this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Have you tried doing the exercise, including the part where you have to explain to others why you have positioned yourself where you did? Particularly the one about how others perceive your gender. At a minimum, you have to talk about other people's understanding of gender stereotypes and how it relates to your presentation.
There are routinely people who say "this line is stupid, I'm putting myself somewhere not on the line", and I should have mentioned that (because it's a possibility often discounted in the dismissal of the activity), and you may well be one of them. (I mean, I have been running the damn workshop and stuck myself not on the lines, not least because I genuinely don't know how others perceive my gender.)
I have. And it boils down to women/girls are "like me".
If I were in a room with a group of men and a group of women, it's the women that I feel the sense of "sameness" with.
Sure, but that's presentation, not identity. I perform what I call "practical femininity". It's the femininity that I have to perform to minimise social pushback. I have no sense of it connecting to who I am, or my identity however.
I think ultimately, I'm being nitpicky here. We all have to navigate stereotypes, and we all have some sort of relationship with them. I just don't agree that we all need them to talk about out sense of self and our own identities, because my sample size of 1 shows me that it's not the case for me
Just want to add you now have a sample size of two - I've read your comments on this post and I feel the same as you. I get so frustrated when people think I've gone through everything I have just so I can perform femininity - hello? I could have been a feminine guy if that's who I was but it wasn't. Sure I wear women's clothes now, but I did a lot before too and I'm too lazy asf to be any kind of fashionista. Every woman (and every man and everyone else too) finds their own place of personal style and comfort. The main impact re: my transition and its relation to aesthetics - for some reason it's now a very bad thing to show my chest in public, because now it's shaped differently. Weird to think about logically. A bra is basically just underwear for nipples.
Anyways, I didn't break out of one box that didn't fit me only to climb into another, is what I'm trying to say.
I love this. I'm stealing this.
Thanks :)
You misunderstand me, I think. I'm not suggesting that you're relying on stereotypes to conclude your gender is "woman" (I assume)--part of the exercise is explaining how your gender is perceived by others, which is both about presentation and how that presentation interacts with society.
It's been a long time since I've run Gender Gumby. I used to answer the "presentation" question with "I don't know", because I didn't -- so much of my day-to-day was occupied by trying to figure out how people were reading my gender for the sake of safety. These days it's unambiguous--I get assumed to be a man. But my gender identity is the same--it's off doing its own thing, getting put into a box by society.
I don't understand how the experience you describe there relates to our previous discussion though. Where in this experience did you have to navigate other people's understanding of gender stereotypes and how it relates to your presentation?
That's really the crux of what I was addressing in my first reply to you. To me, presentation doesn't have anything to do with it, and it hasn't ever been part of my discussion with other people when talking about my own identity.