i never responded to this, but thanks for talking to me. i dm'd flirty fawn and it was really helpful.
yeah, i'd like to hear from them
i haven't been observing myself in this way for that long. i don't know what's transient and what's inherent to me, and more generally i just don't know what to make of any of this. having some context would be nice.
some day, if the human race survives long enough, we'll all be shapeshifting transhumans. imagining stuff like that makes me want to fight harder for the future lol
i think "gender fluid" is probably a useful way to describe what i probably am
even while i've been in this thread, i've felt sometimes like a woman and sometimes like a man. i've never been as acutely aware of this switching back and forth as i've been since posting this thread and talking to you all. i think before today it was just a vague, dull confusion in the background.
when i use little diagnostic thought experiments to judge where i'm at, like "how do i feel about wearing makeup" or "does imagining myself in a woman's body feel right" my feelings legit go from "fuck yeah" to "fuck no," and it's actually kinda rapid, like on the scale of hours, sometimes even minutes.
i still feel like i'm a long ways away from knowing what to do with myself, but today felt like a big step
I managed to hold both the desire to be a large, strong man who works with his hands and enjoys violent play (roughhousing, hurling large objects, and yeah, sex stuff) and the desire to be a sweet, clever, captivating woman who cooks and decorates and loves flowers and flowing garments and all that. My split desire is absolutely also reflected in what I pursue in personal relationships and sexual fulfillment. I guess my breakthrough came in understanding that, in fact, my desires weren’t contradictory or even really split. They weren’t a mishmash of masculine and feminine identifiers, I wasn’t “cross-classing” masc and femme gender expression . . . They’re just my desires and my individual expression of identity, so I’ve moved forward just accepting that I contain multitudes and that what I like is what I like and if it changes day to day, that’s just engaging in the very normal, human desire to explore all there is in the rich world of being a thing.
Yeah, i relate to this. Thanks for putting this into words.
They weren’t a mishmash of masculine and feminine identifiers, I wasn’t “cross-classing” masc and femme gender expression . . . They’re just my desires and my individual expression of identity
especially this part. This is the step i'm wrestling with right now, learning to understand myself in this way.
feelings that i had to find a "coherent" identity
i've been stuck on this for a long time, but in a way expecting biological bodies and brains to be coherent in the first place is kinda weird. it's more consistent with how i view shit to not expect any of this to make sense. we're globs of molecules that make more of ourselves lol, it's just an accident that we're here at all. there's only like 20,000 genes to encode a person with and "make most humans have coherent sexualities" is competing with a bunch of other priorities lol
to some degree i think all people are in a perpetual process of understanding and creating who they are through their experiences and behavior
i have nothing to say this was just really eloquent
tools and sometimes-useful shorthand that can never fully explain any real thing, let alone a human being
in my case it doesn't even seem that useful, in fact all these "constructed and gendered roles and suites of characteristics or expressions" are just confusing the shit out of me haha.
I hope some of that makes sense and that any of it is helpful
it was, thanks for writing it <3
you can be a woman and have a dick
ah yeah sorry about the dick thing. some women have dicks. i just have this caricature of men in my head and it involves their little boy fascination with their dicks, and idk men are just funny to me and i wasn't thinking when i brought up that caricature. i didn't mean to attach unwarranted meaning to genitalia.
non-binary can very much be whatever you feel like you are
this is helpful to hear, because tbh i don't have a very good sense of the distribution of gender identities human beings have, or how weird or common mine is (amorphous and still-being-explored though it might be). like i have no idea what "non-binary" usually means, or even if there's something it usually means.
just sit down and imagine what you want to be
this has always been hard for me, because it changes, but i think that changeability is it. if i could be anything, i would legit be a shapeshifter. I like being a big strong dude sometimes, and parts of me line up with this body sometimes, and i like how safe and small and soft this body can make other people feel. but sometimes i want to be that small, soft person
*the downvote makes me think someone read this as like an angry or defensive response or something "like what even IS femininity" but actually this comment is just attempting to explain ideas and feelings i am confused about and discuss the train of thought that has let me to where i am over the course of my life. If the downvote is instead someone feeling upset by anything i said in here, then please tell me what upset you, help me understand your felings, and if it's a terminology thing tell me how to fix it.
**edited to make some wordings a little more precise
i'm not sure i even understand what femininity is
i think i have a developed enough view to see it as something other than "vulnerability" or "wanting to be fucked" or some categorical thing like "whatever cishet men are told not to feel but cishet women are allowed to feel." inevitably there's a lot of patriarchal baggage hanging around in my head, but i think i've made decent progress sifting through some of it and processing it. i don't really feel like i understand anything yet, and maybe i never will, but i can at least say that i'm always introspecting about it and striving to become incrementally less patriarchal and cisheteronormative.
i find it really hard to explain what it is in me that feels "feminine" to me, or why it feels feminine, let alone judge whether this perception matches some broader definition of femininity that other people experience. but on some gut emotional level, i feel feminine. i also feel masculine. being male is "just ok" to me but imagining myself as female is also "just ok" to me, which is actually very frustrating because i really struggle to imagine any way of being that wouldn't be "just ok." one of the reasons i wrote this post was to attempt to make progress figuring that out.
i think maybe i'm non-binary, which in itself is not a very specific epiphany and doesn't really offer me much relief, but it's a starting place.
sometimes i want to be a woman, and sometimes i feel like a swingin' dick dude walking around doing dick things and living a dick life,. sometimes i feel like i want to be a ghost who slips in and out of other people's bodies and lives, and experiences their existences and their relationships with others, and then slips out again, rather than live my own life and form my own relationships.
tbh i wish i was a shapeshifter and could switch my form at will
also, as to sub or switch, i feel like i'm a "switch" but that it's somehow deeper and more fundamental than a bdsm alignment (though i have no authority to speak about bdsm or what it means to anyone). i wish i could say something that makes more sense than that but, like you suggested, i think i still have a lot to think about and i'm very much "in the thick of it."
i love the sideways glance haha
idk if i'm thinking the same thing you're saying, but i like feet as part of my general liking of someone, and like... there are other parts of someone's body i like a lot more, although even talking about parts of someone's body feels weird because really i'm attracted to the whole thing and how it moves and how it is inhabited by the brain inside it. I could never be attracted to just a foot, but i definitely like playing with a foot sometimes, and i think feet are cute. So i don't have a foot fetish, but i definitely think feet can be attractive and erotic.
this is such a funny opinion
i think that's what's happening in my case too. i was depressed all through my teens and early 20s, which were peak "learning how to be horny" years, so now that the depression is lifting i'm horny as fuck but i don't know how to be horny and it's weirding me out.
that happens to me too, but this time there's no mistaking it lol
sometimes i watch sex scenes from foreign movies out of context, with the subs off, and i pretend they're communists who respect each other.
is there a context in which the slaughter thing makes even a little sense because i dont get it