@FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic ime, you know it when you are denied it or it is coerced upon you.

When I came out as gay, that's when I was confronted by it. It wasn't really an issue for me before then (masking and gender, sure, but it didnt make me question anything).

You feel it when someone tries to tell you who you are or are not. A voice or feeling inside that replies, NO!

@FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic for me, being told that being attracted to women is a masc thing.

It's ridiculous now. But at the time I did believe it. And I believed that lesbians were *all* butch, and a whole bunch of other shit too.

For me, it's the voice saying "fuck you, liking women is now officially a woman thing".

@marytzu @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic

I get reacting against being forced into a role that doesn't fit - like a male or female stereotype. Two responses:

1) society's gender expectations/categories are wrong.

2) I have a real internal gender different from what soc assigns.

I don't have a sense of internal non-imposed gender so went for 1). But I'm curious about what prompts 2) & if it's a +ive feel not a negation, & if most cis people have the same.

@FrightenedRat @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic I suspect that if you have no strong feelings about it, you are cis.

Only oneself can define oneself, though.

Cis isn't a bad word. It's just an adjective that may or may not describe you.

@marytzu @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic

But mightn't strong gender feelings tie to the 2 types of understanding above?

On the gender=normative language view, if someone (S)hes me & I don't notice behavioural assumptions, it doesn't impact my identity: I don't react. But to the extent that I notice their (S)he-ing invoking norms I'm 😡.

But on the gender-words-truly-map-to-internal-genders-with-matching-properties view, then all (mis)gendering invades id?

@marytzu @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic
Gosh - looking at what I wrote 🔝 it seems I think gender language is muddled normative mess.

Most accept the historical norms as functional.

Some dismantle the concepts or try to reform them in a progressive logical way.

Some ... eh .. take the words literally?? As in begin from the view that the messy words do mean what they say ie map to something real. And, from that start, work to fix the mismatch with irl.
??

@marytzu @RolloTreadway @GTMLosAngeles @autistic.me @actuallyautistic

I'm aware that I'm thinking aloud about stuff which I truly don't understand, and which is really vitally important to others. And that's usually a bad look.

I really don't want to upset or offend anyone - my goal is always understanding, and the less I understand the more desperately I feel the need to make sense.

Apologies for my blundering. If anyone has the time energy & will to school me I'd be grateful.

@FrightenedRat @marytzu @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic

I am only seeing part of the conversation (I don't get toots from mastodon.social), but what I see you posting does not appear to be blundering at all to me. The thought process that you trace out is very common, I think, at least among folks of my era and culture.

One of the things I learned only in the past decade is how NOT historical the current gender norms are. The norms are strong, but not due to the weight of history, and the purpose those norms serve may be (i think is) nefarious and oppressive.

All of which feels true and relevant and worth addressing in our lives and politics and parenting ... and, as it happens, has very little to do with my gender identity.

What I had been carrying with me until last week was the collection of accommodations, adjustments, and apprehension that allowed me to pass as a cisgender male - not perfectly well, but no one ever achieves perfection in gender. It is not that I took the words literally, but the words literally took me and formed me to be a certain way.

And I had no idea. I never attributed any of the various discomforts (way too mild a word for what I have felt) as related to gender identity. Not even when I faced gender identity crises with my children. I understood, falsely, my decades of gender performance as my identity.

Only by imagining a conversation with my self as a child did that understanding crack. The key phrase that kept bouncing around my head last week was "You don't have to be a girl to like those things ... and you don't have to be a boy either." All I needed was that space, that choice between not just two options but among all of the wide open space near and far away from those two options.

The absolute certainty I have now about what that child I imagine would have felt makes my half-hearted conformity to cisgender male seem such a sham - a sham to myself. I dishonor myself by validating that wrong framework around my identity.

Right now, I am not doing anything with that information other than talking about it rather anonymously. I am not using that information to change the way I behave in public or professional settings - well, maybe a tiny bit, but no pronoun changes or letters to family or such. In other words, if I am in any way dismantling the patriarchy with my new comprehension, then I am doing it only inside my head.

@FrightenedRat @marytzu @RolloTreadway @autistic.me @actuallyautistic

"Do you want to try one of the dresses?"
"Well, no, I'm not a girl!"
"Ok. You don't have to be a girl to like these clothes, you know."
"Yeah, I guess not." Still sighing, still looking down.
"Just between you and me, kid, you don't have to be a boy, either."
The child looked up, eyes glinting. "Really?!"