

I'm AMAB but I'm becoming increasingly unconvinced that I'm cis, and I've started tentatively referring to myself as transfeminine. It seems more likely than not that this is right, but I'm tired of trying to do this all in my head and I feel like I'm gaslighting myself at this point. So here is a lengthy description of my various genderfeels, written as honestly as I can manage. Please tell me what category label I should use to summarise them.



(1) Inherent "feeling" of gender? Yeah, I got nothing. If there's a signal there I can't find it. To the extent that there's anything there it seems to fluctuate wildly, or adjust to suit the context. I don't seem to be able to grasp what that feeling is supposed to be.



(2) Gender presentation & appearance? I seem to have a moderate preference for feminine presentation, but it's not overwhelmingly strong. It does bother me that I'm supposed to present as male, and I'm a bit allergic to anything strongly masculine. I quite like dresses and jewellry etc, I hate ties and suits, etc. Apparently this goes back a long way, and I used to like dresses and skirts etc a fair bit as a kid.



(3) Attributes I value? I really hate the gender essentialist way we code some attributes as feminine and others as masculine, but I'll set that to one side for the purposes of this Ask. My preferences here tend toward feminine: I'd rather be graceful than strong, I'd rather be pretty than handsome, I'd rather be kind than powerful, and I prefer tactful and delicate conversation over forthright and direct speech. Et cetera.



(4) Body preferences? I recognise that sex and gender are very different things, but I also acknowledge that it's useful to consider one's preferences about body type. On that front I'm mostly but not completely indifferent. If I try to entertain one of those "imagine waking up with the opposite body type" hypotheticals, I don't usually feel anything either way (even though I do have strong feelings when I use this trick to think about other identity categories like my race or sexual orientation). About the only body type I feel averse to would be a very hyper-masculine body. My own slim and small AMAB body is totally fine, and pretty much any AFAB body works too. This feeling goes back a long way - and as a kid I used to have very vivid dreams about my body being transformed from boy to girl, and never found it weird or distressing.



(5) Social situations? Not sure this means much, but usually I feel much more comfortable around women than men, and most of my friends have been women. I feel like there's more of a tendency for women to end up talking about things I find interesting, even if I don't always have a lot to contribute. Around a group of men I'm often on edge, and somehow I always end up getting talked over, but I think a lot of that is that I don't know how to talk to men?



(6) Pronoun preferences? Is it weird that I don't seem to mind? In real life everyone uses "he" and it doesn't bother me, but I would be perfectly okay with "she" if other people felt that was appropriate. Anything seems okay as long as people aren't trying to be mean.



(7) Discussions about gender? Whenever people start talking about gender I tend to find the discussion massively stressful, and almost invariably hurtful. Those conversations tend to be disorienting.



(8) Role-playing? A minor thing, but I something I recently noticed about myself is that I almost always pick female characters and have done so ever since I was a teenager. I'd always justified that choice by reference to my sexual orientation (i.e., if I'm going to spend the entire game staring at a character I might as well pick someone I find attractive), but that doesn't explain why I used to do that back when I did tabletop gaming, and honestly I do find it more fun to have a female avatar.





Okay... that seems pretty clear? But I feel really uncomfortable: on the one hand it's hard to escape the feeling like I'm just being a whiny cis dude (since my whole life has been everyone telling me that I'm a privileged whiny cis dude), and I keep feeling like it's disrespectful to trans women for me to be thinking like this. On the other hand, well, I read my own description above and it doesn't *seem* to describe the gender identity of a cis dude? To me it reads like an AMAB person who prefers femininity over masculinity, and if so that pretty much means I'm some version of transfeminine. That's a reasonable conclusion, yes?



I feel like the answer here should be blindingly obvious, but I keep going around in circles because it's hard to avoid falling back on the "you're just a whiny cis dude shut up already" thing. The perspective of internet strangers would help here.

I need help putting a name to my gender identity. This feels stupid to me, but I seem to be having some difficulty with this, and would appreciate it if the internet would kindly put me out of my misery.