ask any questions about gender that you have. i'm not gonna jump down your throat and i'll be as helpful as i can. whether you need affirmation, are questioning your gender alignment, or just need someone to talk to, i'm here! please message me if you want anything specific tagged. *this is a peer support blog and i am not a medical professional*
identity labels are just tools, so use them if they are useful to you! if asexuality, demisexuality, aesthetic attraction etc help you understand yourself or find other people to connect with, go ahead and play with those colors in the crayon box with wild abandon. you dont have to let go of any other labels either. depending on the context i will call myself gay, ace, a man, a thing, a girl in the gay way, and now even bi :) and theyre all true and not only because i am insane and probably some kind of undiffentiated plural. we are all prisms. let different hues in you shine when they catch the light
my craziest take is you can be cis in a trans way if you feel like it. Like its literally no big deal. if you wanna be completely cisgender but still feel as if you're alienated from your agab then you can be cis in a trans way
Hi, I have a gender curiosity. I am afab, and identify with the label of genderqueer.
I feel most comfortable and mentally have a goal of looking outwardly like a guy. It feels good, makes me happy, all good things. I also wish that socially, boys perceived me as one of them automatically and treated me as if i was a cis guy. I also tend to get dysphoric about girl things.
Yet, I'm not comfortable with actually being called a boy, or son, or words that are rigidly masculine like that. When I was younger (like below the age of ten) and other kids would tell me "you look like a boy" I would tell them with my whole chest, "I'm not a boy." that's still my response today when I recieve any type of comments like that, and then I catch myself thinking "didn't you spend an hour and a half this morning making yourself appear this way on purpose???" I still enjoy the way i look and think it feels right and like me. I find myself wishing that I want it to be simpler, and that I could "just be trans ftm" but I'm not.
I wouldn’t use a label like "demiboy" because it feels way too "sliding chart between boy and girl" for me.
The best way i feel comfortable describing my feelings is "boy, but as far away from the binary as humanly possible".
Can you offer any reassurance or advice? Or, just your thoughts on the situation? If not that's totally fine :)
Thank you!
whoops i haven’t checked my inbox in a while and this is from last year, but it’s an interesting question and maybe this will help somebody else lol
i’ll say first - being a genderqueer butch is awesome and identifying with masculinity outside of the gender binary is awesome. i don’t think you need to feel any negativity about exploring that space even when people misunderstand you or your intention.
your childhood story in the third paragraph reminded me of experiences i had before i started my ftm transition. i was always a ‘tomboy’ and very tall, and all through school other kids would tell me i looked like a boy. i experienced this as an othering - they were perceiving a difference in me that i didn’t yet understand and couldn’t articulate beyond that i knew i didn’t fit in.
it makes sense that those types of comments still make you push back, because it’s hitting such a negative connotation for you. i think working with a queer therapist to unpack some of that stuff might go a long way, just speaking from my own experience again. now that you’re making an effort to present more masc, finding a way to recontextualize those kinds of comments might help - in their own imperfect way, people are recognizing your effort to look like yourself!
hi, i'm having questions about my gender!! i've had them for a few years now so if you have any ideas on what this could be i'd appreciate any pointers.
i'm afab and don't really mind being seen as my assigned gender at birth but all the same being referred to as a girl doesn't feel quite right to me yk? and honestly i'd rather when people look at me they just don't really think about what my gender is at all and rather perceive me as a person. but all the same i don't think i'd say i have zero connection with femininity, like if people had to mistake me for something i'd rather it be a girl than a boy. but at the same time, i don't feel like a girl all that much, if at all…
i'm sorry for the ramble, but if you could help me out it'd mean a lot to me!! thank you!!
‘what this could be’ made me smile - i think it could be a very very common human experience shared by cis and trans people alike.
many cis women share your feeling of not being quite 100% at home in womanhood or having a strong internal sense of their gender - one of my best friends from childhood has said similar things to me, but wouldn’t call herself not cis. it was also feelings like that, plus intense physical dysphoria, that made me feel transitioning was the best choice for me.
i would rather be mistaken for a guy than a lady, but to this day i don’t feel a super strong sense of myself as a ‘man’ when i’m not in a social situation. at home by myself i’m just vibing. feeling at home in my body and having close friends who understand where i’m coming from make some of that social pressure not matter as much to me - it’s like if the people in my circle get me, i don’t really care if the rest of the world doesn’t.
i hope you can find those places where you feel the most comfortable just as a person. i think it’s up to you how you get there and what feels right for you. i would also be happy to give more like specific suggestions if you want to follow up!
There is like one definition of bisexuality I've heard that I think is pretty much perfect: attraction to genders like your own and genders unlike your own. No need for overly complex definitions with stupid qualifiers that are simultaneously narrow and describe something that doesn't really matter in practice or doesn't work like that. No need for splitting it into 20 other microlabels. A very concise, elegant and practical definition.
hi . im entirely unfamiliar with you and your blog i just have a burning question about gender so im asking every random person i see. do you think it’s appropriate for me, as a trans guy, to identify with the label “eunuch”? asking because i mostly see trans girls iding with this but ive seen (trans girls/other trans guys/random others) refer to trans guys as this as well. IDK bye forever
i haven’t heard anything about this personally so i’ll just say do some research on the past and current use of the word and see if you feel it applies to you? i wouldn’t use it to refer to others unless you know it’s a word they identify with
just. dont ever talk about any gendered difference having anything to do with a person's assigned sex at birth. i promise you that whatever you're going through """""""as an afab""""""""""""" is something that trans women routinely experience as well, and that for them it's worsened by transmisogyny. YES this includes reproductive health access dont even fucking start with me. have you ever even heard of a women's health clinic providing trans women with reproductive banking, or any options that would make it possible for them to become mothers at all? no? okay. every single sexist experience under the sun is one that impacts trans women except in their case they are completely erased from mainstream feminist conversations about the issue at all. none of this is afab specific and you dont just sound like a terf when you say that it is, you are promoting transmisogyny
Facts, the minute I hear someone- ESPECIALLY when it's another trans or queer person- start saying:
"as an afab/amab-"
"socialized as a girl/boy"
"afab genitals / amab genitals"
"afab body / amab body"
"afab privilege / amab privilege"
I immediately lose some rapport bc it's almost always coming from a place of bioessentialism, intersexism, terfism, etc. And yes even queer and trans people can perpetuate these ideas. We gotta move past this stuff everybody. Pleaseeee
really not sure when it happened or why but personally I'm pissed that the queer community at large seems to have given up ground on the "people with penises/vulvas/testes/ovaries" language to sex & gender essentialists in exchange for the much less precise, much more demeaning "AGAB" language.
is it because you're scared of the word vulva? of acknowledging out loud that some people have penises? of recognising that many many people, including but certainly not limited to trans people, have mixed sex characteristics that cannot be accurately summarised by "afab/amab" as shorthand for "female/male"?
"in [GENITAL RELATED] situation AFABs will need to do X and AMABs will need to do Y" there are "afabs" with penises and "amabs" with vulvas. Saying this shit makes you look so unserious & honestly transphobic (given the ongoing erasure of post-op trans people within broader community). Intersex people and GRS have both existed for long enough (fucking forever and, decades, respectively) that we should well past making this basic fucking mistake.
quit referring to people by a vague & often violent event that happened at their birth as though it defines ANYTHING about how they & their body currently operate, and start using precise language so you at least look like you know what you're fucking talking about.
Trans men and cis men have more in common than you might think.
Gender liberation, in the end, is not a war between the good group and the bad. It is a collective struggle against the laws, cultural norms, social rules, and institutional policies that restrict all people, and uses rigid gendered categories to keep us so restricted.
I think if we are going to be able to move forward in this fight, trans men must abandon the notion that other men are fundamentally the “bad” gender — and that we don’t belong to that category because of our transness. We must embrace manhood as a state of both strength and profound lostness, an immense liability as much as it is a source of gender euphoric joy, and see the frustrated wanderings of other marginalized masculine people as of a piece with our own.
And so, in the interest of helping us all find our way to each other, here are some of the major struggles that trans men and cis men have in common:
Gender Dysphoria
Many people believe the experience of having gender dysphoria is something like having a phantom limb, or seeing the wrong image in the mirror, but that’s rarely true.
For a lot of trans people, gender dysphoria feels more like a maddening insecurity about how we look and how we are being perceived that seems to know no satisfaction, a mental itching that wanders all across our bodies, our faces, down our throats, across our hairlines, and even all over our clothes. It’s the uncertain sense we are not being ourselves correctly, an out-of-placeness that makes our very being feel like it has no right to exist.
Gender dysphoria is not caused by having the “wrong” gendered brain for one’s body (the notion of “male” and “female” brains is a myth), nor is it a mental illness afflicting only trans people. Rather, gender dysphoria is a pretty sensible trauma response to society’s unrelenting and coercive gendering. All people are categorized as a gender, assigned rules, and threatened with becoming less of a person should they fail to measure up. This means that even cisgender people can experience the terror of feeling that they’ve failed to enact their gender correctly and make themselves socially acceptable— a sensation that often gets called “gender dysphoria.”
I think I first realized that cis people could be gender dysphoric when the actress Amanda Bynes revealed she had tumbled into a major depressive episode after watching herself portray a male character in the comedy She’s the Man. The disturbance she felt from watching herself enact the “wrong” gender sounded exactly like how I felt back when I looked in the mirror at myself as a “woman.”
In 2019, when Jason Derulo complained about his bulge being removed with CGI for his role in the film Cats, I was reminded once again that cis people can feel utterly, dysphorically wrong in their bodies or how they are perceived. Each year, millions of cis people spend thousands of dollars on breast augmentations, jaw implants, hair plugs, and leg-lengthening surgeries, at least in part for gender dysphoric reasons, and if you’ve worn both male and female clothing before, you’ve likely recognized how much of the tailoring of garments is done to deliberately accentuate or even manufacture the gendered features of a person’s shape.
Cis people feel ill-at-ease in their bodies, and fail to measure up to gender normative standards too. That’s how artificially constructed and harshly enforced these standards really are.
In recent years, I’ve spent a good amount of time in gay male bathhouses. When I reveal this fact, even to other gay men, I’m sometimes met with confessions of deep bodily insecurity. The idea of being nude in a highly gendered sexual marketplace often causes people’s worst gendered fears to bubble up.
“I could never go to a place like that,” one cis gay man in his forties confessed to me. “My dick is too small. Nobody would ever want to look at me.”
“I wouldn’t fit in there,” said another cis man, a short, effeminate type with long flowing hair. “They might think I was a girl and kick me out or harass me.”
These men knew, of course, that I don’t have a penis, and can be mistaken for a woman from some angles. And I had just told each of them I’d never had any problem visiting the sauna. Yet they couldn’t shake the sense that I was doing manhood correctly enough, and they were somehow doing it wrong. Despite ostensibly being “cis,” they weren’t quite sure that manhood as a category could hold them as they really were — not when they were nude and vulnerable, surrounded by their idea of the proper man.
Of course, having been in these spaces frequently, I could have told them that nobody there is the “proper” kind of man at all. There’s just regular human beings in there — with sunken chests, stretch marks, amputated limbs, multi-layered bellies, rounded backs, tiny hands, and eye patches.
Over the years, cis men have shared dozens of gender dysphoric insecurities with me, about everything from the width of their shoulders to the length of their eyelashes to the way they hold a can of beer. And in some of the sections below, we will explore more specific examples, because these sources of dysphoria mirror trans men’s almost exactly. But it’s important to establish first that the major commonality across both groups of men is our fear we’re not being men correctly at all.
Every man, I believe, grapples with the disjoint between their actual, complex human selves and the strong, built, stoic, powerful, masculine image that has been pushed upon us. And we fear living up to that standard because the consequences of that failure can be so harsh — these norms are quite violently imposed.
Failing to be a man, in some sense, is what being a man actually means. We are united in the precarity of our position, as powerful as it is. A man in a tank-top with a bald spot sitting beside a lush pond. Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash
Hair Insecurities
“I wish I could grow a full beard so that I could pass better,” says Topher, a trans guy with long hair in his mid-twenties. “But I’m realizing that cis men with long hair get misgendered often too.”
Dunmer, a bisexual trans guy, echoes this experience. “In this one chemistry class a few years ago, both me and this cis guy got called ma’am by a professor. I’m a rather effeminate/androgynous dude, but I have prominent facial hair. And the other guy who got misgendered was pretty masculine, but had long hair and was clean shaven. We both just kinda looked at each other and shrugged after it happened.”
I’ve found that numerous cis and trans men harbor deep insecurities about their hair — where it’s growing, where it doesn’t, how it looks on their bodies, and where they might be losing it. It may sound like a frivolous subject at first blush, but hair is integral to gendered perceptions, as well as how others view our sexual attractiveness, race, and age.
Trans men worry frequently about potential hair loss on T for more aesthetic reasons. I’ve known numerous trans masculine people who have avoided starting hormones because they’ve feared eventually going bald and becoming “less attractive.” And in this we aren’t alone, as 52 billion dollars gets spent each year (by people of all genders) on hair loss prevention treatments.
“It’s helped me to realize that cis men are also scared of going bald,” says Topher. “When I worry about something gender-wise, I ask myself if cis men deal with what I deal with, and it’s helped me settle into my identity more.”
Cis and trans men also share complicated feelings about body hair. Though being covered in a dark blanket of fuzz certainly reads as “masculine,” male beauty standards for the last several decades have eschewed hairiness in favor of a the glistening, action-figure-y look. Trans and cis men alike often fear that hair sprouting on their backs will make them unattractive, or that growing a “neckbeard” will be seen as slovenly. And it’s no coincidence that hairiness has often been linked with fatness and being racialized in many people’s minds — the uncontrolled proliferation of hair is often cast as animalistic, unclean, disgusting, less than human.
But some men have sought refuge from such punishing standards within the gay Bear community.
“I have never felt more welcomed in my masculinity than I have around other bears,” says Kody, a trans male bear. “I’m literally growing in my manhood — getting bigger, hairier, louder, taking up more space. While being really soft and tender too.”
I wrote about the many struggles that unite trans and cis men, and how a deep appreciation for our commonalities is essential to the fight for gender liberation. You can read the full piece for free, or have it narrated to you by the Substack app, at drdevonprice.substack.com.
Hi! I was wondering if you could help me with a question I have regarding my gender.
I am afab, but don't really feel like I fit into a gender (I think it would be agender), but during my shark week, I tend to feel dysphoric about my body. I usually don't feel dysphoric outside of that, but it's extremely prevalent (idk if that's the word) during that week. Would you be able to help me figure it out?
oops this is from last year - sorry! but along the same lines as the previous ask so i’m posting it!
but yeah periods used to be one of my biggest dysphoria triggers and was one of the main reasons i started testosterone, you’re super not alone in that feeling. there are other ways of stopping or reducing the frequency of periods that i know next to nothing about (other medications etc that don’t have the effects of T), but definitely talk to your doctor if it’s something you want to pursue! and if they’re not helpful find a doctor who will listen to you - ask your local community or look online for recs
Hi:) so ive been trying out non binary as a label for myself for a while but idk if thats right yet or if im genderqueer or genderfluid or what but is it weird that the week of my period (im afab) and days leading up to it is when i feel most like a Boy? like i suddenly don't want to present feminine and hate my chest and stuff but after my period is over im back to being okay/neutral as being perceived as female and idk that seems to misalign with a lot of stuff ive read online of how getting your period makes afab people feel, so yeah just wondering if youve heard of that before in general or (if you post this) if any of your followers relate?
Thanks:)
valid as hell!! it’s not something i’ve researched ever but periods are a dysphoria trigger for a lot of people (myself included before i had surgery) so it makes sense to me. even cis women have a ton of variation on how it makes them feel physically and mentally. i hope you’re in a place where you can vary your presentation however it feels most comfortable!
i say this with love: yall will make yourselves feel bad about fucking anything, i swear to god. you feel bad about feeling too much. you feel bad about feeling too little. you feel bad about what makes you feel good. you feel bad about not knowing what you like. you feel bad for not being able to survive easily in a world hostile to you. you feel bad for the tactics that you use to survive. you feel bad for how you identify. you feel bad for being unique. you feel bad for experiences that you share with millions of people. you suspect that every feeling, experience, desire, fear, and question in your brain is somehow evidence that you don't deserve to exist.
i can be so so reassuring about all of these things but ultimately you are the one that's gonna have to make a conscious choice to stop measuring yourself in these ways. there is no authority who gets to determine whether you have the right to exist or not. you already do. there is no body that votes on whether you get to feel, identify, or think as you do. you already do. your existence as it is is non-negotiable. stop trying to justify yourself. you're already here. the world is going to have to deal with it anyway.
"It’s often unhealthy to hyper-analyze your sexuality to the point where how you experience it changes where you belong. This is why the idea that broader terms are somehow more restrictive is baffling. Continuously breaking labels down and creating terminology for each facet of one’s identity shrinks communities until it’s just one person convinced that they’re the only one who relates to their experiences. It isolates people and ignores the importance of individuality within a collective identity."
You shouldn’t have to be trans to get any sex characteristic-related surgery. It’s not a limited resource. Plenty of cis men get implants and cis women get breast reductions. From Colby Gordon today and Leslie Feinberg in Transgender Warriors (1996).
got gender questions? @genderqueerq - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
