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Aella
@Aella_Girl
I think the thing other people are parsing as 'gender' isn't 'gender' to me. I talked with a nonbinary friend recently who described their nonbinaryness as sort of... not wanting to be misunderstood as having female traits. This is valid! This also is completely different from-
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
what I understand as gender. I think there's some other huge cultural understanding of gender going on that isn't translating into my world. The way I parse gender, how well you are described by typical gender traits have very little to do with the gender you are.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
e.g., if you're an extremely masculine woman (like me!), this doesn't make you less of a woman. In the nonbinary gender framework, it seems like this *does* actually make you less of a woman. This is totally foreign to me.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
My conception of gender has a lot to do with common knowledge appearance - how do you read in the world, and how does the world treat you based on how you read? This mostly equals your 'gender'. In this perspective, your gender doesn't belong to you, but to your society.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
It's a very 'old' thing - ingrained, and fundamental to how society is constructed (though I don't think it's necessarily good). This other conception of gender, where it's something you identify as, is completely incompatible with the way I understand it.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
I'm not saying I'm rejecting that framework - I'm interested in using it - just the word 'gender' is really confusing things for me. I think when I overlay the word nonbinary onto the base gender, like "nonbinary woman", THEN it makes total sense to me.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Then that communicates to me - this is someone who is treated by society as the female role, because they have a vagina and look female. They also feel there's aspects of femininity that don't apply to them, and want to be clear to others that they're not a typical woman.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@ZodiacKodiak
Right, i agree. I also don't really understand it. To me, gender is definitionally not proactive; in my word choice i wouldn't describe the thing they're doing as gender.
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imuli
@trystimuli
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
So if you take your definition and ask "what do I want my gender to be?", that expands to something like "how do I want people to read me and treat me?", which is most of the actionable parts of gender by their definition.
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Sandbot
@Sandbot2
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
so you know in dreams, you can e.g. see a location as being your hometown, even if it actually has none of the right properties, but you don't notice the discrepancy until you wake up just as other ppl 'read' as m/f to us, we 'read' as m/f to ourselves
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Day
@demigirl_day
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
This definitely feels like *a component* of my gender. I don't want the world to read me (or treat me) as a man or a woman, because, in important ways, I'm not. The way I engage with the world sometimes follows masculine scripts, sometimes feminine ones, and sometimes neither.
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