seemed like a very powerful, enjoyable, relieving thing to have, to be fully that thing 100%, because unfortunately i've always been a black-and-white thinker and binaries have been the bane of my existence. i made slow realizations that every manifestation of this maleness is basically a script for maintaining control / power over others or over the self within the social, but it hasn't changed the fact that i have a desire to connect to strength, power, energy, and confidence in life without buying into the ridiculous soul-sucking patriarchy and basically hating myself. someone upthread mentioned the reckless energy of fraternal friendship, and i think that's what i crave more than anything + believe that it also isn't anything without tenderness, care and love.

I'm trying not to make this a question of "choice" because that word is so loaded, but the idea that one can resist the deterministic bullshit and make an environment that is more friendly and less harmful to the wide variation of human genotypes and phenotypes, I think that's a better project than just shrugging and going "DNA, man."

qft

X-post yes, that was the article in Aeon that I mentioned in that exact post, funnily enough.

iPhone is too frustrating for this; I'm off to bed & GEB.

timely NPR post!
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/12/12/250012887/why-we-need-more-than-three-genders

as an only child I didn't feel like I had a gender identity, and was just "the child," and was supposed to be educated and socialized by both parents. So I went shopping and made up stories and talked about books with my mom, and I watched and played sports and marched around the living room banging on pots and pans with my dad. As a kid, I think I equated all adult women with "Moms." Adult men were a category in between kids and Moms. Men got to tell jokes, read the newspaper, and sit and watch TV, while Moms cooked, cleaned, managed the doing of chores and the enforcement of proper behavior. Oh and Moms got pregnant, which was really disturbing to me at the time, and seemed like a very unpleasant physical experience. The last thing I wanted to be when I was a kid was a Mom. Pretty much everything Moms did seemed tedious.

FWIW to BB, I think there are many, many people in the world who are just looking for their Other Person, and when they find that Other Person, s/he could be anywhere on a spectrum of attributes of which assigned gender is not the main attractor.

The ultimate example of this is a woman I know who, for as long as I've known her, has self-identified as a lesbian; several years ago she married and had a child with a man, to whom she is still married.

― SHAUN (DJP), Thursday, 12 December 2013 20:33 (1 hour ago) Permalink

well i think we've found at least one magic penis

Assigned male at birth; I have a sense of being masculine gender.

i grew up in a professional/academic household in a small town, so i wasn't really into or good at the stuff of traditional masculinity. i liked music and plays and books, so on that level i was a little bit outside the norm; not anywhere near the level of outsideness as the few (ostensibly) queer kids. my best friend caught a lot of shit for long hair and general weirdness, but he was a loudmouth too. luckily this was a fairly prosperous, heavily northern-protestant town, so paradoxically there was a kind of countertradition of diligent, studious, quiet young men you could kind of slot yourself into.

when i was a teenager and in my 20s i guess i did have a certain attempted self-conception as part of an 'alternate strain' of masculinity tied heavily to music (young dylan, later bowie, the clash). which reduces mostly to being skinny, probably, haha. that sort of artsy-man oevre has its own really nasty mythos about women (the 'manic pixie' bullshit, certain fake old-timey notions we have documented heavily here on ilx) so i'm glad i tossed all that away, and was never very successful at that kind of self-presentation anyway. there was a lot of discomfort with my own person through this time but it's hard to map out where it came from. as other people have said, experience with 'culture' can be a way out of the most brutal kinds of masculinity but it can be as trapping in its own way.

i will say that in recent years i feel like i've become more comfortable with myself, and this has translated into a lot more comfort with 'masculinity' as a part of that. a lot of this is due to having more *confidence* (one of the magical masculine qualities -- seriously somebody needs to do an interrogation of this) as life has become more settled and materially comfortable for me, and i'm older and more capable at life in general. getting over a lot of high-school era gym-fear and starting to respect and be proud of my person was a big part of this, to be honest. i reject cartesian dualism; you don't 'have' a body or walk around in one, you *are* a body. that's probably a whole other converation.

one funny thing is that, through the years, i've always been closer to women than men, as a general rule. whether girlfriends or friends (or some unstable position in between). my most durable relationships have been with women. i've rarely had dude-friends i was close enough to to hang with on a really casual, close level, and i've never really figured out why (even that has changed in recent years too -- hi guys). in low moments this really bugged me. i suppose that's one benefit to traditional masculinity, is if you're inside that circle, it's probably a lot of fun, right? if you all know you're on Team Phallus or w/e you can just hang.

Hey I just wanted to say I'm really pleased with the way this thread turned out, and thank you to the many people who shared their experiences, especially the men for whom this may or may not have been something they deeply thought about regularly. I'm actually excited to see the results and wish I'd set a shorter time (but then again, longer polls always get more results and I want a large data sample.)

I'm gonna hit submit post on this, because it feels like the conversation has reached a natural lull at this point. (Or not?)

And then I'm gonna come back and pick up some threads that I was still interested in/still thinking about but maybe got lost in the rush of conversation.

1) alternate modes of masculinity, and sorry if it feels like I'm harping on this, because this has always been one of the biggest sticking points of stopping at genderqueer and never going al the way to trans* is distaste with the modes of masculinity on offer, and if I did wake up "as a man" I would probably be an effete, long-haired, gender-non-conforming man, and man, would that probably be shit.

*Well, it's not just that, but also um, can I coin a word like internalised transmisandry? Where ~feminist women~ are always told "oh you just want dicks/to be men/etc" on one side, and "you're just grabbing at male privilege!" on the other. When it came down to it, expanding the concept of "woman" felt more important than becoming male. Oh, also I fucking hate surgery and avoid doctors like the plague.

BUT! I do think there's a case to be made for alternate modes of masculinity, and they don't *have* to have a gross, icky artsy-man BS to them. There seem to be two modes of queering (not always literally, often figuratively/symbolically) or redefining masculinity. First there are Cis's brilliant, brittle young men, all bookish and intellectual and wearing 1920s spectacles, which I'd probably code as kinda agender, not quite effeminate enough to be sissy-boy, but definitely rejecting the trappings of warrior-athlete Masculinity. And then on the other side, there's the Ultra-Dandy from Planet Bowie who is the genderqueer approach to masculinity as an "and both" approach - including but not limited to ppl like Iggy Pop, Prince, Nick Rhodes, Kurt Cobain. (I think the patron saint of this thread should be Iggy Pop, when asked why he was wearing a woman's dress, replied It's not a woman's dress, I'm a man, it's my dress, therefore it is a man's dress.) It's the more dangerous approach to redefining masculinity, both because of homophobia, and because adapting aspects of femininity means opening yourself up to the attacks of misogyny. But to me, more interesting.

But that brings me to point 2, which has been inspired by re-reading the thread, being caught by a thread which started with een's post and kind of carried on as an undercurrent in the "can a man really experience penetration?" jokes and playfulness and kept hovering around the edge of many answers.

2) people worrying that admitting to not having a core/innate gender or being genderqueer is somehow stepping on "real" trans people's toes.

There is actually a reason that I brought back up the male penetration thing again: having thought through it thoroughly, I still maintain, it *is* much easier for a male body to experience sexual penetration with his own organs than it is for a female body to experience sexual insertion with her own organs. HOWEVER. A man experiencing penetration, no matter how nice the prostate gland might be, still can not know what it is like to actually be a woman or have sex as a woman. This is actually important, not because phalluses or yoni are ~magical~ or not, but because it's getting at the impossibility of defining what it means to be a man/woman even after we have defined "Gender" for this exercise as, precisely, "What It MEANS to be a man/woman." (Also, the double nature of that "means" - what it means to the self (innate gender) and what it means to those around (performative gender). i.e. how you can not have a personal sense of gender, but still know damn well that the world treats you as if you are a specific one)

And there's 2 parts to this:

a) the sense that being genderqueer or non-gendered, or even indeed seeing gender as one big toybox in which to indulge your fabulous, pandrogynous genderqueer self is actually offensive to "real" trans people - possibly because one is locating a sense of "play" in the locus where other people experiences oppression and danger.

b) the idea that a privileged person (a cis-het man or at least someone who routinely passes for one) can dress up in the attributes of a more marginalised person (a woman) walk around in that identity for a bit, and come out of it being able to speak of it as "oh, I know what it's like to be/perform as a woman! You can do it any time you like!" is pretty fucking offensive, and it's probably not really much of a stretch to say that this feels like some kind of appropriation, even if it's not quite the "gendered equivalent of blackface." (not my phrase - TERF phrase, and deliberately provocative.)

But in both of these cases, it's not the activity itself that is the problem - it is more likely the idea that the person doing this can take the role off at the end and engage in some magical-penis-based equivalent of "if you called your dad, he could stop it all." This is especially salient in the latter case, because although you might get a *clue* as to what it's like to live as a woman by enduring one evening of catcalls and tottering on uncomfortable heels, at the end of the day, you get to take it off. You can *never* know what it's like to live as a woman in a sexist world unless you've done it day in, day out without a break for years.

The former case is more puzzling. In my own experience, I feel like I've *earned* the right to perform or even "play" as whatever the goddamned hell I like, because I endured growing up as a gender-non-conforming lesbian teen in small-town America. But I'm also aware of the fact that I was able to pass (more or less) as a Cis-Het Woman for over a decade... though whether that counts as "taking off my queer identity" is debatable, because the ultimate end of that experience was not becoming a Cis-Het Woman, it was going quietly (or loudly as the case may be) "crazy" with the dysphoria of it all. But still, when I see arguments between Cis Woman and Trans Women, I don't feel like I'm on either team - or maybe I've got a horse in both races. But living in a grey area is crazy-making - you get it in the neck from both sides c.f. bisexuals and the "you're really gay but want straight privilege" vs "you're really straight co-opting queer identities for attention" double jeopardy. I don't pretend to be anyone's gender police, ever, but I can understand the discomfort in the fear that you are co-opting someone else's identity or oppression. All I can say is, I think that being without-gender or both-gender can be on the same spectrum as trans without it being an insult to trans. If that makes sense, and I think it does, in terms of re-reading how other people have already addressed some of these issues.

I've been typing for an hour and I doubt anyone is reading at this point, but it feels quite good to say all this anyway, and I should probably drop it now.

Thank you again for the thread. Have a good Friday.

(And I repeat: it's not *doing* it that's offensive. I actually think it's pretty educational for men to experience the mechanics of wearing high heels and skirts, and how they physically affect and impede your movement. It is drawing the *conclusion* from that experience, that after one night, after which you get to take it off, that you know what it's like to be/perform as a woman that is really kinda offensive.)

I initially gave a very terse answer that I'd like to expand upon:

I grew up in a household dominated numerically by men. I had two older brothers and, even though they didn't live near us, my parents' siblings are overwhelmingly male (my mom has three brothers, my dad has a full brother, a half-sister and three half-brothers). My dad is pretty much a perfect blend of jock and nerd; he was a big choir geek who was deeply into music of all kinds (his favorites being James Brown, Steely Dan, Mahler and Shostakovitch) and ended up with a PhD in chemistry who also ran on a 4x100 meter relay team in college that still holds their school record. My oldest brother went into the Air Force and was a competitive bodybuilder before his untimely passing. My middle brother was a competitive downhill skier with low-level endorsements before he decided to go into law and hip-hop. All through my life, I had very strong examples of different expressions of manhood, most of which were centered around confidence, competition, and discovering where your talents lie and striving to excel in those areas. As a result, while there was clearly some level of posturing/fronting in terms of siblings establishing a pecking order, I never really saw an example in my household of manhood expressed in terms of gross machismo. There were some clear instances of my mom being on an island alone in a sea of men, but the flip side of that was that she also asserted herself in many ways as "The One In Charge" and provided such a clear example of an individual who was easily able to stand toe to toe with my father that I feel like it didn't require much prodding or retraining for me to view men and women being equals as abstract concepts.

Essentially, I grew up in a masculine household run primarily by a woman, and that imprinted upon me a less macho brand masculinity than what I see in mainstream American society. I've never been comfortable with locker room talk beyond "so and so is beautiful" and think getting into details is gross (unless said details are in service of a joke that undermines locker room talk and highlights its silliness; one weird side effect of being the youngest in the family and going through a tragedy during high school is that my first instinct when encountering something is to find a way to make a joke out of it so I can take away its power, since I could never overpower anyone in my family physically). There are still a lot of issues surrounding control which I believe are heavily driven by society but the way I manifest them strikes me as different. (Or maybe I just want to be a special snowflake, I don't know.)

All of that is a roundabout way of saying that as a child, I had many examples of different facets of masculinity presented to me via my dad and my oldest brothers and I got to see which ones seemed to "work" and which ones didn't, and synthesizing those examples combined with the events I lived through molded me into the person I am today, and I have never felt uncertain or conflicted about my gender identity as a result.

BB, that post is really good. Agree with most stuff in it but not all, but honestly I've found it too hard to respond to this thread, at least partially b/c my reactions to my genderedness or non-genderedness are far too inextricably tied up with a generalised hatred of self, whether that be physicality, presentation or mind. Just want to say that this is a good and interesting thread, really.

Booming post, Dan. BOOMING! Thank you.

Emil.y I totally get where you are coming from, on this issue; I've had a similar problem for a long time. But for me, personally, issues of hating my body/hating my self have been both tied up with and not tied up with issues of hating my gender(s)/lack of gender and hating my sexuality, in ways that are v v difficult to untangle.

But, for me, part of the process of starting to not-hate myself quite so much has been taking that scary, weird stuff out of the box and facing and examining it.

It's *fine* if this thread is not a place you feel comfortable doing that. But I just wanted to say, I get it. Also, thank you. :)

quick reply b/c in rush but 1) BB of course i am readin, this is v interesting stuff from all, type all you want!

2) alternate modes of masculinity: despite not conforming to a great deal of masculine norms i've never felt the need for an "alternate mode" as such, and indeed a lot of these alternate modes seem a lot more alien to me than conventional masculinity. it's partly why i don't use the label "queer" for myself - i don't feel queer, my homosexuality feels normal, i don't feel like androgyny or dandification are for me. i feel awkward even in basic fancy dress ffs. maybe that right there is what identifying as male means!

(probz gonna be offline all weekend but i look fwd to catching up afterwards...)

engage in some magical-penis-based equivalent of "if you called your dad, he could stop it all.

and now I am going to my office christmas party

I've been keeping mental tabs on mentions of queerness but haven't done any of the heavy theory reading (and I'm not sure I could hack it tbh) but I listened to an interesting podcast some time ago by and about fat women, and there was an interesting bit about how fatness queers sexuality. That fat ppl, like old people and the non-able bodied and so on, are denied a visible presence for expressing their sexuality, and to do it anyway challenges...whatever we're calling the status quo around this issue. This interests me.

thought this was an interesting article
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/02/090302fa_fact_levy

(On american lesbian separatists in the 1970s)

One of the biggest regrets I have about losing my oldest brother so early is that he was in many ways the "jockiest" person in the family and I would love to have his perspective on masculinity/manliness/male gender; I was just at a point where I could begin to have serious discussions about stuff like this with him when he died.

I dated a former lesbian separatist for a short while a couple of summers ago, and wow, the stories she told were kind of amazing. (Greenham Common/abseiling into parliamentary debates amazing) But then again, I always had this vision of ~lesbian separatist paradise~ and of course it never works out like that.

Yeah, that doubly sucks, Dan. That dynamic of "having different perspectives on gender within the same family of siblings" thing could be really interesting because you come from the same environment but have developed such different ways and comparing and contrasting ways of handling it. (I never got to have that, because my sibling is of a different sex, but yeah.)

(it should be noted that my desire for his perspective on this issue stems directly from the context of just wishing I could see his 50-year-old face; I figure people would implicitly understand that but then again you never know if people will get your subtext and wow it must be the holiday season because I am totally on the maudlin train)

My brother ended up cutting himself off from the family entirely several years ago. I have pretty volatile feelings about that & my relationship with him & I'm still not sure what I'll do when/if I see him again. We fought a lot growing up, but I definitely emulated him a lot when I was very very young and I constantly measured my achievements against his, especially academically. I'd be scared to talk to him about something as serious as gender identity, I think.

I think I keep wonder how much do you indentify with your sex/gender/orientation? Your 'identity'? I'm a straight white American dude from fairly middling circumstances, raised to be assertive yet mindful that I have many privileges denied to ppl all over the globe. Still, I'm very ambivalent about straught, white guys; 'my people'. They often don't like me and I often don't respect them. I hang out around a lot of ppl of various identites, but I have basically one close straight, white friend. It's not that I have a problem with my own orientations and background (I have very little to do with them) but the brand is a little offputting and the would-be clubbishness is frankly gross.

I'm very cautious in how I deal with different groups and even family because certain ways of thought or attitude can be easy to sink into or infectious when it comes to notions about others different from yourself

*bump for weekend ppl to vote*

I don't think i feel innately male - but i dont feel otherwise either. I guess this means I feel...'aligned', that i dont think about it whereas i would otherwise

On the other hand in discussions with my girlfriend re:starting a family, I wonder if my thoughts about it code as male. Blind panic about the whole idea, gradually lessening, partly due to her faith in me

Then i look at my parents and apparently it was my mother who didn't like children and my dad who first wanted them, i dont know

I was raised in an all female household, no siblings, just me, my mother, my aunt, my grandmother. This is probably really common now but at the time (1970's) in the small village we lived in it was definitely unusual. All my friends had dads, or in one case a step-dad, that lived with them. At no stage during my childhood did my mother have a boyfriend, that I was aware of anyway, certainly not one who spent any time at our house. As such I'm not really sure how I 'learned' maleness and was definitely a bit leery of things that stereotypically coded to the v masculine side of maleness, tree climbing, doing jumps on bmx's, fighting etc. On the other hand I was a p big kid, 6ft by the time I was 13 yrs old and was mad about football so didn't really get given any shit about my 'softness' or anything. I think the unease I felt about my place among the other boys was less to do with the no father thing and more to do with the only mixed race kid in the entire neighbourhood thing.

I obviously didn't mean to imply that girls can't like climbing trees, fighting etc

I think the unease I felt about my place among the other boys was less to do with the no father thing and more to do with the only mixed race kid in the entire neighbourhood thing.

thinking about it i actually think this is where my wariness of visibly alternate modes of masculinity stems from - i already stood out in terms of looks so i'm pretty sure i didn't want to stand out any more

Those are really, really interesting points, both of you! On many levels!

But I feel this can work both ways. From reading/speaking to women of colour about constructions of "femininity" etc. they've often expressed the idea that ideas of "Femininity" and more specifically "Beauty" - and these things are conflated again and again and again in our culture - have been so constructed with an ideal of White Femininity and White Beauty, that to be a woman of colour means never being able to attain those standards to start with, so either having to be continually oppressed by them, or create one's own alternate version of both Beauty and Femininity.

Personally, for me, I am not mixed race, but I am a Third Culture Kid who is the child of Third Culture Kids - a third generation third culture kid? I do wonder how much this affects my suspicion or / inability to conform to "Femininity" when White American Femininity is different from Upper-Middle-Class-British Femininity is different from both British and Dutch South African Femininities (is different from British-Colonial/Chinese Femininity in Singapore) so with all these competing, different views of What Femininity Is in mine own home what other conclusion can I draw, except the whole thing is culturally constructed bullshit which never appears to have anything to do with me?

Whoa, this is kind of a lightbulb moment for me, because I do wonder if not having an internal gender - for me - is linked to not having a cohesive cultural view of "Femininity" or "Masculinity" to start with because I never had a consistent culture growing up. I never thought to link those things, so thanks for that!

On phone so quicl - that makes a ton of sense

White masculinity is a less pervasive ideal than white femininity but it exists &was def something I was conscious of growing up - complicated by sexual desire for white men (I didn't grow up in a racially diverse area)

Also being mixed race you def know the feeling of beong neither one nor the other to begin with - which in my case meant not seeing npm-conformity gender wise as an issue

Yeah, I could see it either way. "I'm already neither one nor the other, so I'm not gonna look at any other axes that are gonna give me any more problems! vs I'm neither one nor the other so question everything coz might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb!"

But I think it might be something more inherent in the concept of masculinity itself? Like... I've been learning *so much* about Feminism, about Womanhood, about "Femininity" from the recent/ongoing Feminist Intersectionalism Wars, that I wish there were a similar way to apply that notion to Masculinity. Because it seems like the more marginalised a man is along other axes of race, class, sexuality, the narrower the available options of Acceptable Masculinity are. (See this all the time with Working Class Masculinity in Britain vs Upper/Middle Class Masculinity.)

Code-switching to an American conception of race and masculinity (and I'm on doubly unfamiliar ground here, so I apologise in advance for any massive gaffes I make) - so much of the conception of American Masculinity is based around ideas of physical prowess/dominance; aggressive sexuality; business acumen/financial independence. (British Masculinity so often added this nebulous aspect of "Being A Gentleman" to keep the hoi polloi out and police Working-Class masculinity more aggressively.) But the American "frontier ideals" of masculinity were and more steadily are becoming available to Black Men. (With the accompanying terror/fetishisation among White Americans that Black Men might actually perform that ideal of Masculinity better than them.) That vision of White Masculinity as "strong, sexual, wily" is not quite so sealed off to Black Men, as White Femininity/Beauty is to Black Women? (I am fully aware that I might be talking out my ass here!) So there grows this almost theatrical hyper-exaggerated hyper-masculine, hyper-sexual, hyper-capitalist vision of Black Masculinity, at least in the White American imagination, and in popular culture. But that is in and of itself both a cartoon and a trap of its own, so I probably went down a dead end with that, except not, because I'll come back to this cartoon in a bit.

It's probably more like... in any culture where male is viewed as default, it's less generating of hassle not to question the default mode, if you experience othering along some other line, which is what both you guys have said.

But... I've been thinking a lot, recently, about a conversation I had a long time ago with Nabisco, that of all the arguments I've ever had on ILX, is the one I would most like to replay. Because we were talking about intersectionality or whatever, and I said I was very interested in hearing and learning from women of colour, but black! men! had nothing! to teach me! because: men and masculinity, UGH. (Gender was the locus of so much bullying and awfulness at that point in my life.) And he didn't even get mad at me or tell me I was full of shit, he just got very sad, and said to me, something like "that makes me so sad. I hope you learn to change your mind." And this is the most belated OTM ever, to say, 5 years down the line: but yeah, Nabisco OTM.

Enough talking out my ass now! Complicated concepts are complicated to articulate. Man, if adding race to the already simmering gender-pot doesn't result in clusterfuck, I think I may have re-registered for bizarro-ILX haha eep.

I think that's a pretty good post!

That vision of White Masculinity as "strong, sexual, wily" is not quite so sealed off to Black Men, as White Femininity/Beauty is to Black Women?

To address just one aspect, maybe this is partly because that sort of "frontier" masculinity is to a large extent about abilities, specif physical ones? So if one is able-bodied, that's in some ways a reachable standard for men of color (although there are plenty of other nuances of exclusion due to race). Whereas femininity/female value in patriarchy is determined by adherence to a beauty standard, and that beauty standard is tailored to white Western European traits that are just not achievable/relevant for WoC.

Male parts, XY, all that, just no real sense of being either gender in particular. Huge parts of the socially constructed/expected male experience really feel wrong and weird and gross, but I'm not really comfortable with anything else so *shrug*

I see this as related to a similar phenomenon where, as you age, you understand that your body is getting older and you start to feel the effects of age in terms of loss of physical vigor, but your mental identity veers inconsistently between 'old' or 'young' or mostly some indeterminate age that doesn't really matter.

One of the things that strikes me on this thread again and again, is that, as my friend theorised, there are loads of people who "just never really thought about" - however this is the experience of Cis ppl. People who are agender or genderqueer or "have no real sense of gender" are again and again the people stating that they have thought about it and interrogated and examined it *loads* and still haven't reached a conclusion/reached a conclusion of being neither or and/both. So I do feel more confident about asserting that.

We don't think about it largely because there's no "there" there. i think being made to think about it would be a maddening unsolvable rubik's koan.

Well, the one thing I would hope is that every Cis-Het dude here would go back and read this thread again, and actually think about what it *means* to have that sense (that privilege!) to have no "there" there.

(Then maybe go back and think what it would be like to have a maddening unsolvable rubik's koan rubbed in your face every day 24-7? Because for many people this is our lived experience.)

Great thread, best conversation I've seen on ILX in quite some time. Cheers, all.

I was assigned male at birth and have a strong sense of "innate" masculine gender. My earliest memory of gender policing doesn't involve much violence or threat. During breaktime in first grade, I was playing "lion family" some kids in my class, a game I'd organized. I had decided to be the "mom lion" and was taking care of the baby lions (both boys & girls). This included grooming: licking their hair, you know, like cats do. Unsurprisingly, this freaked the teacher out pretty severely, and she made me stop, explaining that it wasn't appropriate for me to "mother" the other children in this fashion. Especially not the boys. I was bummed. Looking back, I wonder why I'd wanted to be the mom. Perhaps because my father was distant and my mother the functional head of the family? Or because kids like to experiment with stuff, or I'm just a caretaker at heart, I dunno. Thing is, even in that moment of youthful gender-play, I never felt that I was anything but male. I was pretending, having fun, seeing what would happen.

Unlike many in this thread, I'm a cisperson who's spent a LOT of time thinking about gender and masculinity and how they relate to me. I can't separate my (straight) sexuality from either my birth-granted physical gender or from my deep sense of <<being male>>. To take it a step further, my maleness seems an inextricable part of my core identity, even those aspects of identity that don't directly relate to gender and sexuality. No matter what I do, I am always, internally, <<a man doing that thing>>. This remains true even though I don't conform terribly well to my culture's gendered expectations and am at best ambivalent about those constructs. Though I can't know for sure, I suspect that my profound sense of gendered-ness is in some part truly innate, associated with the reproductive realities of which my physical gender is merely a symptomatic shadow. Since biological gender only exists in order to facilitate sexual reproduction, it seems reasonable to suppose that some trace of biology might linger in my psychology (a false binary to begin with) -- as filtered, of course, through acculturation and other forms of experience. But who knows, really?

Anyway, my roundabout point is that it seems to me that I fundamentally and emphatically cannot be anything but male. I could no more experience a "real" sense of femaleness simply be deciding to <<be female>> than I could convince myself I was in no danger while burning to death. Belief is, it seems to me, very much like identity, is perhaps a component of identity. Identity and belief arise almost magically within in me, like emotions, sensations and the physical imperatives that guide my body. I'm not saying that I can't shape or play with such things; I can, but I'm never 100% in control (nor do I wish to be). These things have their way with me at least as much as I have mine with them.

"I fundamentally and emphatically cannot be anything but male"
Not to make you look into the rubik's void, but given an activity that isn't particularly gendered, how does the experience get tinged as male for you?

I'm interested in some of the epistemological questions here. We're talking as though a Cartesian introspective stance on gender is privileged: I'm the one who gets to decide what gender identity I am, and nobody else is in a position to contradict me. I wonder if there are limits to this. For instance, I don't feel strong masculine identification, despite being assigned male at birth. At the same, I enjoy all kinds of male privilege by virtue of everyone's assumption that I'm male, which can't possibly not influence how I treat other people. Others might see all kinds of masculine hallmarks in my behaviour that I'm just not conscious of. In some cases, that could be their problem, not mine, but not always. What if I'm just constantly mansplaining without realizing it, or realizing how it's a function of masculine assumptions and expectations? Then it's totally open to someone to say, pejoratively, that I'm just a guy, and that might very well trump my own attitudes about myself. They might be in a much better position than me to say how I'm inhabiting gender.

Not to make you look into the rubik's void, but given an activity that isn't particularly gendered, how does the experience get tinged as male for you?

Self-awareness. To be self-aware is to be aware of myself as male. This is true in an all-pervasive background sense even when I'm not consciously focused on it. Or so it seems to me.

I'm interested in some of the epistemological questions here. We're talking as though a Cartesian introspective stance on gender is privileged: I'm the one who gets to decide what gender identity I am, and nobody else is in a position to contradict me. I wonder if there are limits to this.

That's an interesting point - the way we talk about gender now, particularly because of the influence of trans people's experiences and their theoretical and practical writing, does privilege the introspective stance. And there's very good reasons for that, because "misgendering" someone can run the gamut from plain rudeness to being used to excuse violence. But at the same time how we are gendered by others isn't purely an alien imposition (for one thing, it can be source of pleasure to be "correctly" gendered, for people who are trans or cis). Our behaviour and our selves adapt to the social constructs that people use to collectively understand the world. We play up the gendered aspects of our behaviour, often unconsciously, in reaction to the way people interact with the gender they perceive in us. Maybe in reaction to someone who acts as though we're insufficiently inhabiting our gender, or in reaction to someone who over-genders us, or to encourage someone who seems to be rewarding us for a gendered behaviour of one kind or another.

I suppose a possible response to your point - beyond the pragmatic "if we let others' understanding of a person's gender be the determining factor we're leaving the field open for the harm that misgendering can do to people" - is that we're kind of dealing with two definitions of gender here. There's gender as an activity (or series of activities: "doing gender"); and gender as your relationship to the act of doing gender. If this thread is about whether people have a core gender identity, it's really only dealing with the second definition: does your relationship to the act of doing gender take the form of recognising one gender as particularly your own, or has the process of "doing gender" left you feeling that no gender is innate to you?

People's assumptions about our gender make the act of "doing gender" either easier or harder. Often in ways we don't recognise! We're still left with a sense of whether doing gender is comfortable or not comfortable, and how it works for us and how it chafes. We can talk about our personal relationship to doing gender even when we don't really know to what extent that relationship has been affected by other people's perceptions and their treatment of us.

reading this over i have no idea if it's a useful response but w/e it's late and the wine has worn off.

booming post

as my friend theorised, there are loads of people who "just never really thought about"

Somehow this statement codes for me as "loads of people who have never thought about it in the framework I would prefer them to think about it, which more or less resembles my own framework, which is obviously the correct one, so that whatever thinking they have done about lacks substance and it is as nothing to me".

The "framework" is the spectrum of human sexuality, though

It seems to me that the framework cited for this thread was specifically separated from sexuality through the use of the term "innate gender identity". It is fairly clear to me that a gender identity cannot track directly to a spectrum as astonishingly wide and varied as that of human sexuality, because, for example, what gender is a foot fetishist as opposed to a rubber fetishist? The idea of genders cannot be stretched that far, imo.

When we speak of such forms within "the spectrum of sexuality", we speak of sexuality, not gender. And it is altogether unclear what the sources of such sexual identities as foot fetishes might be, but it seems unlikely that a foot fetish is "innate" rather than an acquisition, due to external influences.

If "gender identity" and "sexual identiity" are the same thing, then we don't need the term "gender identity".

The "if" in your last sentence seems like a big jump that kind of elides a basic distinction between biological sex and cultural gender and sexual orientation.

bringing up fetishes doesn't really matter with respect to the core claims that drive this thread, which have to do with one's inner sense of what one's gender "really is" (up to and including some inner sense that one doesn't feel any particular way in the first place). But just because sexuality is diverse and various, why would that demonstrate that "we" don't need gender identity in the first place? Who is this "we"? clearly, a sizable and growing trans community does find this way of thinking and talking useful in terms of identifying feelings, issues, and life changes that don't map onto sexual orientation per se.

some trans men date women, and think of themselves as heterosexuals- others regard it as a lesbian relationship, and others just regard it as its own thing entirely.

OK, I need to not read this thread before my first cup of tea because I didn't catch JMM's use of privilege as a verb and then a noun at first, which made that post seem like it went some weird places, but I think C#m has answered that well.

But then the thread has gone to some weird places. I think that someone is definitely leaping to conclusions about my friend's stated position. I vastly simplified a long and nuanced conversation, but I believe I stated it quite clearly, that there was no malicious imposition of a framework (and certainly not the framework that has been implied) merely the elementary error of: "In the absence of contradicting data, I have assumed that most people are like me."

I deliberately left sexuality out of the framework, because that is not the question that I am asking. Bio-sex and both kinds of gender (innate and performative) are tangentially related to sexuality, but the correlation is *not* causative.

I think where this tangle happens is that the definitions of:
-Homosexuality means being attracted to people with a sex/gender that is roughly like or the same as yours
-Heterosexuality means being attracted to people with a sex/gender that is roughly different from yours
-Bisexuality means being attracted both to people who are like you and people who are not like you*
...assumes a working understanding of what sex/gender the self is, to form ideas of what might be "the same as" or "different to"!

(*And this is why people try to come up with new names like "pansexual" and and "humansexual" and "non-binary sexuality" to try to eliminate the impossible binary.)

EXCEPT!!!! This is not actually the way that sexuality works in the wild, as it were. It is a visceral, mostly subconscious process whereby one sees or meets or gets to know a potential partner and the libido goes "WANT!" (Or the libido can just go "WANT!" because of some innate horniness, and the subject looks for an appropriate focus for it; that happens, too. But the "is this an appropriate focus?" thing is also quick and visceral and "Would I, Y/N?" rather than this complex decision process rendered above as "similar to me? not similar to me?")

So it's the process of putting a name or a label or an identity to what is, essentially, a quite visceral and intuitive reaction that reduces it to some kind of pattern-spotting exercise. It might be that many people do depict their sexuality as being attracted to "Men" or "Women" or "Both" or "Androgynous beings" rather than the more formal similar/not similar, and these homo/hetero definitions are a clumsy attempt to show that humans come in (at least) two flavours of sex/gender to do the fancying, rather than a hard and fast rule about how gender affects sexuality? I don't know! I'm thinking this through here. But there are so many potential gender presentations in even a hard F/M dichotomy that casting it as Male-fancying vs Female-fancying bifurcates so quickly into CisHetDude/CisHetLady/Dandy/Tomboy/Butch/Femme/Twink/Bear/Androgene/Neutrois-fancying *mess* and oh god why did I go down this road, abort, abort.

The binary fucks us up again and again, because humans are forever trying to pattern-spot things into binaries: Female/Male, Feminine/Masculine, Homo/Hetero, Trans/Cis, "Ppl w an innate gender"/"Ppl w/o an innate gender" etc when the problem is, that the creation of each binary creates a new group of people outside that binary and our human response is to... just create another binary, rather than admit that being human is inherently not a binary proposition?

Why did I even start answering this, it's so off topic. Why. But I've wasted half an hour of my life typing it so I'm going to hit submit.

Coming back to what TTWS said, thinking about "Trans man in relationship with woman" - there are equally valid arguments to call that a heterosexual relationship, to call it a LGBT relationship (because hey lookit that T on the end there) or to call it Something Else Entirely because being both-and-yet-neither is not the same state as being one or the other.

For me, personally, Trans Feminism has been one of the most mind-blowing *gifts* and most interesting set of ideas I've seen in forever. Because this way of thinking really does force one to blow apart all of those old "Biology Is Destiny" crappy arguments about women that feminism has been trying to dismantled for years. It completely challenges the assumptions of "What Makes Someone A Woman And Why" on every level.

A: What makes someone a woman?
B: Well, it's obvious. Womanhood begins at menarche, so it's about y'know, the onset of menstruation and bleeding and the ability to bear a child.
A: So what about women past menopause? I know some people think women stop being *people* past A Certain Age, but really? They stop being women?
B: No, no, that's silly, it's just about having a vagina, regardless of whether it's in use or not.
A: So what about women who have had their vaginas removed, because of surgery? Or had congenital issues with them? Are they not women?
B: No, they're women, too. OK, it's not about the vagina, it's about chromosomes and being XX.
A: What about XXY women and women who were born XY but have extreme androgen insensitivity, so they grow up appearing female. Are they not women?
B: Uh noooo, it's about hormones and stuff. It's definitely hormones.
A: Menstruating cis women experience a cycle where they have plummeting oestrogen and increased androgen for 4 days a month. Do they become men for 4 days a month? Really?
B: No! That's absurd! It's, uuuhhh... brain structure, yeah that's it. Women tend to have a bigger corpus callosum or whatever that thing that connects the hemispheres is called!
A: Well, the brain is hella pliable. Lookit London taxi drivers' brains! And in the few ways that men's and women's brains really do tend to structurally vary, trans women often have more female-like brains. Is that because they're biologically women, or because acting-like-a-woman increases the "woman-like" brain structures, the same way that "acting-like-a-cab-driver" physically increases the bits of the brain that store spacial and directional knowledge?
B: Argh! I dunno. But look, that's it. It's *acting* like a female, it's being-treated-like-a-female, it's "Performing A Role Called Female" that makes someone a woman. That's exactly it.
A: I dunno; people misgendering me and treating-me-like-not-a-woman doesn't make me feel any less like a woman, it just makes me feel like shit.
B: I give up! What makes someone a woman, then?
A: There is nothing left here but the Cartesian assertion: I think I am a woman; therefore I am a woman.

And I just really really feel like all this anguished hand-waving about the "rubik void" and "there's no 'there' there" comes from this deeply held and continually belief that "Male Is Not A Gender" because male has been the "default gender" for so long. And if men had the guts (hard not to say "the balls" here but it's the one place it might be appropriate) to have the same dialogue as above about "Male" and "Manhood" you would stop clutching your heads and going "ooh, this stuff is ~so hard~" and come down to either "Male is acting-as-a-man and being-treated-as-a-man" or Cartesian Assertion (or both). Or maybe you need to start with the Cartesian Assertion of "I think I am a man; therefore I am a man" that many of you are making, and work your way backwards through the arguments. I wish someone would have these dialogues with you, or you would try to have these dialogues yourselves.

There's so much more I could say and So! Many! Thoughts! but I need to stop talking about this now.

Males arent even really humans when you get right down to it huh

Wow.

Just... wow.

Darragh, I'm going to say this once and one time only: Please. Stop. Projecting. YOUR. Insecurities. Onto. Me.

It is completely possible to say: 'The concept of "Male" been treated for several thousands of years as if equivalent to "Default Gender" and this really is not the case, and this idea needs interrogating and dismantling' without saying anything even approaching "males aren't even really humans."

If you cannot tell the difference between the former and the latter, I do not know how to help you. Good day to you sir.

BB - with

"...if men had the guts (hard not to say "the balls" here but it's the one place it might be appropriate) to have the same dialogue as above about "Male" and "Manhood" you would stop clutching your heads and going "ooh, this stuff is ~so hard~" and come down to either "Male is acting-as-a-man and being-treated-as-a-man" or Cartesian Assertion (or both)....",

you're going beyond your own thread guidance: This is not about "what you think most people are like" so please keep this to your own personal experience

Actually, if you'd read all of my posts as a narrative, you'd find that it *is* within my personal experience.

My personal experience, as I've stated before, was of trying to live as a trans man, (even before I had a *word* for what "trans man" was) and not being able to, because Masculinity was like an actual straitjacket where Femininity had been like an uncomfortable pencil skirt and impossibly high heels.

I'm living in this weird hinterland, maybe because I don't have an "innate gender" and maybe because I feel distinctly not-a-Feminine-gendered-person, yet society's current definitions of Masculinity don't let me in, either. I'm looking for answers, too. I feel not-female and not-male, but also female-AND-male in various capacities.

I want other men to engage in this conversation, because I can't have this conversation of "how do we open up manhood" all by myself!

idk i don't feel like the phenomenon of people who identify as male saying that their sense of maleness is profoundly unknowable to them should be entirely chalked up to male-as-default-gender?

or, rather, if we're going to go down that route, then: if the experience of living in a world of male-as-default-gender is so determining then it is the experience of having a gender for some people! Surely it is as real an experience of inhabiting gender as a protracted and long-negotiated self-examination would be.

You know, some men have made this Cartesian "I feel like a man; therefore I am a man" which, really, is fine, I think on one level, is really the *only* criteria which is unassailable.

But it feels like there are other men who have this stance of "I'm male, I've never had to think about that, and not only do I refuse to think about that, but I am going to challenge men who think they can and do think about it!" which comes across as blinkered and oppressive as White Americans who blithely insist "But I don't haaaave ~an ethicity~!!!"

It's possible that the latter is a defensive projection (because I've been told my whole life that the way I am is broken and wrong) but doI think if that experience stops men from talking about the *performative* aspects of masculinity, which it seems to do, than we have a problem.

Maybe it's time for me to bow out of this thread entirely because once you get ppl who can read 50,000+ words of gender, masculinity, queer theory, trans feminism etc and STILL come back ad-hominem-ing you with the old "you hate men, don't you?" chestnut, I get too tired and eye-rolly and defensive to carry on. (Which I know is the exact point of why people do that in the first place.) That's their narrative; not mine.

But I can't talk any more right now, because honestly, I have to try to get to the back end of Shoreditch when the overground isn't running south of the river.

There's gender as an activity (or series of activities: "doing gender"); and gender as your relationship to the act of doing gender. If this thread is about whether people have a core gender identity, it's really only dealing with the second definition: does your relationship to the act of doing gender take the form of recognising one gender as particularly your own, or has the process of "doing gender" left you feeling that no gender is innate to you?

People's assumptions about our gender make the act of "doing gender" either easier or harder. Often in ways we don't recognise! We're still left with a sense of whether doing gender is comfortable or not comfortable, and how it works for us and how it chafes. We can talk about our personal relationship to doing gender even when we don't really know to what extent that relationship has been affected by other people's perceptions and their treatment of us.

― if you're happy and you know it, it's false consciousness (c sharp major), Saturday, December 14, 2013 6:17 PM (Yesterday)

this is an interesting point, but we don't have to look at the idea of "innate gender" through the lens of performative gender, do we? one might also feel innately male, female or [open-ended anything] without feeling any corresponding need to perform as such. we at least feel varying degrees of the need to perform. i realized when i was quite young that i didn't enjoy or care to participate in many of my culture's expectations of "the masculine", but that only affirmed my sense of the innateness of my gender. i was male whether or not i acted male, seemed male to others, or even felt particularly male (in the performative sense).

"it's complicated." there are many types of gender at play in this discussion, and it's hard to tease them apart. the OP makes room for gender as biology and gender as an (ostensibly) innate sense of being, but there's also gender in relation to sexual orientation, gender as the sense of being granted by performance and/or acceptance, gender as a field of cultural constructs, and so on. this is to say that gender can be not only fluid, but multivalent.

It might be that many people do depict their sexuality as being attracted to "Men" or "Women" or "Both" or "Androgynous beings" rather than the more formal similar/not similar, and these homo/hetero definitions are a clumsy attempt to show that humans come in (at least) two flavours of sex/gender to do the fancying, rather than a hard and fast rule about how gender affects sexuality? I don't know! I'm thinking this through here.

― Branwell Bell, Sunday, December 15, 2013 2:29 AM (4 hours ago)

I am such a person. In terms of how it feels, I am not attracted to "the opposite sex". I am attracted to women. Nor can I separate this from my sense of gendered-ness. For me, to exist is to be male is to be sexually attracted to women. Intellectually, I can draw a line between gender and sexual orientation, but experientially, they are facets of a single, unitary and inseparable being-me-ness. If I were to fuck a man (and while the idea doesn't excite me, it doesn't horrify me, either), I would still feel like - and BE - a straight man fucking another man. If I were to be penetrated by a man, I might indulge the sense that I "felt like a woman", but I would still be a straight man imagining what it might feel like to be fucked as a woman.

...this way of thinking really does force one to blow apart all of those old "Biology Is Destiny" crappy arguments about women that feminism has been trying to dismantled for years. It completely challenges the assumptions of "What Makes Someone A Woman And Why" on every level.

A: What makes someone a woman?
B: [etc...]
A: There is nothing left here but the Cartesian assertion: I think I am a woman; therefore I am a woman.

...if men had the guts (hard not to say "the balls" here but it's the one place it might be appropriate) to have the same dialogue as above about "Male" and "Manhood" you would stop clutching your heads and going "ooh, this stuff is ~so hard~" and come down to either "Male is acting-as-a-man and being-treated-as-a-man" or Cartesian Assertion (or both). Or maybe you need to start with the Cartesian Assertion of "I think I am a man; therefore I am a man" that many of you are making, and work your way backwards through the arguments. I wish someone would have these dialogues with you, or you would try to have these dialogues yourselves.

― Branwell Bell, Sunday, December 15, 2013 4:30 AM (2 hours ago)

For what it's worth, I'm a man who not infrequently has these sorts of dialogues with me male (and female) friends. Or at least I did, when I was younger and still in pursuit of The Answers. My personal take is that no single definition has to account for all possibilities, and no definition is invalidated simply because it can't. Gender is complex, and that's almost the answer in itself. It really IS biology. And it really is performance. And a sense and/or assertion of self. It's all of these things working in concert, the various levels of gender neither negating nor trumping one another even when they seem to disagree, but rather informing a unique personal whole. There's no universal answer; just a sea of individual ones.

I just really really feel like all this anguished hand-waving about the "rubik void" and "there's no 'there' there" comes from this deeply held and continually belief that "Male Is Not A Gender" because male has been the "default gender" for so long.

Ah! Now there is a statement I can uderstand, in that it clarifies a position that has not yet been made evident in what I've read of your previous statements. It is especially helpful in that it allows me to address what has become apparent in light of this statement.

My own reading of "there's no 'there' there" is quite different. You seem to be operating on the assumption that gender is an indispensible framework for self-understanding and everything we or others say or do cannot be correcty understood without reference to gender. The difficulty I find in this assumption (whether it is one you advance or not) would be that it precludes any meaning to the category of "human" until "human" has been modified by a gender.

If, otoh, you do accept that "human" has a valid meaning apart from gender, then there must be a universe of personal thoughts and actions that can be well understood without reference to gender at all. That would be the place I would identify where there is "no there" and gender, even if applied, would not further illuminate. If you accept this as so, then there is no requirement that "human" must automatically have a "default gender".

Rightly or wrongly, it is my experience that the vast bulk of my thoughts and actions are merely "human" and essentially genderless, in that I can imagine any human whatsoever having similar thoughts and performing similar actions. Further, if a woman were to think or act exactly as I have, I imagine it would not call her "innate gender identity" into question, because she has not been thinking or acting as men do, but merely as humans sometimes do.

I'm with this but don't even particularly qualify a lot of experience as distinctly human either, so this idea of a self-awareness that has maleness built into it at every level seems a bit odd to me, unless you're defining self-awareness as being only valid at a specific level of gestalt.

If you accept this as so, then there is no requirement that "human" must automatically have a "default gender".

Rightly or wrongly, it is my experience that the vast bulk of my thoughts and actions are merely "human" and essentially genderless, in that I can imagine any human whatsoever having similar thoughts and performing similar actions. Further, if a woman were to think or act exactly as I have, I imagine it would not call her "innate gender identity" into question, because she has not been thinking or acting as men do, but merely as humans sometimes do.

― Aimless, Sunday, December 15, 2013 10:38 AM (3 hours ago)

I'm with this but don't even particularly qualify a lot of experience as distinctly human either, so this idea of a self-awareness that has maleness built into it at every level seems a bit odd to me, unless you're defining self-awareness as being only valid at a specific level of gestalt.

― Philip Nunez, Sunday, December 15, 2013 1:27 PM (1 hour ago)

This take place = This takes place, obv.

I'm with you on those things but what about experiences like eating an apple?

sure, the taste of the apple, its coolness & crunch hit me in a physically immediate way that has nothing to do with my gender. but as i understand myself, i am always contenderizer [among other things MALE] eating an apple. the experience isn't gendered, but i am.

Are you sure? Isn't quite a lot of activity quite unconscious, or in 'the flow', where you're not actually conscious of yourself at all?

you don't have to be conscious (self-aware in a directed sense) to BE. my fundamental being is predicated on my constructed identity, even when i'm not thinking about it. plus i really do think my "born this way" innate self figures in somewhere.

That's interesting contenderizer, and seems v v weird to me. I mean, I eat an apples as a ~female person~ (whatever that means) but also as a curly-haired person, as a middle-aged white writer, as a hazel-eyed psychology graduate, as someone who has or has not recently eaten cheese... the baggage is obviously ~there~ but of all these acts of being, only the cheese is relevant to my experience of eating the apple, afaik.

I am 100% sure it would taste the same if I had a penis.

yeah, that's 100% true. that's exactly what i meant when i said "the experience isn't gendered, but i am."

my core identity, my operating sense of self includes but is not limited to gender. for instance, i'm relatively oblivious to my own race (as white people are often said to be). i do not "feel white" at the core of my being in the way that i feel male. that said, my sense of maleness is deeper than most other attributes of self, up there with my sense of cultural location, physical capacity, safety and at-home-ness, etc. i honestly see the presence of gender in my self-awareness as a biological as much as a psychological expression, related to but not bound by my sexual orientation.

^ "that said" completely unnecessary up there, strike

just ate some cheese like a man

hell yeah bo

If we theorize that gender infuses every action and every experience, then I'm afraid we're going to make it nor merely legitimate, but necessary to say things such as, "Men drive like this and women drive like this."

no sense of hunger in identity hierarchy?

i don't feel a lot of solidarity with humans

otm

I'm afraid we're going to make it nor merely legitimate, but necessary to say things such as, "Men drive like this and women drive like this."

― Aimless, Sunday, December 15, 2013 5:11 PM (1 hour ago)

no. my gender is my own, innate. it isn't accordance with any external standard.

If your gender is unique to you alone, and each of us has a gender which is special to themselves alone, then it becomes a category holding only one instance. While one may posit such categories, they have very little verbal content or intellectual usefulness. Kind of solipsistic thinking.

i'm not saying that my sense of gender is unique, necessarily, just that it is mine. others might share it, but how would i know? and i'm not trying to provide "intellectual usefulness", just to describe my own sense of the experience, as per OP. i know that i am a man. why should this be consonant with whatever anyone else might take that phrase to mean?

I am getting dizzy here from chasing this particular tail in circles. You seem to be taking a position that gender is somehow all-pervasive in your experience, but that nothing much can be said about what it is or isn't. Which invites the question of how you know it is gender you are experiencing and not some other phenomenon? Is this like the famous opinion that 'I can't tell you what pornography is, but I know it when I see it'?

Im a dude. peace

i'm not trying to prove the existence of anything, aimless. why the interrogation? isn't my statement that "i feel male" valid on its own?

Just some dudes eating apples. Dudeness optional

any philosophy ilxors know of a feminist/trans/queer take on the private language argument?

Is this like the famous opinion that 'I can't tell you what pornography is, but I know it when I see it'?

yes! the funny thing (to me) is that the quote in question is supposed to provide a self-evident example of valueless opinion. it's not valueless; it's just personal, not-universal. relative to individual experience, the personally valid is of much more use than the (supposedly) universally true. pornography can't be meaningfully defined in a universal sense, nor can "love". these things exist only in relation to us, our sense of them, and we each get to define them however we want. there's nothing wrong with that. i don't see why my sense of the masculine should have any application outside my own experience.

any philosophy ilxors know of a feminist/trans/queer take on the private language argument?

― ogmor, Sunday, December 15, 2013 10:46 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark

Haha damn do i ever. Im all about that

and ass

the parts contenderizer described about masculinity didn't seem all that alien to me, except for the part about it being ever-present, never receding even in the face of crunchy, delicious apples.

de gustibus non disputandem est

If gender is as personal and indefinable as one's taste or subjective opinions, then it is not really a fitting subject for philosophical inquiry, in that such an inquiry would never lead to anything one did not start out with before the inquiry began. In such a case, we would each get to have our sense of our personal gender, but forming any theory of gender would be an exercise in futility. I can easily accept this might be the case, in that I find these discussions often lead to that outcome. However, if this were the case, it would be important to understand the utter unreliability of any and all theories about what gender is, how it behaves, how it arises, or what it could mean, no matter how well it seemed to fit one's one own sense of gender.

i'm okay with that. when a trans person says that they were "born with" an sense of innate gender that contradicts their socially assigned gender, i don't feel the need to interrogate their sense of gender, what it is or means, how well it might or might not be described in other terms. i accept the self-description. this doesn't prevent me from considering theories of gender that relate to the ways in which cultures construct and transmit notions of gender, or that criticize prevailing notions, construct alternate avenues, etc.

any theory of gender that pretends to describe the function of gender in relation to ALL individuals is garbage by definition, imo. we can talk about the way such things seem usually to operate, but not externally prescribe their relationship to any given person's internal sense of self.

A theory of how societies behave in regard to gender would not, of course, be a theory of gender itself, but a theory about how societies come to overlook the fact that their pet theory of gender is, to quote an eminent thinker, garbage by definition.

I think too much of a dichotomy gets drawn in these conversations between "innate" vs "learned" or "socialized," as though the former is somehow more authentic and the latter is false. When I drive a car, I just know how to drive the car. I don't have to think about it. It's *like* second nature to me. It doesn't matter that it's actually the result of driving lessons and my dad yelling at me and years of mishaps and experience, because the H2 that I am TODAY is an instinctive, automatic driver. I feel the same way about being a man -- I'll never completely be able to fully sort out how much of my "male" identity is socially constructed and how much of it is biological or innate, but regardless the person who I am TODAY feels male. Of course it's an interesting thought experiment to wonder if I could somehow be "reprogrammed" to feel female, but since I have no particular reason to want to do that, it's just a thought experiment.

People definitely turn into different people when driving.

well actually, once you're in a car, you're technically a cyborg...

I have not read this entire thread but:

I am both male sexed and gendered; I have considered this many times and consistently come to the conclusion that while I feel that I have many femme/feminine characteristics, I am very male-gendered
I live in a pretty queer area and am somewhat active in several queery things; a lot of my friends are trans, including my best friend, who used to be my boyfriend and at some point after we broke up came out as genderqueer and then as a trans woman.

A theory of how societies behave in regard to gender would not, of course, be a theory of gender itself, but a theory about how societies come to overlook the fact that their pet theory of gender is, to quote an eminent thinker, garbage by definition.

― Aimless, Sunday, December 15, 2013 8:28 PM (1 hour ago)

i'm not negating gender theory as a meaningful avenue of exploration. i'm suggesting that my personal experience must ultimately trump anyone else's attempt to construct supposedly "universal" arguments, at least so far as my own internal world is concerned. my experience matters to me precisely because it is my experience. that's what this thread is about as i understand it; not gender theory in general, but rather our individual experiences of gender.

I'm going back to last night, and skipping a lot because I'm going to show a pretty canonical case of "My point, you are proving it."

My own reading of "there's no 'there' there" is quite different. You seem to be operating on the assumption that gender is an indispensible framework for self-understanding and everything we or others say or do cannot be correcty understood without reference to gender. The difficulty I find in this assumption (whether it is one you advance or not) would be that it precludes any meaning to the category of "human" until "human" has been modified by a gender.

If, otoh, you do accept that "human" has a valid meaning apart from gender, then there must be a universe of personal thoughts and actions that can be well understood without reference to gender at all. That would be the place I would identify where there is "no there" and gender, even if applied, would not further illuminate. If you accept this as so, then there is no requirement that "human" must automatically have a "default gender".

Rightly or wrongly, it is my experience that the vast bulk of my thoughts and actions are merely "human" and essentially genderless, in that I can imagine any human whatsoever having similar thoughts and performing similar actions. Further, if a woman were to think or act exactly as I have, I imagine it would not call her "innate gender identity" into question, because she has not been thinking or acting as men do, but merely as humans sometimes do.

This is my personal experience, but it is an experience described by many, many women:

I live in a world where I am constantly, incessantly told, there is Literature, and Women's Literature. There are Writers and Female Writers. Musicians and Female Musicians. Programmers and Female Programmers. Gamers and Girl-Gamers. Magazines and Women's Magazines (yes, there exist "Men's Magazines, but in the UK at least, this is a euphemism for "Porn." Drivers and Lady-drivers. Actors and Actresses. Paul and Paulette, Claude and Claudette, George and Georgette, and on and on and on.

There have been some attempts in recent years, such as the substitution of "Police Officers" for "Policemen" and "Police... uuhhhh... Women?" and thankfully usages like "Doctor" and "Lady-Doctor" were *very* common in my youth but less common now. But the vast bulk of my experience is to see occupations, objects and practices artificially divided into "Thing" and "Female Practitioner of Thing" - the end result often feeling very much like there are Humans and then there are Female Humans.

It is my *dream*, a world where everyone, female and male, gets to walk around feeling just "Human" all the time. But we do not live in that world. The only place I get to feel just "Human" is sitting alone in my flat staring at a blank wall. The moment I engage with any aspect of society, I am told that there is Human and there is Lady-Human. (And Lady-Human is often a pink and sparkly and crap version of Human.) The only exceptions I can come up with, with a female default, are the categories of "Clothing" and "Men's Clothing" and the realm of parenting, where "Mum" is default. There are pretty sexist reasons for these exceptions, too.

When you are the default gender, when you are a non-Woman who lives in a world that has been carefully and systematically constructed to reinforce, in both subtle and overt senses, that there are "People" and then there are "Female People" this whole assertion of "there is no 'there' there" and "I think of myself as just human" just looks more and more like a massive blind spot. My point you have proved it.

(The mere fact that I felt able to use constructions like "Human" and "Female Human" and have them feel, well, logically consistent or at least reasonable English - but when I went looking for an equivalent term to describe Woman and {not-a-woman} then the English language does not even have such a term! That shows how deeply coded "male as default" is, and if you want an example of a *real* "no 'there' there" that's where it's located.)

Male human. Man. There.

My point, you have totally missed it.

BB's making a good point here. If you accept the premises...

A) It's difficult for many women to conceive of themselves as ungendered and simply "human" because they are constantly told that their evident gender makes them different from — and lesser than — the default (male) human state.

B) It is for similar reasons relatively easy for many men to think of themselves as ungendered, simply human.

...Then it shouldn't be too hard to understand why the blithe male insistence that "surely everyone can share in my simple sense of just-being-humanness" might seem a bit clueless, perhaps even offensive to some.

And men are constantly assured of their default-state humanness. Movies for men (and humans in general) are movies, nbd. Movies for women are "chick flicks", a contemptuous dismissal. A stick figure with no evident clothing or sexual characteristics is male. A stick figure in a dress and/or with breasts (and/or long hair, lipstick, eyelashes, etc.) is female. Endless examples.

I live in a world where I am constantly, incessantly told, there is Literature, and Women's Literature. There are Writers and Female Writers. Musicians and Female Musicians. Programmers and Female Programmers. Gamers and Girl-Gamers. Magazines and Women's Magazines (yes, there exist "Men's Magazines, but in the UK at least, this is a euphemism for "Porn." Drivers and Lady-drivers. Actors and Actresses. Paul and Paulette, Claude and Claudette, George and Georgette, and on and on and on.

simone de beauvoir to thread

I feel like starting a separate Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning thread since this is a poll. Anyone else interested in such a thread?

Do it, Viceroy, I am so there.

k...

Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

less sure of my gender now, but pretty sure I am male or female and not contenderizer

I will read all this long posts later but just gonna quickly say I hit the wrong button by accident so when the results come in exchange one intersex don't partic for a male don't partic

"The only place I get to feel just "Human" is sitting alone in my flat staring at a blank wall."
This is like 60-80% of my life! (Except feeling more protozoan than human and under three blankets because too cheap to turn on heat)

It is my *dream*, a world where everyone, female and male, gets to walk around feeling just "Human" all the time.

Your position puzzles me. Not the facts you describe, which you seem to be in full command of and which I accept as true, but rather your use of them.

It is said that knowledge is power. In your description you show a very complete knowledge, but no sense that this has given you the slightest bit of power over what you see so clearly and describe so aptly. You say you are not allowed to feel like a human. You assert that you are 'made to feel' certain things. You are aware of the mechanism by which you are presumably forced to feel these feelings, and you see its workings down to the smallest details. You trace these nefarious lies to their source and follow them through their entire careers. Yet you wish to appear powerless to make any good use of this knowledge. It is also said that the truth shall set you free, but in this case you grasp the truth and somehow nothing happens.

But this leaves me a bit suspicious, harboring the glimmer of the idea that as you learned all these facts, something did happen and some power over them was granted to you. Not, mind you, power over whether others persist in trying to force you to their way of thinking, but rather a power of resisting their attempts and getting closer to that *dream* of feeling human at times other than when you are isolated in you flat.

A therapist I used to consult pointed out to me that anger was a useful emotion in many instances, in that it provided energy and impetus to one's efforts to change whatever it was that caused the anger to arise. If I were aware that others were conspiring to generate in me feelings that I was other than fully human, not for my good, for to my harm, the more I learned about this the angrier I would become and the more successfully I would be able to resist their power to 'make me feel' things I rejected as unwholesome.

Since you've come so far in your understanding of this problem in your life, maybe that approach could work for you?

btw, the therapist was a lesbian and one of the best adjusted, most thoughtful and helpful people I have ever known. She didn't seem to have succumbed to the baleful effects of society's efforts to make her feel less than human. So, it seems that, with luck and pluck, it can be done.

Aimless, no offence, but I find trying to talk to you rarely brings me anything but frustration, and the persistent sense that you are talking to someone who is five feet to the rear of me, or five feet to the front of me, but never to me. Being constantly misunderstood and misrepresented and even condescended to is too distressing to me, so I'm going to stop trying now. Good day to you, sir.

Branwell, no offense, but in this thread you have repeatedly consigned those who do not fully fall into your way of thinking as being either thoughtless or blind, or in some other way deficient to understand your positions, which seemed to you a sufficient answer to any disagreement or lack of understanding. This is a habit you might want to reconsider.

those who do not fully fall into your way of thinkingAimless + the usual ilx misogyny crew

^^kneejerk

dude you're the one who ends up huffing and puffing on every one of these threads, looks like a compulsion triggered by threatening female voices to me. you're pure mansplain, get some fuckin awareness, at least think a little bit about your omniscient tone. is that really how you want to be remembered on here, the guy who explained how the world works to everyone.

pro tips

btw, the therapist was a lesbian and one of the best adjusted, most thoughtful and helpful people I have ever known. She didn't seem to have succumbed to the baleful effects of society's efforts to make her feel less than human. So, it seems that, with luck and pluck, it can be done.

How is this not rude as hell? It's the sexual orientation version of "well, racism is bad, but my good executive friend is a black man, so apparently getting past it can be done"

No, you're right, it's rude as hell.

I remember when I started noticing aimless posts :-(

to be exact it was rude and as condescending as hell, which was an accurate reflection of how I felt after having been condescended to in turn.

so did you and your therapist talk a lot about her experience as a lesbian in a misogynistic and homophobic society or did you just assume that because she seemed like a normal person she'd transcended all of that

aimless you are awful

Wow. I was so scared, when I saw this thread suddenly leap up in new answers, that there was gonna be some awful fallout, but actually... I... I...

OMG... I love you guys. Thank you.

did you feel condescended to by your therapist, or are you saying condescending rude shit about her because you're mad at branwell and need a proxy female to diminish, its unclear

I mean if you aren't going to talk like a person I at least want clarity ffs

Ah branwell you used the word clusterfuck like 8 times itt when the only turbulence was deems's halfhearted Friday afternoon trolling, I'd say it's been a roaring success

Want to say I'm happy to see more ilxors who can be arsed to type out long thoughtful shit on their phones, we need more of that. Obv not gonna practice what I preach here cause fuck that noise

cut some slack, it was only five times

Its hard not to be halfhearted in these conversations after ten odd years tbh wins, but power to you and all that thrive in it

Aimless im not in the habit of givin behavioural advice to adults but you're in here with a mace when what you want, if at all you want to call bullshit on privcru nonsense/hyprocrisy, is a rapier. Darting, man, darting. Whatever extent you engage in short of total obedience or wondered awe is gonna be characterised as rowdy trolling so yknow have some fun or let em at it i say

Nothing on but fuckin repeats this time of year

~the ghost of clusterfucks past, wins~

lol ftr this has been a good and interesting thread tho

HAVE SOME FUN OR LET EM AT IT I SAY: the ILX Season 25 Poll

I respectfully refrained from enjoining a mini-clusterfuck tbh :P

Branners has been OTM with a vengeance throughout this entire thread, and has also been at times exuberant to the point of abrasion, but since when was I ever one with a legitimate complaint about such behaviour

you know darragh, you could engage with it if you wanted, we wouldn't think any less of you

Well I would but

That's not very nice of me, I guess - Branners you've basically been gr8 itt, just don't slag me off on Twitter :P

Good thread too.

Vetoing "branners"

seconded

Well i mean

pretty sure I am male or female and not contenderizer

― mh, Monday, December 16, 2013 9:25 AM (5 hours ago)

sensible place to start

in a way, though, aren't we all contenderizer?

i contain multidudes

Whatever extent you engage in short of total obedience or wondered awe is gonna be characterised as rowdy trolling so yknow have some fun or let em at it i say

― Bigsam: flotsam and jetsam @ whetsam? (darraghmac), Monday, December 16, 2013 1:40 PM (1 hour ago)

Nice darting. I find the best way to engage is to table all grudges, ignore the temptation to school or joust, and just focus on the ideas involved. This is a relatively new strategy for me, so I can't promise great results, but it does seem to be working out fine so far.

Contenderizer, to say that we have disagreed in the past would be an understatement; however, I have mostly enjoyed, and even learned from some of your posts on this thread, so this strategy seems like an A+ one to me.

cheers, BB

Having been mulling this over while running errands, I have remembered that, whatever my feelings, I need to be enough in control of my actions to stay on the adult side of the line. Rather than walk around with an "FP me" sign taped to my back, I think I will apologize to Branwell for my rudeness and take a timeout in the corner.

Contends i know things got rough and heavy on you before you came back whistling dixie but another paragraph of advice like that and im horsing yon bath through the window and breaking out of this asylum for good

eh, talking to myself & aimless, really. you seem to have your shit covered, d.

i'm political, i suppose. i got things i want to say, but more to generate effects than just to open my mouth.

this is where matt p. gets to drop in all "I KNEW IT!"

kinda liked 'branners'

http://www.redcarpetnewstv.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bran-stark-interview-series-3.png

Oh my god. I was just clearing out the inbox on my laptop now I have data again, and in a timely fashion, this had arrived:

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/festivals-series/being-a-man

The "Being A Man" Festival. Set up with exactly the same logo and typeface as the "Women Of the World" WOW Festival (for which I am on the mailing list, which is why I assume I'm getting this) except in blue, rather than pink.

I was actually quite tempted to go, until I saw this quote in the email:

‘Is there really a 'crisis of masculinity', or have men been told it so many times we actually believe it? Can men even celebrate masculinity without being tried for misogyny?’
Martin Daubney – former editor of Loaded and broadcaster

and just thought... no. Why does "looking at masculinity" always have to be set up in *opposition* to feminism and women, rather than being complementary to the process? It just makes me kinda sad and tired, and strikes me as wasted potential.

i've never really found a way to articulate this because it feels so rhetorically close to "what about teh menzzz" which as i'm sure we all agree is laughable, but imo the irony of the men's rights morons is that looking at masculinity feels at heart like a feminist project

(like, it makes zero sense to me that it should ever be set up in opposition to feminism - which is also one of the fundamental reasons that MRA types are so laughable, it's like if you want to talk about gender, feminists have BEEN doing that)

was gonna say this earlier - if there's a "crisis in masculinity" then that has come to light thru the ways that feminism has exposed the underlying instabilities and dishonesties in our notions of masculinity.

They can never even try to be in cooperation w feminism as long as any part of their material includes the idea that women or feminism or a feminized/civilized society have taken something away from men, and that "looking at masculinity" involves getting "it" back.

If the only talk to happen must be on the terms set by (insert group here) else be barraged with mockery then i dunno why its a surprise to anyone when the talk scuttles to unfortunate dark corners or harbours strange ideas about peaceable fruitful coexistence with the types of feminism etc that seeks to set the agenda, tone, limits, behaviours and outcomes as a prerequisite to open discussion.

Xposts Branwell & Lex

How is that not rude?

Well, mainly Lex tbh.

Though I do think it's judgemental to write off an event on the basis of a quote.

How is *what* not rude? Really, is "not wanting to go to a discussion of masculinity as facilitated by the editor of a magazine which makes a not-inconsiderable profit off both fostering and exploiting misogyny" rude? Because if that's rude, really, I don't mind being rude.

Cos it's got a wide range of people speaking and participating and some issues that shouldn't be so easily dismissed: eg male suicide, gang culture, institutional homophobia etc

This is a really interesting thread, although I've only read the first 100 and last 50 or so posts, so may have missed some stuff in the middle.

I voted "Assigned male at birth; I don't particularly have a sense of innate binary gender". I've never felt uncomfortable with my body or physical sex (i.e. being a 'man' with a penis and texticles and facial hair etc etc) [leaving 'texticles' typo in because I like it], or with my socio-cultural gender. I've felt (more than) curious regarding my sexuality at points, and I'm now (mid-30s) very comfortable with this curiosity, even though I'm in a committed, monogamous, heterosexual relationship. At times in the past, especially adolescence, I've felt a little uncomfortable with that curiosity, but never deeply or for very long; I've always very much through that you just fancy people, for any number of reasons, and their gender or physical sex, while a contributing factor to fancying them, isn't the only factor, and needn't be the most important one either. I've never wanted to be anything other than the physical sex or cultural gender that I am, other than on a level of intellectual curiosity (what must it *feel* like to have a vagina rather than a penis? how sensitive are breasts? etc etc). I wore a dress once at a party when I was about 20, and seem to recall really quite enjoying it.

So, never felt uncomfortable with my body, in a committed heterosexual relationship, and in addition many of my interests are quite stereotypically masculine according to cultural 'norms' - playing football, riding bikes, drinking ale - and I have a beard at the moment, so I don't think I currently project any doubt or flexibility at the moment with regards to my gender, but I don't consciously think "I am a man; I must do and be seen to do 'man' things" (I think of my hobbies and interests as more 'adolescent' than 'male', actually, although obviously the are far from mutually exclusive) or feel as if 'maleness' is a defining part of my personality (more on this in a bit). I've been described as camp in the past, especially during my late teens and early 20s. This didn't offend me, and in fact I think I often took it as a compliment. I suppose / suspect this sense of being comfortable with myself but not consciously feeling 'male' is the state of 'normality' / privilege / default / whatever that comes with being white and straight and male in the 20th and 21st centuries (and seemingly all the other ones before, too) in the UK / Europe / US / etc.

I don't know if this has been discussed in the bit of the thread I didn't read, but I've long felt that the way our language is structured makes it difficult and weird to talk about 'our bodies' (even that phrase strikes me as problematic); "I've hurt my foot" linguistically equates to "I've lost my shoe" in terms of subject/object, but a foot is not a shoe; a foot is YOU, intrinsically, it is an element of oneself, the same as an eye or a brain or a personality is, and having to talk about it with a set of linguistic tools that encourage disassociation at a base, grammatical, conceptual level seems like a negative hurdle to have to vault over straight away as soon as we start to enter into this discussion. One's body is intrinsically a part of who one is, is tied to one's personality and intellect irrevocably. Or, at least, that's how I'm lucky enough to feel, and that probably contributes towards a vague sense of intrigued bafflement I have when people say they don't feel comfortable in their body; I simply can't relate to that feeling any more than I could relate to having a vagina instead of a penis. My wife often says she feels uncomfortable in her body for various reasons, and this always makes me feel incredibly sad, that anyone should have to feel like that. I suppose the closest I got to feeling something similar was a few years ago when I was a stone heavier and not exercising much, and looked at myself in a changing room mirror and didn't like what I saw. I suspect that feeling wasn't particularly close, though, and I felt it was as much a reaction to an intellectual and emotional self as it was to a physical self; I wasn't taking care of myself properly in any of those aspects, and have since changed my approach to all three (which I kind of see as one, because they're all me and it seems crazy to neglect any aspect in favour of any others). I wonder how people who feel they have a sense of being an opposite gender would feel if we had different linguistic tools with which to express themselves.

Which is a very long-winded and faintly solipsistic response, and we're clearly in the midst of a sub-discussion right now.

To reiterate, really interesting thread.

Well, I believe the sub-discussion appears to be over? I thought since it was clearly stated that it was ~feminists~ keeping men from discussing masculinity, if I backed off for a while, then it would happen, but... well, unfortunately not. More's the pity.

But then I reread this:

If the only talk to happen must be on the terms set by (insert group here) else be barraged with mockery then i dunno why its a surprise to anyone when the talk scuttles to unfortunate dark corners or harbours strange ideas about peaceable fruitful coexistence with the types of feminism etc that seeks to set the agenda, tone, limits, behaviours and outcomes as a prerequisite to open discussion.

― Bigsam: flotsam and jetsam @ whetsam? (darraghmac

And at first, I was kinda bummed, because it reminded me so much of that old (Margaret Atwood?) quote: men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.

But then I started to laugh. And at first, I couldn't really work out why I was laughing, and thought it might just be some kind of relief-of-nerves thing because I'd been so tense this morning. But then I started to laugh more, not just giggling, but, like, proper full-on laughing. And I realised:

Our Deems, of the supposed "rapier" "wit". He has just stated that he is afraid of being mocked by women. Darraghmac. Afraid of being mocked by women.

The more I thought about it, the more absurd it became, and the funnier it became, and I started laughing so hard I started crying a little bit and had to take off my glasses and wipe them. The great Deems, derailer of gender threads and destroyer of dragons, is a fucking *sugarlump* and actually too afraid to even say "I was born male and I have a gender of ____" because women might mock him. And I swear to god, I laughed for ten minutes straight, because whenever I finally calmed myself down with a cup of tea, I just started giggling again. And now even just logging back onto ILX to check that yes, he really did say what I thought he said, I can't even see his screen name without starting to giggle. Y'know... ~big bad feminists comin' to mock u!!!!~ Be afraid, be very afraid.

Which is actually a really brilliant, and really healthy thing to have happened. Because I can't pretend that having this dude buzzing round my knees like a gnat and making sideswipes doesn't wind me up. Well, it *did* wind me up, in the past. That kind of clutch of "holy shit, is this going to go all awful now" every time I hit submit. (And in the past, yes, I've let people bully me into having no sense of humour left because it's been beaten out of me, with trolling, with threats, whatever.) But now, every time I see his name, the only thing I can think is "Darraghmac is afraid of being mocked by women" and I start to laugh like a fucking drain.

Thank you, this is a fucking gift, because I really do love to laugh.

Im glad for you!

darragh is kind of a softy when it comes to his own self-image, iirc. uses sarcasm to deflect, mostly.

darragh, feel free to not read that previous line. I know you're a rock.

idk bout that. I never kilt any dragons either fwiw.

re: the manliness festival upthread, I don't think I'd have much interest in going to it, but I think that such things could have their place. Not that this particular one may be productive given some of the personalities involved, but giving men the framing device of questioning what masculinity means to them, and how it can be defined not in opposition to, or even as complimentary to, femininity, seems like a reasonable enterprise.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Pong.png

can't argue with that take, either, really

'"I've hurt my foot" linguistically equates to "I've lost my shoe" in terms of subject/object, but a foot is not a shoe; a foot is YOU'

i agree there's a lot of weird abstractions that language imposes on things but the foot especially feels more like a shoe. it's really hard to be in tune with your foot!

Yeah, I don't know that I feel that much difference between "my foot" and "my shoe" and I'm not really sure where that distinction ends. Because by the time you get to "my brain" it starts to get absurd - am I my brain, or do "I" just use my brain to think with? This is above my philosophical paygrade to have those arguments, and I'm not sure this thread is the place for it. (Though I do wonder how much feeling like I treat "my body" the way Iggy Pop treats "his dress" in conceptual terms is the cause of or the result of gender dysphoria.)

I'm only who I am because I'm different from someone else

it's really hard to be in tune with your foot!

Tell that to a sprinter, marathon runner, or footballer, I'm sure they'll disagree!

I'm absolutely convinced that language structures consciousness and character to a very profound degree. It's obviously not the only thing, but I suspect it's an often over-looked factor.

There are both strong and weak versions of Sapir-Whorf which have been hotly debated, but the idea that this is something that is oft overlooked really depends on who you hang out with, I guess!

Well, mainly Lex tbh.

Though I do think it's judgemental to write off an event on the basis of a quote.

― mohel hell (Bob Six), Tuesday, December 17, 2013 1:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i wasn't referring to that event specifically at all, though i will certainly prejudge daubney

It was more the description of "men's rights morons".

Welp I'm about to leave for the airport soon, but based on that last post I expect a hugely entertaining stretch of this thread when I check back later.

Hope it doesn't, otherwise I'd be sorry I posted.

(xps)

I guess you could say that French are stereotypically more in tune with their bodies and they say "I have pain in my foot". But then you have to wonder if the Germans are more in tune with their body parts when brushing or combing them (clean oneself in the teeth) but not when they hurt.

Hm, I suppose "fastidious but detached from pain" is still matching some stereotypes. Ah, never mind. I don't know enough languages to play this game.

For me, the main interest in this thread has been people's personal accounts, exploring what they personally experience - rather than the theories or the disputes.

Our Deems, of the supposed "rapier" "wit". He has just stated that he is afraid of being mocked by women. Darraghmac. Afraid of being mocked by women.

― Branwell Bell, Tuesday, December 17, 2013 8:45 AM (Yesterday)

tbf, i suspect that most of us are afraid of being mocked by our peers. at the very least, we don't relish the prospect.

is the mockery of women experienced different than that of men? perhaps, it depends...

is it any more enjoyable? probably not.

the only thing i'm afraid of is the sky falling on my head

Contenderizer, I actually started typing out a considered, proper, response to that, and halfway through, realised I don't have the energy or the spoons for this discussion, so I'm just going to repeat: "Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them" and leave it at that, and you can think about what's more "enjoyable" - being mocked, or being afraid that someone will kill you or worse.

Sorry, no, I need to join up the dots, because: OCD and this is going to buzz round my head if I don't.

Because a big reason that women and yes, us scary, mocking "feminists" keep saying "we need to talk about masculinity" is because the whole bundle of aggression-and-entitlement that gets tied up with toxic conceptions of "masculinity" are not just annoying and exclusive, but actually fuel that whole bundle of "rape-threats/death-threats/escalation/scary shit that women fear" - and the irony level, that the guy who keeps coming in these threads, and trying to disrupt and derail and troll the conversation with his ~rapier wit mockery~, he claims that he cannot talk about this stuff because, seriously, he is afraid that women will mock him ... can you see the level of dissonance here?

And that whole "women are afraid men will kill them" goes *double* for trans women. Like that stat quoted above, the average age of death for a trans woman is 33. 33! And it's not natural causes! That statistic doesn't *haunt* you? It haunts me! But, yet, the idea that we can't talk about ~gender as distinct from sex~ because oh, hey, a dude is afraid women will laugh at him?

This has been an at times enjoyable, at times infuriating, but thoroughly interesting read. Thx for starting the conversation.

Xxp - BB otm btw

the guy who keeps coming in these threads, and trying to disrupt and derail and troll the conversation with his ~rapier wit mockery~, he claims that he cannot talk about this stuff because, seriously, he is afraid that women will mock him ... can you see the level of dissonance here?

― Branwell Bell, Wednesday, December 18, 2013 11:23 AM (24 minutes ago)

While I generally support the things you are saying in this thread, this is either disingenuous or you didn't actually read deems' post.

Trust me, I read the post.

He never claimed he couldn't talk about this stuff. The post was the response to an aside from other posters about the mens rights movement as far as I can tell.

So you are just taking the opportunity to misconstrue what he was saying about the masculinity conference and posit that it was about "him" -- that sounds like a stereotypical way that men misread and mispresent women's statements.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqq4ivAhip1qfhbcf.gif

I've said what I needed to say. If you want to stretch this into some long string of meta about what you believe my motives are, that's about you; that's not about me. Good day to you, Sarahell.

Just that it's easier for people to justify being disrespectful and cruel when the target is someone that also has behaved disrespectfully and cruelly.

Like that stat quoted above, the average age of death for a trans woman is 33. 33! And it's not natural causes! That statistic doesn't *haunt* you?

Hey, I like the existence of this thread and everything, but this statistic is bullshit. Completely made up. It comes from this article I guess - though there are plenty of other (usually anti-trans) random internet people making similar claims, always with a different number - but there's no evidence for it whatsoever.

born female, identify as a female. i don't know how innate it is. i guess i have some sense of gender fluidity?

when i was a kid i had a lot of things that were considered girl things, and a lot of things that were considered boy things, including toys and clothes. i identified myself as a girl, but when i imagined myself in a scenario, it was a boy that i imagined. my inner voice was a boy's voice. i didn't feel limited by my gender, though, until puberty (common story), when everything closed over my head and i started feeling so burdened by the general unfairness of being female that i had lengthy periods of depression/anxiety about it where I could literally think of nothing else - one almost a year long from 16-17. around that time i went through alternating super femme periods and periods of taping my boobs down and wearing all my hear in a hat (those were more common). imagining myself as/kinda wanting to be a boy made me (sillily) question my sexuality briefly in my teen years - now it seems so obvious that i p much exclusively like men, but when you're a teenager, there's so much going on that it's such a struggle to discern what you're even feeling or thinking. during that lengthy depressive period, the pervading feeling was - being bodily female makes me misunderstood by the world. my feelings were more anger at the world than anger at my body, though, at that time - i hated my body too, tho.

The periods of trying to look like a boy to avoid trouble lasted probably til I was 21, when i met good ally dudes/women and felt less hopeless about being a woman and what it meant to the world. it's interesting for me to read people connecting gender issues to their comfort level in their body. i've never once for a moment felt comfortable in my body - i think it is *related* to gender, but it's related more to prescribed ideas of what people of the female gender should appear like than feeling that i would rather be in a man's body. i have definitely, desperately wanted to be androgynous, bodily, many times in my life. no boobs, no butt, no feminine face. for increased ease living in the world, but also to feel more like my imagined self, i guess.

so im a cisgendered woman who was confused and sad as an adolescent and talks too much, basically :/

xp http://www.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/Hatecrimesandviolenceagainstlgbtpeople_2009.pdf

49 per cent of transgender people attempt suicide.

1 in 12 transgender people in America is murdered.

Transgender youth whose parents pressure them to conform to their anatomical gender report higher levels of depression, illegal drug use, suicide attempts and unsafe sex than peers who receive little or no pressure from parents.

Sources: Guidelines for Transgender Care (2006), Gender Spectrum Education and Training, Families in TRANSition (2008)

the murder of 1 trans person is too much. people are definitely being murdered for being trans, we know that. we don't need to quibble about numbers here, probably.

Sarah, pandemic, contends- thanks.

'bramwell'- no point whatsoever in engaging with you. I promise to mods (hi mods), to all viewers and to your goodself not to kill you. May that suffice, and with best wishes towards your continued mirth.

the reposting of that nakh "zing" felt a bit like a dick move to me, and maybe I should have said something about that, too. I don't want BB to think I am antagonizing her, I just want everyone on this thread to be respectful of one another.

'dick dumb move' - let's keep it gender neutral

oh nothing threatens my masculinity more than somebody playing the cockfarmer

xp http://www.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/Hatecrimesandviolenceagainstlgbtpeople_2009.pdf

49 per cent of transgender people attempt suicide.

1 in 12 transgender people in America is murdered.

Transgender youth whose parents pressure them to conform to their anatomical gender report higher levels of depression, illegal drug use, suicide attempts and unsafe sex than peers who receive little or no pressure from parents.

Sources: Guidelines for Transgender Care (2006), Gender Spectrum Education and Training, Families in TRANSition (2008)

― 1 P.3. Eternal (roxymuzak), Wednesday, December 18, 2013 11:27 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Again, these statistics (specifically the 1 in 12 transgender people being murdered) are bullshit. If you thought about it for a moment, you'd realise that. This person runs through some numbers for you: http://parkthatcar.net/2013/11/20/can-we-stop-quoting-the-1-in-12-statistic-please/

I don't know why anyone thinks it's helpful for trans people to keep hearing such nonsense.

Although naturally I agree with you that "the murder of 1 trans person is too much" to the extent that it means anything at all (i.e. not much), it's a bit disingenuous to bring up madly alarmist statistics accompanied by overwrought prattling ("That statistic doesn't *haunt* you? It haunts me!"), only to resort to "we don't need to quibble about numbers" when called on it. Don't bring up numbers if you don't care about numbers!

OK, I'll rephrase that without any statistics. "People like me are being murdered, disturbingly frequently, for being like me. That doesn't haunt you? Because that sure haunts me."

If that's "overwrought prattling" then seriously, come here and live my life. You can even leave out the "like me" and have that concept still be a fucking haunting though. People are murdered for not conforming to gender roles. Being murdered remains substantially more upsetting than the fear of people laughing at you. This whole "discuss the topic exactly the way ~Feminists~ want or get mocked!" thing basically boils down to: "If you cannot discuss masculinity without resorting to misogyny, homophobia and transphobia - or referring to people as 'retards' - then yes, people will call you out for that bigotry. Sometimes with humour, because humour is more effective than shouting."

The irony of dudes who protest non-violence, is, in my life (and the lives of friends I've discussed it with) it's almost always the dudes who insist, "Hey, come here, I just want to talk to you. I'm not a creep or anything, I just want to talk to you!" who are exactly the ones who go on to engage in precisely the creepy, threatening or even violent behaviour. So, in my experience, "I'm not going to hurt you" is a pretty accurate indicator for, actually, this person has hurting people on their mind. I set my boundaries accordingly.

I really want to come back to the "are you a body" vs "do you have a body" dynamic, and I'm wondering if I've missed some ILX discussion on it, because it's the kind of thing that comes up in philosophy threads, but to my memory, though I have missed a good year or two of ILX, the only actual poll that was done over it was the "Consciousness: freaky shit or no big deal" thread. Again, I'd like to hear less theory (though both philosophical and scientific theories on consciousness and the (false?) mind/body divide are interesting) but more how people experience their own bodies and minds and the interface or not between.

I might just do that, anyway.

Sorry for the dumb name, but I've had Throwing Muses in my head all week:

I Have A Question, it's A Body

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Assigned male at birth; I have a sense of being masculine gender 114

lol

say what up to u mans and dem

http://derbyimages.woot.com/1859635/2aa3348c-5aaf-430c-a31f-ed3327437df6.jpg

Its terrible how etc

manpolling

I realise there's a(n almost exclusive) degree of pisstaking in the last few posts, but I don't see how it's surprising that men voted way more here - men make up the majority of ilx, it's not a shock or weird in any way. Notable that 'feel masculine' won, but (shh don't tell anyone) there's nothing wrong with that.

Don't think I mentioned this earlier, but I was more interested in what seemed to be a distinct schism between reasons for *not* feeling a binary gender. Some people seemed to say that they didn't feel their gender because it was latent, some people seemed to say that they didn't feel their gender because they rejected it. If anyone's still interested in this thread I'd be curious to explore that more, maybe?

Also: am drunk.

I thought it was funny because "making and voting in polls" is a stereotype of male ilxors.

I voted with the majority iirc; I have all manner of fine distinctions to make given that I have always felt like an outsider and can project some of that onto gender roles, but at the same time I've never felt like another role would fit me better.

Also: am drunk.

I thought it was funny because "making and voting in polls" is a stereotype of male ilxors.

― sarahell, Saturday, 11 January 2014 02:25 (2 hours ago) Permalink

this

Since I made the poll, does that make me a man, then?

yeah thats definitely what they were saying there

being a man is pretty rad btw

Wow, a joke, you cannot take one!

And they say it's feminists that have no sense of humour!

I really wish there were more data on Female-assigned people.

Because the data right now shows a pretty even split, but the sample size just isn't large enough (especially compared to the Male-assigned data) to work out if this is an anomaly due to poor sample size, or if it's a specific quirk of *women on ILX* as opposed to women at large. I have so many potential theories about why this result could be!

a) sample size too small; anomalous results
b) the male-skewed nature of ILX in itself attracts more gender-neutral or non-binary women
c) feminine gender *roles* are so prescriptive that women don't feel able to conform to them and this affects women's own perception of their own gender
d) women in general just have looser attachment to gender because this is a fundamental quality of "women"?

(I suspect it's a mix of b and c, but without more data, it's impossible to draw a conclusion.)

But even just looking at the data that we have, I can with confidence assert that, at least in the demographics of ILX, not feeling like one has a core binary identity is totally a statistically significant *thing*, it is not just a case of "unexamined cis privilege" or "not really thinking about it", and my hypothesis was proven and my friend's hypothesis disproven.

Emil.y, since I made this poll, I have been learning more and more things about the universe beyond the gender binary, and how many different forms it takes (Not having a gender vs having 2 genders vs having all the genders etc etc) and if I did the poll again, I'd probably make more options, especially given such a strong result for non-binary people and/or trans* people. I hope that the genderqueer thread would provide a place to discuss that, but it doesn't seem to have taken off; it's hard to have a thread with only 3 participants.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "rejecting gender" - I certainly saw many people who discussed rejecting gender *roles* or feeling like they didn't apply to them. But I'm not sure if one *has* a core/innate gender, that it's possible to reject it? I don't think I've understood your question, and I'd find it helpful if you explained it more, or quoted examples (this thread is very long and most of it happened several weeks ago, and my memory really is poor, so forgive me if there was something really obvious that I have completely forgotten.)

Thank you for participating, everyone, it certainly is useful data for me.

women in general just have looser attachment to gender because this is a fundamental quality of "women"?

this is a loose point or observation, certainly nothing approaching a theory, but: there are species of animals, some kinds of fish among other things, where all of the species at birth are female. at some point in the life cycle a few fish will become male, a transformation that seems to be tied to things like the size of the group, in order to fulfil the requirements of the sexual reproductive cycle and get some fertilizin' on.

fish are nothing to do with people. possibilities for residual ambiguities/fluidity in the experience of gender tho?

OK, so long as we keep this in the realm of "loose observation and conjecture" (which is getting away from the stated goal of the thread, so it might be time for another thread) because we do not have enough of a sample size to extrapolate any conclusions...

This may be mis-remembered, as I cannot be arsed to get up and go dig out the book right now, but talking about foetal development in most gender-differentiated animals, including humans, the physiological "default option" for a body is something approaching female. If memory serves, it takes the influence of hormones, mostly androgens, to "turn" a body male, and without that influence, a body will present externally as female. Hence the term, "female assigned at birth" to cover the experiences of e.g. people who have an XY genotype, but a biological insensitivity to androgen makes them *appear* feminine, though they may well be intersex or undifferentiated in their internal anatomy. (This is from memory, please excuse me if I have got the details wrong.)

There are other animals which hatch from eggs, where environmental influences, such as the temperature of the sand the eggs were buried in, has more of an effect on sex than the genotype. In an environment which indicates stress, male-genotyped animals will be born female (presumably because the male-triggering hormones are not activated.)

So, in *bodies*, I can understand a hypothesis which suggests "females just *are*, males require some action or influence to produce a male body" on a physiological level

However, extrapolating from that a psychological sense of gender being "men have a strong sense of gender, women are just more fluid and ambiguous" is not a conceptual leap that I can make. How would that work?

The line of thinking I was going down was more related to evidence of female sexual fluidity. This is such a new field of research that there just isn't the evidence to suggest *why* this happens, because female sexuality has gone completely unstudied for so long. But if I were going to make a completely unfounded hypothesis from thin air and hunches, I'd suggest - yes, gender and sexuality are *not* the same thing, not at all. But there is a feedback loop between gender and sexual orientation, that I would guess if there were a fluidity to innate gender identity in female persons, it would probably be related to the same thing (whatever it is) that "causes" sexual fluidity.

This is wild speculation, and more related to mine own personal experiences than any basis in scientific study or data, though, and should be treated as such.

shorthand, i'm keeping my brain in Saturday mode

specificity of experience of trans/female/maleness
--------------------------------------------------
sense of feeling gendered??
--------------------------------------------------
underlying sense of quiddity of humanity??
(see brain/body threads)

is there a proto-sense of existence, being a living creature, that gets outside gender or grounds it or escapes it or just isn't reducible to it?

and if there is that kind of feeling or experience, a genuinely "neutral" experience of "humanness", might its biological elements (elements as things that constitute it and/or as things that define the experience) might those biological factors not in fact relate more closely to constructed notions of the feminine, in the sense that "female is the base gender" in some way

a lot of people in the body/mind thread identified very strongly with their minds and i find that interesting alongside this thread in which many people identify strongly with their genitalia

thinking in an exploratory pragmatic way rather than suggesting what it should feel like for somebody else to be who they are

I suppose this question asked "do your genitalia and your mind align?" Enough people talked about their mind being synonymous with their bodies or their mind being separate from their body that the second question was proposed. I don't know if there's a correlation between "I don't feel a distinct sense of gender" and "I'm a mind" because I deliberately didn't ask that in the second thread - but there are still just over 41 ppl here who do not identify with their genitals. That's just on 1/3 of total responders, so although there are "many" people who identify with their genitals, there are still a statistically significant number of people who do not.

or don't identify _as_ their genitals? identify _with_ seems to imply some sense of alienation, IMO. that could be the case but I don't think it's necessary to feel a disconnect to answer that way

i disagree with the premise of a static identity. sometimes i feel like a dude, sometimes i feel like a potato, and we've all felt like a potato at some point.

I don't think I answered this poll, because I still can't really wrap my head around what it means to be male or female, other than 1)anatomy and 2)societal norms/stereotypes/etc. This is most likely a failure of imagination on my part, as there are obviously many people who feel like they are a specific gender in ways that don't necessarily relate to those two things.

"I have a dick" versus "I am a dick"

c) feminine gender *roles* are so prescriptive that women don't feel able to conform to them and this affects women's own perception of their own gender

This is interesting.

that is interesting. I would think male roles are equally prescriptive, however since they are historically more likely to be associated with traits seen as positive in society, maybe men are more likely to want to identify with *maleness.* OTOH, I would also guess the "penalty" for not identifying entirely as male is much greater for men, and hence men who don't feel an especially strong inclination against *maleness* are more likely to self-regulate and fall in line.

i agree that male roles are prescriptive, but equally prescriptive? naw

yeah i hadn't really thought about that point of prescriptiveness of social role being a deterrent to identifying as it. i suspect also that it doesn't apply so much for being male as being male is so much more about being whatever you want to be, with a relatively tiny number of active life desires that can't be absorbed into a wide sense of masculinity.

there have been ways for men to duck out of masculine expectations, if not voluntarily, that haven't been available to women cf. eunuchs, hijra, priesthood &c.

not necessarily voluntarily

also I wld be extremely interested what ppl from those classes thought of the idea innate gender identity

c) feminine gender *roles* are so prescriptive that women don't feel able to conform to them and this affects women's own perception of their own gender

Well, the ~I'm not like those OTHER girls~ trope exists for a reason.

Is there a line between "I'm not like those OTHER girls" and "I don't feel like a girl, at all" or even "I feel like a man as much as I ever feel like a woman" though?

I kinda feel like there is?

Because I honestly feel like I've got to the point where I don't think there's anything wrong with femininity or girlhood or femaleness, no matter what our society tells us. I just feel, very strongly, "I am not feminine". It is very hard to untangle guilt over the former from the feeling of the latter. But my deepest sense is that actually, no, the former is definitely a thing, but it's not the cause of the latter. It's just societal expectations that have made it so hard for me to tease apart the feelings of being not just "failed girl" but "girl traitor."

Like, I'm having such full-on feelings of "girl traitor" over my gender dysphoria recently that I don't even feel comfortable on the Girl Thread. Which used to feel very much like a safe space, and now makes me feel defensive and having-to-justify-my-non-girlhood. (But that could just be the usual general "I don't belong on ILX" defensiveness, too.) It's complicated. And not a very fun place to be at the moment.

There is a line, without a doubt. But you do definitely notice the "not like the other girls" thinking coming from girls or women who don't feel comfortable/have no interest in traditionally feminine roles/doing traditionally feminine activities and rather than seeing it as just another way to be a girl/woman, it gets coded as "this is what it is to be a woman, I'm not that, so therefore it is worthy of ridicule." If that makes sense...?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That where the line is, is between merely "not like other girls" (ergo either enlarge "womanhood as a category" or "leave womanhood") and "I am not like those OTHER girls, ergo feminine girls are ridiculous/bad/terrible."

It's not the case that the former *always* equals the latter, but I think some people have a tendency to read it that way, even when that reading is not inherent.

there have been ways for men to duck out of masculine expectations, if not voluntarily, that haven't been available to women cf. eunuchs, hijra, priesthood &c.

― ogmor, Sunday, January 12, 2014 9:14 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these seem like pretty outlying and marginal examples to the discussion ITT. I would doubt any of the men in this poll ever considered taking refuge from masculine expectations by becoming a eunuch.

I think it is certainly within the remit of the thread, as some of those roles are what some cultures have traditionally done with gender non-conforming men, or men that would now be classed as trans*. Whether we have any eunuchs or hijra on ILX is another question, though, so it would have to be a discussion "talking about" rather than "talking from the position of". So perhaps it would be a discussion better had on the genderqueer thread? I don't mind, though.

I don't have a problem with eunuchs and hijira being discussed on this thread. I just mean that if we're talking about the restrictiveness of traditional masculinity vs traditional femininity, those classifications don't really change the discussion much for most men.

i.e. "Men historically could be eunuchs" does almost nothing to alleviate the kinds of modern, real-world gender pressures I thought we were talking about

As I see it, there are several braids going on at once in this thread.

One is about the modern, real-world gender pressures that cis people face; the other is about ways of expressing non-binary gender for those who find themselves outside the gender binary.

I don't think "eunuch" is much beyond a historical concept at this point,but hijra certainly still exist in the real modern world, in South Asia.

I guess so - maybe ogmor's comment was part of a different subthread than the one I thought. But the point I was trying to make is that men who don't feel specifically female (or entirely genderless) but who might feel like a binary male/female gender doesn't fit them perfectly are probably less likely to feel comfortable admitting it and more likely to "fall in line" as identifying 100% male. Much in the same way that I suspect "hetero" men are more likely to suppress or ignore whatever homosexual feelings they have, whereas I think women are less so.

Just to point out something which ought to be obvious, but the reason there are so few eunuchs today is because eunuchs in the past did not traditionally choose to become eunuchs, but the procedure was imposed upon them at a young age. It was not a voluntary escape from the role of masculinity.

Eunuchs were much more a byproduct of dynastic politics. A careful reading of Byzantine sources will also show that eunuchs were oftentimes were put in command of armies, hardly the place for the flabby, sneaky, soft-spoken stereotype we see in Hollywood movies. Their inability to father children ensured they could not become emperor, making it safer for the real emperor to invest them with near-imperial powers.

I would doubt any of the men in this poll ever considered taking refuge from masculine expectations by becoming a eunuch.

right, was thinking about the workings of masculinity in general rather than as experienced individually. seems curious how common the idea of a sort of third sex is & how it tends to be made up of ppl born male.

Although I agree with you, that most view "third sex" as male-born ppl rejecting maleness (because in most cultures, who gives a fuck what women do amirite etc) but there is always the counter-example of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_sworn_virgins

new band name

v interesting, i've never heard of the kanun, love how the ottomans indulged this stuff.

Reading these threads with great interest, thx folks.

I'm a cis het dude, but I have a slight frame, somewhat feminine features and wavy long hair, so it is genuinely rare for me to pass a day without being called ma'am and most strangers seem to assume that my girlfriend and I are lesbians. I started embracing it in college, crossdressing a few times a year, etc. Tbh I would do it more, because it's fun and I find it pretty empowering to stop fighting the misidentification for a minute, but I worry that it becomes appropriative past a certain point.

What's kind of interesting to me is how much more comfortable I feel with classically masculine behaviors when I'm wearing a dress or w/e. While I've never felt a strong sense of maleness being "wrong" for me, I tend to have a pretty negative view of it as a whole, and find myself pretty uncomfortable with it. Being a dude doing classically dude things (many of which don't actually have anything to do with maleness, but are just socially coded that way) feels bad, like I'm giving in to this historically destructive force that lives inside me. But when I crossdress, it feels like I'm coming to those behaviors through queer culture, riot grrl, etc, which makes them "okay."

Apologies if this is overly convoluted or vague, I'm still kind of working out what this all means to me.

"Working out what this all means to you" is exactly what this thread is for! So thank you for telling your story, it's a really interesting perspective to hear. I'm kinda wondering what you mean by "appropriative past a certain point"? If you felt like wanted to explain that further, but no big deal if you don't feel comfortable.

(I've been wondering around similar themes myself, lately, like, where "exploration" becomes appropriation, either in terms of cis or cis-ish people "appropriating" trans identities, whatever appropriating means - and also trying to interrogate my discomfort about whether "female" is in itself a marginalised identity, because women are the marginalised sex? It's complicated and I can't explain it. Like, trans in no way implies appropriation. But there's a long feminist discomfort with *cis* men doing drag, whether that's gender exploration as an artform, or a kind of co-opting. I don't know if that's a bullshit idea feminism is trying to outgrow or if there's something to it. But these are only my personal ~issues~ and I'm trying to work through them.)

I guess by appropriative I mean a concern that I'm trespassing in and taking advantage of a space that is rightly reserved for those who need it? Like, I'm a girly fella, but at the end of the day, I'm a basically hetero man, and in the workplace, in my family, when consuming media, etc. I'm treated as such; I have all those privileges. Some people may be a little put off by a skinny dude with long hair, but it's rarely (though not never) put me in danger because my body/self are in conflict with societal norms.

Crossdressing/queer culture feels like a needed refuge that I should be very careful about playing with. I may be overly neurotic about it, idk. I would like to make the distinction between drag and crossdressing, as I've never been particularly interested in the former (at least for myself). If I put on a dress and some makeup, it's with the intention of looking like an average woman you might encounter on the street, not a caricature of/tribute to (depending on your perspective) femininity.

Refuge might be the wrong word, I'm so sorry if my clumsy language offends anyone.

OK, thanks for the clarification. I thought that was what you might have meant, but I just wasn't sure. I think it's a good sign that you're aware of the possibility, that's enough to avoid it. It sounds like you're coming from a really good place, so please don't worry about offence!

I am just having some complicated feelings about a friend (not on ILX) who is going through his own gender journey right now, and some of the things he says really really rub me the wrong way. And I'm 90% sure that it's *my* discomfort and nothing to do with him, and he's doing/saying absolutely nothing wrong (maybe a little naive, but who isn't naive when you start exploring something?) and I'm trying to figure up what is up with *me* that I'm feeling this way. (Or maybe... I don't feel like he's "doing drag" but I do think he is ignoring his male privilege, or rather, *why* women act certain ways, in some respects.)

I've been reading these TERF blogs and while I can understand the wariness some women feel about female/feminine appropriation and commodification, or trans commodification in general, it seems that the line between the "authentic" and the "appropriated" or "commodified" is way too hazy to make a judgement call. And it seems like muddying the gender waters is generally a good thing, that it will lead to something more like a marketplace of gender rather than an imposition of gender.

Do not read TERF blogs, by the way. They are hateful things.

Like, I get that cis-queer/cis-straight-transvestite female performance can reinforce gender stereotypes (or are you talking about a different kind of male privilege I'm not intuiting?), but those brands of femme gender performance undermine masculine gender stereotypes, too. I don't want to say they are always pro-female/-feminine, because I know they can be parodic or misogynistic or just, like, reflexively/narcissistically autoerotic or whatever, but they CAN be and often are pro-female/-feminine.

And maybe making a hard distinction between trans women and cis (?) gender play/gender fluidity/feminine performance reinforces a One True Trans narrative; maybe femme genderqueer people and trans women are more self-realized and more ahead-of-the-curve than the latter more cis-leaning group of people.

That said, I think I get your reservations, at least partly.

OK, it's weird, and I am fully aware that this might be another form of "using the internet to self-harm" but I am completely fascinated/horrified by TERF blogs and pretty much can't stop reading them. I had several friends from the feminist community who suddenly turned TERF (or maybe they always had been, and discovering there were others like them bolstered their courage to speak out about it?) and reading their stuff was like falling down a rabbit hole.

I find TERFs compulsive reading in a way that I don't find, e.g. MRAs interesting, because in so many ways, twist for twist, their logic and beliefs mirror and reflect mine own, right up until the last minute, where I turn left, and they veer off into the right. And I've spent ages trying to figure out where, exactly, we diverge, and why, because "almost right" is way, way more seductive than "not even wrong".

And for me, understanding the idea that some people *do* have a core/innate gender identity has been key to understanding *why* TERFs are wrong. Because I suspect really strongly, that TERFs are women who do not have a strong innate gender identity - and so, because they don't have one, they believe that no one else can possibly have one. It's an easy mistake to make. (But... an inherent part of the whole feminist *project*, as it were, is *believing* that people's self reported experiences are what they say they are, even when they contradict The Privileged View.) So if you put together al these other agreed-upon ideas: Gender *roles* are socially constructed, women are marginalised people, the gender roles assigned to women are de-valued because women are marginalised, women have capabilities and interests way outside their prescribed gender roles, ergo "Gender" itself is kinda bullshit as a concept.

If you put all of these things together when you don't have a clear idea of an innate gender identity, it's very easy to come to the conclusion: "the only thing that makes *me* a woman is my vagina."

However, the moves from "the only thing that makes me a woman is my vagina" to "the only thing that makes *anyone* a woman is her vagina" and "I don't have an innate gender identity" therefore "anyone who says they have an innate gender identity is lying" and on from there to "any male-born person who takes on a female identity is the gender-based equivalent of blackface and ergo just as offensive" <-- these are not logical conclusions you can draw from the above. But without the missing ingredient of an "innate gender identity" they *seem* logically possible.

This is already "tl;dr" so I'm going to hit submit before I go on to "drag" and maybe even the intersection of "male privilege" with this stuff, but I doubt anyone will x-post in this time zone.

"Drag" and "Gender play" and "exploring gender fluidity" and "deriving a sexual charge from dressing as the opposite sex" and "dressing as another gender just to see what it's like" are a big gunnysack of things which are sometimes closely related, sometimes not related at all, which all get dropped into the same bucket. I'm going to try *not* to treat them as if they were all the thing, and talk about "Drag" though there may be some "gender play" mixed in as well.

Drag, specifically, cis men cross-dressing as women as an art-form or performance (though I recognise there is obviously F to M drag, it is seldom as politically problematic) - there are so many ways in which this manifests. Like any other artform, it can "punch" in different ways. There are definitely ways (pantomime dames, some drag routines) in which *women* (either individually, or as a group) or "trans people" are the target. This is not OK; this is never OK. There are other ways, in which "femininity" itself can be made the target. This is still definitely questionable, depending on how much it is understood *why* women perform femininity. "It is terrible and shallow and ridiculous to conform to femininity" is a bad, bad message. "Femininity is kind of a weird and arbitrary thing, and why do we give it so much importance in women and not allow it in men?" is a better message. Which brings me to the third kind of drag, which is drag which "punches" at that whole idea of "gender performance" itself. Both "femininity" and "masculinity" are up for examination and interrogation and championing "femme" and subverting "masculinity" are part of the performance. And this, on the whole is a very, very *good* thing. Then there is "gender-flipping" which isn't even "drag" on the classic level, but is definitely on this continuum, because it's putting "women" in male roles and "men" in female roles, in order to highlight the gross inequalities of gender roles. And this is one of the most powerful and effective tools there is to combat the gender binary.

These categories aren't set in stone, though, and there can be a great deal of fluidity and movement within a single performance, whereby it can move from one to the other. And that requires reading and interpretation and context in order to understand. It's complicated, and I recognise that these things are complex, rather than taking a hardline "drag is terrible!" vs "drag is GREBT!" stance.

And as complicated as all this stuff is, the "discomfort with male privilege" thing is more complicated, still, and I don't know that this is the place for me to think through my thoughts aloud on it.

It comes down to the question: What *creates* Privilege? *Being* something? Or being *treated* as if you were something?

I do think the latter has as much of (if not more than) an effect on creating both "Privilege" and the blindness to that quality as being Privilege.

But this is about Intersectionality, and how having marginalisation on one axis does not erase privilege on another. And it's also about "Passing" and the differences between "being" and "being able to be treated as" but so far as I know, no one except Lex has expressed a desire to have a thread on the complicated politics of passing, as it relates to immigration, race, gender, sexuality, class, and a whole bunch of other things tied in a big knot.

A+ posts BB, thanks

i'd be up for a passing thread if people felt there were issues not suitable for one of the existing priv/race/gender threads

i feel like the relationship between passing and priv is tied up with a lot of contingent things like "how often" and "to what ends?" it doesn't feel to me as if privilege automatically settles on yr shoulders like a cloak of invisibility at any moment when you pass for a more privileged status, because the priv is always stolen and liable to be revoked, maybe

but then is all privilege susceptible to that? is it possible to lose even yr male or white priv in some situations? don't mean purely in intersectional terms but in actual conditions at which a person's gender or race might simply be unacknowledged or challenged

not sure if passing needs a separate thread - feels like a natural fit for the existing priv/race ones (and i don't think i have any thoughts-at-length i need to write about it!) - but feel free if you do of course

I am was about to start a "passing" thread, due to the old Greenspun "Rule of 3" (x-post to Lex, bah) but I just wanted to say this...

I do think that there are aspects of male privilege, in specific, that are not about *being* male, but about "having been raised as if one *was* male" and therefore create a sense of expectations and entitlements in male-raised people, as well as a lack of awareness that those expectations *are* a privilege, that not everyone shares.

When a person who was raised as a cis male asserts that actually they are trans*, that set of male-taught expectations/entitlements are not *erased* by the marginalisation incurred by *being* and *being treated as* trans. They intersect.

(Just as my set of privileges for being a White person are not *erased* by my being an immigrant twice/three times over; however, they do *intersect* in tangible ways.)

The problem is, often if you say this to a trans woman or a Male-raised trans* person, they interpret it as "YOU ARE TERRIBLE" or "you don't have trans marginalisation" or "transmisogyny" or other incorrect assumptions. "You have privilege" means "you were assigned a set of cards, some of which were never even given to other people." You are not responsible for the cards you hold, but you do need to remain aware that other people hold different cards. Holding a good card in one suite does not mean you are not holding another, really bad card, in another suite. But that does mean that that first card, the good one exists, so please keep it in mind that other people do not. (Just as Cis women need to keep in mind that they are holding cards which trans* folk are not.)

I completely understand that this can *read* as transmisogyny, and in many cases, the attitude does go hand in hand with genuine transmisogyny. I'm trying to tease apart the nugget of sense from all the TERF madness, to understand where it comes from. And I also recognise I do have a huge dose of internalised transphobia generated by nearly 2 decades of trying to live in the closet. I'm working on that, but I do think there's a core of truth to be dug out.

Both cards that were "never actually given" and also cards which were "taken away, sometimes by force."

^^^this defines both female marginalisation, *and* trans* marginalisation.

(And I feel icky and gross and transmisogynistic for articulating my thoughts so poorly. But I still have my thoughts and need to work through them.)

when you pass for a more privileged status, because the priv is always stolen and liable to be revoked, maybe

I guess this is another thing about the "I'm not like those other girls" schtick which I admit I leaned on sometimes when younger

not only is it rude/hypocritical/narcissistic/counterproductive (what's wrong with "other girls"? are all other girls "other girls"? wouldn't it be more helpful to persuade people to rethink their stereotypes of "girl" rather than say, "yes, girls ARE like that, except for me"? I'm talking mainly to myself 15 years ago here)

but also, you're making an overt bid for a tiny parcel of male privilege, and it comes with a very short half-life and a high chance of getting your presumption handed back to you, "so we agree that girls are inferior, and you're inferior too" or "huh at least those other girls are ~pretty~"

in further confessions of myself at half my age, I used to have some pretty transphobic attitudes from annoyance that men seemed more able to opt out of manhood into womanhood whereas it seemed all I could opt out of womanhood into was failed womanhood, and a totally unfounded suspicion that they did so because of/by means of emphasis on ideas of womanhood that felt completely alien to me (I suppose because of that "no core sense of gender identity" => "not accepting others may have a core sense of gender identity" thing). but then I actually met some of these Others and realised that
1. it's not actually like that at all;
2. the tiny extent that it is like that is solely due to the transphobic world we live in, so the solution is to be more openminded, not less;
3. this shit is difficult and more power to anyone with the strength and perspicacity to deal with it

(I probably still slip up tho so feel free to call me out, though, uh, this post itself may well need calling out, for which I apologise but if you could keep to calling out the bits I haven't already acknowledged as wrong that would be great, thx)

Yeah, those are very very good points, Spacecadet, and echo many of my thoughts and experiences. (I think I hit on "the qualities of 'girl' are way, way bigger than your stereotypes" earlier, as a way of coping.) But I also had (and to some extent still have) those feelings of "men can become trans women, I can only become a failed girl" - but part of this was due to the whole narrative about trans people, in every goddamn media, was always trans women, trans women, trans women - and I didn't even know that trans men were a real, actual, possible thing in the world until about a decade ago, when I started to meet some - while on the Ladyfest tour, of all places! And part of it was due to those endless accusations, you know, "fucking feminists, they all just want to be men, really." (And what if I secretly did? Was that un-sisterly to the cause? Or just proving anti-Feminists right?)

Except all of these things are due to, well, misogyny, at the base of it.

And the solution is to be more openminded, not less. And to open spaces up, rather than close them down.

And yet, and yet, and yet... I am going to hit submit post now because I have finished replying to things in your post, Spacecadet, and have "examination-needing annoyance at this person on social media" rattling around in my head still, and don't want to mix the two up.

OK, I have thought a lot about this, and while I am still thinking this through, I believe I have got to the nub of the matter, as to why this friend - who I do support and feel like I should be encouraging - is actually on other levels, making me very annoyed, in ways which make me suspect that the annoyance says more about *me* than it does about *them*. They are *out*, and very into online advocacy, so I don't think it's *wrong* to discuss my feelings about them, though I do feel somewhat guilty and maybe underhanded about talking about them, rather than talking with them. (Though, really, how is this different from the "complain about your annoying co-workers" thread, in this regard?)

This person, who is male assigned at birth, has come out as bigender, and has been exploring their feminine gender. Which is interesting, and great, and in many ways a brave, strong, positive move to be making. So why I am so irritated by them in way that I do *not* get irritated at, say, Rev, when Rev puts on a skirt and says he feels very femme.

The last time it happened, the super-irritation, this person said something to the effect of "I am not a man in drag when I'm (in dress, wig, make-up, etc) I am a girl." And at this, my jerk-brain just went "NNNNNOPE!" And I had to think, why? Why am I so resistant to this idea? If a friend told me she was a trans woman, I'd say "Right. You are a girl." If a friend told me they were genderqueer and had masculine and feminine aspects, I'd agree and say "Yes! You are genderqueer!" So why am I so irritated at this person, saying that when dressed as a girl, they are a girl? Do I think they're guilty of (what I called upthread "the gender based equivalent of 'if you called your dad he could stop it all'")? No, I don't. They're super full-on committed to LGBT rights and feminism and living their activism, even if it's kind of a young, enthusiastic Tumblr-y way. So *why* am I still irritated? It must be me.

I started to think about myself. When I play with power tools, and then put on a suit and feel super-manly; and then lookit pictures of hott indie-rock dudes, and think "Right now, I don't feel like a girl desiring men, right now, I feel like man desiring men." - this is what I think: I feel like a man. I feel, specifically, like a gay man right now. Does merely feeling that way *make* me a gay man? It does not. I might *feel* like a gay man, but I *am* still a mind in a meat-locker; a meat-locker that has a vagina and bleeds once a month. If I decided that *feeling* like a gay man gave me the right to waltz into the Gay Threads and say "Hey, guys, I'm feeling really gay right now, give me some tips for how to get the santorum stains off my suit after I bang Interpol in the butt!" I would be laughed out of the fucking room. And rightfully so, because I would feel like I was trespassing on an identity that other people suffer oppression for living in.

So this is what annoys: why the hell does this person get to declare that they "are" a girl when dressed like a girl, when I can only ever get as far as I "feel like" a man when I am wearing a man's suit and fantasising about Daniel Kessler sucking my dick? Is it because I don't have a dick? Or is it because of something in the whole ugly process of being raised-as-a-girl, I have never been taught that I could just *be* and be accepted as being - I always had to justify, I could *seem* or *feel like* or *appear to be* - but just to say "I am this because my say-so entitles me to be"? Not without having to prove it. It's the whole thing many of us keep circling on this thread: do I not have a gender identity because I just don't have one; or do I not have a gender identity because I've been taught to second guess every aspect of my identity that doesn't conform to lousy stereotypes; or because I've been taught that my body will always be second-best, and the other kind is much, much better, but I will never have the *right* to the "best" kind, just this ugly failed girlhood.

So this is, completely, not about him at all. It is about me. And the right to say "I am a body" as opposed to always feeling "I have a body" is an expression of high-grade privilege, and fuck your privilege. In tailored suits and chelsea boots.

Ugh, I am basically a horrible person for thinking all of this.

I dunno, dude (heh), it would annoy me too.

I'm not very well versed in matters of privilege and identity, these are things I rub up against but don't worry about articulating very often. I have friends, relatives, acquaintances and co-workers of all stripes, and thus far nobody has pulled me up for treading on their identities although I suspect I am dreadfully clumsy and they are just polite.

I'm one of those vagina-owners who does not 'get' the desire to identify strongly with a set of prescribed gender norms. I this the most useful definition of gender is 'social construct', leaving the biology and anything that flows directly from the biology to the term 'sex'. Ergo there can be no such thing as 'innate' gender.

'Core' gender on the other hand, well, what the fuck is that supposed to be anyway? Does having one mean one is completely 100% happy identifying with the gender norms associated with one's biological sex? In one's own culture / society / family / house / knicker drawer? What? How can a gender identity ever be *core*, when gender seems to be a) highly personal and b) hard to define and c) fluid (on an individual and cultural level)?

If you need to invent a new gender to describe each person's preferred gender performance, what's the point of having a concept called gender at all? Is it a useful label? Let's say you get tribes of people coalescing around common gender-performance preferences (e.g. sewing and wearing skirts) but the sewing-and-skirts gender can (must, imo) include people of any sex & orientation. What's the utility of it? How does the group identity get maintained, other than by policing of the kind that harms those people who cannot quite meet the requirements?

So yeah, I get pissed off when people say things like 'when I do x I am being a girl', but I get just as pissed off no matter who's doing it, because there is no definition of 'girl' that isn't either idiotic and false (wearing a skirt) or problematic (having a vadge).

'I think', not 'I this'.

Heh. "Dude" is fine, though I've had to train myself out of using it as a gender-neutral form of address, it's just funny when female-persons use it to one another.

I kinda need to stop talking about this for a day or so, because I fear it is becoming thoughtwormy. (Says a person who will probably go on to talk about it at length.) And I'm also realising that annoyance at this person is, really, "annoyance at overly simplistic counters to a bunch of TERF and True Trans Narratives which are really quite complex and nuanced, being reduced down to 140 character slogans" as much as anything else.

But the thing is, if other people insist that they *do* have a sense of innate or core gender, or at least a sense that their genitals do (or don't) align with their sense of what sex they are or should be - who the hell are we to tell them they don't? One can only ever take people at their word, or be an asshole and deny others' personal experience. I can only accept others' self reported descriptions of their selves at face values; that is how I maintain my right to assert that I am, indeed, the way I am, even if that way is different to them.

I can only agree that "being a girl" is not synonymous with definitions that are either idiotic and false, or problematic. But I do not know what the acid test for "girlness" might even be!

http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/4403-a-machine-that-helps-women-feel-sex-like-a-man-

worst Rex Harrison song ever

does anybody know anything worth reading on gender expression and ways in which it intersects with/evades commodity consumption?

I forgot about this thread. I've been thinking about having a discussion on here about trans/gender/feminism stuff (then inwardly groaning and walking away) for some time because this thread articulates a lot of what I don't understand. But I think one-to-one discussions have been more helpful than messageboard arguments.

I saw this pop up the other day and started writing something really long, then deleted it. I've been having a lot of thoughts recently about my place on the gender spectrum, and really want to talk about it. I feel like this is a safe space to do it because I'm relatively anonymous here -- nobody here knows me IRL or can connect to my social media presence except the few ILXors who are connected to me on Twitter. The only people I've ever discussed any of this with are my wife and a couple of therapists. But it's very nerve wracking to think about discussing publicly or quasi-publicly.