Serious question.
Since a lot of online leftist spaces have people from the LGBT community, I sometimes do some research and reading or watching on whatever people post. It's interesting but not really relatable to me. The questions I have came up after watching a video posted on here. I t was something like incel to transfemme pipeline or something-something Mari? Super interesting and all, and i thought the comments were insightful, but I still didn't relate to it all. I was born a guy, I look like one and feel like one, and no matter what I do that's the way I'm treated. Like a straight cis guy. Some people post in communities like on Hexbear and idk if they're joking but they mention how they should've known they were trans because they did something feminine or masculine or whatever the opposite their assigned gender is. What's the difference between that, and tomboys or flamboyant gay men? Anything I did that was feminine, it was out of curiosity but made me generally uncomfortable. Honestly the guys I grew up around thought a lot more about what it's like to be a woman than I ever did, and they act a whole lot more manly than I do.
My life really wouldn't really feel that different if I was born or identified as a different gender identity. It's not something I ever really cared much for, and gender just isn't something I really think about. I'm not the most manly of the men, since I think the stereotype is unrealistic. I just do what I do, and no one really questions it or treats me different as I get older. I feel like most people who are interested in this type of thing are already in the "LGBT-space". I never felt that way. I guess after reading all this stuff about how other people deal with the society we live in, I spent some time thinking about what it would be like to be in their shoes. It didn't really change anything. I'm just attracted to feminine types romantically, and I was born and feel like a man. Why fix what isn't broken for me? That's my logic.
I was wondering why some people use they/them, she/them, he/them, or even both she and he. How did you come to that conclusion and why? Or how did you know what was more comfortable for you? To me this just seems like a social construct that doesn't effect me. I just think it's cool to have non-conforming people existing around and feeling comfortable with who they are, since it lifts a lot of strict gender norms on people like me who just chill.
From an ontological standpoint this is a difficult question to answer cleanly because the language we have to work with without getting into academic stuff is a bit incomplete and there are multiple things going on:
socially/culturally gender is a large collection of roles and aesthetics that get gendered. This is all very fuzzy stuff and runs into a lot of problems with how specific things are coerced vs tolerated, and because this is all artificial in the sense that it's entirely constructed culturally any given facet of it may or may not take hold in any given person and so there can be massive variance between individuals.
individually and at the surface-most level gender is how one slots into that framework both in roles and how one's self image has developed. This is generally where definitions stop: with regards to gender people are where they place themselves because the stuff that makes them place themselves somewhere is gender, for all that that's tautological. We can only "measure" gender through self declaration because generally whatever gender is it tends to make self descriptions that don't align with it unpleasant for the individual: a cis woman and a trans woman will both experience some amount of distress if self describing as male, for example. Usually, and with the caveat that "some amount" may not even be noticeable in a given case unless it's stacking on top of other exacerbating stressors.
internally it's something that somehow controls how someone develops alongside that framework, along with things like how the brain responds to sex hormone levels. This is the most controversial level for reasons that are difficult to explain quickly, from the political questions of gender and liberation to the fact that on a neurological level we don't actually know what the fuck is happening because we can only observe that something in our brains usually makes an individual's gender slot into the category associated with their assigned sex but some percent of the time larger than 1% (which doesn't sound like a lot, until you start thinking about how very many people that is; note that that floor of 1% is also in reference to something that's difficult to diagnose and which has been heavily stigmatized socially, and so represents the people who were able to understand what was happening and able to overcome fear and repression, meaning the actual figures are completely unknowable) it actively, painfully does not. This is why I argue for a rather soft "clearly there is something innate here that helps to filter all the artificial cultural stuff and how it relates to the individual, alongside the other clearly innate stuff like how one responds to hormone levels" explanation of this, although even that can be controversial depending on who you ask.
So to try to bring that all together to answer your specific questions, gender isn't really what someone does but how one relates to it. Someone can transgress cultural gender roles without being trans for any number of reasons: they didn't internalize that particular thing as gendered, they don't care, they're actively pushing boundaries as a statement, they're curious, etc. Taken as a whole, though, how one relates to gendered things is what informs their gender: if overall things related to one category make them uneasy and things related to another make them happy, then they're probably in the category that's more pleasant for them; it can be difficult, however, to disambiguate unease that's from learned fear and unease that's dysphoria from a conflict between someone's identity and actions/assigned role/appearance.
And just to be clear, when I talk about "actions" or "gendered things" or "what someone does" there I don't even mean like extremely overt gendered activities or the like, but everything from little bits of self image, idealized self image, mannerisms, vague aesthetics, actual actions, things that exist purely on a sort of meta level with how one relates to others, etc, but I don't have any neat and concise word for that that would be immediately clear nor specific enough to what I'm talking about.