Thread by @lisaquestions

Every so often someone has an enlightenment about the nature of gender in trans people and tries to tell everyone the "right" way to process their gender (usually that it's not innate) and I feel as I often do that calling it "gender identity" has caused people to just push all

the correct discourse about how *gender* is a social construct onto gender identity without significant analysis as to what gender identity may be, how it might come about, etc. And I do not think that it's really accurate or necessary to simply say "gender identity" is itself

identical to or drawn entirely from the social construct of gender. I don't mean to say that gender is innate or whatever, but that does NOT mean people aren't ~really~ their gender, given that social constructs are real, just often arbitrary and can change all the time.

But people who don't neatly fit into cisnormative systems of gender have existed throughout history. This account is from someone born 735 years ago. I strictly mean people who would if they could have sought medical and social transition, not any

https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/987171135535149056

given culture's specific genders as I'm not qualified to speak on them, but people who are like "I need to change my body because it's making miserable in this specific way" have been around forever.

Mostly I think telling people how to process, describe, explain, or inhabit their gender is not the way to get to any kind of liberation. But it is a great way to antagonize people. I often say gender is fake, but my experience of my own body and gender dating back to my

earliest memories feels more fundamental than "women are like this and men are like that" and while I can't explain it, or why my understanding of my gender has changed in the ways it has, but I can't really conceive of my transness as anything but an innate part of myself.

I didn't just wake up at three years old and decide "I don't want to be a boy" it's just something I *knew* well enough to say out loud until I was effectively abused until stopping when I was four. But it wasn't just that, I had body parts that didn't fit or even feel like mine.

And like I'm not going to claim there's any such thing as objectively real genders, like man, woman, neutrois, agender, the many kinds of nonbinary, genderfluid, bigender, genderqueer, etc. Not in the sense of anyone fundamentally and innately being these genders.

But I don't think transness itself can be explained in the same way, just modulated by any society's gender system. If I grew up in a culture where my gender was accepted right away I don't know how I would have turned out, but I'd hope there'd be much less trauma involved.

what I think: Everyone* is literally the gender they say they are now, the gender say they were before, and I have no desire to put that under a microscope and interrogate whether they can "really be that gender"

* Cis, trans, nonbinary, agender, etc applies to everyone

In the past I was a woman, but it made me unhappy over time. Now I'm neutrois, and I can see signs of it going back to childhood, the fact is it's felt right for the past near-decade, even if I tried to soften it as "agender" for a few years and then got on the gender whirlwind

immediately after and honestly because of finally getting bottom surgery.

However, I have never in my life been a boy and definitely not a man.

Obv being plural makes this more complicated but that's a lot of personal history I'm not sharing publicly

* progesterone acts as an anxiolytic not anti-

Also the experience of "being a gender" is so highly subjective anyone could just be like "I'm actually not binary" and it'd be perfectly fine. I don't care if anyone can pass any trans/nonbinary/agender purity tests because there shouldn't be any.

There's no need to worry over whether someone who just came out as nonbinary is *really* *genuinely* *irrefutably* nonbinary. Or even a different binary gender. Experimenting and figuring things out should be something wonderful, not fraught with terror as transphobes claim

If cis people want to try different pronouns, go for it. Please, if that's something you want to try, if it helps you feel more content or happy or comfortable then go for it.