Nature-Spirits wrote:In other news, today in my Theory of Knowledge class the teacher asked us about the kinds of lenses through which we view the world, and how these lenses affect our knowledge and perception of reality. People suggested things such as religion, different branches of science, etc.
I suggested gender, because one of the things I've noticed since I started examining my gender identity is that my gender affects the way I think and react to my surroundings.
For instance, when I'm female I feel fairly comfortable looking at women's clothes in the store (there's some apprehension, of course, but I think that's something that affects most trans people when shopping for clothes -- especially when we're worried about whether or not we pass), while when I'm male I feel embarrassed and uncomfortable going into the women's section of the store. The opposite is also true: when I'm female, I try to avoid the men's clothing section of the store, while when I'm male, I enjoy looking at men's clothes.
Another example is that when I'm female, I find that I'm more likely to cry during a sad movie than when I'm male. (Not that I mean to sound sexist -- I'm just saying it how it is, and that's my personal experience.) I'm also more self-conscious about my body and "being beautiful" when I'm female than when I'm any other gender. (I also care about my appearance when I'm my other genders -- for instance, I like to accentuate my masculine features when I'm male, and no matter my gender I care about looking presentable -- but I'm more worried about it when I'm female, to the point where I sometimes get quite anxious about it.)
There are other examples I could come up with, but I think you get the point.
So, anyway, how do you guys/gals/peeps feel that your gender affects the way you perceive yourself and the world around you, if at all? I have to say, I'm curious.
All sorts of weird things happen to me. (Sadly enough, I don't get many personality changes due to gender. Maybe what I perceive to be maleness, femaleness, etc. are just drops of gender into a world that is so neutrois, that they appear like full versions of the spectrum? Maybe that is a recent development? Explanation ahead.)
Before realizing I am non-binary (most particularly after I got fat again, ages 15-18), I used to feel so dysphoric that I felt terrible with 'fronting' (more like chameleoning, but still) as anything too more feminine than androgynous, like something was lacking in me and everybody would have the right to look weird, I felt like a joke. I dreamed of looking feminine but always felt I couldn't with my present body. I kind of repressed this a lot, and at first, since I lack most traditional womanly 'qualities', I thought describing my gender as mostly floating in a partially neutral but also weirdly masculine stage would best describe who I am as a person in comparison to the rest of the world. It also reflected how I believe others would see me.
This started to change at age 18, first at accepting my gender expression doesn't mean jack shit about who I am on the inside, then about how I'm allowed to be anything I want to and it not invalidate me, added to not feeling so bad about my own body being not culturally acceptable and finally understand that our sense of aesthetics is relative (even though I indeed find my culture's ideal to be sexy, but whatevs), and now I don't get anything.
I always thought true comfort would be passing as female whenever I wanted, but now I don't have this necessity anymore. I feel like being read as a gender that isn't mine will always be a reality, and that nothing about it will [or should] ever satisfy me, so I now have wishes about other people's thinking rather than myself. I feel really bad when I'm de-legitimized, like very very anxious, and it does reflect weird tendencies within me that have been happening since I'm at least pre-teen, but to me being read as the gender I'm most sexually attracted to (what is truly looking neutral? aren't all people unique, body-wise? my gender is based around there being a sole, individual me, with a unique sense of psyche and unique viewpoint due to past experience; nothing about me has the right to be called male, I am here and this is all just mine, not some arbitrary grouping's, it's male because people decide it's an easy classification system but 'from now on I shall question it, too') always felt secondary in comparison to other instances I felt insecure about.
That is, being fat and having skin characteristics typical of fat people felt bad because I thought being read as the mocked kind of male was something that erased me a lot more than just being another kid. This couldn't be farther from the truth, as all non-binary people have it fucked by what surrounds them, and body positiveness should be here for everyone.
I now am using a gay/sexy undercut/chanel, it is the first time in my life due to my own will and the first time in many years that I got it, and I didn't and don't feel any bad about it. My longer hair was hard to take care of, and I wish luck, tolerance and understanding for those kids who wish to grow theirs because they feel terrible about what is forced upon them. Because those forcible things to create a dichotomy were what bred inside my head an insecurity in the first place, and without it, I wouldn't feel so wrong. Now I thought it was appropriate to make official that I'm about to change my life, as Coco Chanel once said is what happens in the life of a woman when they take such a decision.
I love being around people who are positive about it, because it is really important, and I feel like that, in spite of all the hassle, without others around, I would perhaps still have a very rough experience.
But in fact, I once hated my body a lot, and this feeling of relatively inexplicable comfort with my own self even brings a small amount of paranoia. I feel like my neutroisness has been so concrete and so empowered that maybe I'm losing who I usually was gender-wise. I know people laugh at tucutes here and that thinking about gender too much is seen as a kind of unhealthy navel-gazing, but I've been honestly afraid I can't pangender anymore, not because my gender is delicate, as I once thought it was when it suddenly disappeared with sudden kisses of agenderness, but because it has become... Oh, I prefer to not even imagine it enough to put into words, because the whole stuff is actually sensitive and easily affected by how I feel and what I believe it and myself to be. (So maybe the paranoia itself has been creating it, like a feedback.) >.<
More to the point, I'm always partially pangendering even when I'm just the usual neutrois me, and always partially neutrois even when I'm pangendering. Not exactly like an ouroboros (even though IT IS what the ouroboros is supposed to represent), but rather that they are the seed of one another, very strongly connected, and now I'm not really feeling it. I know it's here, it actually is responsive to my concerns/emotions, not only now but all over it while I wrote this block of text and edited some parts, but lots of things feel conflicting/weaker. It's not as tied to my personal comfort, and since I don't feel as strongly about it, it also doesn't feel strongly about me.
It's a very complicated gender because it recently stopped altogether from affecting me in the least, it doesn't say a word or waves hi, it's just there, being directly affected by me and the world around me. Perhaps I should anthropomorphize it so I can better wrap my head around... ou? Or is that too mogai-like?
