Both: What have been your personal life experiences with gender?

submitted by worried19 from self.GCdebatesQT

The new sub is kind of quiet right now, so I figured it might be good to have a "get to know you" thread.

I know most of us are from Reddit, but there are also some new names I don't recognize. What has your personal journey with gender and sex been like? Are you GC, QT, or somewhere in between? How have these subjects affected you throughout your lives, and how did you come to your current positions on them?

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[–]SilverSlippers 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

GC-leaning. I present feminine I guess? My hair is long, I usually wear jeans or shorts and a T-shirt. I sometimes wear make-up, but not most days. Back before the pandemic I would wear make-up to work if I was going to be in the office all day, if I was going to the field - I wouldn't. Now I only show up in person for field work, so I don't. I work in agriculture, it's a male dominated field but I've only few problems from the men I work with. I'm super thankful that my first few supervisors were really awesome women. I came here mostly after the Rowling letter. I'm a long-time fan of her work and seriously didn't find the letter at all offensive. If people think that was 'hate' then they haven't really encountered any true hate in their lives.

I use preferred names and pronouns because its polite. I don't care what bathroom people use as long as they aren't making a scene (i.e. passing trans women using the women's room quietly) and the bathrooms have single-use locking stalls. I think natal female should have female only spaces. Males don't belong in women's prison or in women's shelters. (i.e. I read thing a while back about a homeless shelter in Canada that tried to house a trans woman who still had intact male anatomy in the same room as two women and when they complained, the women were put back out on the street.) I think gender dysphoria is a real medical problem that should be treated with science-based therapies, unfortunately the fervor of the TRA activist community makes that research hard to accomplish. I'm worried about the growing number of young children going to gender clinics and being given hormones and blockers after very little therapy or investigation. I'm really concerned about the growing trend of censorship on social media that makes having conversations like these hard, which will only make the situation worse - both for women and for trans people.

Trans people deserve to live without fear of harassment and have access to healthcare, jobs, housing, etc, just like everyone else. Access to these things are human rights, but access to women's spaces isn't a human right. I've seriously heard people claim that being able to compete on the sports team that they wanted to was a 'human right'.

[–][deleted] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

So glad to see you here! I think JKR really re-invigorated a lot of willingness (need?) to get together, ask some tough questions, and try to figure out where we all are with sex, gender, all the things.

[–]emptiedriver 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Great idea. I'm here from Reddit and some kind of moderate GC. I am bisexual, had a long term relationship with a butch lesbian in my 20s/30s, but had a child with a male partner at 40. I have had a variety of different haircuts including shaving my head a few times, and keeping short buzz cuts, as well as having long hair. I've rarely done anything complicated or overly styled with my hair, worn make up, or worn dresses or skirts - there were times when I was younger when I'd go out for something, usually in a sort of "goth" vein (blue hair, eyeliner, skirt with boots, type thing) but it was never a commitment, and now that i'm in my 40s I probably haven't worn make up in decades, and am the boring jeans/tee shirt mom you don't notice.

I always used to think gender was kind of a fun thing to play with - I used to take photos of myself (and other people) in poses or making expressions to try to make them look more male or female, sort of as a joke/experiment, I think because I have a fairly androgynous face - a strong jaw for a woman, but high cheekbones, so it depends how I lean toward the camera if I look more feminine. The woman I was dating also looking boyish, but clearly womanly, in a different way, and I found it intriguing. And at the time, drag kings were big, but trans identities really hadn't taken over, so it felt like a lot of people who explored gender were doing it theatrically. I love performance so I found the whole genre fun and clever. I thought it was social commentary on the boundaries of gender as the characters performed were so hilariously stereotyped and ridiculous. Then some of those people actually transitioned and I was left confused and disappointed - they hadn't been commenting the way I had thought, anyway... But, not everyone transitioned, life went on, I went back to school for another degree and other things changed and by the time I became aware of the issue again, everything had really started to drift. These days I can't really talk to my friends on social media about it without it making me a lightning rod, which I've done a couple times and generally avoid now.

[–]worried19[S] 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm GC for the most part, although on the moderate side. My life experiences with gender have mostly been based in trauma. I grew up as a highly GNC girl in a small, conservative town where there were no representations of people like me anywhere. I had a carefree early childhood, but a depressed and isolated adolescence. Gender was traumatic for me because I could not conceive of myself growing up to resemble society's idea of a woman, and for a while, I planned not to remain one for long.

I survived and made it to college, where I went online and started searching for a label that might fit me. I was convinced I was too masculine to be a "regular" woman and therefore I must be something else. I flirted with terms like "genderqueer" and "transmasculine" before discovering GC thought and abandoning the idea that my masculinity somehow made me less real or valid as a female person. GC ideas were the first thing that had given me real peace.

I still struggle with male identification, internalized misogyny, and hatred of other women, especially so-called "normal" women and women who aid and abet the patriarchy. I'm sure it will be a lifelong struggle. But being around radical feminists and GNC women who refuse to disavow their womanhood helps.

[–]DistantGlimmer 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A lot of similarities to your experience from the opposite side of the aisle. I was a very shy introverted kid but I definitely did never feel I fit in with other boys and prefered hanging out with girls. In universtiy I took some feminist theory courses, one in particular with a cool radfem prof, and this combined with getting interested in the goth subculture made me realize that being male didn't mean I had to be masculine. I do remember the feeling of visceral happiness when I was first experimenting with dressing in a more feminine way that I was expressing something deep inside myself and it felt very liberating. I suppose this is the closest I've ever felt to their "gender identity" (but it certainly didn't make me feel like a woman it just was not having to be a stereotypical man that felt so liberating I knew I was still male)? I also do remember getting some books about transsexualism and exploring the issue (more thinking "maybe if I take feminine hormones that will help me to look more androgynous or feminine, not actually wanting to be a woman.)

But the books I read were what we'd call today very transmedicalist and they said you should only transition if you want to live full time as the opposite sex and have dysphoria. I never thought of myself in any way as a woman so I dopped the idea.

I moved to a very small town where being openly GNC in dress is difficult and I guess I really just continued being myself and generally supporting feminism but not thinking a lot about gender issues until last year I was actually looking for some info about feminism on Reddit and thought maybe to get involved in discussions and there was this thread in one of the main feminist subs where a woman was saying some very common sense things which reminded me of what I had been taught about feminism and gender and she was just being moobbed by a group of like 20 people who were just saying horrible things to her and calling her a "TERF" (I barely even knew what that was referring to) but they were also saying "r/GenderCritical is evil! and even reading it will turn you into a bigot!" or something like that. I didn't even know what "GenderCritical was but these people, despite being in a feminist sub were acting like the MRAs and GamerGaters I had argued with a lot in the past, shaming and bullying a woman just for being a feminist soI figured I should check out anything they hated so much, particularly as I knew radfems to be good people and not bigoted at all.

Queue the usual. Reading GC, discovering the debate sub, Meghan Murphy, Magdalen Burns ETC. and getting "peaked". Finding what GC people believed was actually very similar to my own beliefs about gender which I've had for like 25 or 30 years.

[–]theblackfleet 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I'm a radfem, not GC, not QT. I hate gender because it has imposed on me from a young age. I will relate this one personal story. I was IQ tested in the 3rd grade as part of a program where they would identify the most gifted children and put them in a program called ATC. This was a new program in education where instead of allowing gifted kids to skip grades, they made a special program where once a week we would be excused from all our classes and go to a special classroom next to the library and learn all sorts of advanced things.

My IQ score qualified me, along with other tests, which I think were called CAT tests. However, the program was mostly looking for males. My second grade teacher had to fight to get me and some other gifted girls into the program.

I finally made it to this program and it enriched me to no end, but I was born female, and had to fight for everything, every step of the way.

Gender to me is nonsense. It's all stereotypes. Sex is WHY I had to fight as a female to get anywhere in this world.

[–]tamingthemindradfem (GC) 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Question - why do you say you're "not GC" when you're very clearly critical of gender?

[–]Porcelain_QuetzalTabby without Ears 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Soo. Guess I'm gonna be the QT unicorn in this sub. I came over from reddit, but I'm using a different name here. Mostly for a fresh start, but some may recognize my position and style.

I'm moderate QT. Some would call me truscum, but I'm still not sure if I fit that label.

I'm honestly a bit to lazy to write out my whole struggle with gender and especially sex in all it's beautiful [s] forms, so I'm just gonna throw out my current position on the issue:

Gender roles are bullshit and should rightfully be abolished. GC has all of my support in that regard, even if they don't want it, because I happen to have a Y chromosome. I disagree on some of the details and am not sure if a world without stereotypes is possible [maybe the best we can get is that Noone is forced to conform] but we can argue about those once we get there.

Dysphoria exists. I don't believe that gender roles are the cause of dysphoria. Mostly because of the way I and many other experience it. Gender roles can worsen dysphoria, because they are a constant reminder of your sex, but aren't the cause of it. I personally use gender identity as a placeholder for the cause of gender dysphoria.

I also think that the model of symbolic interactionism is more important in day to day sociology, than the class analysis GC follows. Don't get me wrong. Both are important and useful when looking at certain issues. In my mind they are both tools with different jobs.

I might post a more detailed description of how I got to these opinions if anyone is interested.

Please respect that I'm currently not able to debate all of you at once for both time and personal reasons. So I might not engage in debates for now.

[–]questioningtw 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

woohoo! I was really hoping that some of our trans posters would make it over here...

[–]worried19[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Welcome to the sub! We desperately need more QT people, so invite your friends.

I don't believe that gender roles are the cause of dysphoria.

Do you think that can vary depending on the individual or on the individual's natal sex? Why do you think they can't cause dysphoria, especially when they're rigidly applied? No pressure to respond, only if you have time. I don't want our few QT people to be overwhelmed.

[–]Porcelain_QuetzalTabby without Ears 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I don't have any friends to invite.

It seems like I haven't expressed myself precisely enough. So please, let me clarify:

I don't think the [singular] cause of [gender] dysphoria is gender roles. This does not change depending on the paitents sex. As I have said already I do think that these two are connected however and gender roles can be a significant trigger, especially when ridgedly applied.

I don't want to say that people can't be dysphoric due to the constraints of gender roles alone. I just think that this shouldn't be diagnosed as gender dysphoria and shouldn't be treated the same way.

[–]worried19[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

That makes sense. Thanks for explaining. I think right now we're in an era where a lot of people in the latter situation are being confused for the former. People are distressed, but it's not their sexed body alone that is distressing them, making them quite different from old-school transsexuals.

[–]tamingthemindradfem (GC) 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Damn, I have a degree in a linguistics-adjacent field yet I have never heard of symbolic interactionism. I'm intrigued - thanks!

[–]peakingatthemomentTranssexual (natal male), HSTS 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I’m going to try not not to do like a super life story thing, other than that I’m someone who you could point to and say transitioned because they naturally fit in better with gendered expectations for the opposite sex than their birth sex (sorry QT). I had a strong cross-sex identification from basically my earliest memories, but if you were gender nonconforming and punished for it, it’s like a chicken and egg problem and I don’t know how you can know for sure. Sexual orientation is part of all this too. I don’t think all trans people have that experience though and many have dysphoria despite fitting better into the expectations for their sex, so I don’t want to downplay that or say mine is typical (although I think it might be for kids).

I discovered QT ideas (mainly Butler) in college and really liked them. It felt good to embrace post-modern ways of thinking where you could ignore differences that might be uncomfortable and I was in a place where I absolutely was in a weird denial about my own transness (because everything about it hurt).

Life continued. I finished college, started a career, and got married, but I always had this lingering sadness about gender. I really wanted to believe we were moving towards a world where feminine boys and masculine girls wouldn’t be punished the way I was growing up. I even had these reoccurring dreams where I was a childcare worker who would be comforting a child who was bullied for not conforming and telling them they were fine just the way they were. Sometimes I’d wake up in tears because it was just so vivid. What interests me most with GC is that I feel like it ideally wants to breakdown those expectations in a way that would help everyone. Gender hurts trans people too.

[–]questioningtw 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Awesome! I am from Reddit and am moderetly GC(I basically think being transgender is a real condition and that trans people who are what they say they are; but they have to start transitioning and I think this non binary thing is just silly for the most part) My experiences with gender are pretty bad and partially why I am GC. Growing up I was always fascinated by cars and dinosaurs which my parents hated. I also was very rebellious when it came to picking up stuff after boys and would cry about how unfair it was that they got to actually have fun, while girls did underappreciated work. I also hated make up and wanted to be seen as smart and funny and not just pretty. This got me called bullied relentlessly and one of the reasons I hav e such bad internalized misogyny. I hated that men actually seemed to like other men and had activity based friendships; while women were just supposed to gossip. I used to also hate how men would be upfront with each other, while women would often make plans and then completely flake out or do stuff like invite you to be a bridesmaid and then right before the wedding say nvm, you are too fat and I just didn't want to bring it up before. For a long time I actually did question my gender. How could I really be a woman if I value stuff men value? Maybe I am not a man, but agender or genderfluid! I realized this was silly and that I loved reading about genuine and trailblazing women. One reason I get so touchy with this Kathrine Hepburn was trans crap is because it just makes me think that people hate strong women and want them to be men.

[–]tamingthemindradfem (GC) 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I hated that men actually seemed to like other men and had activity based friendships; while women were just supposed to gossip.

Absolutely feel this. Also, the expectation that men's friendships should be solely based on doing activities, and that discussing feelings with fellow male friends is "unmanly" - it's the flipside of those shitty prescriptions.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks for the sub and thread!

Moderate GC, heterodox, political independent. Favorite GC facets: examination of gender, emphasis on critical thinking. Least favorite GC facets: Communist/Marxist critical orientation (though I get and respect how it informs 20th century western feminism). Mixed liberal arts-science background, so I'm all about evidence and research. Not a big online debater, but my undergrad and grad programs emphasized seminar and Socratics, so I like "getting at" the core of an idea in a meaningful way.

I have irl experience with an adult sib transing (HRT and SRS), though the motivation was almost certainly AGF and undiagnosed bipolar with at least one Cluster B personality disorder (three clinical opinions). Because of what I've seen, I support ethical gatekeeping and pre-trans differential diagnosis screening for mental health issues. I also have serious concerns about Gender Dysphoria overdiagnosis and any pharmaceutical or surgical pre-adult transing (because of the serious implications on developmental endocrinology and neurology).

Even so, I respect the decision of functional, capable adults to undertake the transitioning process, and believe they should have competent support throughout. I believe that women should continue to have sex-based rights as a protected class, and that transpersons should be afforded safe public accommodation and civil rights protections of their own.

I've always experienced gender as a social construct, both intuitively as a child and intellectually as a student and adult.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

a lot of people trying to control/influence what I think and what I do wrt to it, and not nearly as much listening and support as I would have liked.

I like the thread idea too, thanks for making it.

[–]MrFahrenheit46Gen Z butch dyke 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm a 16 year old detransitioned butch lesbian. I jumped on the testosterone bandwagon and pushed incessantly until I got it. I took T for ~9 months before realizing that I had never really wanted it. Right now I'm working on training my voice to make it sound remotely like how it used to be. In the future I'll be using electrolysis to get rid of the excess hair. Aside from a mistaken transition, my experiences with gender haven't been too horrible. People were largely okay with my slow shift to a more "masculine" presentation as I got older, but they didn't get to see me as truly butch: I only cut my hair really short and changed my wardrobe after starting my social transition. At the moment, I'm really nervous as to how people will react to me "coming out" all over again, and to how they'll handle my masculinity.