A simple question I posted for research purposes on Tumblr. I’m curious to read your (likely un-simple) answers 🙂
How do you describe your gender?
A simple question I posted for research purposes on Tumblr. I’m curious to read your (likely un-simple) answers 🙂
genderqueer.me 
Agender fluid child (call me boy but NEVER man)
Imagine a venn-diagram type of thing: trans –> transmasculine –> non-binary –> demigender –> picoboy, as in a very small boy. Also lots of other things, I like words and making up new ones for my identity. Muunsukupuolinen means non-binary in Finnish (lit. other gender, adjective), and when you remove one ‘u’ so that it becomes munsukupuolinen, it means “my gender-y”!!! I don’t think words can ever describe all the aspects of my gender, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. 🙂
In swedish there’s a word – intergender, meaning in between genders. That’s me – both man and woman, and neither.
I’m old school. I simply identify as a guy, and only use the trans adjective when referencing our collective uniqueness, or when talking about transitioning itself.
Internally genderqueer, externally male. Androgyne as a descriptor, transgender as a general identifier – but neither are identity. I see genderqueer (meaning, for me, passing between genders and encompassing more than one), and male as part of my identity.
When I throw out the jargon and try to describe my sense of my gender, I come up with Christopher Robin (A.A. Milne, not the Disneyfied version), or basically a gray haired sweet boy who doesn’t throw punches.
In jargon terms I identify as a transgender butch. I like transgender because it encompasses the whole range of transition and change, and allows for you to move around without being pinned down to one narrow definition or endpoint. I keep butch for historical reasons.
“Not what you think”? Words I like are genderqueer, non-binary, boydyke (especially boydyke), or just plain trans.
I don’t really describe it. If anyone me this question, I pretty much just sigh. Do they have any sort of starting point to understand how difficult this is, or what my answers might mean? But in this place right here, I guess I can say “genderqueer and femme” and maybe you’ll have some idea – or maybe not. Who knows? 🙂
Male 🙂
Gender neutral, transmasculine, and non-binary. =]
Cute, feyboi, crone, plastic..?
I don’t describe it to anybody, but in my mind, male.
Transgender, mostly female, all around tomboy! 🙂
Complicated.
Reblogged this on Alex's Transformation.
nonbinary, sometimes a sister, sometimes a son, always a kid
I don’t, usually. Agender. Abstaining from the entire thing, to the best of my abilities. (Except in the workplace, where I’m not out as such.)
Genderfluid, non binary, dyke
80% neutral, 29% male and 1% female.
Both, None, and/or Other.
I mostly call myself androgyne, but how I actually feel is difficult to describe. I don’t feel like a woman or a man. When I think of those groupings of people, I don’t feel like I belong to either. Nor do I really feel like a mixture of both. Traitwise, I suppose I have both feminine and masculine traits. (I think most people do, to some degree; though how one can define a trait as masculine or feminine to begin with is a murky subject itself). In my mind, gender isn’t determined by traits. A woman can have masculine traits, and a man can have feminine traits.
So, why don’t I feel like a woman with masculine traits, then? Is it due to dysphoria with my female body? Maybe I don’t feel like a woman, because I don’t like having a female body? How can I be a woman, if I dislike (don’t identify with) the very thing that in most people’s minds makes a person a woman? Maybe I feel more like a man with feminine traits, than a woman with masculine traits. Though, that isn’t exactly it either. I wouldn’t want a completely male body either.
I feel plain, normal, undefined. But that’s more a lack of gender identity, than an identify. Calling myself plain, undefined, neutral, or agendered doesn’t sound particularly flattering. So when I want to describe myself in more positive terms, I choose a gender that appeals to me, something other than male or female, something both and/or neither. That’s what Androgyne is to me.
@Darkoshi … how you describe yourself is exactly how I feel, and well done doing this as I completely agree with difficulty . It’s as if the necessary vocabulary doesn’t exist yet.
As an answer to the original Q about how I (would like to) identify, I personally prefer Pangender …but can’t reiterate enough the sentiments in a lot of the posts that it’s so difficult to explain…
When I tell people the best way I found to get them to understand, is to ask them to think of one thing about themselves that they couldn’t be more SURE of…they don’t need to tell you what it is, they just need to be honest with themselves about the answer..that one thing that no-one can change their mind about..could be their gender identity, sexuality or their opinion on Marmite..doesn’t matter as long as they’re sure…that sureness is how I feel about my GI..I am me and “me” there seems to be no word for…but I do like Pan.
The comment about not getting why personality traits are associated with gender and are clumped into only two categories really spoke to me. (I’m logical, verbal, emotional, completely non-macho, completely fashion-challenged.)
My gender expression is mostly non-femmey female– long hair, no makeup, no shaving, but enjoying and showing off curvy body. I’m fine with ‘she’ pronouns. I wear neutral practical clothes (bright colors, simple light dresses in the hot summer, good warm gear in the winter).
I’ve never felt like either, but i’m not neutral either. The gender terms that work for me are nonbinary, non-cis, and ‘lumbering pixie’ — the only other person I know who seems similarly ‘lumbering pixie’ is my brother (though he identifies as a cis gay man, also neither femme nor butch).
I describe my gender by using terms such as trans-feminine agender child/boy. Being called a man is jarring, that’s one of the many things I learned when I transitioned from female to male. I don’t identify with being a man or a male in today’s society, nor do I identify as female or a woman.
At heart, I am a child who has their body before puberty changed it into a female and of my own choice, testosterone to develop male sexual characteristics. A deep voice and excess body/facial hair causes me intense dysphoria (something I was not expecting as I had embraced my identity as a male) as the child within wants to keep my body smooth, hairless with ambiguous genitalia … not displaying traits of both sexes. Voice therapy to gain a gender neutral voice and shaving slowly eases the body dysphoria.
When I was born, I had a birth condition that meant my genitals were more masculine than feminine, the doctors were discussing whether or not to perform “corrective” surgery on my enlarged clitoris and thankfully, they decided against it. I grew up believing I was a boy, that I could pee standing up like my father… when it failed (due to the anatomical differences that I was unaware of), I convinced myself that puberty would fix my body so I could pee standing up. When puberty came and the “talk”, it dawned upon me that I was not a boy, I was a female… thus began my decade-long hatred and rejecting anything feminine, in fear that if I did enjoy feminine activities, that I would be seen as female, something I detested being. While transitioning, I learned that gender expression does not equate your gender identity, e.g. enjoying feminine activities doesn’t invalidate your identity as a male. I began to enjoy femininity and discovered I really enjoy it as a boy. My parents see me dabbling in “traditionally feminine activities” such as buying make-up and they ask why I am buying that, that why would a man want to wear make-up… I appreciate them accepting me as a male but… expecting me to adhere to a stereotypical male lifestyle is damaging – I will be miserable, if not more miserable than I was trying to attempt to “fit in” as a female.
Whew, that ended up being a little too long than expected… Sorry! Thank you for asking this question, it has brought me clarity about my identity more than I had before. I was previously struggling with my identity and thinking that I might as well detransition back to female because I enjoy the thought of having long hair, curves and free to wear dresses but writing above has solidified the fact that no, going back to being female would be devastating.
Well, you see most people think of gender as a strict binary system of male and female; but from a non-binary, non-normative perspective it’s more like a big ball of gendy-bendy, ziry-queery …stuff
You are wonderful. I’m glad you exist.
(The life-sized David-Tennant-in-10th-Doctor-Costume cardboard cutout by my bed also approves.)
Agender.
As a child, I wondered if maybe I was “supposed” to be a boy and had just been given the wrong body/parts. But it didn’t take me very long to realize that I didn’t really feel like a boy. I wanted a penis, but I didn’t feel like a boy. I just didn’t feel like a girl either.
I still don’t feel like a boy or a girl, a man or a woman. There are certain aspects of different genders that I enjoy at times, but that doesn’t make those genders part of my gender identity any more than enjoying curry makes me Indian.
Honestly, after my brief moment of gender confusion as a child, I never really gave my gender much thought at all. Recently, it’s come up a few times and each time has sort of re-inforced for me that gender just doesn’t seem to be a thing for me.
Talking with my mother about what makes us “us”… things like “woman”, “mother”, and “wife” topper her list. And I realized that, for me, gender didn’t even make the list.
The more I talk to people about gender, the more I realize that I don’t really understand gender. It makes my head hurt. I can sympathize with gender issues on a superficial level, but I cannot empathize since I’m still blocked on trying to figure out what having a gender feels like.
That said, I still want a penis. That’s not a gender thing though, it’s a sex thing. Sex is much easier for me to understand.
Due to the fact that I don’t really want to get rid of my breasts or my vagina but I’d also like a penis (and possibly also things like more muscle mass, a deepr voice, and facial hair), I’ve decided that “androgyne” is probably also a valid descriptor. It just describes my sexual identity rather than my gender identity.
Basically it goes like this: ???????
If I could pick and choose how people saw me, I would say that I want to be seen by cisgender males as male, the trans* community as trans*, and cisgendered females as not-fully female, but still one of them. I don’t want to stop being a female or being seen as female, especially since I’ve spent so much of my life as one and being partially happy. I feel there is more for me in the middle of the spectrum, or maybe it’s best to say I’m bigender. It’s such a difficult thing to explain, especially when you haven’t gone any further than questioning and coming out as such.
“Somewhere between Ellen DeGeneres and David Tennant.”
It gets exactly the strange expression I think it deserves, and it’s OH SO PRECISELY ACCURATE.
The easiest thing would be to call myself a straight female. After all, I have breasts, a vagina, a clitoris and a boyfriend with a penis. However, it is slightly more complicated than that:
Basically it’s like this: I’m a person who happens to be female. In elementary school I simply felt as “not a boy”, then in high school I felt like a gay man locked in a woman’s body, and now I’m simply a person who is a she, but not really a woman. More neutral. And my friends are all of the more neutral kind too, the kind of people who generally don’t make much fuss about gender. I have more in common with my father and my male friends than I have with “women in general”.
I like my breasts and don’t mind having a vagina, but I hate having a clitoris. Although I enjoy having sex with my boyfriend, it’s mostly that I love being near him and close to him. I hate being physically aroused, and will masturbate only in the hope of ceasing to be aroused. I like my boyfriend’s penis because it’s part of him, but generally thing sexual organs are something weird. I’d rather be part of an egg-laying species.
I’d love to be a dad, but I would hate to be a mother. I don’t want my personality to get erased, I don’t want to be pregnant, I don’t want to give birth, I don’t want to breastfeed, but I’d love to spread my genes. I’d love it if humans were more like birds.
I like having curves, but I also want to be strong and muscled. But not like bodybuilder females. Female clothing generally looks stupid on me, or at least I feel stupid when I look in the mirror. I love jewelry, but most of it doesn’t ‘fit’ me. I generally fancy both men and women, as long as they aren’t macho or overly feminine; it’s more a type of person than a gender that I like. Not fancying a person because of their genitals seems like a very odd thing to me that I can’t really comprehend.
So I’m a neutral she-person who likes androgynous/neutral people. Most of all I just feel like I don’t belong, like I will never ever fit in.
And I hate filling in a gender on forms. It feels intrusive, unnecessary and stupid.
Agender null. I have to strategize and consciously think about how to pretend to be my assigned gender, and I don’t identify with either side. If someone magically genderswapped me, I’d have to pretend to be the other gender and have people make exciting new and different wrong assumptions about me instead.
Totally adorable child of unspecified gender. Likes pretty dresses. And building things. And hugs. Emotional and easy to frighten. Asexual. Thinks naked people touching each other is weird. Prefers female words, but only because they sound prettier. Very friendly. Thinks adults make things too complicated.
I consider myself a woman, but not in contraposition to man. Mostly, I am a person, and I identify myself about a 90% with what is generally considered “feminine”. But, even when I was born and raised as a girl, and I like boys, I still feel that a binary model is not right for me. I feel more in some point of a continuous line, closer to femininity than to masculinity.
Until recently I’ve always thought of myself as a cis female, because I really hadn’t thought about gender very deeply, and I didn’t feel like it was causing problems for me. I don’t really like the gender expectations my society has for women, though, and I mentally reject them while feeling I must outwardly conform to them. The more i read and learn and look, the more I reject not just the notion of my femininity, but the idea of gender entirely. I’m questioning, reading, and learning, but I don’t know what (if anything) to really do.
I struggle to. I consider myself to be in possession of Shroedinger’s Gender, both girl and not-girl. I would open the box, but the box does a lot of yelling and running away and I’m moderately certain it bites.
(I am absolutely certain it bites. One does not simply prise the lid off of Shroedinger’s Gender Box.)
I have a complicated relationship with the concept of being a ‘woman’, but feel no uncertainty about the fact I’m definitely not a ‘man’. I grew up partly as a girl and partly as a child, and find myself lost for a current word for myself that isn’t simply ‘an adult person’. (Which feels really detached, and I wish there was a nice and familiar word for a person who is neither a man nor a woman.)
Transmasculine is a lovely word and I’d love to apply it to myself, but I consider myself neither trans (at least, not most of the time – some days I wonder why on earth I don’t when I’m clearly not quite what I was assumed to be) or…masculine. Not in mannerism, at least, and not really in appearance. Someone on a forum once said I might be ‘transgender butch’, but perhaps ‘nonbinary soft butch’ might have been more apt.
A lesbian, though. Definitely a big gay. I sometimes think that if I weren’t into women (and feel so damn gay about it) maybe the whole gender thing would feel less complicated!
The only thing I can easily and succinctly say about my gender at the moment is that I’m almost certain I’m a ‘them’. So at least there’s one thing I can be sure of, at least for now.
my gender is,, weird. im not so sure about it. on one hand, i dont have any problem being called a girl, but on the other hand, i dont feel any strong connection to it either. i dont really feel any connection to ANY gender. the closest label ive found for what im feeling is apogender, which is a subset of agender, where you feel not only genderless, but entirely removed from the concept of gender. however, unfortunately, that label feels iffy as well. i try not to think about it too much, as gender is made up anyway. i go by she/her or they/them pronouns, and thats all anyone needs to know.
My gender: meh close enough