Quote from: Pema on May 23, 2025, 12:23:18 PMDo folks who end up deciding they're clearly binary go through a genderfluid phase as they discover their gender identity?

YMMV People can go either way, although my experience of working with people is its common for folk to experience what feels like a genderfluid stage as their learned (internalised) transphobia breaks down. My personal experience of this was an increasing comfort with my feminine side even as my masculine side objected which made it a real rollercoaster at time. Then I spent quite a while (as in years) reasonably certain my feminine side was dominant, only to experience a swing back as became more comfortable with the idea that masculine and feminine gender expression could live comfortably within me. Basically, I quit fighting myself

Quote from: TanyaG on May 23, 2025, 12:36:15 PMYMMV People can go either way, although my experience of working with people is its common for folk to experience what feels like a genderfluid stage as their learned (internalised) transphobia breaks down. My personal experience of this was an increasing comfort with my feminine side even as my masculine side objected which made it a real rollercoaster at time. Then I spent quite a while (as in years) reasonably certain my feminine side was dominant, only to experience a swing back as became more comfortable with the idea that masculine and feminine gender expression could live comfortably within me. Basically, I quit fighting myself

I find this very interesting.  I was just reading about about internalized transphobia. I am really trying to understand how this relates to things. I got really stuck in the book I was reading. Now I see this here it has me lost

Quote from: Annaliese on May 23, 2025, 01:03:34 PMtI find this very interesting.  I was just reading about about internalized transphobia. I am really trying to understand how this relates to things. I got really stuck in the book I was reading. Now I see this here it has me lost

How do you mean, Annaliese? Do you feel like you experience internalized transphobia?

I'm reading what Tanya wrote as different from what I think that would mean, but maybe it isn't. What Tanya's saying sounds more to me like trying to fit oneself into a socially defined category and then eventually deciding that that just doesn't make sense for them. Sort of a broader acceptance of who they are.

I'd think that internalized transphobia would be more along the lines of feeling like it's "wrong" to feel the way you do, whatever that may be.

But I could be guessing and wildly off-target.

Quote from: Pema on May 23, 2025, 01:22:25 PMWhat Tanya's saying sounds more to me like trying to fit oneself into a socially defined category and then eventually deciding that that just doesn't make sense for them.

That's a part of what I'm aiming at. We're brought up to believe we can either be masculine or feminine and that if we're assigned male at birth (AMAB) we should be masculine, and if AFAB, should be feminine.

When we realise that our gender and sex assigned at birth aren't congruent (don't match) then we may not also be ready to accept that our gender need not be one of the two society licenses.

So many non-binary people go through a phase where we realise we have gender incongruence, but instinctively use a binary lens, because that's what we've been taught since we were tiny. In other words, for a time, a non-binary person with gender incongruence may think they must be a trans woman, when in fact they aren't, it is just their learning about gender only serves them up that alternative. Later, the truth may dawn that they lie somewhere in between. That's the whole challenge of being non-binary.

I hope I've explained that better this time, I'm still thinking through all the processes I went through to peel this particular onion.

Internalised transphobia is simply self-loathing. Unfortunately, it frequently manifests itself as plain old transphobia, with the person lashing out at other transgender people.

Hugs, Devlyn

Quote from: Annaliese on May 23, 2025, 01:03:34 PMI find this very interesting.  I was just reading about about internalized transphobia. I am really trying to understand how this relates to things. I got really stuck in the book I was reading. Now I see this here it has me lost

A couple of posts I've written might help with this, but this is an extract from one of them. The whole post can be found here (most of which is about what's called hyper-gendering):

How learned gender punishes us for non-compliance

One way those words in italics play out in real life is when someone's first glimmering they are trans dawns on them. If you've read earlier posts in this blog, the growing realisation pulls up all kinds of scripted responses we can't do much about to begin with, assuming we even recognise them for what they are.

This is part of gender dysphoria and comes out in feelings of disgust at our own trans thoughts and behaviours, all of which, I stress, would have been normative had we been raised in the gender with which we identify. In other words, all the lore we've absorbed about our home team (as in the gender we were brought up in) tells us the pack is going to eat us alive if we support the other team.

I'm leaving out non-binary people for this round, because, clearly, this situation is different for them. But for the rest of us, the instinctive solution is to prove to ourselves we deserve to belong to the gender we were brought up in to avoid being cast out.

If the gendering we were raised with was masculine, the moment we start getting thoughts to the contrary, we'll do everything we can to prove to ourselves we're stereotypically masculine, and if we're feminine, we'll opt for being stereotypically feminine.

That's a problem, because basic masculinity and femininity are already stereotypes which leave little room for manoeuvre, so when someone goes hyper, it's noticeable.

Quote from: Devlyn on May 23, 2025, 02:13:45 PMInternalised transphobia is simply self-loathing. Unfortunately, it frequently manifests itself as plain old transphobia, with the person lashing out at other transgender people.

Very true, Dev. Yet, the worst thing is when someone who is trans has internalised transphobia, we don't lash out at other people, we lash out at ourselves. That triggers everything from clothing purges to anxiety and low mood.

For everyone else (Dev knows this) what drives our internalised transphobia (sounds crazy but I've had to work through it as have others here) is what is called scripting.

Again, for anyone else reading, I wrote a post about it here. Scripting is so powerful it influences many of our unconscious actions and reactions and disconnecting and binning scripts is one of the really helpful things therapy can do. Even understanding they are there and how they betray themselves in our thoughts and actions can make a massive difference to our well being.

Not to sound callous, but I'm fine with working with someone who is  hating on themselves.

It's when it bubbles up to taking it out on someone else that I get hot under the collar.

Hugs, Devlyn

Quote from: Devlyn on May 23, 2025, 02:29:06 PMNot to sound callous, but I'm fine with working with someone who is  hating on themselves. It's when it bubbles up to taking it out on someone else that I get hot under the collar.

Me too, no question about that. The irony is the same mechanism drives both the former and the latter. It shows how deep social conditioning and scripting's reach extends.

Just to clarify this, the idea that someone who is trans can have internalised transphobia sounds insane until you think about how deeply our learned responses go and how instinctive they become.

I've a really good example of this. I am very strongly right hand dominant, but I was taught to shuffle cards by someone who was left handed. I was only about eight or something and really keen to learn because I thought it was cool. To this day, when I pick up a deck of cards, I pick it up with my left hand. Everything else, I pick up with my right, and I cannot shuffle cards if I try leading with my right hand.

Now imagine being taught from the age of first awareness you must wear clothes and behave in ways consistent with your sex assigned at birth. By the time most of us have any awareness of gender, which is about three years old, we're already conditioned about what our birth sex wears. By the time we begin to suspect something is off, which is a maybe around six or eight, that's another three or five years of conditioning. But these are crucial years, because we learn like a sponge at a young age and a year of learning/conditioning then is as powerful as ten when we're thirty or forty.

Maybe we grow up in a conservative family or in a strongly gendered society too, in which case, we end up having to comply with their view on gender right through our teens until we leave home. At that point, we've had a minimum of eighteen years of having it pounded into us that boys wear boys clothes and girls wear girls clothes and that girls do not behave like boys and boys do not behave like girls.

And like me learning to shuffle cards 'wrong handed' all those years of programming have sunk in so deep we don't even know they are there. Not until we experiment with expressing ourselves as another gender, at which point all that subconscious learning loads its semi automatic and shoots us full of bullets loaded with disgust and loathing.

Which is very hard to stop because our subconscious by definition isn't visible to us, so we end up torturing ourselves without knowing why and without a clue how to stop.

I am a leftie. Sinistra is the Latin word for "Left", which is where we get "Sinister" from, lol.

The thing I struggle with, and I do struggle with it quite a bit... is how people relate masculine and feminine to male and female. I've always seen them as quite distinctly separate from each other, in spite of the obvious. I am curious, if anyone cares to comment, how you see the these aspects in terms of being non-binary. Or even binary. Maybe this should be it's own thread.

Quote from: Sephirah on May 23, 2025, 03:17:10 PMhow people relate masculine and feminine to male and female.

I think much of that is how we are raised. It wasn't until much later that I realized that there are feminine males and masculine females. I had an aunt who was the latter. She would never back down from a fight, and my dad described her as "big enough to go bear hunting... with a stick." She was a wonderful woman, but tough as nails. Again, here we go with associating what we think is masculine or feminine behavior. I gotta figure out how to unlearn this crap. 

Quote from: Lori Dee on May 23, 2025, 03:36:56 PMI think much of that is how we are raised. It wasn't until much later that I realized that there are feminine males and masculine females. I had an aunt who was the latter. She would never back down from a fight, and my dad described her as "big enough to go bear hunting... with a stick." She was a wonderful woman, but tough as nails. Again, here we go with associating what we think is masculine or feminine behavior. I gotta figure out how to unlearn this crap. 

I know plenty of girls like that, Lori, lol. And that's why I think I struggle with it so much. And like... just being here... you see a whole range. Masculine girls, feminine dudes. Everyone in-between. And none of them really think it has anything to do with gender. You don't balk when a girl fixes your car because she's massively into engines and how stuff like that works. You don't bat an eye when some guy creates a fashion show because he's deeply into that stuff. They accept it so we accept it. Because why wouldn't we?

That's kind of why I posed the question. When it comes to being genderfluid, non-binary... do you see a distinction between masculine/feminine and male/female? And how does that affect how you feel and how you see yourself?

Quote from: Sephirah on May 23, 2025, 03:17:10 PMThe thing I struggle with, and I do struggle with it quite a bit... is how people relate masculine and feminine to male and female.

When I was working I used to play a thing I called the gender game with clients, it was very illuminating. Most cis people see gender and sex as a strongly coupled binary, while strongly binary trans people see them as a flipped binary. Every trans person I've ever dealt with who wasn't strongly binary revealed a mix of masculine and feminine traits in the game, somewhere along the spectrum between the polar ends of masc and femme.

I've always conceptualised it as being similar to being other sex attracted, mixed sex attracted and same sex attracted. Mixed sex attracted people can lie anywhere along the line between being attracted to their own sex or another sex, and will often have different scaling of romantic and sexual attraction to add flavour too it. So it goes with gender identity.

Quote from: TanyaG on May 23, 2025, 03:51:01 PMWhen I was working I used to play a thing I called the gender game with clients, it was very illuminating. Most cis people see gender and sex as a strongly coupled binary, while strongly binary trans people see them as a flipped binary. Every trans person I've ever dealt with who wasn't strongly binary revealed a mix of masculine and feminine traits in the game, somewhere along the spectrum between the polar ends of masc and femme.

I've always conceptualised it as being similar to being other sex attracted, mixed sex attracted and same sex attracted. Mixed sex attracted people can lie anywhere along the line between being attracted to their own sex or another sex, and will often have different scaling of romantic and sexual attraction to add flavour too it. So it goes with gender identity.

This is what I'm trying to understand, Tanya. And clearly not doing a good enough job posing what I want to try and grasp. Put sex and gender aside for a moment. What doesn't connect in my brain is this:

QuoteMost cis people see gender and sex as a strongly coupled binary, while strongly binary trans people see them as a flipped binary. Every trans person I've ever dealt with who wasn't strongly binary revealed a mix of masculine and feminine traits in the game, somewhere along the spectrum between the polar ends of masc and femme.

How do those traits relate to sex and gender? I get that cis people see it that way, and trans people see it that way, but what does masculine and feminine behaviour have to do with it? Obviously they're termed as such because people link them to sex and/or gender. But men can be, and some are feminine... and girls can be, and some are masculine, and literally everything in between. What trait does someone have to have to exhibit for them to see themselves as male, or female, or somewhere along the spectrum? Is it a physical thing or more of a mental... behavioural thing? That's kind of what my brain just doesn't get. And struggles to understand.

I'm probably just really dense, lol. 

In my experience, it seems more mental than physical. I exhibited strong feminine tendencies as a young child. But these tendencies were so negatively reinforced I 'learned' how to act masculine. All subsequent reversions to feminine tendencies I considered perversions and not expressions of a true, underlying self. Heck, I agree with TanyaG on one point: sometimes I think I'm an onion with no underlying 'authentic' self. But that doesn't seem to be stopping me from peeling back the layers.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on May 23, 2025, 04:40:04 PMIn my experience, it seems more mental than physical. I exhibited strong feminine tendencies as a young child. But these tendencies were so negatively reinforced I 'learned' how to act masculine. All subsequent reversions to feminine tendencies I considered perversions and not expressions of a true, underlying self. Heck, I agree with TanyaG on one point: sometimes I think I'm an onion with no underlying 'authentic' self. But that doesn't seem to be stopping me from peeling back the layers.

Does this contribute to seeing yourself as female, Anni?

To give you some context... for me it is only physical. It's what Morpheus in The Matrix called "Residual Self Image." How you see yourself when you see yourself outside yourself. For me it has nothing to do with masculine or feminine. Sometimes I lean one way, or the other way, or both ways in a very short timeframe. But that self image is constant. Because... I don't really know why. And that's what I'm trying to understand.

If people had let you be okay with those feminine tendencies while being able to grow up as a guy, do you think you would see yourself differently than you do?

You have an authentic self, Anni. I see you every time I talk to you. But I want to keep that out of this conversation because it might colour your view if I say anything. I want to try to understand this to try and understand people better.

Quote from: Sephirah on May 23, 2025, 04:47:54 PMTo give you some context... for me it is only physical. It's what Morpheus in The Matrix called "Residual Self Image." How you see yourself when you see yourself outside yourself. For me it has nothing to do with masculine or feminine

Thanks, Sephirah! I really need to re-watch the Matrix. And the way you posed the question gave me an 'Ah Ha!' moment. When I dream through the eyes of the dreamer, I am always a woman. When I dream as an observer, it's a mixed bag. Male far more often than female. And, weirdly enough, occasionally neither. I am to the age where I seldom have an erotic dream but I've become a bit of a romantic in my dream life and the 'other person' is almost always female. But not always. Actually, I'm beginning to feel like I'm in a therapy session so I'll probably stop there and look for The Maxtrix on one of the streaming channels.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on May 23, 2025, 04:59:36 PMThanks, Sephirah! I really need to re-watch the Matrix. And the way you posed the question gave me an 'Ah Ha!' moment. When I dream through the eyes of the dreamer, I am always a woman. When I dream as an observer, it's a mixed bag. Male far more often than female. And, weirdly enough, occasionally neither. I am to the age where I seldom have an erotic dream but I've become a bit of a romantic in my dream life and the 'other person' is almost always female. But not always. Actually, I'm beginning to feel like I'm in a therapy session so I'll probably stop there and look for The Maxtrix on one of the streaming channels.

Sorry, sweetie. I know I can make people feel like that. <3

All I will say is... hold on to the dreamer. And the dream. That is deeper and more telling than a lot of stuff we try to create while we're awake. <3

Quote from: Sephirah on May 23, 2025, 04:09:38 PMHow do those traits relate to sex and gender? I get that cis people see it that way, and trans people see it that way, but what does masculine and feminine behaviour have to do with it? Obviously they're termed as such because people link them to sex and/or gender. But men can be, and some are feminine... and girls can be, and some are masculine, and literally everything in between. What trait does someone have to have to exhibit for them to see themselves as male, or female, or somewhere along the spectrum? Is it a physical thing or more of a mental... behavioural thing? That's kind of what my brain just doesn't get. And struggles to understand.

When we are born, we're a blank slate with a few pre-programmed instincts, but totally reliant on our parents. We can't even see properly until we're six weeks old. We have a physical sex assigned to us at birth by someone who looks at our genitals and decides boy or girl, but we're not even aware of that.

However, we are gendered from an early age, by virtue of how our parents dress us and teach us how to behave and not to behave. Somewhere around three years old, we become aware of that which is where the uncertainties for trans people begin and where the certainties for cis people also begin.

Gender isn't an on off switch, but instead a balance. So if someone has more masculine traits than feminine ones, they'll be read as male and vice versa. What happens next depends on other factors and much more crucially, on what model you use to understand what being trans means.

In the transsexualism model, which is almost the default here, to be trans you must reach an understanding you're in the wrong body for the gender you identify with. A woman with a preponderance of masculine traits who isn't seeking GAMC doesn't fit and if she's attracted to women will be regarded as a butch lesbian. A man with more feminine traits than masculine ones who doesn't seek GAMC doesn't fit either.

I've worked with 'stones', who are butch lesbians who don't like to be touched and who dislike contact with their genitals and all of them had much in common with trans people.

Non-binary people don't fit in the transsexualism model at all, because many of us aren't seeking to change sex.

The model I use is that gender incongruence is a characteristic and a desire to change physical sex is a symptom some people with that characteristic share.  Everyone here can be fitted into that model, which opens the door to effeminate men and masculine women, because they share gender incongruence with us. Yet these two groups don't regard themselves as being trans, because the word has such heavy connotations of 'wish to be another physical sex,' for which they have no desire. Using my model of gender incongruence, everyone's welcome and everyone's explained.

Does this make sense and/or answer your question? If not, tell me where it falls down for you and I'll refine it some more!