Gender is estrogen to me and the more estrogen I have the more gendery I am

If my estrogen is off I pretty much go nuts. Vision gets blurry and I become very sensitive and irritable and prone to dysphoria

I've worn all sorts of clothes and stuff since transitioning, and I've found my comfort zone, but if my estrogen is off I feel like shit in anything

I don't have a gender. I experience dysphoria at things that feel like attempts to gender me, though as i get older i have become more comfortable with dressing in ways that lead strangers to perceive me as a gender. though i don't think i would ever be comfortable with people who know me using gendered terms for me etc.

but yeah. no gender for me. i don't even really feel nonbinary, even though the term technically applies since i am not binary. you could say i'm a kitten instead of a man or a woman, though i don't consider kitten to be my gender either.

i am post-gender. i am just myself. someone forgot to install the gender software in my brain. also i'm intersex, and i feel like this has impacted how i responded to the gender roles society threw at me, because i just sort of assumed none of it applied to me. and my mother, while i was assigned a sex, was very opposed to raising kids differently based on gender so i never really got much of it from my family.

i've always been curious about what gender feels like to other people, so i've asked a lot of people, cis and trans, and what i find curious is that they all tell me different things. there is no one unifying thing that all women or all men will tell you makes them a woman or a man. and i think that is a good thing. gender is very personal, and we all resolve the trauma of gender being imposed on us very differently, and reclaim it in whatever way feels best.

i remember talking to a cis-lite friend of mine. she told me that she only identified as a woman because she was so often pushed into the roles of caring, cleaning etc, and so she identifies as a woman for the convenience of that.

I personally present as cis because it's easy, but the reality is that I really don't care about gender as a concept. To the point that I don't even really like being called "agender". In spite of lengthy heartfelt conversations with two trans partners in my time, I still really struggle to understand the mindset of feeling gender is important to one's identity; Not understanding it actually feels quite isolating, sometimes. I frequently feel like I'm the only person who doesn't "get it".

None of which is to say I do not love and support my trans comrades to the ends of the fucking Earth . Transphobes can line up against the wall.

Gender has always felt like a label with no relevance to me, like what football team I support (none, I don't watch it.) I'm happier keeping my identity ambiguous, but I have made peace with presenting as my agab irl because it's easier. I imagine being vulnerable and putting in the effort to 'pass' as nonbinary (whatever that means) only to still have people not get it would hurt, a lot more than keeping my real self hidden from everyone but the people closest to me.

when i was more on the binary I defined it in terms of behavior sets - masculinity had a lot of baggage over years of performing it, and more than anything, the masculine social role became something i associated with oppression, self and external hatred. I don't think of that as healthy, it's just where I ended up after years of performing ill-fitting social roles, and the fatigue of living in misogynistic and patriarchal circumstance; and presentation - how i comport myself, how i dress, how i exist in a social environment.

As I got into hormones, it was the subjective experience of feminization. What started to emerge that felt right, and affirming to do and be just.. changed. Gender euphoria guiding, the general internal changes that came with HRT became the most important thing. It literally made my brain work better. I'm autistic and I began just naturally perceiving social cues I used to miss. Im not saying estrogen cured my autism, far from it, however the breadth of what I can naturally process and understand expanded more dramatically than years of psychedelics and painful-to-learn behavioral coping strategies ever gave me. I felt substantially more human, when i used to genuinely ask myself if i was some kind of secret alien or something.

I still feel a kind of alienness to allistic folks but i'm much b etter at doing and being alongside them now, while generally honoring who i am otherwise.

These things all came together and matured, because I got comfortable enough in my own skin to cease defining myself with those behavior sets and presentations i arbitrarily assigned to my vision of womanhood for myself. At this point the high-femme repetoire i learned in my first two years of transition are the basis of a more non-binary being. I call myself transfemme, because i don't really see myself as a woman, the transness of my identity feels inseparable from any specific manifestation of Gender - I like dressing like a tomboy or a more non-binary femme, like i honestly prefer traditionally lesbian styles that don't innately accent the feminine form, they're just cute and comfy things.

I'm not beyond a cute dress and makeup and more traditional expressions of femme being, but in general I try to just exist comfortably now - that's something dominantly feminine, but not bound by it.

I have limited plans for surgery - i dont want breast augments anymore, i don't want ffs, i just want laser surgery and/or electrolysis to make my beard go away forever. Everything else feels manageable. Sometimes I think i should pause hormones to bank sperm and try to get myself in a place to have a family - something i deeply, badly want - and i'm perfectly willing to use the birth equipment to get there, so my dysphoria isn't strictly in a place of needing drasting bodily alteration to sate, and so it doesn't feel right to myself to insist i'm exactly like somebody who wants to completely alter their look and body.

which is to say i'm kind of in the same boat as OP maybe, but we're all different, but i felt some kinship in reading it.

Ever since I was a kid, it’s never been about wanting to be a woman so much as not wanting to be a man.

I'm nonbinary AMAB leaning masc but I'm very much gender-agnostic on a personal level, which I think is quite common for autistic people.

I tend to prefer spending time with women and enbies but I think that's because I live in a pretty patriarchal society and there's a lot of weird proscriptive masculinity that's applied to people who present as men here and I'm not interested in all that and I don't vibe with it, so a lot of men don't take kindly to me being a weird little guy who doesn't care for whatever gendered rules I'm supposed to be adhering to. Some women here are also rigid in their expectations of people who present as men but generally they exist in circles I don't move within so it's much less of a thing in my experience.

I haven't really had a chance to sit down and hash out my gender identity seriously because of other more pressing concerns so I just settle on being on the enby spectrum somewhere. I think that also speaks to my attitude of gender agnosticism - for other people gender is a very important or pressing issue and I 100% respect and support this but for me, I have never addressed the higher priority stuff to get down to my own experience of gender.

They pay me more money now

Gender? I'm literally just vibin'

I don't really think of it at all. I think about it about as important as my name, which is to say I don't care about it or think it has really anything to do with what's important about me.

Mostly I'd rather be perceived without any assumptions based on gender. I have a special hate for sports, for example, because of cis guys asking me about them, forcing me to eternally be saying I don't know anything about them and am not into them. Generally goes over with the awkwardness of a fart in a church.

So as some (many??) of you know I am newly hatched and autistic so I know this isn't how most people see things and I don't mind if other people view things differently, do whatever/label yourself however you like. Also I have not so much as even worn girl clothes so, yaknow maybe my understanding will be influenced as I start to transition.

::: spoiler cw for possible brainworms, dysphoria, and envy I think it is mostly about my physical body and presentation (such as clothes and accessories). I want to look like a woman. I "know" I am a woman in the sense that I want to be a woman. But when I look in the mirror, I do not see a woman. I see a man. With hrt and girl clothes, I hope to feel like a woman. To see one in the mirror. I feel like my pronouns are to reinforce that I am actually perceived as that woman I hope to be/look like. When someone calls me she, it makes me feel happy because I want people to look at my body/clothes and say "yup, that's a woman". Honestly, when people misgender me irl I don't get that upset. It hurts a little bit they don't see me as a woman, but honestly I don't see myself as a woman. I very obviously look like a man. I see myself as a future woman, once I transition. If I never got to take hrt/dress fem I would see myself as being a guy. Trapped as a guy. While I use the term "pre transition woman" for myself, I think "trans guy" actually makes more logical sense to me. I am a guy who wishes to transition. Being a woman, to me, is getting hrt and dressing the part. And with that will come being she/her'd, which re-enforces that hrt/clothes are working to make me look like/be a woman.

Basically I am what I "look like", and I want to look like a woman/inject E directly into my body. This makes/will make me a woman.

I know its very biological brained I'm sorry

edit: oh its a little funny that wearing funny socks would make me feel more like a woman then having a penis makes me feel like a man. Maybe the "biology" is literally just hrt? :::

It means being hot and gay

It means walking around with the exaggerated swagger of a soviet marshall with full confidence that every day of my life is better than the last day

I want to be cute and I don’t want to be a man.

A lot of this has to do with society, like externally I would never want someone to perceive me as a man and I would like for them to perceive me as cute or a woman.

But also internally I want those things.
I don’t like the idea of being masculine, or at least being the level of masculine a man is.
I want nothing to do with the effects of testosterone physically and mentally.
I like being soft, I don’t care about being strong (even in a positive non-toxic way).

Obviously like…Men can be feminine, to some extent and Women masculine and even I’m some parts of each, it’s not a hard binary.
But the part I’d emphasize or want people to acknowledge first is the feminine.

It means that I'm alienated from everybody.

I don't know if this is uncommon among nonbinary people or not (certainly seems to be in this thread at least), but I have a gender. I actually have a very strong experience of my personal gender. But my gender is just an extremely subjective personal lens through which I experience the world. Idk if I can encompass all of it in a verbal description, but I will try my best.

::: spoiler extremely long post

I was coercively assigned female at birth and I get a lot of dysphoria from that fact. I've always experienced strong social dysphoria, I hate getting perceived/gendered as a girl or woman. I want to take testosterone to fix this, as well as to solve some physical dysphoria problems that I experience (a lot of feelings of incongruence up in this body!) This took me a while to work out, though; for a while I thought that maybe I would be comfortable as a nonbinary person who did not physically transition, until the contradictions sharpened within me or something and I was pushed to the realization that yes, I do in fact want some fat redistribution and a lower voice. Top surgery took me even longer, because I thought for a while that I liked my boobs, but I realized rather recently that I only like them from an aesthetic point of view, and that actually living with them is kind of a huge pain that I would rather not deal with.

However, while I think I would prefer if (irl) I was perceived as a man, to some level that still makes me uncomfortable. I would only prefer it insomuch as I would prefer it to being perceived as a woman; no more than that. I do not feel like a man, I do not want to be a man. I do not even feel or identify as a masculine person. This is why I do not like using the label "transmasc" for myself even if it technically fits me as a person CAFAB who wants T. This does create some awkward situations sometimes, especially online. I do not fit neatly into transmasc spaces because I really don't find myself identifying with transmasculinity; hexbear is my main online trans community rn. I try my best to delineate that I am not transfem and cannot speak to that experience, while also not incorrectly gendering myself as transmasc. (I hope I'm doing an okay job of that? Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing that poorly.)

Another aspect to this is HRT, and the fact that I'm not on it yet. I want it, it's been about two years now since I confirmed I wanted it; but in that time I've been living in a very unstable household. I'm going to be temporarily moving out later this year and that's when I plan to get it. I feel like my experience of gender is very subject to change once I inject the funnyman hormones for the first time. Maybe I'll start identifying with transmasculinity then? Who knows.

Unironically I view my gender through the lens of the things I care about the most. It's like a personal xenogender. My gender is swarming cicadas, it's brutalist architecture, it's the sci-fi megastructure, it's abandoned buildings and rusting metal, it's insect exoskeletons, it's industrial and cyberpunk. It's the art I like best — surrealism, illustration, abstraction, pen and ink, explosions of violent color. It's being a communist and a vegan. It's masking in all public spaces because I still take covid seriously. It's my music taste and fashion sense — I'm a gestures vaguely gothy punky something-or-other, I DIY my clothes and I listen to tunes, I visibly stick out in public because of my fashion and I don't care.

These are gender markers, to me, the way "skirts" have been constructed as a gender marker for women and "suits" have been constructed as a gender marker for men. I mean, while both of these markers are real phenomena neither of them are innate or immutable, they're all products of the dialectical process of history; so ultimately my personal gender markers are just as real as they are, in a way, even if I'm the only person who sees and accepts them. I'm currently like, theory-crafting an idea that subcultures and aesthetics constitute their own forms of gender in the modern age. There is a performance and a set of interests associated with being goth or punk — almost like there is a performance and set of interests associated with being a "man" or "woman". Of course, they are not yet the same (and within subcultures there are still divisions of gender and a lot of misogyny), but with how the concept of gender is currently shifting in front of our very eyes, I think it's very possible that in the future, gender will be more of a subcultural experience than a superstructural one. Maybe I'm wrong on that one, who knows.

I'm not a fan of the idea that being nonbinary makes you inherently more "queer" or "transgressive" than being a binary trans person (whatever these categories even mean — I think they're a bunch of fluid, noodly nonsense anyways.) There's a good Lily Alexandre video that sums up my thoughts on that whole discourse. Ultimately, we're all smashing the cissexist notions of gender. Capitalism revolutionized the understanding of gender for millions of people. Should communism win, which I believe it will, I believe a second revolution will come — and this time a better one. :::

It means being gay

Nonbinary Transfem at the moment, for reasons that are eerily similar to OP.

I met someone who described themselves as apogender some years ago, and that's been a consistent goal/motivation.

No gender for me, thanks. I find it very freeing to step away from all that and allow myself to behave and present and think of myself however I want to.

In my day to day life, most people see me as a woman. I’m okay with letting them think that. Deep down, I am emphatically not a woman (or a man either), but I don’t want to deal with the social repercussions of trying to come out as nonbinary/agender at work, so I just live with it. It helps that my coworkers are lovely people who don’t expect me to perform femininity at all.

Gender is when you say you're gender and not because of transphobia (I think some forms of transphobia hide people). I think there's some more beliefs I have, but I don't know what they are?

Guess the reason I like the agender label may be because gender labels seem kinda meaningless, at least within a cisnormativity society. Not being cis for me just means being a "man" seems icky and preferring more bodily features typically caused by E instead of those caused by T (although gonads suck in general - I don't want either and I'm not confident whether I think boobs would be meh or cool).

if i tried to explain my gender i would have to give my whole life story, go into tremendous length about materialist dialectics, tell like six abstracted and unrelated stories, write an epic poem, and still wed only be like 1/6 done. for all other intents and purposes im just a weird monster

I’ve always looked up to men and non binary people as role models and I tried to copy the behaviours of boys around me because I wanted to be like them. For a long time I thought that came from misogyny but later I realised that I respect women as much as menby’s but for women I respect I see them more as just great people and not necessarily as role models. So something unconscious in my mind wants to be like the menby’s in my life, and it also wants me to look like a man. I wish I understood that part better.

This... might take a bit. Maybe I should go over my full transition experience so far too? That might honestly help make it make more sense 🤔 From reading everything here my own relation to my gender seems quite different from the others, but I already knew I had a very particular understanding. Fuck I might need to reread some papers and do proper citations too.

It’s kinda hard to describe. Part of me has always felt like ‘what is gender’ or ‘what is a woman’ is less important than the fact that I want to be one. Like, I know there’s such a thing as a woman and I know I want to be one, the rest is just details. The physical changes and presentation stuff is a big plus to be sure, but it’s not the core of it. Like, if I imagine myself as an hrt femboy with she/her pronouns, something about that feels off. There’s a part of roseanne barr’s recent comedy special/trainwreck where she’s going around and doing the conservative grievance politics bingo and eventually she gets to the trans stuff and tries to give the audience some red meat but she’s clearly too unplugged or uninterested to understand what the fuss is supposed to be so she just goes “‘what is a woman?’ A woman is me!!!” and I think that’s probably going to be my attitude once I finally internalize the view of myself as a woman lol

I think I came to the opposite conclusion as you, where I figured that if nothing is inherently gendered, then why can’t I just be a woman? Like I feel like trying to hold myself to some strict femme standard of gender presentation would probably feel constricting, but cis women can transgress that and still be women, so why can’t I? I don’t have to be nonbinary to be gender nonconforming if I want to. Maybe when I get further in my transition and stop boymoding I’ll feel different, but that’s where I am now.

::: spoiler discussion of transphobia On a practical level being my gender involves shame, and freedom from shame. I once joked that ‘I’m not ashamed of being trans, I’m ashamed of being a woman’ but it’s kinda true. Some of my earliest memories involve being taught that I’m not supposed to be a woman and a good deal of my childhood involved learning how to hide that part of myself. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how living in a cishet-normative society can mess with your head and make you hate yourself. So I developed this shame complex around my gender identity before I even knew what it was.

Being a woman kind of represents freedom from that shame to me. The freedom of embracing who I am instead of hiding it. I l’m not broken or deviating from what I’m supposed to be, this is just who I am. :::

We haven't figured out how to turn me into a glowing ball of light yet but gender to me has always felt like an oppressive cudgel used to cause me pain and make me feel inadequate based in some arbitrary rules of what people think i should be. So I'm happy to just be me and not have anyone assign values or requirements to my person based on some warped world view of binary gender roles.

If i could have it my way I'd literally be a shape shifter cos that would be swag as fuck.

It's complicated of course. Often it feels like a box I'm forced to fit into when I don't really fit into said box.

For the longest time, I considered myself in closest proximity to non-binary as an AMAB person that generally likes to present and be viewed in a feminine matter but without any overwhelming body dysphoria. By contrast, I felt feminine presentation just always fit the body I'm given more than masculine presentation as I've always tended towards a more typically feminine profile slender with long legs and a more androgynous facial structure. Though the narrowness of my hips and my shoulder width do lean more to the masculine side.

That being said, I've been finding lately that I've been left with this feeling that I kind of have to "pick a side" in order to be taken seriously in society as a whole. My presentation alone has caused many to assume I fully on identify as trans in the past, as it leans very femme. Certain aspects of me like my height and the 'maleness' of some of my features make full on 'passing' difficult to me, but I have mulled over hormones as a way to potentially address this. I just don't know. I posted some pics of me on another website recently that while getting largely positive feedback, also resulted in relentless brigading from a small group of TERF's and transphobes who wanted to hyperfixate on every aspect of myself that I'm already uncomfortable with. Instead of the potentially intended reaction of making me want to shy away from my expression, it just made me want to put in the effort to be seen more as a woman though I still don't feel like my identity is completely "woman," yet when forced to pick a side so to speak, I align far more with that than being a man.

So that's where I'm at right now. Pretty much transfemme I suppose. But still trying to figure out what that means for me exactly.

Just some autistic asexual womanthing that identifies as a non binary transfem and dresses for comfort and practically first, looking badass a close second. I voice trained.(one of the best commitments of my transition)

I take E, and it completely changed how I feel and interact with the world in almost universally positive ways.

I don’t identify with cis womanhood, and am finding increasingly belonging with transsexual vs transgender mostly because it is funny.

I use the term "genderfluid" because it's the label I've found that's... least wrong, I suppose. I don't think I have a "gender identity" in a traditional sense at all, I'm never really a man or a woman, but I present and live as a woman because I'm an AFAB individual with other divergence from normal living in a conservative area and I just don't really care about gender more than my physical safety. I let people write off my divergences from that as nonconformity originating from sensory needs, and leave the issue the fuck alone. I often get dysphoria from being seen as a woman but know that being seen as a man wouldn't fix it and neither would the type of androgyny that makes people unsure and prone to use neutral terms, but attracts attention. What shifts isn't really identity, but more desired gender presentation. Which I can't do a lot about, limited resources and safety concerns, most of the time I really don't care, I'm not going to wear traditionally feminine things that aren't comfortable or take obscene amounts of time, but I'm also not going to spend the time and sensory frustration to intentionally present masculine either, but sometimes I do experience a hard shift into wanting to present more gender conforming in one direction or the other. Which is easy when it shifts feminine, very difficult when it shifts masculine. I often use the language for this that many genderfluid people use for their gender identity shifts, but I don't think it's an actual gender identity change going on. Just a shift in desired presentation rather than how I'm viewed and the terminology folks use and all that kind of stuff that's separate from but often matched with desired physical appearance.

Terminology is a very tricky thing for me. I don't like everyone I meet using the same set of pronouns for me. She/her and he/him aren't huge problems or that twinge a lot of people get at being misgendered but they are definitely my least preferred. What I've stated on this site is the least terrible solution I've found among fellow queer people who Get It, when around cis people who can barely get gender neutral terms for enbies right, let alone neopronouns and uncommon things like mirror, it/its and so on... if they're safe and known allies, I'll indicate they/them, if it's obvious the pronoun question is being asked in a perfunctory way by unsafe people I'll play the out of the loop cis woman and indicate "She/her, obviously" with a nasty look. I do not like being called a woman. I do not like being called a man. "Boy" and "girl" are both equally not right but also not wrong. I have not found a solution for this that other queer people understand, let alone cis people. I frequently just grit my teeth and deal with feminine terminology and being called a woman. It hurt less when I was eight and people said "girl". Being called a "young woman" or "young lady" while my male peers were still called "boys" at nine~ten felt really weird. It felt less weird but still wrong when the double standard evened out as a teenager.

I always thought gender was a social expectation thing rather than a true internal identity, and that my neurodivergence and general weirdness was why I didn't Get It, until I started hanging around trans spaces as a teenager and realised that gender is Really Important and Defining to some people. As a small child, I just thought that all kids found this boys and girls divide pointless and I'd feel more like my female peers and even less like my male peers when I got older, and then puberty hit and that still hadn't happened and I still felt... puberty was a frustrating nightmare to be endured for the greater privileges of being a teenager and seen as more mature than little kids, which I thought was how all AFAB people viewed it, I didn't really feel any desire for all the Girly Things my peers were into, I didn't wish I was a boy instead, it all just felt so stupid and painful. I blamed sensory issues for everything gender related that ever "acted up". Every time a pair of girls' trousers or a dress or a blouse just wouldn't sit right, I'd blame sensory issues, while already reaching for something I'd bought from the men's section, that I swore fixed sensory frustrations just because it was cut a little bit differently in common pain point areas.

I don't have a gender, to the point even terms like nonbinary or agender still don't feel correct. But I let people view me as a woman because that makes my daily life easier, and it saves me the shitloads of drama everyone other than binary women get for wearing certain things, on those rare days I actually want to dig a skirt out of the back of my closet.

My gender is like a negation and a combination. I'm not a woman, not a man, but I'm not not a woman, y'know? My gender is people being confused about what exactly my gender is. My gender is avoiding gendered restrooms.

It's about feeling comfortable with myself, about fully describing a me which doesn't really fit, but still functions, in society. My gender is having neither an 'm' nor an 'f' on my legal documents.