I'm coming from a different direction and it's such a mindfuck. "Man" is a description for me that is so utterly *wrong*. And yet woman isn't quite entirely what is fitting either. Something in close proximity to it, influenced by it, yet not wholly like it and containing inscrutable differences. Which is in no part due to society's ever-present influence: always too autistic, too tainted by a first puberty, too fucked up by a lifetime of trauma and bullshit, too outside the skinny-abled-affluent demographic; always wrong, and often a threat. Medical interventions helped with some of it, they can take my HRT out of my cold dead hands, but for other aspects it possible yet out of reach (financially for one), but for most it's plain impossible.
I'm left wondering: how much does being autistic feature in all this?
Am I too autistic to understand the binary male-female dichotomy and the very much affluent white cishet notions that people hold about it?
Am I too autistic to be seen and treated as a fully fledged human instead of Wrong and Alien?
Am I too autistic to not see the kaleidoscopic mess of traits, behaviors, etc. as anything but (self-)contradictory bullshit that people make up on the fly and having ever-moving goalposts?
No wonder I get why people find themselves in being totally Other, Monstrous, and/or Alien. Make your home for yourself out of the things that resonate. I just wish there was a map to follow, as contradictory as that sounds for some as paradoxical and personal as this, because I am *lost*. Until then I'll just refer to my gender as "none woman with left autism". If you get it, you get it, and luckily some people do.
When I was 12, I had pics hidden in my school desk of cosmetic-wearing, floppy haired, androgynous looking guys. David Sylvian, Bowie, models for male makeup (a move that didn't take off till 40 years later, respect to Mary Quant who tried to pioneer it). It's taken me years to unravel my relationship to those pictures. We'll all keep travelling our sex-gender journies. Thanks for a beautiful piece.
Thank you for your writing & sharing your journey. Very much appreciated.
My own life journey has led me at age 64 to feel completely & comfortably QUEER. And non binary. For me it’s about being fully myself beyond prison of societal standards. I don’t even want to fit in to a society I view as somewhat insane.
A few hours ago I read this quote by belle hooks for first time and thought yes! That is me! It was like seeing simple words in one sentence that explained how I’ve felt my entire life. Just thought I’d share it:
“‘Queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
My personal add to that is “at odds with everything around it” means the human everything around me - I feel at home with Nature and find solace there.
this is so real. i have yet to transition physically but i do want to be able to be feminine (whatever that may mean) without being seen as a woman, and masculine (ditto) without being seen as a man. Perhaps this is an impossible dream, but I intend to keep living as myself. Unrelated but I also wish there was some other shit you could transition into, like a terrestrial octopus creature or something. I do not feel fully human.
Thank you so much for this! I'm 3.5 years on T but am yet to be read as a man consistently despite that and top surgery. I refuse to stop being kind, expressive and flamboyant in the name of passing, also partially because I just can't. I'm also short and round with tiny hands and feet and I think my hormone levels have only ever been at the low end of standard male. I don't really have facial hair yet. I know I like he/him pronouns most of the time now (after 10 years of they/them before that).
I feel like medical transition has allowed me to be into men sexually/romantically, whereas before I couldn't easily explore that side of me. But being around men is often scary. I fear physical violence and emotional cruelty from them. Equally, one thing that contributed to holding me back from wanting T (tho it was chronic health issues that actually held me back) was the idea of women in the street fearing me. Such a horrible thought.
I definitely relate to the non human categories. That's why I added cyborg to a lot of my online names years ago, and it resonates with both my autistic and trans experiences. I feel really comfortable dressed as a clown too, a very freeing, playful, somewhat creepy creature.
There's loads more I could say but this is already just a ramble! Thank you again for sharing, it's so helpful to see others with overlapping experiences
I ask myself some version of that a lot. Something like, am I just too weak-willed to be a proud gender non-conforming man? Have I not worked on my own brain enough, to make myself like my (now masc) body? Am I not brave enough and mentally strong enough to deserve gender liberation?
These questions aren't helpful. These are the kinds of questions that keep people in egg mode or in the closet for a very long time, myself included when I was on the other side of things. In them, there is no productive answer.
What if I am weak-willed, what then? I can't make myself stronger. Maybe I can be proud of being weak. That seems like a pretty gender-nonconforming thing for a man to do. What if I won't ever be able to psychologically willpower myself into liking my body, since that never worked as a woman or a man? Then I guess liking my body isn't the most important thing. I've lived this long not liking it. I can put that goal aside since it's not coming. Am I not brave or strong enough to deserve gender liberation? A freedom isn't a thing to be deserved, so I can cast that one aside too.
My position passing as a cis man gave me huge social rewards. I still hated being in it. On the path I'm on now, I'm going to lose a few of them. Go back to being stared at in the men's room and the locker room. and things like that That's okay. For some reason that feels more comfortable than fitting in. There's a lot of privileges a TME trans person gets, and I have a responsibility to own up to them. But I don't think anything like a semi-detransition affords social rewards. When people draw that conclusion they think it's a snap of a finger that retroactively makes you cis. And it doesn't. It's another transition. With all the social challenges and vulnerabilities that entails.
I suspect we have a different view of what being transgender is and means. I’m committed to a scientific view of the human animal. That’s why and how medicine works, much of the time. Under that view, there is no such thing as no longer being trans, any more than one can stop having good verbal acuity or great navigation skills or, say, same-sex attraction.
The relevant brain structures seem to me unlikely to be amenable to a change of such magnitude that the property is meaningfully changeable. (Of course we can damage the brain to reduce someone to non-verbal capacity but…)
Yeah, it sounds like we do. I have yet to see any convincing evidence that transness can be observed in the brain; gayness can't be either. I tend to see questions of the self and identity as being very mutable and contextual, and thus hard to pin down. Especially since science can really only serve to describe and predict, not offer any kind of prescription for how a person ought to make sense of how they feel in the particular.
In the studies conducted at Stockholm Brain Centre, treatment-naive transgender patients had two notable variations from typical. One, lower gyrifixation index in parietal cortex. That is, the area of the cortex where sensory nerves from the entire body terminate and where the body is represented by a “map” differs. The area is flatter than what it is in cisgender controls.
The other major difference has to do with default mode network where sensory input is related to perception and feeling of self.
Considering how extreme behaviours and feelings transgender patients report, it would be extremely surprising if we didn’t see major differences in brain structure and function.
Neuroimaging research is truly in its infancy and is prone to a lot of p-hacking, fishing expeditions, false positives created by data cleaning, and of course the often-mentioned small sample size problem. On a more conceptual level, attempting to identify a biological, observable "reason" why someone is trans is a dead end. What should we do if someone wishes to transition but doesn't have that biological trait? Should we screen for it before allowing someone to access transition-related care? What about trans people who don't want to medically transition but are firm in their identity? The search for biological reasons that people are queer/trans/gay/etc only reflect a scientific desire to explain, track, and control something that ought to be left to the rights of the individuals themselves. Even if there were a strong correlation between transness and any observable neurological structural differences, there will always be people who wish to transition who do not have them, and so it's a faulty theoretical orientation. And a dangerous one.
Let's start at step one. Let me know what you disagree with, ok? :)
Biological sex is not a discrete, independent, binary, property. Everyone has properties that fall somewhere on the spectrum we see for a given species, and, yes, there are usually, but not always, two modes for this distribution in adult animals.
However, we, humans, have created the classifications of female, male, and intersex. But it's always a human agent who makes the call of who is the 'last female' and who is the poor woman who loses her female-ness when she's plopped over into the category of 'intersex.' In actual reality, we are over 8 billion individuals, each with their unique blend of properties. Intersex as a category is just a crutch. (But it can be clinically useful)
You see the difficulty when you start asking for 'a rule of recognition' -- how to recognise the female-ness or male-ness of someone. You get word salad. For every rule I've heard, there are either naturally-occurring exceptions that show the rule doesn't quite do the job, or the person formulating the rule has some explaining to do for why they have so gerrymandered the definition.
Example 1. Having many genetic variants that code for 'tall' doesn't make you tall. Having the kind of sex hormone dominance that often correlates with being taller than most people doesn't make you tall. Height is a physical property we can measure, but where is the limit of being tall or just normal height?
If you get leg lengthening surgery, and you start hitting your head on low-hanging lamps, and you can suddenly reach the top shelf -- are you now tall or not? If you lose your legs in a traffic accident, are you still actually tall? Depends on how you want to use those labels, right?
So, what is a female? If you talk about producing oocytes, or having the kind of organs that can, or will be able to, or could earlier, do that, you've now excluded many PCOS women from being female.
If you make exception for those "hormonal imbalances" (as if nature has such a thing as 'right' hormones concentrations -- we have those hormones we have, and we might enjoy the results or not, but there's no right in biology) but not others, why?
Example 2. If an identical twin is born without ovaries, but gets one from her sister, are they now both female? Were they both female ab initio? If yes, then being female doesn't actually depend on having the type of gonad, sex hormone synthesis, pubertal development, or sex cell production that TERFs and intellectually lazy biologists use for classification into female sex.
If no, then we have made someone from not-female into female. Through surgery. Here, the TERF or lazy biologist has to explain why restoring function that leads to 'female-typical' course of development and life somehow fails to make the person female, despite them having "female" genes, sex hormones, anatomy and germ cells.
Or if she loses her ovaries as a child in an iatrogenic accident? She now no longer has "female" gonads, sex hormone synthesis, sex cell production, growth and development, and likely not psychology, either. Why is she still female, regardless? Genes?
But why base our classification of the animal body on genes? We don't classify someone as 'patient with haemophilia' if they don't actually express that property in their phenotype. Or "myopic" if they have 20/20 vision, no matter their genetic predisposition for myopia.
In nearly every other case, we base our classification on phenotype, gene expression, not the chromosomes or genetic variants. (Except medical genetics, but that doesn't save the essentialist thinker, either. Because there, our intention is to avoid letting someone go from 'has DNA that codes for condition X' to 'has condition X')
Ah, I’m not talking at that level. Here, I was thinking about how we might wish that humans stopped caring about what other people look like, but it’s not going to happen. They won’t even start looking beyond congenital properties that have no moral weight whatsoever.
Prof Glenn Loury said something like this in a podcast of his… ‘no matter what you do, some people will always see a <slur>. But you don’t have to be that. You don’t have to be a ghetto n… or a bad motherf… You can live as a black man with dignity’.
What I’m getting at is: the world is what the world is. If we go against the prevailing social codes, we cannot expect most people to reward us for it. Humans are the kind of social animal that cares for whether other people go along to get along or are contrarians or not afraid to rock the boat. The catch is, sometimes we are utterly in the wrong if we hold our peace for social rewards.
But this basic feature of human social life will remain: we like those better whose behaviour signals that they are with us, and like those worse who challenge our team.
I'm coming from a different direction and it's such a mindfuck. "Man" is a description for me that is so utterly *wrong*. And yet woman isn't quite entirely what is fitting either. Something in close proximity to it, influenced by it, yet not wholly like it and containing inscrutable differences. Which is in no part due to society's ever-present influence: always too autistic, too tainted by a first puberty, too fucked up by a lifetime of trauma and bullshit, too outside the skinny-abled-affluent demographic; always wrong, and often a threat. Medical interventions helped with some of it, they can take my HRT out of my cold dead hands, but for other aspects it possible yet out of reach (financially for one), but for most it's plain impossible.
I'm left wondering: how much does being autistic feature in all this?
Am I too autistic to understand the binary male-female dichotomy and the very much affluent white cishet notions that people hold about it?
Am I too autistic to be seen and treated as a fully fledged human instead of Wrong and Alien?
Am I too autistic to not see the kaleidoscopic mess of traits, behaviors, etc. as anything but (self-)contradictory bullshit that people make up on the fly and having ever-moving goalposts?
No wonder I get why people find themselves in being totally Other, Monstrous, and/or Alien. Make your home for yourself out of the things that resonate. I just wish there was a map to follow, as contradictory as that sounds for some as paradoxical and personal as this, because I am *lost*. Until then I'll just refer to my gender as "none woman with left autism". If you get it, you get it, and luckily some people do.
"I hereby grant myself the right to remain unhappy and dysfunctional forever, and to do what I like with my body regardless." ❤️❤️❤️
I can’t quite put into words how much it means to see this written down. Endlessly grateful for all your work and effort here.
This resonates in all kinds of ways, thanks for putting it into words Devon.
Wow this beyond resonates. Thank you for articulating this so well and sharing. I know I’m going to keep coming back to this one.
That picture of yours that your friend took is absolutely stunning!
It's kinda funny&sad how often one needs to come to that same realization of "I am, in fact, absolutely weird and that is alright."
Be it neurodivergence, sexuality, gender, kinks...it's something that we always have to come back to. It's okay to be weird.
Thank you for this. Sincerely.
When I was 12, I had pics hidden in my school desk of cosmetic-wearing, floppy haired, androgynous looking guys. David Sylvian, Bowie, models for male makeup (a move that didn't take off till 40 years later, respect to Mary Quant who tried to pioneer it). It's taken me years to unravel my relationship to those pictures. We'll all keep travelling our sex-gender journies. Thanks for a beautiful piece.
Thank you for your writing & sharing your journey. Very much appreciated.
My own life journey has led me at age 64 to feel completely & comfortably QUEER. And non binary. For me it’s about being fully myself beyond prison of societal standards. I don’t even want to fit in to a society I view as somewhat insane.
A few hours ago I read this quote by belle hooks for first time and thought yes! That is me! It was like seeing simple words in one sentence that explained how I’ve felt my entire life. Just thought I’d share it:
“‘Queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
My personal add to that is “at odds with everything around it” means the human everything around me - I feel at home with Nature and find solace there.
this is so real. i have yet to transition physically but i do want to be able to be feminine (whatever that may mean) without being seen as a woman, and masculine (ditto) without being seen as a man. Perhaps this is an impossible dream, but I intend to keep living as myself. Unrelated but I also wish there was some other shit you could transition into, like a terrestrial octopus creature or something. I do not feel fully human.
Thank you so much for this! I'm 3.5 years on T but am yet to be read as a man consistently despite that and top surgery. I refuse to stop being kind, expressive and flamboyant in the name of passing, also partially because I just can't. I'm also short and round with tiny hands and feet and I think my hormone levels have only ever been at the low end of standard male. I don't really have facial hair yet. I know I like he/him pronouns most of the time now (after 10 years of they/them before that).
I feel like medical transition has allowed me to be into men sexually/romantically, whereas before I couldn't easily explore that side of me. But being around men is often scary. I fear physical violence and emotional cruelty from them. Equally, one thing that contributed to holding me back from wanting T (tho it was chronic health issues that actually held me back) was the idea of women in the street fearing me. Such a horrible thought.
I definitely relate to the non human categories. That's why I added cyborg to a lot of my online names years ago, and it resonates with both my autistic and trans experiences. I feel really comfortable dressed as a clown too, a very freeing, playful, somewhat creepy creature.
There's loads more I could say but this is already just a ramble! Thank you again for sharing, it's so helpful to see others with overlapping experiences
This really resonates and I just wanted to take a moment to express my grattitude for being given the gift of reading it. Thank you
Congratulations for figuring out how you want to live your life!
I was, however, left with a sense that you want to flout convention and tweak everyone’s noses while also enjoying the social rewards of fitting in.
I ask myself some version of that a lot. Something like, am I just too weak-willed to be a proud gender non-conforming man? Have I not worked on my own brain enough, to make myself like my (now masc) body? Am I not brave enough and mentally strong enough to deserve gender liberation?
These questions aren't helpful. These are the kinds of questions that keep people in egg mode or in the closet for a very long time, myself included when I was on the other side of things. In them, there is no productive answer.
What if I am weak-willed, what then? I can't make myself stronger. Maybe I can be proud of being weak. That seems like a pretty gender-nonconforming thing for a man to do. What if I won't ever be able to psychologically willpower myself into liking my body, since that never worked as a woman or a man? Then I guess liking my body isn't the most important thing. I've lived this long not liking it. I can put that goal aside since it's not coming. Am I not brave or strong enough to deserve gender liberation? A freedom isn't a thing to be deserved, so I can cast that one aside too.
My position passing as a cis man gave me huge social rewards. I still hated being in it. On the path I'm on now, I'm going to lose a few of them. Go back to being stared at in the men's room and the locker room. and things like that That's okay. For some reason that feels more comfortable than fitting in. There's a lot of privileges a TME trans person gets, and I have a responsibility to own up to them. But I don't think anything like a semi-detransition affords social rewards. When people draw that conclusion they think it's a snap of a finger that retroactively makes you cis. And it doesn't. It's another transition. With all the social challenges and vulnerabilities that entails.
I suspect we have a different view of what being transgender is and means. I’m committed to a scientific view of the human animal. That’s why and how medicine works, much of the time. Under that view, there is no such thing as no longer being trans, any more than one can stop having good verbal acuity or great navigation skills or, say, same-sex attraction.
The relevant brain structures seem to me unlikely to be amenable to a change of such magnitude that the property is meaningfully changeable. (Of course we can damage the brain to reduce someone to non-verbal capacity but…)
Yeah, it sounds like we do. I have yet to see any convincing evidence that transness can be observed in the brain; gayness can't be either. I tend to see questions of the self and identity as being very mutable and contextual, and thus hard to pin down. Especially since science can really only serve to describe and predict, not offer any kind of prescription for how a person ought to make sense of how they feel in the particular.
In the studies conducted at Stockholm Brain Centre, treatment-naive transgender patients had two notable variations from typical. One, lower gyrifixation index in parietal cortex. That is, the area of the cortex where sensory nerves from the entire body terminate and where the body is represented by a “map” differs. The area is flatter than what it is in cisgender controls.
The other major difference has to do with default mode network where sensory input is related to perception and feeling of self.
Considering how extreme behaviours and feelings transgender patients report, it would be extremely surprising if we didn’t see major differences in brain structure and function.
Neuroimaging research is truly in its infancy and is prone to a lot of p-hacking, fishing expeditions, false positives created by data cleaning, and of course the often-mentioned small sample size problem. On a more conceptual level, attempting to identify a biological, observable "reason" why someone is trans is a dead end. What should we do if someone wishes to transition but doesn't have that biological trait? Should we screen for it before allowing someone to access transition-related care? What about trans people who don't want to medically transition but are firm in their identity? The search for biological reasons that people are queer/trans/gay/etc only reflect a scientific desire to explain, track, and control something that ought to be left to the rights of the individuals themselves. Even if there were a strong correlation between transness and any observable neurological structural differences, there will always be people who wish to transition who do not have them, and so it's a faulty theoretical orientation. And a dangerous one.
Let's start at step one. Let me know what you disagree with, ok? :)
Biological sex is not a discrete, independent, binary, property. Everyone has properties that fall somewhere on the spectrum we see for a given species, and, yes, there are usually, but not always, two modes for this distribution in adult animals.
However, we, humans, have created the classifications of female, male, and intersex. But it's always a human agent who makes the call of who is the 'last female' and who is the poor woman who loses her female-ness when she's plopped over into the category of 'intersex.' In actual reality, we are over 8 billion individuals, each with their unique blend of properties. Intersex as a category is just a crutch. (But it can be clinically useful)
You see the difficulty when you start asking for 'a rule of recognition' -- how to recognise the female-ness or male-ness of someone. You get word salad. For every rule I've heard, there are either naturally-occurring exceptions that show the rule doesn't quite do the job, or the person formulating the rule has some explaining to do for why they have so gerrymandered the definition.
Example 1. Having many genetic variants that code for 'tall' doesn't make you tall. Having the kind of sex hormone dominance that often correlates with being taller than most people doesn't make you tall. Height is a physical property we can measure, but where is the limit of being tall or just normal height?
If you get leg lengthening surgery, and you start hitting your head on low-hanging lamps, and you can suddenly reach the top shelf -- are you now tall or not? If you lose your legs in a traffic accident, are you still actually tall? Depends on how you want to use those labels, right?
So, what is a female? If you talk about producing oocytes, or having the kind of organs that can, or will be able to, or could earlier, do that, you've now excluded many PCOS women from being female.
If you make exception for those "hormonal imbalances" (as if nature has such a thing as 'right' hormones concentrations -- we have those hormones we have, and we might enjoy the results or not, but there's no right in biology) but not others, why?
Example 2. If an identical twin is born without ovaries, but gets one from her sister, are they now both female? Were they both female ab initio? If yes, then being female doesn't actually depend on having the type of gonad, sex hormone synthesis, pubertal development, or sex cell production that TERFs and intellectually lazy biologists use for classification into female sex.
If no, then we have made someone from not-female into female. Through surgery. Here, the TERF or lazy biologist has to explain why restoring function that leads to 'female-typical' course of development and life somehow fails to make the person female, despite them having "female" genes, sex hormones, anatomy and germ cells.
Or if she loses her ovaries as a child in an iatrogenic accident? She now no longer has "female" gonads, sex hormone synthesis, sex cell production, growth and development, and likely not psychology, either. Why is she still female, regardless? Genes?
But why base our classification of the animal body on genes? We don't classify someone as 'patient with haemophilia' if they don't actually express that property in their phenotype. Or "myopic" if they have 20/20 vision, no matter their genetic predisposition for myopia.
In nearly every other case, we base our classification on phenotype, gene expression, not the chromosomes or genetic variants. (Except medical genetics, but that doesn't save the essentialist thinker, either. Because there, our intention is to avoid letting someone go from 'has DNA that codes for condition X' to 'has condition X')
Ah, I’m not talking at that level. Here, I was thinking about how we might wish that humans stopped caring about what other people look like, but it’s not going to happen. They won’t even start looking beyond congenital properties that have no moral weight whatsoever.
Prof Glenn Loury said something like this in a podcast of his… ‘no matter what you do, some people will always see a <slur>. But you don’t have to be that. You don’t have to be a ghetto n… or a bad motherf… You can live as a black man with dignity’.
What I’m getting at is: the world is what the world is. If we go against the prevailing social codes, we cannot expect most people to reward us for it. Humans are the kind of social animal that cares for whether other people go along to get along or are contrarians or not afraid to rock the boat. The catch is, sometimes we are utterly in the wrong if we hold our peace for social rewards.
But this basic feature of human social life will remain: we like those better whose behaviour signals that they are with us, and like those worse who challenge our team.
I can hear and feel your struggle and pain.
The pressure on male and female in these times are way too much... if ya don't look a certain way, function a certain way ...
the judgments, condemnations ... it is soul crushing.
This world has become so crazy no wonder younger generations are revolting, protesting in utter disgust of these boxes they are being shoved in...
Self expression has basically become impossible...
I'm glad you have found a way!!
There’s something beautiful about this. Thank you for sharing this.