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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)

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)

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)

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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this implies that you can always tell what birth sex people are. might be better to rephrase as "I'm too uncomfortable with a non-binary model of gender, so I'll insist on forcing you into whatever binary model I believe you conform most closely too"

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If I can't tell, then I process them as 'neither gender', which I assume is closest to nonbinary. If they're a passing trans person, then I process them as closest to their preferred gender, and this doesn't change when I find out their sex.

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sure. this whole thread is so odd—yes, gender is a societal construct, but instead of exploring how different societies construct it, or why it's constructed like this, you seem to be unequivocally buying in to the current model. do you usually do that?