#gender noncomformity

[im-secretly-a-frog]

Y'know what? Fuck it. I am a dude. I am sapphic. I love girls in a very gay way. I love boys in a very gay way. I am a guy, but not a man. A use he/him but I am not a man. I don't use she/her but I am sapphic. I have a complicated relationship with a lot of parts of my identity, and that will not change overnight, but right now what is important is that I am amazing.

I am queer and beautiful and in love. I use labels I want and reject ones I don't.

[floral-ashes]

I was asked why the moral panic around Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was so centred on trans people when there’s no evidence that she’s trans. I thought I’d share my thoughts publicly.

The reason is that, in many ways, transphobia isn’t about trans people, it’s about what trans people mean to ideologies of race and gender. The controversy about the Olympic boxers is linked to rising anxieties about the line between men and women becoming increasingly blurred in contemporary society. These anxieties are fuelled by right-wing movements who see rigid divisions between men and women as critical to maintaining white social, economic, and political control. Because trans people are seen as challenging the justification of gender norms and roles based on biology and reproduction, they’re targets of particularly intense hostility and violence. My colleague Blu Buchanan and I tracked that racial logic a bit more in depth in a truthout essay a few years ago. White supremacist ideologies are heavily invested in rigid gender norms and roles because they see them as necessary to white reproduction.

The moral panic about ‘gender ideology’ is about trans people, yes, but it’s also explicitly about cis men and women not conforming to gender ideals that see men and women as fundamentally different forms of life with different roles in a society organized around the nuclear family. Women have to act and look a certain way to be considered ‘really’ women, much in the way that gay men are deprecated as ‘not real men.’ This moral panic manifests in the disproportionate targeting of racialized women and especially Black women for not conforming to white ideals of femininity. This dynamic is only amplified in the context of elite sports given the pervasive association of athletic ability with masculinity, especially in contact and strength-based sports like boxing as opposed to, say, gymnastics.

[heartless-aro]

For many girls and women, aromanticism is inherently a form of gender nonconformity, just as asexuality is for boys and men.

Romance novels are seen as being “feminine,” and romcoms are often derogatorily called “chick-flics,” for example. Women are expected to want flowers and chocolates and care about things like anniversaries and marriage to a greater extent than is expected of men. Even many of the things women are expected to do to conform to female gender roles are centered around looking attractive: having long well-styled hair, wearing makeup, shaving, wearing skirts and dresses, etc.

So shoutout to aro women and girls who want to be feminine but feel like their aromanticism makes them feel like an outsider to womanhood. Shout out to women and girls who feel left out of “girl talk” because they don’t have a crush or significant other to tell their friends about, or because they don’t think any of their classmates/coworkers/etc. are “cute.” Shout out to aro girls who are sick of being asked “who you’re dressing up for” any time they want to wear a bit of eyeliner and a pretty skirt. Your femininity is not made any less real or valid by your aromanticism.

And shoutout to gender nonconforming aro women and girls. Shoutout to aro women and girls whose aromanticism makes them feel disconnected from femininity. Shoutout to aro women and girls with short hair, and deep voices, and hair on their upper lips, chins, chests, stomachs, backs, armpits, arms, and legs that they choose not to shave off. Shoutout to aro women and girls who identify as both female and non-binary, who are both male and female, who use pronouns other than she/her. Shoutout to intersex aro girls and women. Y’all’re cool as hell and the aro community wouldn’t nearly as beautiful and vibrant without you.

[justdavina]

Again ladies...You must be tired by now of me telling you all how much I LOVE sheer fashion! This wonderful transgender woman kills it with this snappy sheer black number! With her wonderful body and girly features this amazing trans woman is PERFECT!

[erinelliotc]

A few years ago I used to be that annoying "transmasc lesbians don't exist, this shit is harmful and invalidates both transmascs and lesbians" person, and now I'M the transmasc lesbian. Seems like the tables have turned, huh?

I've spent so many months, years, trying so hard to fit into these categories that I saw so many people talk about as if it were the definitive truth, and this shallow and simplistic vision seems to be gaining a lot of attention and traction here in Brazil. Isn't it ironic to free yourself from cisnormativity and heteronormativity and all these binary boxes to find yourself again trying to fit into other boxes and norms that don't actually describe your experience correctly? Because your experience with gender is so chaotic and confusing (as expected of a nonbinary identity, and even more so if you're neurodivergent too) that there's no simple way to describe it. Then when you find out what describes this, people say you can't identify yourself that way because two or more of your identities are "incompatible". I see people treating non-binarity as if it were an exact science, as if it were math, as if it were something simple and logical, as it is precisely the escape from what has been established in our society as the only two possible options, generating countless identities within a gray area outside this black and white vision, so of course it's something complex, abstract and subjective.

EDIT: One of my reasons for thinking this way was that I ignored that the transgender experience and the cisgender experience aren't and will never be equivalent. It's obvious that a cis man can't be a lesbian, but the same doesn't go for transmasc people, and I thought that admitting that was the same as being transphobic, denying the masculinity of transmascs, denying their male identity. I already had a debate on Twitter because people didn't want to admit that trans men and transmasc people in general can suffer misogyny and male chauvinism (as society can still see and treat us as women) because they also saw it as the same as saying transmasc people are women. The identity of trans people is a very complex experience that involves a series of factors that cis people will never experience. We cannot equate the trans experience with the cis experience.

I thought identifying as a butch lesbian was enough to describe my masculinity, but I realized that I felt like it didn't encompass everything I felt, I still felt like something was missing. Preventing and depriving myself of identifying with more explicit masculine identities was actually making me feel bad and dysphoric. So yeah, I've been avoiding identifying with male-aligned identities because I thought that would mean having to stop identifying as a lesbian, and I didn't want that, and I don't really feel like calling myself straight makes any sense.

I have a text in Portuguese talking about my experience as a butch lesbian, and I feel that now it also serves to describe my experience as a nonbinary transmasc (the part where I talk about not identifying with "traditional masculinity", but with a "different type", like "soft masculinity", is directly related to the fact that, in addition to being nonbinary, I don't identify as a man, I don't feel comfortable with the term "man", but rather with "boy"). I spent a few months wondering whether I was libramasculine or boyflux, and I ended up deciding that if I can't identify which one I am, maybe it makes more sense to just adopt both identities, maybe I am both then! I'm tired of trying to fit into supposed rules about being nonbinary. This is exactly how non-binarity shouldn't be. I'm supposed to feel free, not trapped again. My identity is my identity and that's nobody's business.

[jiabeewrites]

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!!!

pride polls: gender edition

put your pronouns in the tags!

reblog to support another genderqueer!

(you'll probaby get a happy pride msg if i see u reblogged)

[aliyahali]

[queerism1969]

Notable transgender people from history

Here's the list I put together for when people on non-trans subreddits claim we didn't exist until recently:

Ashurbanipal (669-631BCE) - King of the Neo-Assryian empire, who according to Diodorus Siculus is reported to have dressed, behaved, and socialized as a woman.

Elagabalus (204-222) - Roman Emperor who preferred to be called a lady and not a lord, presented as a woman, called herself her lover's queen and wife, and offered vast sums of money to any doctor able to make her anatomically female.

Kalonymus ben Kalonymus (1286-1328) - French Jewish philosopher who wrote poetry about longing to be a woman.

Eleanor Rykener (14th century) - trans woman in London who was questioned under charges of sex work

[Thomas(ine) Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas(ine)_Hall) - (1603-unknown) - English servant in colonial Virginia who alternated between presenting as a woman and presenting as a man, before a court ruled that they were both a man and a woman simultaneously, and were required to wear both men's and women's clothing simultaneously.

Chevalier d'Eon (1728-1810) - French diplomat, spy, freemason, and soldier who fought in the Seven Years' War, who transitioned at the age of 49 and lived the remaining 33 years of her life as a woman.

Public Universal Friend (1752-1819) - Quaker religious leader in revolutionary era America who identified and lived as androgynous and genderless.

Surgeon James Barry (1789-1865) - Trans man and military surgeon in the British army.

Berel - a Jewish trans man who transitioned in a shtetel in Ukraine in the 1800's, and whose story was shared with the Jewish Daily Forward in a 1930 letter to the editor by Yeshaye Kotofsky, a Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn who knew Berel

Mary Jones (1803-unknown) - trans woman in New York whose 1836 trial for stealing a man's wallet received much public attention

Albert Cashier (1843-1915) - Trans man who served in the US Civil War.

Harry Allen (1882-1922) - Trans man who was the subject of sensationalistic newspaper coverage for his string of petty crimes.

Lucy Hicks Anderson (1886–1954) - socialite, chef and hostess in Oxnard California, whose family and doctors supported her transition at a young age.

Lili Elbe (1882-1931) - Trans woman who underwent surgery in 1930 with Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who ran one of the first dedicated medical facilities for trans patients.

Karl M. Baer (1885-1956) - Trans man who underwent reconstructive surgery (the details of which are not known) in 1906, and was legally recognized as male in Germany in 1907.

Dr. Alan Hart (1890-1962) - Groundbreaking radiologist who pioneered the use of x-ray photography in tuberculosis detection, and in 1917 he became one of the first trans men to undergo hysterectomy and gonadectomy in the US.

[Louise Lawrence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Lawrence_(activist)) (1912–1976) - trans activist, artist, writer and lecturer, who transitioned in the early 1940's. She struck up a correspondence with the groundbreaking sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey as he worked to understand sex and gender in a more expansive way. She wrote up life histories of her acquaintances for Kinsey, encouraged peers to do interviews with him, and sent him a collection of newspaper clippings, photographs, personal correspondences, etc.

Dr. Michael Dillon (1915-1962) - British physician who updated his birth certificate to Male in the early 1940's, and in 1946 became the first trans man to undergo phalloplasty.

Reed Erickson (1917-1992) - trans man whose philanthropic work contributed millions of dollars to the early LGBTQ rights movement

Willmer "Little Ax" Broadnax (1916-1992) - early 20th century gospel quartet singer.

Peter Alexander (unknown, interview 1937) - trans man from New Zealand, discusses his transition in this interview from 1937

Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989) - The first widely known trans woman in the US in 1952, after her surgery attracted media attention.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (1940-present) - Feminist, trans rights and gay rights activist who came out and started transition in the late 1950's. She was at Stonewall, was injured and taken into custody, and had her jaw broken by police while in custody. She was the first Executive Director of the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project, which works to end human rights abuses against trans/intersex/GNC people in the prison system.

Sylvia Rivera (1951-2002) - Gay liberation and trans rights pioneer and community worker in NYC; co-founded STAR, a group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women

Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992) - Gay liberation and trans rights pioneer; co-founded STAR with Sylvia Rivera

[magpiethepunkfairy]

I love you "weird" queer people

multigender people, trans people who are sometimes cis, queer people who are sometimes straight, trans people who don't want and will not transition, trans and nonbinary people who don't want binary bodys, queer platonic relationship havers, rabies flag people, people who's queer identity is influenced or directly tied to their mental health, queer people with different dissociative disorders, people whos identity is tied to their nerodiversity, identitys that are fluid and constantly changing, queer people who don't feel human, poly aroaces, people who's identitys can't and don't need to be labeled, I love you I love you I love you

Do what ever you want forever

Queer as in fuck you

Queer as in I love you

Queer as in weird!!!

[cr1zz0]

my fav scene in Pocket mirror goldenertraum.

it's just soooo wholesome.. he is such a cute GNC pumpkin....

[oediex]

I don't know if anyone needs to hear this but if you're gender non-conforming, I love you. Your existence makes me happy. I see you in the street and I smile.

[aaa-battery-not-rechargeable]

shout out to mfs with no pronouns at all

we rly said: don't refer to me. matter of fact, don't perceive me at all

[justdavina]

La grande dame! Is sooooo HOT!! This wonderful drag queen has nailed it when it comes to HOT! Her magical outfit will live with me forever! It's just incredible!

[flekh]

Something about Arcane and older women with muscles. As I approach my 30s, each passing year solidifies my belief in the importance of representation.

If you gender-switch Sevika, Grayson, or Ambessa, you'll get fairly typical male media archetypes for their ages, but they won't be nearly as popular among the female characters. Usually they get feminized as soon as they become female. And feminized also means become more tame in a desirable way, dull the edges. Men are those who have the luxury to frequently see themselves on screen at this age with agency, action, desirability, respect, and love interests.

And as a woman who relates to those three characters, I used to be afraid of growing older because I didn't know what would happen to me. Why would I? I have never seen a woman like me getting older. It may sound silly, but without representation it's so easy to think it's a natural order of things to lose your personality to age. When it's so scarce, seeing those characters can "extend" your lifespan in your head - see, she exists, and she's not a doting grandma or a crazy retired cat lady, so you don't have to feel lost.

So I'm immensely grateful for those characters being in the biggest animated show of the decade. I hope this trend does not die out with Arcane, with what it's doing for the gender non-conforming women.

[diaryofamultigenderlesboy]

Do you guys ever feel like the whole anti-lesboy discourses feel less like people not wanting to see men in the lesbian community and more like people not wanting to see trans and gender non-conforming people in the community??

Like a huge portion (if not the majority) of the lesboy community (atleast from what ive seen online) are trans or/and gender non-conforming. The history of male-identifying or/and masc-presenting lesbians is full of trans and/or gender non-conforming people.Yet exclusionists will still act like we are some sort of terrible danger for the lesbian community,online and irl.

This same logic is used by transphobes who do not wanna share spaces with trans or gender non-conforming people,treating us as we are same sort of threat for the well-being of the community. This is why i refuse to see exclusionism as nothing more than barely disguised terf ideology. They will see a lesbian that is connected to manhood/masculinity (aka a lesbian who is trans or gender non-conforming) even in the slightest and lose their shit and act like they are the reason why lesbophobia exist even if said lesbian are themselves affected by it.