Gender is estrogen to me and the more estrogen I have the more gendery I am

If my estrogen is off I pretty much go nuts. Vision gets blurry and I become very sensitive and irritable and prone to dysphoria

I've worn all sorts of clothes and stuff since transitioning, and I've found my comfort zone, but if my estrogen is off I feel like shit in anything

I don't have a gender. I experience dysphoria at things that feel like attempts to gender me, though as i get older i have become more comfortable with dressing in ways that lead strangers to perceive me as a gender. though i don't think i would ever be comfortable with people who know me using gendered terms for me etc.

but yeah. no gender for me. i don't even really feel nonbinary, even though the term technically applies since i am not binary. you could say i'm a kitten instead of a man or a woman, though i don't consider kitten to be my gender either.

i am post-gender. i am just myself. someone forgot to install the gender software in my brain. also i'm intersex, and i feel like this has impacted how i responded to the gender roles society threw at me, because i just sort of assumed none of it applied to me. and my mother, while i was assigned a sex, was very opposed to raising kids differently based on gender so i never really got much of it from my family.

i've always been curious about what gender feels like to other people, so i've asked a lot of people, cis and trans, and what i find curious is that they all tell me different things. there is no one unifying thing that all women or all men will tell you makes them a woman or a man. and i think that is a good thing. gender is very personal, and we all resolve the trauma of gender being imposed on us very differently, and reclaim it in whatever way feels best.

i remember talking to a cis-lite friend of mine. she told me that she only identified as a woman because she was so often pushed into the roles of caring, cleaning etc, and so she identifies as a woman for the convenience of that.

I personally present as cis because it's easy, but the reality is that I really don't care about gender as a concept. To the point that I don't even really like being called "agender". In spite of lengthy heartfelt conversations with two trans partners in my time, I still really struggle to understand the mindset of feeling gender is important to one's identity; Not understanding it actually feels quite isolating, sometimes. I frequently feel like I'm the only person who doesn't "get it".

None of which is to say I do not love and support my trans comrades to the ends of the fucking Earth . Transphobes can line up against the wall.

Gender has always felt like a label with no relevance to me, like what football team I support (none, I don't watch it.) I'm happier keeping my identity ambiguous, but I have made peace with presenting as my agab irl because it's easier. I imagine being vulnerable and putting in the effort to 'pass' as nonbinary (whatever that means) only to still have people not get it would hurt, a lot more than keeping my real self hidden from everyone but the people closest to me.

when i was more on the binary I defined it in terms of behavior sets - masculinity had a lot of baggage over years of performing it, and more than anything, the masculine social role became something i associated with oppression, self and external hatred. I don't think of that as healthy, it's just where I ended up after years of performing ill-fitting social roles, and the fatigue of living in misogynistic and patriarchal circumstance; and presentation - how i comport myself, how i dress, how i exist in a social environment.

As I got into hormones, it was the subjective experience of feminization. What started to emerge that felt right, and affirming to do and be just.. changed. Gender euphoria guiding, the general internal changes that came with HRT became the most important thing. It literally made my brain work better. I'm autistic and I began just naturally perceiving social cues I used to miss. Im not saying estrogen cured my autism, far from it, however the breadth of what I can naturally process and understand expanded more dramatically than years of psychedelics and painful-to-learn behavioral coping strategies ever gave me. I felt substantially more human, when i used to genuinely ask myself if i was some kind of secret alien or something.

I still feel a kind of alienness to allistic folks but i'm much b etter at doing and being alongside them now, while generally honoring who i am otherwise.

These things all came together and matured, because I got comfortable enough in my own skin to cease defining myself with those behavior sets and presentations i arbitrarily assigned to my vision of womanhood for myself. At this point the high-femme repetoire i learned in my first two years of transition are the basis of a more non-binary being. I call myself transfemme, because i don't really see myself as a woman, the transness of my identity feels inseparable from any specific manifestation of Gender - I like dressing like a tomboy or a more non-binary femme, like i honestly prefer traditionally lesbian styles that don't innately accent the feminine form, they're just cute and comfy things.

I'm not beyond a cute dress and makeup and more traditional expressions of femme being, but in general I try to just exist comfortably now - that's something dominantly feminine, but not bound by it.

I have limited plans for surgery - i dont want breast augments anymore, i don't want ffs, i just want laser surgery and/or electrolysis to make my beard go away forever. Everything else feels manageable. Sometimes I think i should pause hormones to bank sperm and try to get myself in a place to have a family - something i deeply, badly want - and i'm perfectly willing to use the birth equipment to get there, so my dysphoria isn't strictly in a place of needing drasting bodily alteration to sate, and so it doesn't feel right to myself to insist i'm exactly like somebody who wants to completely alter their look and body.

which is to say i'm kind of in the same boat as OP maybe, but we're all different, but i felt some kinship in reading it.

I'm nonbinary AMAB leaning masc but I'm very much gender-agnostic on a personal level, which I think is quite common for autistic people.

I tend to prefer spending time with women and enbies but I think that's because I live in a pretty patriarchal society and there's a lot of weird proscriptive masculinity that's applied to people who present as men here and I'm not interested in all that and I don't vibe with it, so a lot of men don't take kindly to me being a weird little guy who doesn't care for whatever gendered rules I'm supposed to be adhering to. Some women here are also rigid in their expectations of people who present as men but generally they exist in circles I don't move within so it's much less of a thing in my experience.

I haven't really had a chance to sit down and hash out my gender identity seriously because of other more pressing concerns so I just settle on being on the enby spectrum somewhere. I think that also speaks to my attitude of gender agnosticism - for other people gender is a very important or pressing issue and I 100% respect and support this but for me, I have never addressed the higher priority stuff to get down to my own experience of gender.

Gender is posting in the trans mega. The more you post in the trans mega, the more gender you have.

Ever since I was a kid, it’s never been about wanting to be a woman so much as not wanting to be a man.

They pay me more money now

Gender? I'm literally just vibin'

I don't really think of it at all. I think about it about as important as my name, which is to say I don't care about it or think it has really anything to do with what's important about me.

So as some (many??) of you know I am newly hatched and autistic so I know this isn't how most people see things and I don't mind if other people view things differently, do whatever/label yourself however you like. Also I have not so much as even worn girl clothes so, yaknow maybe my understanding will be influenced as I start to transition.

Mostly I'd rather be perceived without any assumptions based on gender. I have a special hate for sports, for example, because of cis guys asking me about them, forcing me to eternally be saying I don't know anything about them and am not into them. Generally goes over with the awkwardness of a fart in a church.

It means being hot and gay

It means walking around with the exaggerated swagger of a soviet marshall with full confidence that every day of my life is better than the last day

I want to be cute and I don’t want to be a man.

A lot of this has to do with society, like externally I would never want someone to perceive me as a man and I would like for them to perceive me as cute or a woman.

But also internally I want those things.
I don’t like the idea of being masculine, or at least being the level of masculine a man is.
I want nothing to do with the effects of testosterone physically and mentally.
I like being soft, I don’t care about being strong (even in a positive non-toxic way).

Obviously like…Men can be feminine, to some extent and Women masculine and even I’m some parts of each, it’s not a hard binary.
But the part I’d emphasize or want people to acknowledge first is the feminine.

It means that I'm alienated from everybody.

I don't know if this is uncommon among nonbinary people or not (certainly seems to be in this thread at least), but I have a gender. I actually have a very strong experience of my personal gender. But my gender is just an extremely subjective personal lens through which I experience the world. Idk if I can encompass all of it in a verbal description, but I will try my best.

It means being gay

Nonbinary Transfem at the moment, for reasons that are eerily similar to OP.

I met someone who described themselves as apogender some years ago, and that's been a consistent goal/motivation.

No gender for me, thanks. I find it very freeing to step away from all that and allow myself to behave and present and think of myself however I want to.

In my day to day life, most people see me as a woman. I’m okay with letting them think that. Deep down, I am emphatically not a woman (or a man either), but I don’t want to deal with the social repercussions of trying to come out as nonbinary/agender at work, so I just live with it. It helps that my coworkers are lovely people who don’t expect me to perform femininity at all.

I’ve always looked up to men and non binary people as role models and I tried to copy the behaviours of boys around me because I wanted to be like them. For a long time I thought that came from misogyny but later I realised that I respect women as much as menby’s but for women I respect I see them more as just great people and not necessarily as role models. So something unconscious in my mind wants to be like the menby’s in my life, and it also wants me to look like a man. I wish I understood that part better.

Gender is when you say you're gender and not because of transphobia (I think some forms of transphobia hide people). I think there's some more beliefs I have, but I don't know what they are?

Guess the reason I like the agender label may be because gender labels seem kinda meaningless, at least within a cisnormativity society. Not being cis for me just means being a "man" seems icky and preferring more bodily features typically caused by E instead of those caused by T (although gonads suck in general - I don't want either and I'm not confident whether I think boobs would be meh or cool).

if i tried to explain my gender i would have to give my whole life story, go into tremendous length about materialist dialectics, tell like six abstracted and unrelated stories, write an epic poem, and still wed only be like 1/6 done. for all other intents and purposes im just a weird monster

It’s kinda hard to describe. Part of me has always felt like ‘what is gender’ or ‘what is a woman’ is less important than the fact that I want to be one. Like, I know there’s such a thing as a woman and I know I want to be one, the rest is just details. The physical changes and presentation stuff is a big plus to be sure, but it’s not the core of it. Like, if I imagine myself as an hrt femboy with she/her pronouns, something about that feels off. There’s a part of roseanne barr’s recent comedy special/trainwreck where she’s going around and doing the conservative grievance politics bingo and eventually she gets to the trans stuff and tries to give the audience some red meat but she’s clearly too unplugged or uninterested to understand what the fuss is supposed to be so she just goes “‘what is a woman?’ A woman is me!!!” and I think that’s probably going to be my attitude once I finally internalize the view of myself as a woman lol

I think I came to the opposite conclusion as you, where I figured that if nothing is inherently gendered, then why can’t I just be a woman? Like I feel like trying to hold myself to some strict femme standard of gender presentation would probably feel constricting, but cis women can transgress that and still be women, so why can’t I? I don’t have to be nonbinary to be gender nonconforming if I want to. Maybe when I get further in my transition and stop boymoding I’ll feel different, but that’s where I am now.

This... might take a bit. Maybe I should go over my full transition experience so far too? That might honestly help make it make more sense 🤔 From reading everything here my own relation to my gender seems quite different from the others, but I already knew I had a very particular understanding. Fuck I might need to reread some papers and do proper citations too.

We haven't figured out how to turn me into a glowing ball of light yet but gender to me has always felt like an oppressive cudgel used to cause me pain and make me feel inadequate based in some arbitrary rules of what people think i should be. So I'm happy to just be me and not have anyone assign values or requirements to my person based on some warped world view of binary gender roles.

If i could have it my way I'd literally be a shape shifter cos that would be swag as fuck.