This is one of the difficult parts for most of us normies, I suppose. If I imagine myself in a woman’s body, the thought doesn’t fill me with neither anticipation nor dread. It seems to me that my identity is not at all linked to my gender. Is this just a symptom of being too comfortable with the current situation and not being able to properly imagine how a conflict would feel like?
Probably. I ask cis folk about this pretty frequently because while I understand being trans I don’t actually know what it is like to be cis, it is just sort of assumed mutual experience amongst cis folk. Trans is my lived experience and our society insists we need to defend our needs in ways that make sense to them but cisness is just as interesting. I encounter two camps. The majority of cis people I ask this question to just don’t feel strongly about their body on the axis of their sex. They might feel dysmorphias around not looking good by the rubric of their sex that’s more about how the privilege of beauty or ugliness impacts their lives.
I have also encountered a minority of cis people who are actually decently euphoric about their gender. Sometimes that has to do with the cultural bits of their experience and sometimes not. The one thing they have in common is they actually just really love what they got going on. Being male or female is an integral part of their self identity.
My personal COMPLETELY unsubstantiated posit that these two versions of cisness are distinct and the with the euphoric version they are basically experiencing the key component of binary trans nature with the one factor different being the body and mind are in alignment and not at odds.
Some of the non-binary agender experience seems almost like an extreme version of what you experience where the concept of gender matters so little internally that it’s outside application to aspects of your life become a complete nuisance as if becomes an obstacle to people recognizing the actual person you are as they make too many assumptions about you based on a factor which is personally meaningless.
Not to say this is key to all agender folk. Some folk just react poorly to having any sexual characteristics at all. Non-binary as it’s own spectrum is internally made up of such disparate presentations it is like comparing peaches to green peppers. Both are fruit but they practically nothing alike in experience.
The thing is in both cases it’s hard for cis folk to really empathize with the trans experience because they either can’t get a handle on what it is to care about gender at all or they take their comfort as a given and don’t realize just how bad it is to live without that source of confidence.
Great anecdote, thank you for that.
This is one of the difficult parts for most of us normies, I suppose. If I imagine myself in a woman’s body, the thought doesn’t fill me with neither anticipation nor dread. It seems to me that my identity is not at all linked to my gender. Is this just a symptom of being too comfortable with the current situation and not being able to properly imagine how a conflict would feel like?
Probably. I ask cis folk about this pretty frequently because while I understand being trans I don’t actually know what it is like to be cis, it is just sort of assumed mutual experience amongst cis folk. Trans is my lived experience and our society insists we need to defend our needs in ways that make sense to them but cisness is just as interesting. I encounter two camps. The majority of cis people I ask this question to just don’t feel strongly about their body on the axis of their sex. They might feel dysmorphias around not looking good by the rubric of their sex that’s more about how the privilege of beauty or ugliness impacts their lives.
I have also encountered a minority of cis people who are actually decently euphoric about their gender. Sometimes that has to do with the cultural bits of their experience and sometimes not. The one thing they have in common is they actually just really love what they got going on. Being male or female is an integral part of their self identity.
My personal COMPLETELY unsubstantiated posit that these two versions of cisness are distinct and the with the euphoric version they are basically experiencing the key component of binary trans nature with the one factor different being the body and mind are in alignment and not at odds.
Some of the non-binary agender experience seems almost like an extreme version of what you experience where the concept of gender matters so little internally that it’s outside application to aspects of your life become a complete nuisance as if becomes an obstacle to people recognizing the actual person you are as they make too many assumptions about you based on a factor which is personally meaningless.
Not to say this is key to all agender folk. Some folk just react poorly to having any sexual characteristics at all. Non-binary as it’s own spectrum is internally made up of such disparate presentations it is like comparing peaches to green peppers. Both are fruit but they practically nothing alike in experience.
The thing is in both cases it’s hard for cis folk to really empathize with the trans experience because they either can’t get a handle on what it is to care about gender at all or they take their comfort as a given and don’t realize just how bad it is to live without that source of confidence.