Well, personally I have never benefitted from getting titles of things right. Those are all just words. I mean, I know we think we need to capture things in words to communicate with each other, but these categories like, "Bi-gender" and "genderfluid." I feel that ultimately they are going to be limiting to most people. Even "man" or "woman" are probably going to be limiting to Cis-sexual people at various times in their lives.
Consider this: Whether you're a man or a woman or something else, how much of the day does that just not matter at all? A great amount of the time, I should think. I mean, if I'm working on a project with some engineers, or if I'm teaching a bunch of ESL students, then for that purpose, then and there, does my gender matter? Most of the time, no it doesn't. I imagine that for 99% of occupations, it also shouldn't be an issue. So, if someone just forgets about it during that time, and maybe goes with whatever behavior she or he was socialized with, that would make a lot of sense.
And when we speak of "dressing masculine" or "dressing feminine." I was mentioning on another thread, I grew up with a perfectly momly mom who dressed in jeans, t-shirts, and work boots and smoked marlboros for like 14 years. She cut her hair pretty short and slicked it back. LOL, yeah, she got hit on by a lot of Lesbians who assumed she was of their type. But she just grew up the child of two poor farmers, hunting and fishing and hanging out like that. It's a matter of how she was raised and what she grew up being comfortable with. Anyways, she dressed up for church, and still had some pantyhose for me to nick when I was a kid (there's the tie in to the forum main topic).
Anyways, my point is just that for me, everytime I've made a particularly big deal about WORDS, I've never found it led me anywhere useful. Much more useful is to just notice that sometimes it's very apparent to me that I'm a woman. Other times, it's very apparent to me that being a woman can sit in the background because, I don't know... I'm washing dishes or something and frankly a genderless robot could do this.
Other times, I'm climbing a mountain on a bike or I'm trying to get some employees to finish their part of a project and I just need to use whatever words are going to be most effective to get this done. Do I NEED TO care how they see me? Is it more womanly for me to get the job done or make a big deal out of how I present myself to those engineers? In which culture is your answer to that question based?
See what I mean? Whatever we say is "masculine" or "feminine" is definitely going to fall apart in a lot of circumstances as just something particular to one little niche of the world,one social circle, one culture, one familial group, one person....
The road to happiness is removing as many barriers as possible between you and yourSELF, the real you. If you can do that at every moment, you're pretty far advanced, and I'm sure you come across as a beautiful human, whatever words you or the people around you are using.
--Lyra
