chocolateshoes:

adecentworld: physical (and specifically genital) dysphoria is not a “measuring stick” for trans*ness

man and woman aren’t the only two genders

at all

also genders may change and that’s okay too

if you really really have to go by dysphoria: non-binary people experience dysphoria too,… I’m a cis female and I have a legitimate question. What do trans people define as “gender”? I’ve heard people say they don’t want to change their body’s sex, but they’re “mentally” the opposite gender. What does that mean? Is it a way of dressing and behaving? I find faults with that considering western culture is just one of many cultures, and what’s masculine to me might be feminine to someone else. Wouldn’t that just be a cross-dresser? I’m genuinely curious, this has been bugging me for a while now. (Also waiting for someone to say “die cis scum” instead of educating me. Just don’t.)

Different folks have different definitions of gender, so don’t take me as like The Authority or anything, but:

I define gender identity as what you want to be seen as, what words and communities feel right for you, and so on. Gender expression is the stuff like the clothes you wear and the way you behave – sometimes they “line up” in a normative way, sometimes they don’t. For instance, you can have a really femme man who loves lipstick and dresses and so on, but prefers to be called “he” and “man” and considers himself “a man” in all aspects – that makes his gender identity a man (and no less of a man than someone who has a more masculine gender identity).

(He might also call himself a cross-dresser, he might not; I personally don’t have much experience with cross-dressing so you’ll have to find someone else to answer those types of questions.)

And yeah, it’s all culturally and temporally specific, but that doesn’t make it any less important or existent. I don’t like wearing make-up or dresses and this is very probably because they’re feminine-coded, but that doesn’t make the dislike cease to exist.

I’m an example of a trans person who separates my sex from my gender. My gender is (typically) agender – none of those gendered words “man” or “woman” or “boy” or “girl” seem to really fit, as hard as I try, and I can never think of myself as “one of the guys” or “one of the girls”. There are some other reasons I choose “agender” as opposed to other non-binary identities. My sex on the other hand I usually say is “FTM”. I was designated female at birth, but parts of my body cause me dysphoria and I have changed them/am in the process of changing them, and the way I’m changing them fits into the standard medical FTM model – testosterone, particular types of surgery, etc.

Hope some of this makes sense!

(via 0l0x)