The majority of the explanation for what gender is seems to come down to "I feel this way", or "I think I act this way, so therefore I am" can easily be countered with "I have blue eyes, so therefore I am blue eyed" or "How do you know that how a X gender feel when you have no evidence or datas to back up those feelings and/or how do you know that how everybody that identifies that way feels or is that even true at all?". So, I'm saying that the majority of explanations of gender I have seen is problematic and especially when it comes to trying to explain to people like me who identifies as what his parts say, but lacks a feeling pertaining to gender. I identify as cis-genderless because I do not ever have a feeling of gender, but I apply the essentialism approach because it works on me and it applies well to me. Here's a good explanation which is made by "Dodecahedron314" at AVEN (Yes, I go there).
Explanation by Dodecahedron314 : "Imagine that the inside of your mind is a room, where you spend all of your time, keep all of your thoughts and experiences, and so on and so forth. That's sort of your home base, your operating paradigm, if you will. In that room, there's a bunch of stuff representing your memories, thought processes, etc., but there are also a mirror and a window. The mirror represents how you see yourself, and the window represents how you interact with the world. Those can have a bunch of their own characteristics--shapes, sizes, frames, curtains, what have you--but the main thing we're looking at here is their color. For the most part, before people start questioning their gender, their windows come in one of two colors, either red or blue, for female and male, respectively. (Occasionally, some people have purple windows, for being intersex.) These windows are sort of two-way glass, in that they don't necessarily dictate how you see the outside world, but they affect how the outside world sees you--if it's red, people generally see you as female, if it's blue, people see you as male, you get the idea. How people see you can also affect your internal state of mind, and so the light coming in through that window can be tinted in the color of the glass. Now, this is where the mirror comes in. The mirror is also tinted in a certain color, but there are far, far more colors out there than red and blue--you could have a green mirror (nonbinary), or a purple one (androgyne), a light pink or light blue one (demigirl/demiguy), a clear/silver one (neutrois), or even two/multiple mirrors (bigender/polygender), a color-changing mirror (genderfluid), or no mirror at all (agender). That mirror is what colors how you see yourself and the things going on in your mind, and is completely independent of the color of the window. If the color of your window and your mirror match up, you're cis, and so everything in your room is displayed in the same color light, nothing is awkwardly contrasting. But if the colors of your mirror and window are different, then things might get confusing--some things look like they're supposed to be tinted one color but they're actually another, the shadows start acting weird, and the interplay of the different colors of lights coming in through the window and reflecting off the mirror just might not look quite right, and so everywhere in that room it just feels like there's something fundamentally off about the whole environment, like something's not matching up. That's dysphoria. Sometimes you ignore it, but other times you might not be able to, and so you might try to change the color of your window so it better matches that of the mirror, and that's presentation and transition--when people start seeing you as what you really are, and interact with you as such, the light coming in through the window is the right color, and things get a bit less crazy in your head because the internal conflict between the window light and the mirror light has lessened."
And uh, I pointed out to that person there are zero good evidence for different thought processes between those who identify as male and females, and recent evidence using meta-analysis of several analysis of many different gender differences studies shows negliable differences in behavior. In return, this person extended the metaphor:
"neither the mirror nor the window has any bearing on the contents of the room, what you do inside it, etc., it's just one more parameter describing the environment of the room itself, which can be interpreted and processed however the occupant of the room sees fit."
One thing I notice with the metaphor is that I know that not every trans experiences dysphoria, so there's the issue with that metaphor. Is there a way to resolve this issue?
