#i can't take credit for the sand vs wheat analogy because my datemate came up with it but they said i could use it here

[cthulhu-with-a-fez]

Hey how do u know if u wanna be a boy in a cis way or a trans way? I’m a girl btw

alright so i'm gonna preface this by saying that i'm... probably not the best authority on What Makes A Man(TM), considering that i'm not one, and that no answer i give is going to catch every relevant topical nuance? but i know i've talked a bit in the tags about my personal blend of cis+ gender-woogity, so i'm gonna go out on a limb and assume that's what you're asking about!

it got pretty long, so i put it under the cut :D

there's two ways i tend to approach my assessment of my gender, which for purposes of this ask let's call "diagnostic" and "diegetic".

the diagnostic approach is more or less what it sounds like - comparing and contrasting what i understand gender to be, denotatively and connotatively and culturally, with what my sense of my own gender is, and trying to figure out what feels closest to me and why. this has been influenced pretty heavily by two posts i've seen floating around over the years but can't for the life of me find right now.

one of them is just a quote to the effect of "consistently wishing you were a different gender is a pretty strong indicator of being that gender." and it makes sense, right? human intuition, gut feeling like that, is made of a million little deductions about the world relative to yourself that you don't consciously process all of, but which make themselves known however they can. if you're a girl but you keep finding yourself thinking "man, i wish i was a boy," that might be your brain doing behind-the-scenes pattern recognition about being a boy and trying to flag your attention towards it.

which isn't to say that it's an infallible tell, gut feelings are not always correct, let alone accurate! even when they are, you're getting, like. fortune cookie amounts of information about things that might require thesis paper amounts. but that's where you have to take a level in metacognition and think about why you think about or respond to something the way you do. or, to quote discworld,

“First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.”

― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

figuring out the why of your own responses is good for tons of non-gender-related reasons, but it's especially helpful with those kind of vague but persistent I Feel A Way About This thoughts. if you're a girl and you keep thinking "man, i wish i were a boy", there's a lot of reasons you might think that! for legit gender reasons, yeah, but it might also be "i wish i were a boy because their clothes look better" or "i wish i were a boy because then i wouldn't get cat-called" or "because they get paid more" or "because no one assumes they can't pick up heavy things" or more. some of them are aesthetic things, some of them are cultural misogyny things, all of them are relevant and valid! but it also makes it a little harder to tell how heavily gender-weighted they are in general - you can be mad about the pay gap and and explore a more masculine silhouette while still robustly being a woman.

(though, pro tip about the clothes? regardless of your genderfeel, men's section jeans are where it's at. huge pockets. not made of tissue paper. sized with actual waist/inseam measurements instead of a random number revealed to a women's fashion exec in a vision. cannot recommend them strongly enough. have pocket. be free.)

that brings us to the second post that i regrettably can't find, and another excellent diagnostic tool!

it was a comment written by a trans man in a longer thread about gender identity, talking about something that helped him distinguish between 'cultural misogyny sucks' thoughts and 'i am not a woman' thoughts. he definitely explained it more eloquently, but his rule of thumb was "would this upset me if it happened to me, but not to a female friend?"

for example, if someone holds the door for a girl and calls her "ma'am," all courteous manners, that would probably not be an issue for most women! but if you aren't a woman, or you're starting to not feel like one, it might not feel so comfortable an interaction.

i've learned to use that as a baseline for a problem management system for "i wish i was..." thoughts like those - it really does help to distinguish between external circumstance thoughts wearing a gender envy hat vs actual gender envy thoughts hiding under an external-circumstance hat, especially when there's multiple confounding factors involved. for example, let's go back to the clothes thing for a second!

i've always had a bit of a contentious relationship with clothes shopping, which in hindsight was a combination of personal aesthetic, sensory issues, body image issues, and gender issues. trying to develop my aesthetic was hard, especially back when "department store girls' section" was my only real choice and the best i ever hoped for was a grudging least-worst option just to get it over with. this has since changed! i have experienced presentation euphoria! i have a style now that feels comfortable and makes me happy! but it was a steep climb to get there until i learned how to identify what made the least-worst option least worst and move closer to it.

sometimes it's easy, like "this fabric is soft but the color is hideous" so find a different color, or "it's too tight across the chest because it was designed for someone skinny" so try a different size, or "this is just blatantly not-my-aesthetic" so move on. but sometimes it's "i'm getting steadily more upset trying to find a dress that i don't hate on my body despite them looking and feeling just fine on the hanger," and that one's a little tougher.

because on one hand, part of it really was the body image issues. i don't need to shop plus-size, but there's still something really disheartening about basically every retail outlet's 'normal' size range heavily implying that i'm only barely thin enough to be worth catering to, you know? fatphobia in the fashion industry is a whole different other conversation that we're not having right now, but it heavily contributed to some non-gender-related body dysphoria that's played first-chair tuba in my brain for a long time.

but on the other hand, looking at myself in a mirror wearing a dress and really hating it wasn't entirely about my body in a dress - it was also about my body in a dress. it didn't really click until a good friend of mine invited me to be in their wedding party, and said "we're not doing bridesmaid's dresses, just bridal party colors, wear whatever you feel most comfortable in as long as it matches!" and i spent ten seconds mentally gearing up for another godawful harrowing misery gauntlet of dress shopping -

and then stopped. because.

if i can wear something comfortable.

and a dress isn't.

...... what if i wore a suit?

and lo, i went to men's wearhouse and got slacks and a vest and a buttondown and a tie and it was amazing. i feel so fucking good in that outfit, i feel handsome and classy and confident in a way i literally never once in my life have felt while wearing a dress.

most of the time, people want things or don't-want things for a whole blend of reasons, and if there's one reason yelling loudest (hello, body-dysphoria tuba) it's often hard to tell what the rest of the factors are. but it's really, genuinely worth it to try and figure it out, even if you have to dig through a big old lump of stress and misery to get there - understanding yourself better and accepting what you find will only ever lead to quality-of-life improvements. sometimes it's as simple as refining your aesthetic some more, realizing "i can do better than grudging least-worst options" and navigating towards a wardrobe that you actually like!

but sometimes, it's realizing that your clothes don't make you feel good in the first place because they're expecting a kind of gender performance out of you that you can't comfortably give.

and that's where the "diegetic" part of my self-analysis kicks in.

the definition of "diegetic" is (of sound in a movie, television program, etc.) occurring within the context of the story and able to be heard by the characters. the score of a movie is non-diegetic, whereas the song playing on the radio during a driving scene is. how does this relate to my gender, you might ask?

well... perception.

i can be on as many levels of Advanced Gendermancy as i want, but that's all non-diegetic. myself as i am, occurring within the context of existing in public and able to be seen by the other people out there living life? i'm gonna get perceived as a gender, and i'm gonna get perceived as "girl," with maybe an addition of "... queer?" when i feel like making a statement with flannels. and that's okay with me. it's not a hardship to have people assume i'm a girl, because yeah, i'm a girl! ish! mostly! girl-lite, girl-as-default, noncommittal-wiggly-hand-gesture rounding-down-to-the-closest-answer girl.

but the thing is, i'm a carpenter. blue-collar union carpenter. women comprise... i think 2% of the construction workforce in my area. which means that just by existing on-site, i'm making all the guys remember that the gender binary exists because there's now a "them" for them to be an "us" about. i get called "miss kelly" like that's my whole name by the guys from my company who know me, and i get called "young lady" by guys from other companies who don't, and it's all very respectful and courteous, but... i don't want it. what i want is access to the "we're literally all men here so it doesn't even matter that we're men" gender space they have without me, which i can't have, because i am diegetically female in a male-dominated field. and if gender is a fluid, i'm a water balloon deforming under pressure, because the more frequently i get Gendered on-site - even when everyone's been nothing but polite about it, and certainly not intending any insult! - the more stressed-out i get in the same direction as wearing dresses made me feel. it's too much, too constrictive of an expectation that i do not meet, and i don't like it, and you know what helps?

chasing masculine presentation a little harder to make up for it.

being seen and Gendered masculinely, even if it's a little more than i would normally want, feels good because it's balancing the pH of my gender fluid again, and getting to have that is entirely dependent on someone else perceiving you and acting on that perception.

so that's part of it as well, beyond any interior exploration you can do. it isn't just about what you feel like, which is certainly important - it's also about the way people treat you relative to what you feel like. and it's hard, it's really really hard, to figure out what's right for you in that balance, especially if you don't know what's wrong in the first place.

it's like being blindfolded on a beach and told to find wheat grains scattered in the sand by touch alone. you know there's something good out there but not where it is or how to find it, only that you don't have it, and if you find wheat at all it's mixed in with so much sand you can hardly taste it anyway. if you're lucky, you bump into someone who's gone through it already who can take the blindfold off and show you how to sift for wheat instead of just eating a handful of sand and hoping, and that makes it easier, but for every one person like that there's a hundred more who've never had to try to pick wheat out of sand and can't tell the difference anyhow who think you're just not trying hard enough to live off of the """wheat""" you've been given.

i can't really tell you what it feels like to want to be a boy, because i'm not a boy and i don't really want to be? but i can tell you how i worked out the gender that i've got right now, and i hope it helps you anyway.