Big questions about gender, gendered markers/perception, and essence

Ok, so you're getting into transmedicalist territory with gender markers, so I would avoid that kind of terminology. I think you do have confused perceptions of gender, but that doesn't mean you're a man.

Simply put: what do you want to be? That's what you are.

What label brings you the most joy? Your perception of gender is heavily influenced by the current enforced gender system which can make any kind of self discovery confusing. Instead of thinking of gender as this big complex concept you can dissect it in smaller simpler concepts.

• How do you like to dress or present yourself?
• How do you want people around you to treat you?
• Do you like your pronouns or would you like different ones?
• Do you like your body or would you change anything if given the choice?
• What kind of role would you prefer to play in a relationship?

The answers to those questions can be connected but they don’t have to. Women can use he/him pronouns and dress traditionally masculine. You can just pick and choose what makes you feel most comfortable. And you are allowed to change your answers anytime.

I've had similar thoughts about myself.

I never strongly felt like a man(AMAB). I wondered if that's because I wasn't born with all the "manly" physiological features. Or do I not identify as a man because I don't want to be one?

The conclusion I've come to is that my lack of most masculine traits growing up may have had some influence on the way I feel about the male gender, but it didn't define my gender identity outright(I'm agender). There's no way to know if I'd have been agender if I was born with more masc traits, but it doesn't matter.

Gender markers aren't a prerequisite for any gender identity. So I think it isn't really productive to focus on them when interrogating your gender identity. Like another comment says, "what do you want to be? That's what you are."

I wouldn't want to identify as NB or trans for the wrong reason

I've also thought similar things, like I was taking something away from "real" trans people somehow. But I would never question the genuineness of someone else's gender identity, I have to show the same courtesy to myself. I'm agender because that's how I feel, that's who I am, and it's what I want to be.

Hopefully this makes some sense. I also hope I didn't say something stupid, this is pretty new to me still.

which smol grammar word make smile? idt it really needs to be more complex than that.

Sometimes people get so wrapped up in trying to find their absolute “correct” identity they end up going out of their way to reinforce gender stereotypes. You’re allowed to be wrong about yourself, you’re allowed to change your mind, you’re allowed to be indifferent.

I decided if I was gonna be autistic about this, I’d do it in the way that idc about “social norms” not that I need to collect all the data and do a statistical analysis on “gender markers.”

Sorry to zero in on probably the irrelevant part, but you mention higher voice, narrow shoulders, less facial hair/body hair and a less aggressive temperament. Each by themselves probably nothing but together suggest a possible pattern of lifelong low testosterone. Do you live in a country where you could see a doctor for screening for hormone levels and/or intersex conditions? Like Klinefelters syndrome or something. They’re not that rare actually. Might be worth ruling in or out on this journey.

Genders are social roles that have typical learned behaviors built into them based on the societal norms. In our context, these social roles are also conflated with physiological markers, using the same names to describe different things, with the similarity being that in each case the names are ultimately reductive and fall short in fully describing the thing they aim to describe. Just saying this to remind that it is an inherently confusing situation to understand and being confused about it is very natural.

I say the answer to your question is yes and no. Many straight, cis men have what would be described as one or more atypical gendered markers, as you are describing them. At the same time, if a person is trans and grows up in a place where they don't know trans people even exist, would they potentially start socializing and learning gendered markers of the gender they ultimately feel more related to? Probably so, but it really depends on the community they live in and who they have access and exposure to. In either case, the socialized behaviors are results of their environments more than their "inherent" gender, since gender is learned behavior.

In your description of yourself, I assure you that there are many people who describe themselves quite similarly and are comfortable being cis men. From my experience, the mere fact that you care enough to put any energy into this is already setting you apart from other people who might seem quite similar from the outside, but are not questioning their gender. That is to say, don't put so much credence in the idea that gender markers and socialized behavior is going to be able to give any definitive answers on their own. What matters is viewing all this within the context of your unfolding journey of questioning and seeking understanding about your own gender identity and how you live and breathe and move through the world. You have clearly begun that journey, so I would focus less on comparing yourself to other people and more on diving deeper into your own experiences, desires, goals, etc.

There is a very typical "egg" journey that many go through which is what your comrades might be picking up on, most people can't tell that kind of stuff, but those who have already been down that path can often recognize the signs much easier. Still, you need to have your own control over your experience. I've had other trans people early in my own journey explain to me that I need to do x,y,z in order to embrace myself as a trans person and I did not like that at all. In the same way that I had grown up being gender policed as my assigned gender by people around me, it felt like the opposite side of the same thing, where I had to prove my transness by emulating particular aesthetics or routines which don't feel authentic to me.

In the end, your journey is going to be your own, despite similarities to what others may have experienced, and you might be one of many who move around on the whole spectrum of gender as years go by, never quite landing anywhere but "I'm definitely not this, or that." If you can access a queer therapist, I definitely recommend exploring your identity perceptions in that setting. Just remember, all gender is fake, that is the point, and you don't have to be anything. You can reject all of it, or collect the particular things you like from anything else and make something new out of it. If you know you are not cis, you are really just opening yourself up to then be whatever you want, as you want it, with no commitment to continuing that at any point thereafter.

In a communist future, gender simply would not exist. Everyone is just a human, and then from that point on each human would act and dress and enjoy things however they want.

There is no gender essence. Ideas about gender categories only truly correspond to reality insofar as they affect how people interact and live. Humanity is a remarkably variant group. Every one has “gender characteristics” from multiple categories and there is no line separating one from the other. What attributes are designated “male” or “female” as well as additional categories are constantly changing from social factors. For example, due to education, women used to be stereotyped as messier writers, but now they are said to be neater. There were a great many outliers in both times.

Not to diagnose you across the internet, but this is a very autistic way to try to “figure out” gender (ie a logical examination of the data through available frameworks). I have done the same, but as a counter, through what I consider to be a much more coherent framework. Most people do not think about gender in this way. They accept the category they were placed in at birth, and if confronted with characteristics which contradict that category they don’t care or feel bad about it depending on their temperament and conditioning.

Preferences (in this case in regard to “gender[ed] characteristics”) come from a dialectical interaction of internal tendencies and social experience. A reasonable definition of “transgender” would be one who’s preferences lead one to feel uncomfortable with being associated with their assigned gender at birth to the point that the urge to diverge from that category in accordance with preferences arises. I myself know gender is not “real” and don’t have much of a positive identity in substitute, but don’t like being associated with my assigned gender and would prefer certain changes to things that are called “male.”

For practical purposes, you may adopt whatever identity makes you feel good and do what you like without regard for abstract ideas.

When it comes to conceptualization, I find the (accurate and Marxist) ideas that all is constantly changing and made of contradictory parts to grease the gears.

Gender is a vague, ambiguous term that refers to a bunch of things that appear to be one monolith to cis people, but are actually entirely unrelated dimensions of one's personality and social interactions. This only becomes apparent once you take all this stuff apart. The following is based on Leslie Feinberg's Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue* and the Gender Accelerationist Manifesto* by Vikky Storm and Eme Flores. I highly recommend reading both.

Gender identity, whether you are a man, a woman, both or neither, some part one of these and some part something else etc. is an entirely internal thing. A a foundational layer of your personality, a psychological depth structure that lays the groundwork for how you understand your actions in a gendered context, want to be seen and recognized by others in such contexts and experience your body in regards to gender. If it does not line up with your assigned gender, growing up in a structurally transphobic society will lead people to repress it, but it's always at the core of your gendered experience regardless. If you're trans and still an egg or just freshly cracked, there may be an incongruence between this and the other dimensions of your gender (although particularly for androgynous-appearing nonbinary or agender people, such an incongruence may just not exist because there is no disconnect between gender identity and other dimensions of gender). This incongruence may be experienced either as a state of confusion, dissociation or compensatory denial for repressing or questioning people, or as what is known as gender dysphoria. This incongruence can also be healed partially or entirely during the transition process, be that through social, medical or other means. Note that agender people will often draw a blank here, as simply not feeling gender is a cornerstone of their experience. It's possible to just leave this field blank. But for me, when i look back at my life, it only makes any amount of sense when i assume i'm a woman. Realizing that wasn't done within a day, but during my questioning phase, a lot of loose puzzle pieces started falling into place until i eventually had the whole picture. When i go by my assigned gender at birth instead, it's the same disordered, incoherent mess i was in for most of my life, a constant struggle to even feel an intact, complete sense of self.

Gender presentation and gender role on the other hand are not inherent, internal and immutable, they are socially constructed and exist in relation to others. Presentation includes how you dress, groom yourself, certain ways to move, gesture and speak. They define how you behavorially signal your gender to others. As you can imagine, these cues are highly culture-specific, subject to change over time and also very malleable in our own lifes if we want to because we actively decide, whether consciously or subconsciously, to practice this part of gender. This is the most easily hackable part of the gender package, the most frequently overlooked aspect of how you "pass" as a certain gender, and the source of endless confusion for the straights when you dare to be queer enough to fuck it all over. Your gender role is the part that does not relate to appearance, but to your actions towards others. This includes which role you play in familial relations, during sex, in your friendships or within your community. It may appear like a binary to straight people, but even when you're a cis man or a cis woman, gender roles can be much more complex than an either-or. Just ask butch lesbians or fem gays. Unlike Feinberg, who treats presentation and role as one dimension, i'm seperating the two because a lot of people, including myself, practice them in different ways. I present very femme, but the way i act in my relationships is decidedly butch most of the time. Both of these are feminine identities if you ask me, and the way i do femininity is also always a very queer one, but under the common ideas of what being a lesbian means, these things are different poles to a lot of people and i found it helpful when i learned to make a distinction between these two sides of social gender.

Then there's gender as a class. That's how the things above fit into property relations, division of labor and social hierarchies. This is the nasty part where state control of the uterus, the nuclear family as the core unit of fascism, marriage as a contract to ensure generational transfer of wealth, the devaluation of reproductive labor, the grooming of men as careerist hustlers and soldiers and all the other shit that patriarchy does for the ruling class enter the playing field. It's the part that revolutionary queers fight against: Forcibly assigning everybody a discreet, coercive, binary gender at birth to ensure the proper functioning of capitalism. When we say "abolish gender", we do not mean "be as gender neutral as possible" or "do not act like a girly girl or a manly man", but "do not force people into this crap. Let them decide for themselves who they are and how they want to do gender."

Oh, and there's biology. "Gender markers" are not as clearcut and binary as reactionaries want to make you believe. They particularly have nothing to do with all the other aspects discussed here. Most people do not show the full range of all the things that are clustered as "biologically male" or "biologically female". A lot of people miss some of these traits, or show some traits from the other sex construct, and yeah i'm deliberately saying sex is also a social construct here. Observable biological facts are one thing, but they are more like a mosaic or a spectrum than the two neatly seperated, mutually exclusive boxes that are associated with pseudobiologist fallacies about gender. Biology is commonly abused as a justification for things that are entirely social in nature, or to deny that bodies can be altered. Disparate, not universally related factoids get reified, exceptions and edge cases are overlooked or explained away, the way we talk the biology of sex is heavily ideologized.

I could go on, but then i'd have to write a book, and i do not have the time for that tonight. I just hope this clears some things. It may also open up a ton of new questions, that's just how these things go at times.