Update: identifying as non-binary for work award

[Somerville1234]

Can't find the old thread... but anyway, there's an award/opportunity at work, only for people who are LGBT+++. I don't remember all the categories but they included genderqueer, genderfluid and genderfree. Also K, which I'm reliably informed stands for kink lifestyle. I don't understand why someone would need a special thing at work for getting off on weeing and whips (?? I don't watch porn, I don't have a clue), but maybe I'm just old fashioned. Anyway, old fashioned or not, I'm gender free because I don't believe in gender. And I wanted the professional opportunity. (Forgive me for the vagueness - being careful because of doxxing.) And you lot were encouraging...

I ended up applying - which didn't involve saying how I met the criteria, just ticking that I did. And then I was perpexedly approached by my woke boss.
(WB "Erm... so you realise that this is for LGBT+++ employees, Somer?"
S "Yes."
WB "Erm...it was my understanding you're a straight woman...?"
S "I'm genderfree and-"
WB: "Really?"
S "Yes, and I think I need to remind you that the staff handbook recommends that no-one should assume anybody elses's gender."
WB: "Oh, terribly sorry about that.")

I then had a lovely meeting with HR where they were very keen to update my pronouns on the system. I told them that being gender free I require the box beside gender to be left empty, but that I can accept female pronouns because that's my biological sex. They were happy with this novel idea and to learn more about the difference between sex and gender. They young HR person didn't know they're not synonyms but he learns something new every day apparently.

And now... I've heard I'm shortlisted for the next round!
It's been announced to the whole company, and I've had a few bemused looks but no direct transphobia, I'm happy to report.
My longsuffering DH (works in same field) has been teased a bit for my gender identity but he's happy to suffer for the sake of my fight for equality.

Oh, im absolutely not mocking.

I was one of kids who were ‘trans‘ since age 3. wanting boys toys. And refusing to wear dresses. I got bullied a lot for Not being a proper girl. And I’d have been totally suckered in by this stuff if it had been around 20 years ago.

I genuinely am agender (but biologically female)

resistering Clearly I'm not wine-resisting

It's been a difficult week for me, but this glorious thread has raised my spirits enormously.

Somerville you are a genius and I genuinely hope you win the award. I keep arguing with TRAs on Twitter that I don't believe in gender and reject its imposition, but you've made me see that genderfree is actually exactly what I am - a biological female who has no idea what it means to 'feel like a woman'.

Gender refusing has a certain appeal, I'll admit

It isn't an irony bypass, it's pathological. It reminds me of a child who freely hits and bites peers but sobs bitterly and is distraught and outraged if any peer ever retaliates, resists or hurts them. These are not well people capable of considering other people's needs or interests.*

This is not just childish behaviour it is the manifestation of a narcissistic personality

Fermat, could the term 'genderfree' not mean that one resists subscribing to the limitations and stereotypes society imposes upon women? In other words one is trying to free oneself from culturally imposed gender?

I think this genderfree thing could really go somewhere.

It would also be useful if glinner could retract his prank tweet. Because under it all this is deadly serious.

OK so one of the very genuine reasons I have severe anxiety is because of how gender stereotypes mean that women can be patronised, spoken down to, emotionally blackmailed and otherwise treated as children. Once I've explained it to DH he's been shocked as he started to notice how he got a different level of respect for being male and 6'2". It very genuinely affects my life and my health. It's definitely prejudice and oppression.

I am frustrated and hate the body I'm in as a result. In my head I'm as smart, as funny, as politically aware as any man. My interests are politics and history (with a particular taste for war history). My favourite movies are gangster movies and war movies. I love going to gigs but never really fancied anyone in a band. They are generally dull or dickheads. I used to resent being a woman because women with guitars just didn't look right. I wanted to look a lot more androgynous but my body was 'too feminine'. I never wore make up and I wore clothes which were gender neutral.

In the end I ended up trying to starve myself at university almost as publishment. I self harmed because I hated my body so much.

As a kid I played computer games and was obsessed by them. Then I had a phase of being obsessed by football. My room was plastered with footballer. Again, it wasn't because I fancied them. My mum complained I was born the wrong way round fgs and should have been male!

From the age of ten I found the idea of having a baby revolting and something I could never do. This developed into a full blown phobia and avoidance of babies for which I have had to seek support. I could not get pregnant without it, and eventually had a Cs because the whole thing was traumatic to me and was setting off panic attacks and I had an inability to speak.

I have found it hard to form friendships with women and always had more male friends until after university when this become impossible as everyone was paired off.

Even now, I find the whole thing of DH going off with his mates and me being with 'the wives' really difficult to navigate.

I quite honestly CAN say that my gender identity does not match my body. I have a social AND medical history which testifies to it. My body is female. I do not like it being female. I do not 'feel like a woman'. When I was 19 I remember having a conversation with a good (male) friend about how I didn't feel female and how frustrating it was.

I literally could not have much more that screams my gender identity does not match my body.

So if my gender identity does not match my body, (it doesn't) I'm not 'cis'. By all these Stonewall definitions that therefore means I'm trans.

Except we are literally being told we are not trans and these feelings are a pisstake and it's all made up nonsense. Except its my lived experience.

I'd therefore like to know, if I'm not cis and I'm not trans, wtf am I? And can it go under the most oppressed in society banner because its something that isn't even recognised by society?

I'd very genuinely like to know answers to these questions, because it affects my quality of life.

Taking testosterone, having surgery and 'living as a man' just wouldn't work. I'm 5' 1"! I'd still be below the conversation line. And physically I can't do 'man' things to the level that DH and his friends do.

Where the hell does it leave me?

Dying in a fire apparently. Yet this isn't prejudice, to profess that I should die in a fire.

I know this started out as only half serious, but I'm deadly serious. I really don't know where my identity is supposed to fit in.

If I am to accept the concept of gender then surely there needs to be a place within this system for me. I don't identify as female. I can't identify as male. I'm not non-binary. I'm told I can't be trans. I'm told that being gender free is a pisstake.

There is no space within for females who want to escape gender oppression and all it brings on them.

And when you break it down to that, everything collapses.

Oh Red.

If you are a teenager now, they’d have a box to put you in, of course. I’m not sure that would be better.

I was similarly ungrndered in my attitudes and hobbies at school age (and rejected as not a proper girl for it), though less unhappy as I had brothers to scramble around with at home. It came as quite a shock to realise that outside the family, I was an automatic failure by unspoken rules of a game I hadn’t realised we were even playing.

When I started puberty at primary school I was horrified at the way my body changed - especially growing breasts. I refused to wear a bra until I was about 14 as I was in denial about my need to. Growing up I wore DMs as the idea of heels and their association with being a “woman” also horrified me.

I dreaded growing up into a woman and the expectations that would place on me - not just in how I would dress, but the things I would do (such as have children).

I reject gender as a set of stereotypes that I was horrified by as a child and don’t conform to as an adult (I sometimes do, in terms of how I present, mostly when it is required/expected of me to present in a particular way in order to progress professionally).

But “gender” is a social construct, and I sometimes give in to societal pressure to look a certain way.

But I’ve been discriminated against at work because of my biology (removed from a promotion process because I told them I was pregnant, basically told to “suck it up” by my boss as it had happened to her and other women too). My biology (smaller and weaker than most (all?) men) is what makes me scared to walk alone in the dark.

So I don’t “identify” as a woman - I am one, my biology says so even if I’ve spent most of my life hating my biology. But I reject gender and whether that makes me genderfree/non-binary/agender it certainly does not make me “cis”.

I am someone who should have been 'transed'? And if the answer is yes that's a disturbing answer. Cos whatever my problems, denying my biology has only added to them, not resolved matters.

Redtoothbrush I would imagine
that transing you, or anyone, would certainly make things worse. Surely your feelings about your body are a result of the systemic inequality you grew up in, not any biological wiring or spritual essence. The coginitive dissonance between your identity and your biology is difficult but it’s a social construct. Gender is a fallacy - a set of rules designed to keep women in their boxes and it works against us a lot of the time. But you don’t stem a river where it lets out - you stem it at the source: societal change. Having said that, I appreciate that doesn’t change how you feel right here, right now. And I know you know all this, I’m just processing out loud really.

Red, so much of what you’ve written resonates with me. I was a tomboy, with similar interests and reading habits to yours. My primary school head told my mother that I was “like a boy” in class, because I was so unthinkingly confident in my knowledge and happy to speak up. I HATED puberty, especially menstruation and getting breasts. Later, I also felt visceral revulsion at the idea of being pregnant and giving birth.

I’m really tall, though. That helped, though the outrageous Jessica Rabbit body that came with it meant that I was really, really visible to exactly the short of creepy, entitled man who made my skin crawl.

It took a decade (age 12-22) for me to get comfortable in my skin. In the meantime, the thing that got me through was FEMINISM. I wasn’t “wrong” for not being ditzy, appearance obsessed, and keen on marriage and babies, I was just a different type of woman. A feminist. I started using “Ms” when I was 16 years old.

When I got out of my backward town and went to uni, it was a revelation. I became firm friends with lots of people who didn’t want to follow traditional gender stereotypes. Some were gay, some were straight. We experimented. We tried kink (it was the 90s, didn’t everyone?). We formed bands. We raved all night. We marched against section 28 and went to Pride parades to show support and (frankly) be part of a protective crowd.

It was a massive surprise to me when the fling I was having with an incredibly handsome, far-more-mainstream-than-I-am bloke stretched from one year to two, then three, then seven. I was amazed to find that I could countenance the idea of having a baby with him (ONLY with him, mind).

It was very strange, after decades of hating and fearing the idea of pregnancy, to find myself intentionally pregnant and happy (though still fucking terrified of birth).

Twenty+ years on, I’m still with the handsome straight bloke. I’m a mother. My tastes & interests are still as non-feminine as they ever were. My children have lots of big gay uncles and aunties. They don’t need to be told at school that some families have two daddies or two mummies, because they’ve grown up seeing it.

So imagine my surprise now to be told I must be “cisgender” now.

The reason why, when all the trans stuff started, that I’ve not called myself LGBTQ+++ has been because I have wanted to honour the personal and political struggles that gay and lesbian people have been through.

Stonewall incorporated me when they renamed and colonised feminism. I’m not “appropriating” anything, I’m just carrying on being me. But now that I’m in the new conquering church, you can bet I’m going to be just as gobby and smart as I’ve always been. Don’t expect meek compliance now folks, because it ain’t never been there before.

It makes me so frustrated and pissed off. People are being harmed by this shit, so the solution is to codify it and promote it?

Honestly it's bonkers.

Red, I see you’ve posted more since I started my rant. I think you (and me, and however many more of us) are only “trans” in the sense that this generation has decided to absorb, co-opt, and rebrand feminism as LGBTQ. (We are the Q now, apparently.)

Add ageism and old fashioned misogyny to the mix and we get the TERF wars, where young folks piss all over a section of the people who smoothed the way for them to enjoy their self-identification.

People are being harmed by this shit, so the solution is to codify it and promote it?

Of course. Easier to find your “tribe” when you’re trying to figure out who you are if you can tick a set of boxes on a dating profile. Easier to have the right clothes and nightlife pushed to you - you don’t even have to find zines anymore, Google does it for you. And it’s SO much easier to market to and data mine.

Why not just plug yourself in, and never think?

I am sorry OP. I simply cannot believe this. Not for one moment.

Not one human being ever would pretend to be trans or non binary just to get access to something or somewhere they should not be. It is beyond my level of human comprehension to think that anybody ever would ever try to use ill thought out laws or even just "lobby/pressure group's best practice guidance" to exploit a situation that gave them access to something they wanted which was actually designed for another category of humanity's wellbeing or safety. Couldn't happen.

Nope this could never happen. Nobody would ever do this.

I think it’s more insidious than that. They are thinking... and thinking, and thinking... but it’s all turned inwards.

All this handy internet self-organisation starts off as a relief - I’m not alone! - but slowly turns them away from being in the world, where you have to work at a balance between what you want, and how you interact with others. As the therapists say, you can’t control others, you can only control you. I think all the thinking is obscuring that for an awful lot of youngsters.

red Your story is EXACTLY the same as mine. Are you sure we're not the same person?

I still can't have kids to to the anxiety I have over the whole pregnancy process. It horrifies me and makes me worry about disphoria coming back full throttle.

I cannot even begin to say how angry this ideology makes me. I totally feel you.

I don't have a gender identity, I do not identify as a woman, I had disphoria, it still affects me but somehow I'm a liar, not agender, not under the trans umbrella and have been told on twitter that I do have a gender identity, and am in fact cis, and not only that but a hateful bigot too.

Mate, I'm so angry.

Anyone denying this as a prank needs to explain why their examination of their own gender is more worthwhile than mine.

This is the issue isn't it? It is all about the need to feel unique and special and an individual ( & a lot of rests of tokens of male privilege. We don't see too many trans men shouting and screaming and being abusive)) - which we all do in some area of our lives - but taken to an extreme.

Apart from this radical trans ideology arising in a time of big pharma and advancements in medicine and surgical technique; it has also come in the internet and social media age, and is very much fuelled by it.

I'm not talking about identifying as gender-free on twitter ( I'm not on twitter) - which seems to be Harrop's beef - I'm going to do this on forms and in questionnaires etc in real life.

I know this started out as only half serious, but I'm deadly serious. I really don't know where my identity is supposed to fit in.

Just being ourselves can often be the hardest thing. So many pressures to perform and demands to fulfil. Identity is fluid and shifting, and tends form around strongly lived experiences; personal tastes and preferences, and also through our relationships to, and with, others.

The TRA thing revolves entirely around having some sort of fixed 'gender identity' - but until this time nobody had really ever heard of a gender identity; and nobody asked each other what their identity was. If questions of identity arose it would be in relation to those aspects mentioned above.

It's not that nobody ever questioned social roles and expectations, many people do and always have done, and have struggled to accommodate them, wanting to reject them.

You are just a human being, and you don't need to 'identify as' anything you don't feel fits you. You don't need a label to be who you are.

So what all this boils down to is you're ONLY allowed to have gender dysphoria if you're a man, or a woman who wants to be a man.
If you're a woman who is not a lesbian then you have no rights to access the other forms of "gender variance" because you have a uterus and know how to use it, therefore you MUST be "cis" because the males say so.

OK then.

Fuck off with all that shit.

Red and others - I also recognise a lot of your story as being similar to mine. I wasn't vehemently anti girl stuff but I liked cars and trains far better, and I hated pink (still do). I liked maths and chemistry and car racing and rowing and all sorts of male province stuff - and I stood up for myself and didn't bow to the idea that girls "should" be quiet and look pretty.

I'll take the genderfree name as well, quite happily, because I don't "do" female gender as the TRAs describe it.

And fuck anyone who tries to tell me I can't.

Except we are literally being told we are not trans and these feelings are a pisstake and it's all made up nonsense. Except its my lived experience.

I have been thinking about this thread,and I love being able to identify as gender free.This is why it's such an emotive topic,because it's about identity and I'm tired of having my identity invalidated.I do not identify and never have identified with female stereotypes.I'm not cis,I don't want to be trans,I think the problems around gender come from society.It seems that what some people want is for us to stop thinking about our identity and just buckle down and decide which of their boxes we fit into - which reminds me of something though I can't quite think what.....

My lived experience is of always having had a strong bias towards "boys stuff",and that is years of feeling you are getting life wrong,even in the much easier 70s
The more I think about it now the more I see I've been uncomfortable in my body,but I am actually small and basically curvy,I can't do that boyish androgynous look which is how I feel inside.
But because I'm biologically female I've also got positive and negative things from that.The thing that helped me was feminism,I could be a woman and be like myself.
I don't think this is innate,except in that I think everyone is different.I do think being extremely unhappy with your experience of society's gendered expectations is real,I think the mismatch between how you feel and what you've got biology wise is real.I don't think our feelings are a pisstake.
I don't think the feelings of most people who identify as trans are a pisstake either,but I do think that some individuals are taking the piss.And I strongly believe that changing society is the answer,not producing a whole lot of new labels for people to choose from.