The last few guys I dated would regularly wear women's clothing and I didn't mind at all. I've applied makeup to many of my male friends!
Despite how I look, I'm also pretty deviant, and deeply sympathize with the difficulty of failing to perform the 'correct' gender norms. (2/6)
Conversation
So to reiterate - any expression you want to have with your own body, clothing, mannerism, vocabulary - I welcome it.
But I want to retain ownership over the way gender resonates with me. To me, all that stuff above has very little to do with gender. (3/6)
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To me, expression is independent of gender, and your gender is completely outside of your control; it resides in the eyes of society. Gender *is* an assignment of society. And so when people expect me to view them as a gender I don't view them as, that just does not work.(4/6)
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I can't view them as the gender they want no matter how hard I try.
And to be clear, I still use preferred pronouns and try to do all the least upsetting things for genderpeople. I just am bothered by how afraid I feel to express the way I experience gender. (5/6)
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In my ideal world, they would say "Hey, my pronouns are they/them", and then I'd say "Nice to meet you! I process your gender as your birth sex and don't view you as nonbinary personally, but I'm happy to use your pronouns if that makes you more comfortable." (6/6)
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Similar to religion. I want religions to have the right to exist, believe what they believe, and I support steps to protect them from discrimination, hate crimes, or social rejection.
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I view the neo-gender-framework deal to be analagous to religion; it's a deeply personal and important belief system to people, it affects their sense of identity and belonging, and I personally don't believe in it but I accept people who do.
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Ironically enough, I see your framework (and gender in general) as analogous to religion as well in that it's rooted in ancestral traditional observations about the world and enduring as a social construct, resistant to new evidence or ways of conceptualizing.
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I don't even know how to update; this feels really, really deep inside me, not a conscious belief at all. It feels analogous to looking at a tree and 'reading' it as a tree. You can argue it's actually a house and maybe you can do it well but it doesn't change my reading.
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A lot of things around gender *have* updated in the face of evidence for me - accepting unusual or genderdeviant ways of expression does feel conscious. Accepting that people have weird genderfeelings does feel conscious. That stuff does feel potentially changeable.
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Ok, yeah I think I understand the barrier for you. You can update your conscious logic and beliefs based on tangible observable circumstances but you don't feel like you have access to the levers for the underlying low-level categorization your brain performs.
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