Answered by: tonidorsay on 23 April 2014

When I say brothers, sisters, and siblings, it is those who are not binary I am referring to when I say siblings.

There is an ongoing shift within the culture of transness that is going to see the same sort of fraction in gone saw with “gay”, and it is going to end up with a broad set of values.

Plotting identification on a three dimensional graph, one identifies seventeen distinct clusters when using a structural spectrum to identify where along a spectrum folks are. Two of them are the largest and most dense, and those are the binary clusters.

That leaves 15 other clusters for which the terms can vary, even regionally, and through time.

There are also outliers, singularities.

That graph is based on four thousand trans people. It makes things interesting for people, and it demonstrates the lack of value in using Dysphoria as the measure, as Dysphoria is, itself, a predominantly binary system as approached by most folks who don’t understand that it is a scale.

Dysphoria can be absent, very low grade, medium grade, high grade, and intense. Dysphoria can be caused by the variation between social sex identity, physical sex identity, physiology, and even sexual orientation. All of which are aspects of self awareness and so exist at a nominally unidentified level.

This is how we get those clusters. Each one represents a commonality of variations, a point where those points all collide.

And that set of clusters only applies to the US. Different cultures are going to have different clusters.

Long before nb/GNC folks became a much wider and more broadly recognized force to me, I had met a trans man who was assigned male at birth, went through transition, including incredibly expensive surgeries that are outside the soc, and then went on living his life as a man with a woman’s body.

Then I met others like him.

What they told me changed the way I saw much of transness.

It led me into the deeper areas and is what got me involved in more of the studies and the various efforts. It is what made it possible for me to dig into critical trans theory.

This is the sort of thing that freaks people out, and. Like them, nb/GNC folks freak people out. They break the rules even more than regular trans people do, and they are still building out their own cultures.

When I speak about kinds of trans people, I often use the terms Cis, Trans, Inter, and then I say two others that we don’t know yet.

I say that to allow space for those nb/GNC people to develop their own terminology instead of applying one to them.

And that is important to do. That is why there is a split coming. That is why there is a kind of backlash going on against the nb/GNC folks, especially among truscum and hbs sorts who make it their business to police who is and who isn’t trans.

The key to it all is self awareness, not Dysphoria. Dysphoria is the excuse cis people created to allow them to wrap their heads around us.

Transness is an aspect of self awareness.