cat-trans

  • ashinadash [she/her]
    ·
    8 months ago
    autism and gender intersect in really incredibly unfunny ways

    niko-concern What the actual fuck, dude. This whole fucking gender thing, as in the two that E*rope assholes forced on everybody, is literally fake. The labsls, the associations, gendered things, they are entirely socially constructed. Literally completely, an imperialist fever dream I think. That's what reading Gender Outlaw and then The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto is like.

    So hey what the fuck, am I an idiot for calling myself a lesbian? Or a woman, maybe. Because what the fuck right, no one aspect of humans, physical or mental or emotional, is inherently gendered, at all. Stupid fucking idea. So if "woman" is just a vague collection of physical aspects, then "lesbian" is only even kind of a sexuality label. It doesn't indicate if you prefer long hair or short hair, wide hips or slim ones, high voices or low ones, fuck it doesn't even reliably say what sex hormone you prefer in a partner? What the fuck does it even mean, aside from the queer cultural association I guess... it doesn't stop being "lesbian" if you include nonbinary people in that, right? But then what the hell even is the definition of "lesbian"? Not really "woman liker".

    So if that's the case, (maybe it isn't Idk) then what the fuck does identifying as a "woman" even mean? I guess it's comfortable to me because it's associated with femininity, I guess. But having long legs or thick thighs or incredibly long hair or boobs or soft skin or small shoulders(not necessarily in width terms) aren't actually gendered at all. Maybe cisnormative views would say those are woman traits, but there are enbies and agender people and genderfluid people and even fuckin' dudes that have some or all of those traits. So um what the fuck??

    "Women" actually did get debunked. Motherfucker.... niko-what This has busted my brain in half in a way that's kind of making me panic, Idek what to feel. Thanks for reading my absurdity?

    • AutomatedPossum [she/her]
      ·
      8 months ago

      You're definitely not alone with this. I hear takes like yours a lot from neurodivergent trans people and many of them specifically go for the agender label because it's what makes the most sense to them.

      It's not how i view this stuff, i could write an entire effortpost about what being a lesbian means to me or how i'm both nonbinary and a trans woman, or how meaningless bodies are in regards to gender once you've had decidedly lesbian sex with a pre-transition trans woman who's more feminine than every cis woman i've ever been with, but i don't have the time for that today and i think jesse-wtf is a perfectly reasonable and valid approach to this whole gender stuff, and i'm not gonna debate that.

      • ashinadash [she/her]
        ·
        8 months ago

        Is it agender tho if you change ur body via sex hormones thonk-trans that seems weird but I guess maybe it's not incompatible? I also kinda like 'she/her' pronouns though, so Idek.

        If you did I would read it :) I guess "lesbian" could always just mean funny and different things to me, right? I mean, it means something slightly different to everybody anyway, so why not completely bust it and use it differently to how it's culturally conceived? I guess I can just appropriate this term and use it for all of the feminine (and occasionally masc) non-dudes that I am into, I mean why the fuck not right? I suppose this is why people tend to flex and bend words so often, they are just words after all.

        how meaningless bodies are in regards to gender once you've had decidedly lesbian sex with a pre-transition trans woman who's more feminine than every cis woman i've ever been with,

        Love this for you, excellent stuff ❤ and yeah fr. It's a little easier to square the sexual/romantic end of this, at least. Surely if you decouple gender labels from body types though, (which we do) all gender labels suddenly become borderline meaningless right?

        • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@reddthat.com
          ·
          8 months ago

          Is it agender tho if you change ur body via sex hormones

          Gender isn't your hormones, so I don't see any reason why the two would be incompatible (if they are, I guess me and a lot of others are doing something wrong). Some cis men take estrogen because they prefer having a more feminine body, but like being men, for example. I've seen other agender people who also have used cross-natal-sex hormones.

          Also, there's labels like librafem, which is considered part of the agender spectrum and demigirl which can be part girl part agender (or other NB gender). Not particularly a fan of micro-labels myself because of how useless they are outside of niche communities (like, say an agender subreddit), but I do like learning of the different ways people try to describe themselves.

          • ashinadash [she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            8 months ago

            Yea,

            I think I would genuinely rather have labels that are useful and structurally sound but obscure, rather than squeezing my being into a silly box that people can recognise. Maybe people who cannot grasp it simply do not deserve to know...

            • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@reddthat.com
              ·
              8 months ago

              Fair. I rather just use generic umbrella terms for the and maybe append "-spec" to the end to make it clearer I'm using it as an umbrella term. Partly because uncertainty, but partly because a bigger umbrella gives more wiggle room to move around. But like, I could also just say something like "transfem agender" to communicate the same idea as "librafem", but one more people can sorta guess the meaning from the two words that make it up (even if they think its somehow a contradiction) and the other might make people think I'm a fem who is really into astrology.

        • AutomatedPossum [she/her]
          ·
          8 months ago

          Is it agender tho if you change ur body via sex hormones

          Yeah, it's best to follow Feinberg Thought and clearly seperate biology, gender as a social performance and gender identity as an internal, psychological structure. How you feel in your body and how and if you transition is independent from your gender identity. There can be an interaction between these, like things that give me dysphoria feel clearly incongruent from how i feel my body should be, they violate my sense of self - but i wasn't less of a woman when i could still grow a beard or before my boobs started growing, and getting bottom surgery will not make me more of a woman, it will just mean that i get rid of things that feel like foreign objects and cause me psychic damage. But that doesn't say anything about my gender identiy, people with a more binary understanding of gender do the same things as me when it comes to transitioning and people who would not use the term woman for themselves also do.

          • ashinadash [she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            8 months ago

            Mhm, that was what I thought as soon as I hit "reply", just some leftover brainrot is all, mb. Transition independent from gender identity (for me, have always separated the two when it come to other people) is slightly new to me. The rest of this does scan easily to me though.

    • Cromalin [she/her]M
      ·
      8 months ago
      spoiler

      my take is gender is entirely made up and bullshit but broadly it's still real (even if it gets incredibly fuzzy around the edges) and so i'll make my way through it picking the place in it that make me happiest and i hope everyone else does too. i try not to worry about it beyond that unless i'm arguing with someone who is being an asshole over someone else's gender, but i always make sure to recognize that it's constructed

      • ashinadash [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        8 months ago
        yuh

        There is def a part of me that wants to just not worry about it and cognitive dissonance myself, but... I don't know how I feel identifying by such poorly constructed, fuzzily-bordered labels. Can I be happy with that? Is it even useful?(maybe?) Does it encompass all of my identity?(probably not lol) Is it harmful, do we actually unironically need to lead a People's War against binary gender????

    • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@reddthat.com
      ·
      8 months ago
      spoiler

      So hey what the fuck, am I an idiot for calling myself a lesbian? Or a woman, maybe.

      Even if they are made up, that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with identifying with them or that they can't be useful within the context of our current social conditions.

      then “lesbian” is only even kind of a sexuality label. It doesn’t indicate if you prefer long hair or short hair, wide hips or slim ones, high voices or low ones, fuck it doesn’t even reliably say what sex hormone you prefer in a partner? What the fuck does it even mean, aside from the queer cultural association I guess… it doesn’t stop being “lesbian” if you include nonbinary people in that, right? But then what the hell even is the definition of “lesbian”? Not really “woman liker”.

      Given how masculine my mom is, I find it strange lesbians date her. Gay men also used to be interested in her, mistaking her for a boy. But it apparently still is a functional label somehow.

      • ashinadash [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        8 months ago
        yeag

        I guess yeah, like pronouns are socially constructed too but I have no hangups about those. I guess these labels don't really feel useful because they are definitionally wobbly to me. When I processed the "nothing is gendered" thought a few years ago, I just sort of ignored this and existed with the cognitive dissonance because whatever, nobody's gonna interrogate my identity. But it's weird

        Okay yeah that weirds me out, the gay men part lol. Liking masculine women is definitely a(n optional) historical part of being a lesbian though.

        Does any of this gender bullshit make any sense at all makima-huh

        • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@reddthat.com
          ·
          8 months ago

          Okay yeah that weirds me out, the gay men part lol.

          She's regularly gendered as a guy (both over the phone and in-person), so not really surprising. I assume she went to gay bars to meet women, so not really weird that other people would be going to the bars for similar reasons. And she seems to be happy the gay men mistook her as an attractive guy, even if she's not into men. She has the opinion gender is just the bits you were born with and nothing else, so I don't really think she believes in gender either. But that leads to a bit of a language barrier in talking about gender. I feel like if she used the language conceptions of words as I do, then she's at least consider herself agender/NB/etc.

          Does any of this gender bullshit make any sense at all

          Not to me, but maybe I'm just the one missing something.

          • ashinadash [she/her]
            ·
            8 months ago

            Okay yeah, I see. Your mum's view of gender is appalling but I guess it's... simple, easy to parse cringe one way to not believe in gender I guess. Also yeah sometimes you get that, where there's a queer (or neurodiverse, etc) person of an older generation who you can tell maybe would fit certain labels, but there's a big barrier in understanding. Just how it be.

            Okay well I guess we're missing something together :) I'm not certain about much anymore, like what am I, Idk. Do I wanna identify with these socially constructed labels, if yes why? If no what do?