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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
no subject
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....
no subject
no subject
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.
no subject
Yes! Exactly!