"not only can live outside those systems, I can thrive as who I am."

[cosmolinguist]

I see so much of myself in this person's life! I knew they were my age before they said, just from their description of junior high.

And of course so much is different too. I wish I could write anything as good as this.

Comments

[arlie]

Thank you for posting this. I appreciated a chance to read the linked post.

And I absolutely get it with the wtf about how everyone has a sense of gender identity, rather than knowledge of the rules enforced on them because of the shape of their body.

I was told that I could determine the innately feminine (aka, the rules of my birth culture) through introspection. So females are good at math, prefer to spend time alone, prefer practical to attractive in their own clothes, tools, etc., and otherwise are just like me? Somehow when I drew conclusions like that I was getting the introspection wrong.

But in any case I knew that was bogus, having already been informed of my innate feminine desire to "catch a man" so I could be his servant, sex object and similar, until he tired of me and replaced me with a younger model. This of course required constant attention to my own attractiveness, including in matters of appearance, along with hiding my intelligence (he'll want someone less smart than him) etc etc etc. All of it naturally tending to twist my development so that I wouldn't be able to earn a decent living except as "wife", or perhaps call girl.

"Innate" attributes clearly aren't accessible to introspection, even while obvious to outsiders.

p.s. I'd be a bit older than the poster - no personal computers in my K12 schools.

[cosmolinguist]

It's really great to read your thoughts on this; thank you.

I had such a similar experience of mixed messages about my gender, complicated to some extent by disability and my parents' attitudes (my dad liked long hair on little girls and dresses, but also was clearly much more comfortable telling me to help him lift heavy things around the farm than in telling me that I shouldn't sit how I normally do when I was wearing a dress; my mom had some kind of paradigm shift from a terribly tomboyish childhood to being the fusspot about clothes, hair and makeup that I've always known her to be so I wonder if she expected I'd do similar and was disappointed when I never really outgrew my boyish habits).

[nanila]

Thank you for linking that. It was an interesting read.

I would like to push back on the suggestion that their writing about themselves is superior to yours. They come across as a great deal more self-absorbed than you are.

[cosmolinguist]

Heh, fair. Thanks for that perspective; it wouldn't have occurred to me. I think gender can be really self-absorbed for some people and I don't normally love that, yeah. I feel like it's much more about how we relate to the outside world and vice versa...but maybe I'll write about that myself some day. :)

[barakta]

If you wished to share, I would totally read things you wrote on this.

The OP writing about their experience of gender reminds me (in a 180 degrees opposite kind of way) of a lesbian friend who used to be cool to trans folk (helped with legal paperwork) and indeed changed her own name to a trad-male one (albeit after a religious figure who was female) gone TERF who can't seem to conceptualise that just cos she interrogated her internal gender for 2 years and decided she is a cis woman and biology matters to her, it doesn't mean trans/NB people are wrong when they come to a different conclusion and wish to define as trans, (or wish to transition and not define as trans)... ExFriend seems to think her own gendered view is everyone's and that people who misgender her (she looks pretty butch and has this male name) are doing it out of spite and it's ALL trans people's fault that outsiders don't know what to call exfriend, rather than just "I get it, we seem similar but my name is xx and pronouns are yy I consider myself cis".

ExFriend forgets that each of us gets to think about our own gender (or lack thereof) and should be allowed to make our own decisions internally and externally and even similar wordings can be different outcomes/decisions/internalisations/externalisations and that's not just okay, but cool and interesting.

And it's great to read people talking about less commonly seen narratives whether they are rare or just not known or not.

[barakta]

Agreed. I think Erik's writing is excellent, not the same as Aiden's but a hell of a lot less verbose.

[otter]

it's too much for me to read today, but I'm hoping to remember to come back and read the rest of it. I got to where they talk about Butler and the other author.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah it took me a long time to read it all -- I've had the tab open for months!

[gender_euphoric]

Wow, that was really profound.

And I find it interesting that someone they quote, Imogen Binnie, used to be my LJ friend.