I think I'm the freak in the thread.

My parents were as granola-y hippies as you could possibly imagine, my mom scorned makeup until she was in her 30s and ate wheat germ concoctions and they hung out with artists and protesters and bought me and my brother gender neutral toys and games that were about cooperating instead of winning.

And she ended up with me who started bugging her to get my ears pierced at the age of 6, wrote with sparkly purple ink on pink notebook paper, painted my nails with white out because she wouldn't let me wear makeup and wanted a Barbie Dream House.

Yeah, I guess idk what pangender is and need to research. That may be more accurate for me although I feel gendered in presentation. I present as a pretty white woman idk and receive certain responses and benefits/disadvantages from other people’s perception of me

What's up bros, breauxettes, otherbros, did I miss anything?

42/63/29/8/42

Uh it makes it clear that your ex does not sound like someone I would want to be involved with romantically or as a friend, but beyond that not really

I should probably be a little more clear

If you’re speaking of gender as a social construct instead of based on biological differences (which seems to be what is broadly happening here) then I don’t think I ever felt any reason to question or feel anything other than “male” because I was raised with almost zero gender based expectations and everyone just told me I was a male/boy and that was fine because that meant me. I had plenty of traditional “masculine” hobbies and interests but a decent number of “feminine” or “gay” interests as well and I have been mistaken for gay in a reasonably large number of different contexts although it never really bothered me, I was just never romantically interested in other guys.

I don’t know, I feel like I’m kinda just talking at this but I really do want to understand better what it actually means when people have a non-binary gender identity

Re: gender, I'm as boringly traditional as they come; I share Herbie's general inability to truly comprehend what others are talking about wrt their internal feelings.

lol! nah, it was endearing. we'd crack up when she'd say it.

For me it just means that the external pressures to perform social characteristics for my biological sex did not align with internally who I am. I grew up with family members who told me there were certain things I couldn’t do because I was a girl, or things I had to do as a girl. I couldn’t hang out with my cousin and uncle and build things in the garage as a girl, I had to go to bed early with my four year old for cousins because I was an eight year old girl while my seven year old cousin stayed up late with my 10 year old brother. I had to wear my hair long and got given sparkly pink things even though I liked green and yellow. I couldn’t take my top off when we played in the mud because someday breasts would be there because I was a girl. I was rude or vulgar when using cuss words, I was rude for not smiling enough etc. standard stuff, but also just a disconnect of not feeling like being a woman fit “me”. I feel like there are tons of womanly things that do fit, but it isn’t because I’m a woman that they fit. In general gender identity is only a factor in my life because of how others perceive me, woman isn’t a box I would have ever put myself in if someone held two boxes up with all these characteristics and asked me to choose. Even in terms of sexuality, I don’t like people based on their genitalia. Those binary boxes didn’t align with the multitudes, although I admit now the things inside those boxes could be different I still think the binary is kinda defunct.

for my internal feelings, i think it's mostly a hardcore rejection of toxic masculinity. and in our culture that can make me seem like a gay ass little b*itch, which i own.

That being said, seriously there are tons of things in the “woman” box that do apply! I’m just not a fan of being limited to that box.

i think i wouldn’t talk like this though

it comes across as very homophobic

As a kid i played with stickers, went to girl scout camp, and listened to boy bands. It had nothing to do with sexual orientation, sexual identity, etc. - in my case i just had a slew of such experiences because i had an older sister i was close with.

I couldn't really tell you which things i stopped because i got bored of them, which i stopped when my sister stopped, and which i stopped when my friends found out about them and laughed at me. A lot of harm is caused just by society discouraging people from doing things they might enjoy (a much smaller harm than transphobia and such causes, but just as widespread an issue)

Anyway, this does not address Herbie's question at all but the conversation made me think of it.

And since people are always curious, my mother volunteered at the girl scout camp and they had a couple groups of boys just for kids whose mom's volunteered.

I can't even imagine growing up like this, and I got pigeonholed plenty, but not by my family.

My mother did try hard to prepare me for others putting their expectations upon me as a girl vs a boy (for example the cussing thing, she said it was unfair, but part of life that as a woman I would find that people would judge me more harshly for swearing, but that I shouldn't let it stop me, just be aware of it.)

But it was a very weird dichotomy being raised in suburban Texas by California Berkeley parents. My parents fought the good fight but they were outnumbered. I ended up with a lot to unlearn once I started to really care about equality and identity.

UD's reminds me that while i probably didn't pursue things I might have, mine did not affect me too much probably due to a combination of being a boy and my immediately family not being part of the problem

my mom encouraged me to do ballet when I was really young but I had no interest

but she still sometimes showed worry that I might end up gay

afaict that worry didn't come from anything other than how well I hid my crushes

my mom, her friends, my sisters and their friends all assumed I "wasn't into girls yet" well into my teens even though I had been obsessed with them since I was like 3 and always had a big crush on someone

I was into "typical" young boy stuff (Transformers, sports, etc) along with traditional nerd stuff (reading, a ton), with the only pressure placed on me being related to academic performance. With that said, neither my sister nor I were in any way atypical gender-wise, so it's hard to know for sure what would have happened were we not; my parents are both pretty practical, but it was the 80s, so who knows.

On that note I do enjoy chopping wood or lifting heavy weights, and maybe in some regard just because they are "manly".

That was another thing people tried to stop me from doing. God I love chopping wood.

I think it's time we ban the pub and only use the politics thread

I went to a school that didn’t allow girls to wear pants and a church where they prepared us strictly to become obedient housewives. I wasn’t given a choice between home ec and shop. I had to wear shorts down to my knees to play sports. Everything I am today I had to fight for alone. Some of you are so lucky; I can only dream what freedom in childhood felt like.

For whatever it's worth, I'm sorry you had to go through that, cross.

We have a now-friend/former employee (not the term filthy would use) that was the daughter of a Pentacostal preacher that was, from how she described it, raised in a similar situation. She was married to a guy that was abusive - definitely emotionally and possibly physically (they are now divorced, thankfully) - and she would, in conversations with my wife without me around, say things like "I'm starting to realize women can be more than just preacher's wives" at age 35+. It was sad, and a fair bit eye-opening to me, as I was never really exposed to anything that explicit.

I appreciate you guys being willing to talk through this with me a bit. It’s interesting to me how perspective and lived experiences shape some of this stuff. I think at this point I’m just kind of noodling on the difference between destructive gender stereotypes, which I definitely understand and drive me crazy on a regular basis, and the concept of gender identity itself. At the risk of sounding insensitive what it sounds to me like both of you are articulating here is a desire and a need to be more than the traditional stereotypical definitions of “male” and “female” allow you to be - which is something I distinctly feel for myself as well and agree with. The times in my life that I have felt the worst about myself and my actions are the times when I felt like I had to behave a certain way or project a certain image or attitude to conform to the expectations of others and society especially in a stereotypically gendered way. I’ve just never thought of that as being related to gender identity, although if that’s what we are really talking about here than I can understand that. But I guess I feel like there is something more than that going on that is still somewhat eluding me here.

speaking of le guin and gender identity, or identity in general, I highly recommend reading her essay "Introducing Myself"