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Ok I don't know if this has already been done better elsewhere, and it's more of an intellectual exercise than a serious call for new language.
But I've been thinking about how it would be useful to have a way to signify that when I, for example, describe myself as "a man" I mean it in the context of being genderfluid, having a gender which includes "man" but is not defined by or limited to it, and which is just as much "woman" and "other" in the same way. I am not a "man" in the same way that a binary trans man or cis man is a "man", where man is the entirety of their gender identity to the exclusion of "woman" etc.
So it's like... I'm a man&, and also a woman& and other&. (I would use man+ etc but have a vague memory of seeing that used for something else. Google just got confused when I checked, though)
And I actually need three ways of writing things. Like:
Which would be incredibly cumbersome and confusing to actually use in practice outside this one little post, but it is useful to generally remember that they exist as separate concepts. And I'm going to keep using those symbols here because you can take the algebraist out of academia but you can't take the algebra out the algebraist.
It's important to note that the experiences of people I'm lumping together under the man| umbrella can be pretty nuanced and varied! Like... I feel like non-binary men would vary wildly about whether they'd describe themselves as a man& or a man| or neither. And what about a trans man who still feels some complicated connection to his experiences when he still identified as a woman, even though he doesn't identify as non-binary? Even ostensibly cis men often have a complicated relationship with being a man. This is mostly about how things feel to me here in man& land, I suspect this framing would be less helpful for those closer to but not squarely in man| land, and so forth.
Anyway!
In my experience most trans-positive people do understand what I mean when I say I'm a "man", once I explain. So the issue is mostly situations where I am talking to strangers and it would be cumbersome to give all that context. Obviously it would, in practice, be even more cumbersome to define man& and then describe myself that way, but it's nice to imagine a world where people just immediately understood.
Something a lot of people don't seem to understand so intuitively, even some other trans people, is that I am similarly masculine&, feminine& and androgynous&. There's this incredibly frustrating assumption, even amongst some other non-binary people, that literally everyone is exactly one of masculine or feminine, even if they may not be a man or woman, or might be a feminine man/masculine woman etc.
And obviously non-binary people who are exactly one of masculine or feminine are 100% valid! My problem isn't with them, it's with people who act like they're the only kind of non-binary people who exist.
I see this a lot with push-back against the idea that non-binary people are all "women-lite", and obviously it is especially relevant in this context to bring up non-binary men, masculine non-binary people etc. But it often feels like it genuinely hasn't occurred to a lot of people that anyone is genuinely agender or not aiming for any sort of gendered presentation at all etc, or that anyone can be both masculine& and feminine&, etc.
It's also worth noting the complicated relationships between woman/woman-aligned/feminine/femme etc and man/man-aligned/masculine/butch etc. These are all sometimes treated as synonyms, when they're not, and also some people will reject one binary (eg woman| vs man|) only to assume another (eg masculine| vs feminine|).
Thinking about this I realised why I feel so alienated from a lot of discussions of being trans masculine. Because I am masculine&, and it's no more or less central to my gender identity than being feminine&. The fact that I am masculine& and afab is significant from the perspective of like... the ways my gender is read by a cisheterormative society, practical concerns with finding clothing that fits or what hormones to consider etc, and other specific things I have in common with other trans masculine people which differ from other sorts of trans experience, especially stuff like transmisogyny.
But like... I very much do not want to be read as masculine|, I want to be read as masculine&. I would also like to be simultaneously read as feminine&! The reason my gender presentation leans masculine is that my body leans very much towards being read as feminine, so I aim for an overall look that reads as somewhere in the middle. But if I woke up tomorrow 6 foot tall with broad shoulders and no boobs, I'd go buy some frilly dresses, to average things out the other way.
Another thing I've been thinking about is why I feel so deeply alienated by a lot of "lesbian and gay" focussed approaches to gender and sexuality, even when they explicitly include non-binary and bi people. And I think it's because a lot of it ends up being implicitly at odds with some of my "&"s. Like... "genderfluid and bi" modelled as "sometimes a lesbian|, sometimes a gay| man|, but always homosexual|".
And I know that's how it works for some people, but for me, no, I am both homosexual& and heterosexual&. My attraction to women is not not similar to lesbian attraction, but it also has similarities to straight and bi men's attraction, when those men manage to see women as people who just happen to have a different gender. My attraction to men is as much like that of bi or (non-homophobic) straight women as it is like that of gay or bi men.
The &-ness of my heterosexuality& in many ways has more significant effects than the &-ness of my homosexuality&, because heterosexual| people are straight, while homosexual| people are fellow queers, and that shared queerness changes things. And obviously it sucks when people act like bi people are basically straight, or 50% straight. But the way people frame heterosexuality& as totally distinct from heterosexuality|, beyond the fact one experiences homophobia and the other doesn't, still sometimes really rubs me the wrong way.
Similarly, my masculinity& causes more social differences than my femininity&, being a man& and other& causes more social differences than being a woman&, since I'm afab. But I am still a woman, and have things in common with women| (cis and trans) that I do not with men|, even trans men|.
And all this &-ness is central to how I experience gender and sexuality. It's not a minor add-on to a central |-ish version of me.
Ok this is all descending into pure algebra I should stop here haha. But hopefully I got across some things.
More thoughts:
I didn't even go into how I'm like... allosexual& and asexual&, which is a whole other thing.
Above, I was referring to butch/femme in their more gender neutral usage, but back when I identified as a woman I was really bothered by the assumption that every single wlw was, if not butch| or femme|, then at least sitting in a specific static position on the butch| to femme| continuum.
I haven't addressed the continuum between no gender and "a little bit man and nothing else but not like 100% man" etc, and I'm sure there's other gender identities it didn't even occur to me to think of. But I guess man& vs man| captures the contrast between gender as I experience it and gender as all men are assumed to experience it, even if it doesn't capture the full spectrum of man-ness.
But I've been thinking about how it would be useful to have a way to signify that when I, for example, describe myself as "a man" I mean it in the context of being genderfluid, having a gender which includes "man" but is not defined by or limited to it, and which is just as much "woman" and "other" in the same way. I am not a "man" in the same way that a binary trans man or cis man is a "man", where man is the entirety of their gender identity to the exclusion of "woman" etc.
So it's like... I'm a man&, and also a woman& and other&. (I would use man+ etc but have a vague memory of seeing that used for something else. Google just got confused when I checked, though)
And I actually need three ways of writing things. Like:
- man& man plus other things
- man| purely man and nothing else
- man an umbrella term covering both.
Which would be incredibly cumbersome and confusing to actually use in practice outside this one little post, but it is useful to generally remember that they exist as separate concepts. And I'm going to keep using those symbols here because you can take the algebraist out of academia but you can't take the algebra out the algebraist.
It's important to note that the experiences of people I'm lumping together under the man| umbrella can be pretty nuanced and varied! Like... I feel like non-binary men would vary wildly about whether they'd describe themselves as a man& or a man| or neither. And what about a trans man who still feels some complicated connection to his experiences when he still identified as a woman, even though he doesn't identify as non-binary? Even ostensibly cis men often have a complicated relationship with being a man. This is mostly about how things feel to me here in man& land, I suspect this framing would be less helpful for those closer to but not squarely in man| land, and so forth.
Anyway!
In my experience most trans-positive people do understand what I mean when I say I'm a "man", once I explain. So the issue is mostly situations where I am talking to strangers and it would be cumbersome to give all that context. Obviously it would, in practice, be even more cumbersome to define man& and then describe myself that way, but it's nice to imagine a world where people just immediately understood.
Something a lot of people don't seem to understand so intuitively, even some other trans people, is that I am similarly masculine&, feminine& and androgynous&. There's this incredibly frustrating assumption, even amongst some other non-binary people, that literally everyone is exactly one of masculine or feminine, even if they may not be a man or woman, or might be a feminine man/masculine woman etc.
And obviously non-binary people who are exactly one of masculine or feminine are 100% valid! My problem isn't with them, it's with people who act like they're the only kind of non-binary people who exist.
I see this a lot with push-back against the idea that non-binary people are all "women-lite", and obviously it is especially relevant in this context to bring up non-binary men, masculine non-binary people etc. But it often feels like it genuinely hasn't occurred to a lot of people that anyone is genuinely agender or not aiming for any sort of gendered presentation at all etc, or that anyone can be both masculine& and feminine&, etc.
It's also worth noting the complicated relationships between woman/woman-aligned/feminine/femme etc and man/man-aligned/masculine/butch etc. These are all sometimes treated as synonyms, when they're not, and also some people will reject one binary (eg woman| vs man|) only to assume another (eg masculine| vs feminine|).
Thinking about this I realised why I feel so alienated from a lot of discussions of being trans masculine. Because I am masculine&, and it's no more or less central to my gender identity than being feminine&. The fact that I am masculine& and afab is significant from the perspective of like... the ways my gender is read by a cisheterormative society, practical concerns with finding clothing that fits or what hormones to consider etc, and other specific things I have in common with other trans masculine people which differ from other sorts of trans experience, especially stuff like transmisogyny.
But like... I very much do not want to be read as masculine|, I want to be read as masculine&. I would also like to be simultaneously read as feminine&! The reason my gender presentation leans masculine is that my body leans very much towards being read as feminine, so I aim for an overall look that reads as somewhere in the middle. But if I woke up tomorrow 6 foot tall with broad shoulders and no boobs, I'd go buy some frilly dresses, to average things out the other way.
Another thing I've been thinking about is why I feel so deeply alienated by a lot of "lesbian and gay" focussed approaches to gender and sexuality, even when they explicitly include non-binary and bi people. And I think it's because a lot of it ends up being implicitly at odds with some of my "&"s. Like... "genderfluid and bi" modelled as "sometimes a lesbian|, sometimes a gay| man|, but always homosexual|".
And I know that's how it works for some people, but for me, no, I am both homosexual& and heterosexual&. My attraction to women is not not similar to lesbian attraction, but it also has similarities to straight and bi men's attraction, when those men manage to see women as people who just happen to have a different gender. My attraction to men is as much like that of bi or (non-homophobic) straight women as it is like that of gay or bi men.
The &-ness of my heterosexuality& in many ways has more significant effects than the &-ness of my homosexuality&, because heterosexual| people are straight, while homosexual| people are fellow queers, and that shared queerness changes things. And obviously it sucks when people act like bi people are basically straight, or 50% straight. But the way people frame heterosexuality& as totally distinct from heterosexuality|, beyond the fact one experiences homophobia and the other doesn't, still sometimes really rubs me the wrong way.
Similarly, my masculinity& causes more social differences than my femininity&, being a man& and other& causes more social differences than being a woman&, since I'm afab. But I am still a woman, and have things in common with women| (cis and trans) that I do not with men|, even trans men|.
And all this &-ness is central to how I experience gender and sexuality. It's not a minor add-on to a central |-ish version of me.
Ok this is all descending into pure algebra I should stop here haha. But hopefully I got across some things.
More thoughts:
I didn't even go into how I'm like... allosexual& and asexual&, which is a whole other thing.
Above, I was referring to butch/femme in their more gender neutral usage, but back when I identified as a woman I was really bothered by the assumption that every single wlw was, if not butch| or femme|, then at least sitting in a specific static position on the butch| to femme| continuum.
I haven't addressed the continuum between no gender and "a little bit man and nothing else but not like 100% man" etc, and I'm sure there's other gender identities it didn't even occur to me to think of. But I guess man& vs man| captures the contrast between gender as I experience it and gender as all men are assumed to experience it, even if it doesn't capture the full spectrum of man-ness.
Tags:
- gender,
- me,
- non binary,
- thoughts,
- trans
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I was vigorously nodding along with all of this paragraph. <3
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Thanks it's good to know this resonates with other people!
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Yes, me too! Also the bit about how my body does plenty on its own to bring femme to mind, which is part of why I lean masc in presentation a lot when I'm Doing Gender (as opposed to when I'm just schlubbing around the house, lol). I think if I looked more masc physically on my own I might be more comfortable exploring femme clothing choices again (but also I'm not sure if I'm masc& enough to want my body to do the masc part of the signalling). And while I'm definitely Not A Femme|, I'm also Not A Man|, even though claiming space for the part of me that's at least somewhat man& brings me joy. There's some femme& in there that I'm still figuring out -- a lot of my gender journey has involved being able to say no to enforced femininity, but there's still some parts of it that I like for itself even though accessing it is complicated these days.
And this:
Yes yes yes yes yes. It fucking bothered me. Before I felt comfortable claiming nonbinary for myself in general, I remember literally saying to someone "If butch and femme are genders, which they are for some people in our social group, then on that scale, I'm... basically non-binary here."
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Yeah, accessing my femme& is complicated but I can tell it's in there.
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While I identify as a queer cis geeky woman, something about this resonates for me, and I’ll have to sit with it to figure out which bits and how that might affect my labels.
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Oh, that's great to hear, good luck with your sitting :)
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Er, I assumed this was okay to link to - let me know if not and I'll take it down asap.
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Before I medically transitioned, I leaned hard on a masculine presentation because otherwise everyone thought I was a woman. Now that everyone thinks I am a man, I am leaning hard on feminine presentation. I do not want to be seen as uncomplicatedly one thing. Whatever people think they are seeing, I want to add to it.
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Lesbian& feels really true to me personally.
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I was just the other day talking with some fellow queers about the common model of gender as a spectrum between man and woman, and how flawed that is (and similarly for masculine and feminine, etc.) Because it sets it up as, the more man you are the less woman/other you are, and vice versa. And lumps agender and third gender in with "exactly halfway between man and woman" to boot.
I like a model that is more like a coordinate system, where male and female and any other genders you need to include are distinct directions and a gender can be made up of any combination of them (including negative values, if someone's gender is substantially informed by what they're not.) Granted I'm a mathematician....
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Oth order approximation: Everyone (who counts) is a man.
1st order approx: Gender binary: there are men and women.
2nd order approx: Sliding scale between men/male and women/female.
3rd order: Sandra Bem's two-coordinate system, grouped into "masculine", "feminine", "androgynous" and "undifferentiated".
Much better approximation: Near-infinite vector space of all the properties one could considered gendered, where some neighbourhood clusters correspond loosely to genders we have names for.
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Yes! Exactly!
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But it often feels like it genuinely hasn't occurred to a lot of people that anyone is genuinely agender
Like, the whole concept of agender people (along with all nonbinary people, basically) as a point somewhere between "man" and "woman" and barely distinct if at all from being multigender or genderfluid etc is baffling. Also, I appreciate you pointing out that woman, woman-aligned, femme etc are not the same, because I'm always navigating that in my head.
And some of this was "wow, that's totally the opposite of my experience! Which makes sense, but I hadn't thought of it!" I hadn't really thought through how even "I'm a man at this moment in time" drops a lot of the man& nuances. And a gender aesthetic that serves to average out gender presentation didn't occur to me, either! My own line of thought wrt that was more "it's all such a pain, and wrong anyway, so I'll go with what I find most attractive in other people and also most convenient", lol. That's pretty conventionally feminine, but it does feel slightly validating to be read as not-feminine in some way, yet that almost always means "being read as masculine in some way" which is wrong in its own way, so... in my ideal world, there'd at least be some way to signify not only "not a woman/man" but "not fundamentally anything at all."
(I do also feel like a lot of gender discourse is predicated on erasure of agender people t b h.)
(...I just realized that this is probably why my fantasy conlang, for a society that is Not Great on these matters, does distinguish agender people from everyone else. A shocking twist, haha.)
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Thank you for explaining this so clearly. Some of it really resonates.
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I appreciate another look at how to not be caught thinking of gender as discrete points on a line.
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hmm, by this definition I am technically Woman&, because I know I am not just Woman, I think?
Thinky thoughts, also I am bisexual and my attraction to people is...quite varied. (Sometimes I do feel like I am attracted to men like a gay man, at least the one hetero man I described it to admitted his attraction to women feels like what I describe. And what I describe feels different from how hetero women approach their attraction to men. Even though if you look at me, 98% of the time you can assume and people do assume I am a hetero cis woman.)
Sorry for going off about my own stuff, but this gave me thoughts!
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It's nice knowing the post gives people food for thought!