#and experience many of the same body things that are associated with the cis woman experience

[possumnest]

getting treated like diet woman at my job again when im rocking the tguy tweenstache is cool <-(lying)

[cardentist]

Fam how can one be trans in the direction of their assigned sex? I'm not even trying to make the idea sound ridiculous or anything. I'm genuinely curious and want to understand. I thought the whole meaning of trans was that you feel or act in the opposite direction of your assigned sex; if you're transfem but you're afab then to me that's just cisgender??? But like please explain to me how that's not the case if that's what you and others strongly feel so I may grow my compassion

Context: [Link]

well ! while I personally am not intersex, I DO want to highlight intersex people first and foremost.

gender and sex are very Very complex, and I think generally people don't consider the way that being intersex can play a big role in that!

there are intersex people who are afab who are also trans women, there are intersex people who are amab who are trans men, there are intersex people with many Many different relationships with sex and gender and anywhere in between !

an afab person can be born with masculine sex characteristics and transition the way trans women often do. that person May identify as trans, they may not ! that trans person may not even consider themselves a woman depending on who they are and what they want !

I Do think there needs to be an effort to be aware of and make space for intersex people within the trans community, and really the wider queer community as a whole. as it's often something that's given a footnote without deeper thought into the ways that intersex people Actually interact with our communities.

which I don't blame people for not already knowing ! that's the whole point of trying to educate people in the first place ^^

.

and as for Myself

labels are, ultimately, a form of gender presentation. what you call yourself is an extension of not only how you see yourself, but how Other People perceive you.

I could call myself nonbinary or I could call myself trans masc, and both would be Accurate. but people have certain traits and expectations and associations when they see those labels. there are assumptions made about the kind of life that I live, the things that I want, the things I might experience, that change depending on which labels that I use.

and that's not Inherently a bad thing ! I mean, that's part of why people Like labels. but it Can be a struggle for people whose gender is Funny.

I could Also describe myself as genderqueer or multi-gender or genderfluid or gnc or-. I've tried on lots and lots of labels, and for the most part I haven't thrown any of them out, I just keep them in a box under my bed and take them out when relevant.

I've been wrestling with the feminine aspect of my identity for a very Very long time. I've been aware that I'm some level of trans masc. that part was easy. I want a deeper voice, I want things about my body to change, I don't want people to look at me and see a cis woman.

but I Also like femininity. I've found that after accepting myself as trans masc and slowly growing an environment where I am Perceived as masculine, I've started getting euphoria at presenting femininely in the Same way that I did (and do!) get about presenting masculinely.

but that feeling doesn't carry over when I'm perceived as a cis woman. it's Quite Uncomfortable for obvious gender reasons.

and while I may not know the exact Words that I'd use to describe it (as I've said, I've been chewing on it for Many years now), I've gotten a clearer idea of how I Feel.

I want to be Visibly trans. I want to be perceived masculinely And femininely. I want to transition masculinely to present femininely (and sometimes butch, sometimes like your dad at the ace hardware store, I contain multitudes).

and of course, figuring out what I have going on has involve a lot of exploration ! it's the same way I figured out the whole trans masc thing in the first place. seeking out other trans people and other Things About trans people feeling things out.

I find ! that I have a lot of shared experiences with transfeminine people. both in how I feel about certain things, some of the presentation that I want, and in how people would React To said presentation.

my femininity Is Trans, I don't relate to cis womanhood. but I Do relate to trans femininity. which is really awkward for me, because it's difficult to describe it to other people fjksldljkasfdjklfasd

(I don't personally consider myself a trans woman mind, but I'm certain there Are people who are trans men and trans women at the same time. gender is complicated, sex is complicated. labels are malleable and sometimes situational)

Could I describe myself with a different label? probably ! I've got lots of them. but when I Don't put emphasis on this aspect of myself people assume that it's not there. insist that it Couldn't be there, and I don't know what I'm talking about. and those people who Would act nasty towards me probably aren't gonna change their mind just because I changed my bio. but it feels Nice to assert that aspect of myself when other people are trying to tear it down.

.

part of me feels like I should post the intersex portion of this by itself, because people tend to engage more with shorter posts and there's nothing Short about my gender situation ljkfdasjkls

but ! I dunno, if this makes even one person understand the gray areas of gender and presentation a little more it'll be worth it.

thank you for taking the time to ask ! and especially for doing so kindly ! I do hope you'll see this

[lordmushroomkat]

《The strong association of PCOS with cis womanhood, the defining of it as a disorder or syndrome, and its framing as a “women’s health issue” obscures the fact that PCOS is a natural hormonal variation, an endocrine difference that is illustrated through secondary sex characteristics. 

During my initial search for resources and community, I also learned that PCOS, given its characterization as a hormonal variance, falls under the intersex umbrella. This intersex umbrella covers a wide range of “individuals born with a hormonal, chromosomal, gonadal or genital variation which is considered outside of the male and female norms,” and PCOS meets that definition. 

This is not an attempt to sway every person who has PCOS to identify themselves as intersex—though it is an acknowledgment that we have the option and the right to do so if it rings true to us. Rather, this is to say that shifting my perspective on PCOS and viewing it through an intersex lens allowed me to better understand it as a natural human variation rather than an affliction causing my body to do the “wrong” thing. 

“I believe that someone with PCOS has every right to use the term intersex for themselves if they want, but I also understand it if they don’t,” said writer and intersex advocate Amanda Saenz.

“As an advocate and an intersex person, I opt to use a definition of intersex that is open ended and expansive,” Saenz explains. “The experiences that a term like ‘intersex’ hopes to define include differences in hormonal production and hormone reception, and the phenotypic effects these differences have on the body. To me, this is inclusive of things like PCOS.”

Discussing PCOS in this way is often met with indignation and resistance. Our society has a hard time separating gender from sex. This has resulted in a widespread misunderstanding of intersex identity as equivalent to transgender identity. Many who vehemently resist the idea of PCOS being under the intersex umbrella do so because they categorically link “female” with “woman,” and therefore misinterpret any acceptance of intersex identity as a denial of womanhood. Moreover, the stigma around and marginalization of intersex communities prevents many people from feeling comfortable with embracing it. 

“You can be intersex and cisgender, transgender, or nonbinary. The ‘opposite’ of intersex is endosex, not cisgender,” explained Eshe Kiama Zuri, founder of U.K. Mutual Aid. As a nonbinary intersex person, Zuri approaches these ideas with a clear understanding of how the bodies of intersex individuals as well as many people with PCOS interrupt binary thinking about both sex and gender. 

“The resistance to PCOS falling under the intersex umbrella is due to a white supremacist society’s desperation to cling to binary genders, which we know [have been] used as a colonial tool of control,” they offer. 

The same medical and surgical interventions that legislators seek to ban trans and nonbinary people from accessing—which would be gender-affirming, life-saving care for them—are often forced on intersex infants and children who are unable to consent. This is done in efforts to align intersex bodies with social expectations of female and male, man and woman; the same logic undergirds the societal and medical pressure to “feminize” the female-assigned bodies of PCOS patients. 

PCOS is “shockingly common [and] the most frequently occurring hormone-related disorder.” However, according to Medical News Today, “up to 75% of [people] with PCOS do not receive a diagnosis for their condition.” If we were to understand and accept something like PCOS as intersex, considering how “shockingly common” it is, the dominant idea of binary sex, with intersex being thought of as nothing more than a fringe occurrence, would be shattered. 

“PCOS is only one of many conditions that could fall under the intersex umbrella, and care for people with PCOS would be considerably better if it wasn’t for the forced gendering and resistance to providing actual support for people with PCOS, even if it challenges society’s ideas of gender,” says Zuri. 

Combating myths built around the gender and sex binaries would create more space to understand PCOS traits as part of normal human variation, rather than inherent problems to be fixed, symptoms to be eradicated. As Zuri so beautifully put it, “When we start to accept that this is not a body behaving ‘wrong’ and it is just a body, we stop blaming and punishing people for how their bodies work and start challenging societal expectations.”》

I was fucking right!

[ventbloglite]

Some of you really need to step back a little bit and acknowledge how ignorant you are towards how misogyny affects trans mascs and how you yourself may be perpetrating said misogyny when speaking ill of trans mascs.

Which is not something you should be doing at all, fyi. You can talk about individual shitty trans mascs and certain community issues you dislike which involve or are perpetrated by trans mascs without just being transphobic towards trans mascs in general.

So many times I've seen the sentient of 'AFAB's have it really easy, everyone accepts AFAB's as trans, everyone loves AFAB trans people, the world caters to you, there is basically no problems for you if you're AFAB unlike AMAB folk' shown in a variety of ways from a variety of people including just outright saying it. Not to mention the belitting of trans masc experiences with transphobia and misogyny + the way those interact because they identify as men even though transphobes still consider them to be women and don't give a shit about their actual gender.

A main crux of transphobia (though many other factors which result in hating us come into play, too many to go into now) is that trans people are seen as and treated as their AGAB and punished for not identifying as it or portraying it 'correctly' by society. So tell me why so many seem to 'forget' about how misogyny impacts trans masculine people. Could it be because you believe that advocating for trans women and trans femmes and fighting transmisogyny somehow must involve being transphobic towards trans men due to that radfem influence you've absorbed? The world will never reach gender equality of any kind if everything is 'men versus women' so can we just fucking not bring that into trans spaces please.

Examples!

I saw recently a post which perfectly pointed out the potential risks associated with someone considered 'male' growing out her hair but OP clearly knew absolutely nothing about the same risks associated with someone deemed 'female' cutting his hair. Instead of not making that post or doing some research, OP thus assumed there weren't really any risks likely due to already believing that AFAB trans people have it easy.

The ignorance! Misogyny heavily impacts the way hair is treated on those perceived as women (including body hair) and women/those perceived as women have no end of people policing what they can and can't do with their bodies often taking things to the absolute extreme to do so. Short hair on woman may seem 'more accepted' but AFAB people of any gender could quickly tell you multiple situations where it's not and results in the same violence, abuse, homo(lesbo/butch)phobia and yes possibly even death depending on the situation even if you still identify as a woman. Pretending this doesn't happen is straight up misogyny btw.

'AFAB's pass easily by doing basically nothing' is another frequent one which makes me laugh. 'Passing' for most trans people is so situational and so dependent on what you do or don't do to strictly conform to gender stereotypes if you're even able to do that at all. To suggest that the world ignores feminine gender markers the moment someone's hair is short and their chest appears mostly flat ignores both the complexity of how humans perceive gender and how misogyny comes into play whenever a woman/perceived woman shows any masculinity let alone maleness. Considering the same misogyny comes into play frequently against trans women you'd think it'd be easy to remember.

This general sentiment of 'Being born with a vagina means your life is easy and everything you do will be loved and supported because society adores you. You don't and will never have any real problems, not like anyone born with a penis.' isn't magically okay and absolutely super different to when misogynists say it about cis women because you're using AGAB language and cite 'because you're men and blah blah patriarchy' as the actual reason you're saying it. It's very clearly same shit different coat of paint. The pool is there, your toes are in, stop preparing to dive for Gods sake.

[savefrog]

Dude the human body is crazy

That post about T giving you too much blood, and how thats a genetic condition passed down mainly through cis men (hemachromatosis). And how its a risk for going on T because someone can have inherited the gene but not know until going on T triggers the issues. I need to do more research, because I cant find a lot of information on how it reacts to T (besides it often resulting in lower T), but it almost looks like the body gets T and is like "Oh cool we're going dude mode now, heres that condition you were missing!"

Makes me think of how people who have had a hysterectomy can still experience the menstruation cycle even without a Uterus. Like PMS and the soreness and bloating associated with cramps. And its hard to find research on because its a newly recorded phenomenon with a lot of bias against it, but trans women on E may also experience a monthly cycle (PMS and the soreness and bloating associated with cramps) even without a Uterus as well. The body gets estrogen and is like "oh sick i know what to do with this! Pain!!!!!"

Like it really drives in how the human body is made of analogous structures. The reproductive system is all the same parts, just given different instructions. The clitoris can get erections! Hormones can change BONES even though its limited! (Horomonal changes also affect the bones during menopause for example, something archaeologists or forensic scientists can notice)

And speaking of, that whole thing about "when archaeologists see your skeleton THEN they will know" is bullshit! (ON SO MANY LEVELS)! Sex determination with bones is typically based on the measurement of literally ONE bone. And the field of archaeology has, for quite some time, acknowledged how innaccurate this can be. (And honestly, this assumption shows a lack of science knowledge in general, where in my experience researchers like to lean more towards "probably" rather than "definitely" when making ANY kind of assertion about something because there are ALWAYS EXCEPTIONS!)

Thanks to X-rays, we have classifications for different types of pelvis shapes. Do you know what may cause someone to have a C-section???? Having an Android (or "male-shaped") pelvis. Yes. A cis woman LITERALLY GIVING BIRTH, may have a pelvic shape that is labeled as having a masculine shape. AND IT IS NOT THAT RARE!!!! (A brief search says 20% of cis women)

But consider that people usually only get X-rays or other scans when absolutely needed. There could be so much more overlap that we arent even aware of. Things that are "rare instances" may not be that rare. We arent analyzing the dna of every person in existence, we only see what we are looking for and research has only just opened up past our cultural biases towards gender!

We know from studies of the brain that a lot of gendered assumptions (women are good at sorting colors because they were gatherers, etc) are not well-defined AT ALL. A lot of it may be learned during development. There are some stereotyped trends, but they're just small percentage trends such that its impossible to look at a brain and 100% say "yup thats male!", only at the most "well, statistically, its Slightly More Likely male" and still be very wrong. Exceptions are the NORM.

(And that whole evolutionary psychology thing of "women are better at colors because gatherers?"...based on what ancestors?!?!?!?!? Different groups of ancient people had different gender norms!!! There wasn't just one big caveman family for the entire paleolithic!!!! There are SO MANY recorded remains of what are most likely female hunters!!!!! Why would they not take advantage of having MORE HUNTERS during a hunting season?!?!!)

"Its simple biology" is quite possibly the most ignorant statement one can make, its a paradox. Biology is INHERENTLY complex, varied, and difficult to categorize. If you say it's simple even just for the sake of categorization, you are literally admitting to not knowing SHIT. Ask anyone into taxonomy. Categorizing animals seems easy if youve never actually done it, and meanwhile there are appparently heated debates on river dolphin teeth and whether or not river dolphins with no visible differences except slightly different teeth are different species or not. Birds are reptiles!!! Everything is a fucking fish!!!! Rigid thought based on societal bias is antithetical to science (though it has SURE affected science!)

Its that bias where the less you know about something, the easier you think it is. Someone may think they already know everything about a topic if they never actually researched it because they dont know whats out there. Whereas someone actually knowledgeable in that field KNOWS that its complicated and feels LESS like they know everything about it. Cis people who have never thought deeply about gender THINK it is simple because they lack any experience. They THINK its the same as they believed in preschool because they never challenged it - when everything else you learn in grade school is obviously simplified!!!

Its so blatantly apparent how little transphobes want to actually consider facts. Its all "just ask a biologist" until real biologists tell them its complex, then its "science is woke". They'll talk about gender all day and yet mock anyone actually studying it. It's all about rigid definitions, until someone tells them the literal definition of gender makes it seperate from sex. They pretend to care so much about the literal definitions of words and what you can and can't call something due to biology...but still call a seastar a "starFISH".

The WORLD is amorphous! Words are merely tools! Biology hates rigid categorization! EXCEPTIONS ARE THE NORM! live your damn life!

[hanszoe]

hello, i wanted to ask you about your opinion on amab intersex hans in canon. it's mostly a head canon, but i feel like it could work for both manga and anime.

i haven't read the manga yet so i don't have the context of how they're depicted in it aside from a few panels i've sought out

to preface, i think that attempting to analyze hans' experience with sex and gender on the basis of canon is pretty pointless. the material never appears to address it, they're depicted with female secondary sex characteristics and often speak masculinely, that's the extent of their canon depiction as far as i'm aware of. isayama can get away with his "who knows" specifically because of his lack of addressing it. in the anime and maybe a panel in the manga i haven't checked they do contrast themself with men once and speak from the type of violation usually associated with misogyny, but that says nothing about their sex

on their being intersex, the experience under amab umbrella is probably so vast hans could have had so many different experiences. i'm not intersex and consider myself quite uneducated so i'd prefer an intersex person be the one to write about what hans' life might have been like if they were amab, but i don't think that it's an invalid interpretation of their character. isayama probably wrote nothing of their past specifically for reasons like this anyway, both to avoid actually depicting them as queer and also to leave it up to fan interpretation i guess (your pick of good or bad faith there).

what is the precedent for intersexism within the walls, is it possible for eldians to be so since there was apparently some "God's will" type genetic editing going on, does random mutation and what we're familiar with as nature still work the same way, have there been sex assignment surgeries, would hans have been a victim of one, if so how did others treat them when they developed female secondary sex characteristics, would they have faced difficulties entering training on account of it. so many things that could have happened to them.

as far as my analysis of them and their reasons for joining the survey corps and wanting to leave the walls it wouldn't be out of place at all. i feel that they simply faced "something is wrong with hansi". ironically bigotry is often vague in this way. i want to believe that to define something, to truly want to understand it on the basis of what it is, even if it means making up new words, is to love it. (also very much hans and titan research. maybe it's a reflection of what they wished someone would have done for them). a double edged sword, but the kind of faith hans has in particular, "i wish you wouldn't group me with them" about those who misuse it, that's what i mean.

my only small thing is that the origin of their sex and gender even being in question is that the illustrations of them must have been "not feminine enough" for some readers, which led to the "what are their primary sex characteristics" type of question. though i am not intersex, i am someone with a body that compels strangers to question something similar. hansi's existence, at least as the character that was illustrated by isayama and is interpreted in our world, began as someone who appears to have been supposed to be a cis woman, but was degendered on account of their appearance. there is a violence in that too that i don't want to overlook. hans may be amab as much as they may be a cis woman. there is an important sharedness there, though one of course cis women have a much greater imperative to understand.

thank you for your ask!! i want to see more of hansi, i want to know everything about them that they would comfortably share so that i can love all of it too. if they're intersex, if eldia didn't have the medicine nor the words to describe them, if they've never even known what's "wrong" with them. i wish they had a creator who would have given them that voice.

[antiterf]

"Gender identity and feeling a certain gender isn't like sexual orientation. We know what attraction is!"

Okay but can you explain the feeling of being attracted to someone? Can you do it without using symbolism? Can you do it without objectification? Without the "feeling" because feelings aren't objective? We have the term sexual attraction to describe sexual orientation, and we have gender identity to describe being transgender. Both have been neglected by psychology and other sciences in regard to LGBTQ+ people and most of the time, it is, at the end of the day, multiple different theories and not a single explanation.

It took me longer to recognize romantic attraction than it did for me to recognize my gender identity. I assumed that certain things were sexual attractions when they weren't. Many gay, lesbian, and ace people go through that second one because sexual attraction can never be objectively described.

I eventually figured out romantic attraction as the feeling I get when I think someone as cute, not from aesthetics but as a person. That is not exactly specific enough for most people to understand. When combined with sexual attraction it becomes a constant yearning for the person to be next to me, the feeling that part of me is missing when they leave. I cannot separate sexual attraction from romantic, but can separate romantic from sexual. If we're going blatantly then sexual attraction would also be my want to have sex with the specific person because their body alone gives me feelings of euphoria (oh we love the oxytocin), but when comparing that to gender, that would be a sexual expression like how pronouns and clothing are gender expression.

On top of that, I can only speak for myself. Others can and will report feelings that do not match mine, but they still use the same terminology because those feelings will still fall under attraction. Trying to restrict what is and what isn't a form of romantic or sexual attraction by personal experience isn't helpful and likely more harmful.

Gender identity was the feeling that something was off and that I had one foot in the door and one foot out. That something was missing until I put the key into place. It was the feeling of euphoria when hearing my preferred name. It's the comfort I get when there's some compression on my chest because I associate binders with relief and happiness. But wait... wouldn't that second one be instead feelings of transsexualism?

I don't fucking know dude! I don't feel these things separately! Separate orgasm from pleasure and see how that works out for you!

When trans people talk about our experiences with gender identity because someone wants some sort of description, when a cis person who has never had to examine what gender identity feels like, there's not going to be much of a way to describe it where someone completely understands unless if they've experienced it before. We as trans people can go "oh yeah that sounds accurate to my experience" or go "oh no, not me, for me it's a little more like ____" but there's not much of a way to objectively describe it.

What is a woman, anyone who claims that they're a woman, is as circular as a definition as:

Sexual attraction: attraction that makes people desire sexual contact or shows sexual interest in another person(s). Romantic attraction: attraction that makes people desire romantic contact or interaction with another person or persons.

So neuroscience is used to try and find Where the Gender is Stored but the brain is such a complex organ that the shape of your brain can be used to identify you like a fingerprint. Oxytocin is what we have for attraction but which one? Does it matter? There are studies that show that the brains of trans people are different in some way but I kind of stopped caring about them years ago because I don't care! I don't care!

I'm trans, we keep trying to explain what gender identity is, why we transition, but there's always some issue on it being too vague or reinforcing stereotypes (men having flat chests with binding even though not all men do for instance).

So when you get a way to describe all of what you feel objectively that everyone can relate to you can get back to me and I'll fucking applaud you.

[notbadforacat]

The Fishcourse

Some AFAB people (queer or otherwise) really put their feet down over the word fish. Fish as in drag queens and transfems use to mean passing as a woman, as in giving natal-vagina-owner realness, or (less commonly) to refer to cis women as in how they don't have to deliver that realness because for them its just real.

There's a few ways to approach this conflict. Like right off, it's obviously crude and gross to evoke fish (as in the smell thereof) to call up vaginas. I understand the ick factor there. Especially if you're trying to reclaim the vagina as a sacred source of power as opposed to the shameful anatomical hobble that many AFABs (side note: I kinda hate the AFAB vs AMAB acronyms) are conditioned to see their bodies as. In terms of creatively gross ways to describe anatomy, fish ranks along with Arby's roast beef/roastie. Roastie coming out of 4chan/gamergate losers as a delusional sour-grapes way to describe the women who will never date them. So yes, fish is gross for the same reasons roastie is gross, but the difference is pretty obvious. Fish didn't come from 4chan.

Yes, while fish etymologically stems from a meme referring to a smell, fish as it is used is not an insult. Fish is an ideal that is strived for, often desperately. Fish is important thing to be, and was even more so in the decades and communities where the term arose. If you're a sex worker, being fish means being able to pull trade so you can afford to live. If you want to live full time as a woman, being fish means fitting in, and maybe having a chance at the decent life. Of course, this just leads to the passing discourse. People who don't pass are beautiful and valid, and in an ideal world we shouldn't have to pass, but in a very real sense, passing is the difference between a good trans life and a hard trans life. Being fish means having made it, so I understand why fishiness is celebrated, whether the concept is 's politically ideal or not.

Still, I don't mean this to be a defense of fish (whenever someone says they're not defending something controversial, they're lying; don't believe my bullshit), rather I think the fishcourse illustrates the delicate nuances needed to build intersectionality. Because language policing isn't about the root meaning of an offensive word; it's a request from one group to another to recognize their privilege. And with gender and sex being such a tangle web of associations, archetypes, memes, and experiences, I'm genuinely not sure if not to say fish is a fair or worthwhile request.

I don't know.

[cxparadisi]

i feel like a lot of transmascs feel on some level that admitting that they are fundamentally different than cis men is an invalidation of their masculinity and it makes them go to bat for cis dudes as if they face the same pressures and societal expectations as trans men which ends up in them being very stupid and transmisogynistic because they come into conversations where transfems are talking about transfem eggs and the way that amab people interact with masculinity and transmascs join the conversation with "let men be masculine".

because trans men do in fact face transphobia for being masculine. masculine transmascs are constantly scrutinized and attacked for being ruined women who will never truly be men, with our masculinity being held up as a prize we will never earn no matter what we do and which we are arrogant and destructive of our natural female bodies in our urge to reach. that joke about how if bathrooms are enforced by agab the trans dudes who look like kratos are gonna have to be in the ladies' room ends before the punchline which is that those trans men either piss at home or are forced to invade womens' spaces which has very real social consequences including threats to their safety. trans men with full beards and male pattern baldness cannot pass as women to most people, so to anyone who knows or finds out your agab immediately knows that you're transgender, which means that situations where a trans person might closet themselves for their safety(visiting transphobic relatives, not having to come out to people who knew you pre-transition, trying to access gender-locked healthcare) are unavailable to you, so the non-op ftm with a lumberjack beard still has that while he's trying to get a pap smear and that joke about mom insisting that the trans guy wear a dress to the family reunion only for him to show up looking like hulk hogan ends before they tell you what happens after that. chasers who expect every transmasc to be an androgynous twink happy to perform femininity for their sexual gratification absolutely punish trans men who don't fit that standard, and your current partner preventing you from transitioning because you won't be their girl on command anymore is a well-known issue. masculine transmascs also get a lot of shit from other afab queer people, often even other transmascs, who also expect trans men to fall neatly under "women and trans men who i consider women" so they consider you a bad ending for a cute tboy who transitions too much, which makes swimming in a toxic pit lake preferable to existing in some transmasc communities as everyone politely informs you that they wish you didn't exist.

so like yeah, trans men do face discrimination for being masculine. that discrimination is called transphobia, and is why it is politically necessary for them to advocate for themselves in a way that cis men do not need to.

so why do so many annoying transmasc people add "and cis men!" into any posts they make about transphobia? why attribute this to an attack on masculinity generally as if cis men are also told by their boyfriends that getting bottom surgery would render them sexual pariahs? probably most of it is extending "trans men, being men, are closer to cis men than cis women", which is true, past its logical limit into "therefore cis and trans mens' experiences are interchangeable", which is not true, and they know it's not true because when they're called out for being misogynistic a lot of them will suddenly understand that they're a politically separate category from cis men. i am sympathetic to the overextending thing because spending your entire life being told that you will always be a woman often leads to an urge to frantically dig your claws into the only men you've been told are Real men and associate yourself entirely with them. wanting to be cis is a form of internalized transphobia almost every trans person experiences and not examining that can make you say some real dumb shit. i am not so sympathetic to them derailing transfem conversations that operate with the correct assumption that some "cis men" are actually women because, having staked the validity of their masculinity on being just like cis men, the idea that they might actually be women and especially the idea of having someone try to convince them to be a woman is painful and triggering.

counterarguments:

some trans men consider themselves closer to cis women than cis men or find the idea of forcefem hot: yeah that's why i said "a lot of transmascs" and not "every transmasc in existence", but also trans people can have complicated or contradictory feelings on their assigned gender which is why transandro bros who talk about androphobia like they're considered cis men will still understand that many trans men are considered women outside of just failing to beat the transmisogyny allegations.

a lot of that sounds similar to transmisogyny: that's because transphobia is a part of transmisogyny! tma people are also simultaneously held to the standards of masculinity and femininity and punished for a percieved failure to achieve either, and of course some of this is misdirected transmisogyny from percieving masculine trans men as trans women who don't pass. this is misdirected both because what works for trans women often is not helpful to trans men and vice versa so analyzing it as the same issue leads to suggesting solutions that only work for one group and are useless or harmful to the other, and because even if you're attacked for being a dude who looks like a chick, a lot of that transphobia can be avoided by proving you're not a trans woman. if an afab person gets accused of being a trans woman the main thing people do to defend them is cite their assigned gender, not argue that trans women shouldn't be barred from the olympics. this doesn't mean that transphobia against trans men, masculine trans men included, isn't real, traumatizing, dangerous, and often life-threatening.

medically transitioning doesn't automatically make a trans man masculine and is not interchangeable with passing: yeah i know but "transmascs who present as and are generally percieved as male" is really long to type and a lot of stigma against medical transition is based on its masculinizing effects. this is itself transphobic because it relies on the assumption that beards and penises are masculine while boobs and vaginas are feminine, but that is unfortunately what is systemically accepted and enforced.

are you saying that being forced to closet yourself is a privilege: not in any systemic sense or outside of the most general definition of "being beneficial in some specific circumstances with heavy caveats and downsides". like yeah being able to get into a women's shelter is better than not having that option but also being forced into the closet makes people kill themselves so it evens out.

feminine trans men experience a lot of this too: yeah "feminine" and "masculine" are socially constructed categories that in practice no transmasc 100% falls into one binary side of, and transphobia against trans men affects all trans men.

what about the assumption that transmascs face less oppression than transfems?: dude trans girls aren't saying that oppression is a quantifiable resource you are allotted a measurable amount of they're just saying that there is an extra axis of oppression you're not experiencing. a disabled trans man living in bhutan experiences more axes of oppression than an abled trans woman living in canada but that doesn't mean either of their oppressions aren't real, just that in comparison to a disabled trans woman living in bhutan they are systemically less oppressed. it's also possible that despite belonging to more or less systemically oppressed groups they as individuals could have any range of experiences from a pretty good life with a supportive social network to being killed in a hate crime at age 14. nobody in existence is on every axis of oppression, and TME means that you aren't on this particular exact one and nothing else.

but cis men shouldn't be forced to be trans women if they don't want to: and people who like astronomy shouldn't be forced to become astronauts, a trans girl asking a cis guy if he's ever thought about why he's more comfortable playing games as a girl applies exactly as much societal pressure to transition as asking a kid who's obsessed with space if they want to be an astronaut when they grow up. most of the time feminine cis guys aren't going to end up transitioning, as most people into space aren't going to become astronauts, but just posing the hypothetical isn't harmful and at absolute worst might be a little annoying if you get that question a lot.

[genderkoolaid]

Something I noticed while scrolling through the tags of the posts abt you is the people saying that certain things that apply heavily to transmascs are just transphobia because transfems experience them too. And like...yeah. I'm sure they do. But by the same token, a lot of what these people say is exclusive to transfems, I've definitely seen happen to transmascs too. The thing is, transmisogyny and transandrophobia both have a primary target, but not an exclusive one. Hence, some things end up overlapping. There's probably a conversation to be had about that, but I don't think these people are interested in having it.

Yes!! Exactly!! Transmisogyny incorporates much of the same elements as transandrophobia (transphobia, misogyny, and antimasculism), albeit generally acted out in different ways. I've seen many good posts about how trans women are often immediately stereotyped as sexual predators for literally anything- which is true and a key part of transmisogyny. But I know very well that the same thing happens to trans men. Does that mean that that isn't transmisogynistic, or that it should be called "just transphobia" because it's not entirely exclusive to transfems?

No, because that's stupid. What makes it transmisogynistic is not that it's transphobia being done to a trans woman, it's that transmisogyny sees trans women as a type of deviant men who are, because of their "male deviance", are extremely sexual and extremely aggressive. It would still be transmisogyny even if it happened to a GNC man the transmisogynists believed to be a trans woman. It's not the identity of the victim that matters, but the motives of the attacker. Trans women also get denied hormones by transphobic doctors, and that is a serious issue; but specifically in regards to transandrophobia, transmascs transitioning is depicted by transandrophobia as stupid girls ruining their bodies, and in need of (cis, often male) doctors to prevent them from doing this because of misogyny.

It's interesting, because these people (often, in my experience, self-described TMEs white knighting for transfems) will claim that trans women experiencing something means it can't be part of transandrophobia- but if trans men experience something commonly associated with transmisogyny, they aren't allowed to say they experience transmisogyny and that experience is still "owned" by trans women. And like, it would be shitty of a trans man to claim that because he experiences something, it means trans women aren't allowed to call that experience transmisogyny... but that's why people shouldn't fucking do that to trans men w transandrophobia either!!!!!!!

[reign-life]

"The epidemic of sexual violence that male people commit against female people" Trans people are actually more likely to experience sexual assault and abuse. What genitals a woman has doesn't matter nearly as much when simply being a woman(or a gnc man in some cases) will get you harassed. And in some cases, being a woman with a dick will make you more likely to be raped or sexually harassed

And this isn't even mentioning how some people have actually been raped or harassed by cis women

"using their penises" again, cis women can rape and harass people. But even if that wasn't the case, a lot of sexual related harassment don't even involve dicks? Rape is by far the more serious crime, but plenty of people have been sexually harassed or assaulted with mere words and hands respectively

"no, people’s caution around penises is the problem" Yes op is saying that, but not within the context your words are implying? "that’s why trans women are abhorrent to... male chauvinists... both groups have... strong feelings about what a penis *represents*, and find the conceptual and actual presence of a woman with a penis to be simultaneously vile and nonsensical because they’ve loaded so much symbolic baggage onto both women and penises."(cutting out parts to get to the point) already implies this isn't "trauma bad, cis women complain too much", this is "society(including cis men) has a problem"

Even if we ignore the context of the entire post, "power, dominance, sexual agency" aren't bad characteristics, yet these Powerful Things are associated with one the most vulnerable body parts. Wouldn't you, as an obvious feminist, agree that all this power and importance being given to a mere body part is unfair and sexist? A woman with a penis(don't give me the biology spiel, I'm not here for that) is seen as bad to some groups because such a Strong Powerful Body Part belonging to a woman doesn't make sense to them. And in some cases it's "they can't have penises, penises are violent and evil, which are obviously the opposite of women", which is kinda infantilizing, makes cis women out to be Oh So Special, and arguably downplays the violence women can inflict on other women or in general

"It’s never “stop terrorizing and committing hate crimes against the female population and forcing them to constantly be on guard,”" see paragraph 1 and the links contained there

"it’s never “we need to restructure law enforcement and the justice system so that rapists face harsh penalties and there are quick and effective interventions when males demonstrate sexual aggression toward women.”" Again, making the post about a topic that wasn't supposed to be the case. As op is a trans woman, I'm sure they feel the same way you do. Law enforcement and the justice system treat women(cis or trans) horribly, especially when it comes to sexual violence. Men get away with a lot of shit and it's unfair, society is unfair

But the post isn't about sexual violence or the police being shitheads. It's about dicks in all contexts(even a mere "bulge in a swimsuit or simply knowing that there’s a dick somewhere in the same bathroom as you") being seen as powerful, evil, violent

"It's just “women need to stop having feelings about their own assault and oppression, they’re making penis people feel like their penises aren’t neutral :( “" 1. Again, paragraph 1's links would shock you 2. this is a woman(again, idc about your transphobia) having feelings about their own oppression, albeit focused on the tamer side of transphobia and sexism

3. Dicks are neutral. Hands are used to commit the most amount of crimes. Knives are used to be violent and hurt people. Many people have trauma surrounding knives. But cutting a fruit isn't violent, shaking someone's hand isn't violent, and no one freaks out about knives or hands being inherently not neutral. A dick is a chunk of flesh and muscle, it is inherently morally neutral. It can be used to hurt, but it can also just exist

You can be uncomfortable with penises. You can be scared of them. You can have trauma surrounding them. Anyone who argues otherwise is a prick at best and a bigot at worst. But that doesn't make a chunk of flesh more evil, and your trauma and discomfort surrounding dicks just existing is something you need to deal with in your own time. You are putting words in op's mouth and seeing a meaning that isn't there. The original post doesn't address everything about penises and their connection to society or violence, because it wasn't meant to

Trans women will never be free until people stop having strong emotions about penises. Like we, as a society, have got to stop caring about dicks! Dicks have to stop symbolizing maleness, obviously, but they also have to stop symbolizing power, dominance, sexual agency and aggression, violence, and even sex itself. Like trans women can’t be free if the very conceptual presence of a penis represents an intrusion(!) of unwanted(!) sexuality(!) in public life. Like that’s why trans women are abhorrent to both male chauvinists and radical feminists, because both groups have extremely strong feelings about what a penis *represents*, and find the conceptual and actual presence of a woman with a penis to be simultaneously vile and nonsensical because they’ve loaded so much symbolic baggage onto both women and penises.

Anyway dicks are totally neutral body parts and seeing a dick, or a bulge in a swimsuit, or simply knowing that there’s a dick somewhere in the same bathroom as you isn’t harmful or violent

[seahorse-dad-in-training]

Why would a trans guy want to be a gestational parent?

I want to kick off this blog by talking about one question so many people have... "But, why??".

Why would someone who's a man want to be pregnant and birth a child?

Why would someone who's desperately trying to be seen as a man do one of the biggest things associated with being a woman?

What about gender dysphoria?

Why not adopt or get a surrogate? Or what if your partner is a cis woman, shouldn't she carry instead?

There's multiple answers to all of these questions depending on the trans person you talk to. Some will say "I would never want to be pregnant, I couldn't do it", some would say "it's just easier than adoption" some would say "having a child come from your body is a beautiful thing" and so forth

For me, I've known for a long time I wanted a child. This child was not planned, but they're coming nonetheless. I've known that options like adoption or surrogacy isn't very accessible and probably wouldn't be possible for me, and frankly I want a child that looks like me. Having someone surrogate can be extremely expensive and the hormones they put you through to collect eggs can be stressful and difficult, and isn't worth it to everyone.

I understand I will experience, and have experienced gender dysphoria because of it. I get weird questions, I get confusion, I get misgendered as my appearance changes and my breasts get bigger, and it's only going to get worse as I start showing.

I've had people ask me "but isn't this against everything you believe in??" And I was confused. I've never said I was against birthing, I never said I didn't want to have a child, and I never said I wanted to rid of my current genitalia. I've had people ask me what the child will call me, if it'll confuse them, etc.

To me, it'll all be worth it in the end. I'll have a child I can raise my way, with a healthy family, and trauma and ND informed parents who will always love them and help them when needed.

It's hard, of course it's hard. It's hard enough for cis women and for us trans guys (and nonbinary people), it's extra hard.

Basically at the end of the day, we have the choice to do what we wish with our bodies. We aren't harming anyone by being pregnant, and we aren't harming anyone if we choose not to get pregnant.

Remember to keep invasive questions to yourself, and remember we deserve the same respect anyone else does. Respect us, and everyone will be a lot happier in the long run.

[lo-fi-charming]

People who are part of a marginalized group that you aren't are allowed to criticize how you portray them. You're not a trans man. Being non binary doesn't give you some magical immunity to having latent transphobia toward trans men. Yeah trans men can like their chests and long hair and feminine clothes, but when you only ever portray them with all those things (plus mostly drawing cis women alongside them) you comes off as someone who just thinks trans men are women.

whats up it's ya boi just got woken up by my cat at 6 am for her breakfast and saw this so im tired and annoyed at you and typing this all out on my phone so i can immediately go back to sleep Anyway,

1) never said it gives me immunity, just that I wasn't cis anymore, and mentioned it to explain why i removed the disclaimers

2) you are making SO many assumptions about me based entirely on how i draw ONE character. just because i draw jon most often with long-ish hair and Sometimes wearing more feminine clothing does not mean i only ever draw all trans men like that. i draw martin as trans, too - no top-op, but he's also fat and tall, typically only in "masculine" clothing. i also draw sasha trans, do you have a problem w her as well? oh i guess not since she's short and femme and has big enough boobs that you can assume she's just cis, bc only cis girls look like that (though her being fat too is probably pushing it for you!)

(you know, i have lots of my own characters yall don't see on here; if i had to say, i probably have more trans girls than trans guys, and girls overall, bc im gay about ladies. but no you're right the art of one character you exclusively see on my sequestered fandom blog gives you a great idea of my tastes overall)

3) you insist that my inclusion of drawing a trans man alongside a cis women = i think they're the same thing which is just REALLY WEIRD like ??? do people get less trans by association now?? i simply don't understand this point. am i no longer allowed to draw both and i have to chose one? (assuming youre the same anon as the first), you've got this weird fixation on how a trans man's (jon's?) body is 'the same as a cis woman's) but YOU'RE the one saying if a man has boobs and a vagina then he is the exact same beast as a cis woman. maybe actually Think about that for longer than a second and accept the fact that those physical traits do not a woman make. some men just look like this.

i agree it is important for people - especially those who are not part of The Group - to be Mindful of how they portray that group, but that doesn't mean not making things with or about said group. i mean what are you trying to tell me to do, even? stop drawing trans men period? or i can draw them but Only if they have top surgery? only if they look like cis men? only with other trans men? all of this sucks.

like this isn't criticism. you keep trying to accuse me of dodging criticism of my Apparent Transphobia, but you're the one making stupid rules about it. not to mention wilfully ignoring all the other trans men (you claim to be sooooo concerned about) who DO like my stuff, because it speaks to them and their experiences. so like. get tf over yourself and don't send me more messages like this, ill just delete them

[mueritos]

so glad people are realizing these ideas of “rationality” or “logical arguments” (whether this applies to any sort of “discourse” but here I mean on the topic of transmedicalism”) are all rooted in white supremacy and the patriarchy. And I don’t mean using logic to discuss glucose cells or bouyancy, im talking about the concept that we must approach complex human issues in the most rational way possible to remove all biases. Transmeds like Kevin Garrage and Blaire Racist like to parade themselves as The Most Logical Trans people, even though all of their content is emotionally charged reactionary content that’s mostly seen in conservative spaces, and to make it worse, the content they make spreads harmful misinformation about marginalized communities.

Patricia Hill Collins’ “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought” sums up this violent separation of understanding and advocating for your own community in spaces of knowledge and discussion. I highly recommend reading her paper, because while she focuses on the self-knowledge of Black woman, a LOT of what she speaks about can be applied to other marginalized groups. BIPOC in fields of academia and discourse are forced to produce thought and knowledge under a system that advocates for knowledge by and for the dominant group (White/cis/het/abled-bodied/etc), therefore, when many marginalized people enter academic spaces with the goal of studying their community, they’re forced to separate themselves from their community to “reduce bias”, reduce the radicalization of their thought so as not to provoke the established dominant group’s structure of knowledge and thought, and also reducing the radicalization of their knowledge in order to even get published/funding. Collins writes it here best: “Since researchers have widely differing values, experiences, and emotions, genuine science is thought to be unattainable unless all human characteristics except rationality are eliminated from the research process”, and here “Emotion indicates that a speaker believes in the validity of an argument. Consider Ntozake Shange’s description of one of the goals of her work: ‘Our [Western] society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else’s feelings, and yet be very respectable. This, to me, is a travesty. . . I’m trying to change the idea of seeing emotions and intellect as distant faculties’.”

Transmedicalism is rooted in the idea that there is a sort of irrationality related to being trans. That there MUST be a logical reason for the way someone’s gender is the way it is, and if it is not the way transmedicalism dictates it should be, then it is wrong. Gender in itself is inherently irrational, it is a social construct upheld by white supremacy, the patriarchy, and colonization. Nothing about gender makes sense, we have all been socialized to believe it should be this way due to Western society pushing these ideals of what a man and a woman should be. Even globally you cannot find the exact same ideals or manurisms that we typically associate with men and women in the West.

Transmedicalism serves a purpose, and that is to take something that is as confusing and weird of questioning your gender and being transgender and reduce it down to something understandable. This is why you see the common experience of younger trans people or trans people who are just starting transitioning to fall into the transmed blackhole. The truth is, personal experiences with gender, with life, with society, with the self are all credible. Feelings and emotions DO have their place in academia and in life, and the idea that they don’t just contributes to the violent idea that we do not belong in these spaces of study. We are taught that our identities must be accommodated to the dominant culture, because if we truly let trans people exist as freely as we should, it would cause the dominant group’s power to begin to crumble. It’s also important to mention that even if feelings were disregarded when it comes to letting trans expression be free, trans people have existed for CENTURIES in nearly ALL PARTS OF THE WORLD and have been documented throughout history with complex gender structures, expression, and spiritual values (Two-Spirit, los Muxes, etc). History in itself is a fact, and by disregarding the historical identity of trans folks by assuming dysphoria is a byproduct of transness when it actually is a byproduct of colonization is further colonizing trans identities.

As trans people, we simply do not owe anyone an explanation for why we exist and why we do the things we do or why we express ourselves a certain why and why we use these words to describe our experience, etc and etc. Your experience is credible. Your feelings are credible. Your transness is real, and somebody else’s transness will never take away from your own. You do not owe cis people validation, you do not need to make your transness palatable to cis people, and you are not an embarrassment to the trans community for expressing your gender in a way transmeds do not understand. You are not the reason why transphobia exists, your transness is not ugly, weird, unnatural....

Your transness is your own, and that is what makes it wonderful. To transmeds: Kill the colonizer in your brain.

[wfuanthrotheory2022]

J.K. Rowling and the Performance of Gender

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge the situation of J. K. Rowling’s controversy is incredibly multifaceted, and so for this short blog post I will be specifically focusing on only one part of it so as not to write ten thousand words. Secondly, I am writing with the belief that trans women are women (in the Western sense of the word) - therefore, “women” refers to all those who identify with the term, “cis women” refers to those who were assigned female at birth and continue to identify with that, and “trans women” refers to those who were not assigned female at birth but identify with the term women.

I am going to look at J.K. Rowling’s comments on whether trans women should be permitted in what she calls “women’s only spaces” through the lens of Butler’s “Performance Acts and Gender Constitution”. Like Slocum, Butler describes a fundamental difference between biological sex and gender, which she says is “in no way a stable identity” and is “instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (519). Sex in these definitions refers to the biology of a person, and while Butler does not deny that gender in many cultures is influenced and informed by a person’s sex, the two do not universally equal each other - biology helps inform a person’s lived experience but a person is more than just their body (521). However, Butler acknowledges that there are social consequences for people who do not perform their gender “correctly” (522)- which we can see in the high rates of suicide, mental illnesses, homicide, and discrimination against the trans community. 

Rowling shares an emphasis on lived experience in common with Butler. In Rowling’s own writing on her views, she talks at length about the oppression that cis women (she specifies) experience and how that has fundamentally shaped her definition of “woman”. Rowling writes that she respects and cares for trans women, and believes that they deserve equal rights. However, she does not believe that trans women should be considering in the same “category” as cis women because, in her opinion, that opens the door for predatory cis men to pretend to be trans women in order to abuse cis women. It is clear that Rowling is writing from a deep-seated fear than stems from her own lived experiences with abuse by cis men. This absolutely should be sympathized with, but it is simultaneously true that gender (if you agree with Butler as I do) is not a natural truth - it is culturally constructed. Therefore, perhaps the answer that Rowling is looking for is structuring spaces based on sex, not gender. She does not acknowledge same-sex abuses, only those perpetuated by cis men agaisnt cis women, so by her logic if safe spaces were structured by what biology a person has this could be reduced. 

But Rowling also disagrees with gender inclusive language such as “people who menstruate” or “people with uteruses”. She feels that this is dehumanizing, which is sort of in common with Butler, who describes the performance of gender as “humanizing” (522). This controversy raises the question of if oppression and violence is a fundamental part of being a woman, and is there no way to reduce misogyny and violence against women that does not discredit the performance of gender by both cis women and trans women? 

Based on the reading of Butler, I would argue that what this shows is a movement to redefine what gender is in our society. The way Rowling grew up, she writes in her blog, having certain organs and hormones was part of the definition of “woman”, but in recent years the definition is becoming more individualized - “woman” means someone who identifies as such, and that person can choose entirely what being a woman looks like and means to them. Butler says that gender “is only real to the extent that it is performed” (527), so perhaps gender becomes less real if everyone performs it differently, but that might not necessarily be a bad thing. 

Similar to Rowling, most of the things I associate with what it means to be a woman are negative. But the trans women I have known find so much more positivity and gender euphoria in womanhood, which I find fascinating in a discussion of what gender is and how it is constructed. 

  Link to Rowling’s comments: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/ 

[gendercensus]

Gender Census 2020: The Identity Question

This report is the second in a series, analysing the >24,000 responses from the 2020 Gender Census question-by-question.

[ Report #1: On “enby” and age // Report #3: The Title Question // Report #4: The Pronoun Question ]

~

This year’s Gender Census, aimed at everyone whose gender(s) or lack thereof are not adequately described by the gender binary of “always, solely and completely male OR always, solely and completely female”, was open from 12th February until 7th April 2020. There were 24,576 usable responses. (Unfortunately the spreadsheet of responses won’t be available until I’ve written up the report for every question, sorry about that!)

This report will summarise the responses for the first question, regarding identity.

As in previous years, I asked:

Which of the following best describe(s) in English how you think of yourself?

There were 30 checkbox options presented in a random order, largely based on which answers were chosen by over 1% of participants last year. (More on how I’m updating the selection process later.)

Here’s a graph of the results:

And here’s the top 5:

nonbinary - 66.4% (down 0.2%)

queer (partially or completely in relation to gender) - 42.9% (down 0.1%)

trans - 33.7% (down 2.9%)

enby - 31.5% (down 0.2%)

gender non-conforming - 29.0% (up 2.8%)

Last year queer was added to the checkbox list because it was entered into the textbox by over 1% of participants (2.9%) the previous year, and it rocketed to second place. At the time I was very surprised by this, and I had some reservations about the data quality, because the word “gender” isn’t mentioned in the question. Perhaps people were choosing queer as a checkbox option because the question isn’t clear enough and they identify as queer in terms of their sexual orientation? This year, the queer checkbox option was a little longer:

queer (partially or completely in relation to gender)

... and it was still entered by around the same proportion of participants. I now feel satisfied that these results are representative of participants’ gender identities or similar, and not entered in error. I will retain this wording for future surveys, just in case.

Aside from that, nothing particularly stands out as a new trend. Here’s the graph of the top 10 identity words from the past seven surveys:

[Please note, there was no survey in 2014 so the graph is a little misleading on the left there.]

Genderqueer continues its gradual downward trend, and I’ve bolded that line so you can see it more clearly. Last year it was sixth most popular, and this year it’s seventh. Gender non-conforming has climbed a little and now sits above transgender, but only by a very slim margin of 0.05% (12 people) - just enough to push transgender out of the top 5.

~

THE 1% AND 3% BOUNDARIES

In order to talk about the textbox entries and the words I will be adding and removing from the checkbox list, I’ll first have to explain a decision I made last year.

In 2019 the checkbox identity list had 30 terms on it, which was long enough that people couldn’t find their identities. Several people asked that the words be sorted in alphabetical order to make them easier to find, but if I do that I will risk primacy and recency bias - the phenomenon of participants being more likely to choose options at the start and end of a list respectively, the solution for which is to randomise the list for each participant.

The 1% boundary ensures that a word only gets added to the checkbox list when enough people write it into the textbox, but I can’t use the same boundary for removing terms from the checkbox list, because most words get chosen around four times more often when they’re presented as easy checkboxes that remind participants of their existence.

So, last year I decided to create a removal boundary of 3%. The proposal: if a checkbox identity term is chosen by under 3% of participants, it will be removed from the checkbox list for next year. When I ran the numbers in 2019, I found that the few terms that fit that criterion were words I have mainly seen used by older people, and older people are underrepresented in online surveys. If I remove checkbox terms that are mostly used by order people, I am further excluding them from a survey that is already less accessible to them.

The only solution I could think of was to start asking for participants’ ages every year, and then remove words that are chosen by under 3% of both under-30s and over-30s. This year I asked for age, and let people choose in 5-year increments, to reduce identifiability. I then split the popularity of identity words by age: participants 30 and younger, and participants 31 and older.

~

THE CHECKBOXES

Here’s how the top 5s look when split by age group:

30 and younger

nonbinary - 68.0%

queer (partially or completely in relation to gender) - 42.9%

trans - 35.0%

enby - 32.6%

transgender - 29.8%

31 and older

nonbinary - 56.9%

queer (partially or completely in relation to gender) - 43.1%

genderqueer - 29.8%

trans - 26.2%

gender non-conforming - 25.3%

Broadly similar at the top, though older participants were more likely to choose genderqueer and gender non-conforming, whereas younger participants were more likely to choose enby and transgender. (You can see more on the word “enby” and its age connotations in the first report here.)

Here’s the new top 15, calculated as an average percentage from both age groups:

This graph shows that in this new overall top 15, people aged 31 and over were significantly more likely to identify as genderqueer or woman. But I think it is interesting to note that the two groups are much more similar than they are different.

~

WORDS TO REMOVE (UNDER 3%)

On the checkbox list, only three terms were chosen by under 3% of participants in both age groups: third gender, cisgender, and binary.

I will be keeping cisgender and binary on the list for next year, because I have a policy of offering words that are opposites of words that need to stay on the list. In this case, they act as controls for transgender and nonbinary.

However, third gender has been on the list since the first survey because someone suggested it when I casually crowdsourced checkbox ideas, and it has always been pretty low on the popularity list. Last year it was 2.2%, and this year it was about the same: 2.2% for under-30s, and 2.3% for over-30s. I looked into the phrase a little more, and found that it’s essentially a term used by white anthropologists to describe non-straight-non-cis people in non-Western societies. That could include LGB people and binary trans people, in addition to people whose genders are not described by the M/F binary. On the basis of racism alone I’ll be very happy to remove this term from the checkbox list for next year.

If there are no words to remove next year, I will consider increasing the removal threshold to 4%.

~

TEXTBOX IDENTITY WORDS

This part is always a joy for me, and the age group thing made it more interesting this year. There were 3,546 unique identities written into the textboxes, which is one new term for every seven people.

Taking all write-ins at face value, there were two words that were typed in by over 1% of participants in either age group: human, and female.

This is probably the point at which some of you will start to feel nervous. “Adult human female” is the slogan of some gender-critical/trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Most years the survey link gets shared in gender-critical circles and we get a handful of responses from people identifying as women, some of them trying to disrupt the survey and some earnestly sharing their experiences of their own genders.

This year I thought more about the issue and came to a decision about whether or not these responses should be included, and you can read more about that here, but the summary is: many gender-critical women responding to the survey describe lifelong experiences of gender dysphoria and a relationship with their bodies that could have been recounted by any nonbinary participant. I invite anyone to participate who feels that the gender binary has failed them, and gender-critical women/TERFs should be included in that group.

So, if a gender-critical woman’s response isn’t abusive or hurtful, it can stay. That means that we had plenty of people who entered the words adult, human and female into the textboxes, and I have to decide what to do about that.

Adult didn’t make the cut. For some reason it wasn’t entered as often as human and female.

Human was an easy decision. It can be assumed that if one is filling in a survey on the internet using a keyboard, one is probably human. That doesn’t need to be included on the list.

Female is harder. I have previously debated whether or not to include male and female on the checkbox list, and every time I have decided that the risk is too great. My experience is that many trans and nonbinary people are uncomfortable enough being asked about the gender they were assigned at birth and their biological sex that they would be much more likely to duck out of any survey even vaguely alluding to it. Since male and female were never entered by over 1% of participants I never had to consider it at all - until now.

So, when it became apparent while the survey was open that female might break 1%, I ran some informal polls on Twitter and Mastodon, and combined the results in a spreadsheet. I wanted to find out whether people associate male/female with biological sex and/or gender assigned at birth, and how people would feel about them being included as visible checkbox options. Here’s a summary:

81% of voters said that male and female relate to bodies/sex/anatomy exclusively or in at least some contexts. In the extremes, people were a little more likely to say that male/female relate to bodies/sex only, as opposed to gender only. This fits my experience of the trans narrative that sex and gender are different things that are incongruent in trans people.

People were on the whole in favour of male and female being words on the checkbox list distinct from man and woman, but it was very close.

When asked how they would personally feel seeing male/female on the checkbox list, it became a little less ambiguous - only 18% said they’d feel uncomfortable or otherwise negative. I say “only” - one in five is a lot of participants. I suspect that would still lead to a lot of drop-outs.

To act as something like a control, I asked about an issue that is often controversial: the inclusion of it/it pronouns in the pronoun checkbox list. 82% said they felt good about them being included, compared to only 54% of people who would feel good about male and female being included.

For now I conclude that the words male and female correlate with physical and anatomical sex enough that it would interfere with the quality of the data. Until the balance tips from “male/female = body” to “male/female = gender”, I don’t think I will feel confident that I can add them to the list without affecting survey results and participants’ inclusion.

So that’s it for the words counted at face value - nothing will be added next year.

However, taking into account variations of spelling and similar, the picture looks a little different.

Some textboxes contained phrases like “lesbian (yes, as a gender identity)”, which I found interesting! So I started to count as many of these oddballs as I could, ensuring along the way that they fit the spirit of the question. The following words were entered in some way by at least 1% of participants in one of the two age groups:

lesbian

butch

femme

Butch and femme are familiar to me as words that describe an experience of gender outside of heteronormativity, but lesbian in this context was new to me, which is always exciting!

Interestingly, I didn’t see anything like the same trend for terms that usually describe gay men, such as gay, bear, etc. For fairness, I will include gay if I include lesbian, in the same way that I include cisgender if I list transgender. And, like queer, I will feel more confident in the data if I can know for sure that participants are choosing words in the spirit of the question - gender identity rather than sexual orientation.

That means next year I will be adding four (!) new terms to the checkbox list:

lesbian (partially or completely in relation to gender)

gay (partially or completely in relation to gender)

butch

femme

The removal of one term and the addition of four will make the identity list 33 words long. This is very unwieldy! People were already struggling to find familiar identity words at 30. Next year when I crowdfund I will be raising money to pay for SmartSurvey to make a custom question layout for us, that looks something like this mock-up a nice person made last year:

A search box, and when you start typing the term you’re looking for, the list of checkbox options filters out everything that doesn’t fit. So if you typed “dem” you’d be left with demiboy, demigirl, and demigender.

The quote that SmartSurvey gave me is £400 plus VAT - so I assume £480. Oof! But I think it would be a one-off fee, and I think it would be worth it.

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CLOSING THOUGHTS

You all are super interesting!

“Nonbinary” is the most popular, but it’s still only good for two-thirds of us.

The identity list is getting very long.

Genderqueer is down, queer is up.

The line between gender and sexuality is delightfully blurry when you get right down to it.

Age is just a number.

It’s already August and I’ve only done two reports of maybe four or five. In addition to this whole pandemic situation I’ve also been going through a lot in relation to disability issues, housing, etc. I’m doing my best, and I won’t give up!

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SEE ALSO

A list of links to all results, including UK and worldwide, and including previous years - summary page / results tag

The mailing list for being notified of the final report and next year’s survey

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