Aromantisicm influencing nonbinary gender identity

[thesolarian]

(Im new here and on my phone so excuse any mistakes. Also I put a lot of spaces so its easier to read and since im on my phone it may seem excessive) 

 

This will be about how my lack of attraction influences my lack of strong binary gender alignment, and my wondering if any others feel similarly, but I want to lead up to that for clairification and because I like talking a lot too. 

 

Anyways I identify as genderqueer as I feel like it encompasses the complexities and discontinuities of my gender, dysphoria, and how I want to present. 

 

I was assigned female at birth (dfab/afab) and my dysphoria pushes my transition to a very masculine side, enough that I identified as a trans man for a long while and still live as such offline. I want to have a more masculine build, facial hair, a lot of body hair, and a deep voice. But my dysphoria is the most binary aspect of myself, after that it gets much less binary.

 

My gender expression at the moment is rather masculine so I am not seen as female, but how I often imagine myself later in life once im on hormones and physically look and sound more masculine is gender nonconforming. In the future I want to experiment with more feminine expression with clothing, makeup, and the like.

 

And then we get to my sense of gender. I don't relate well to much of anyone with a binary gender so I don't feel I have much of one. I feel agender.

 

I assumed that my lack of relation to cis guys was because of how I didn't interact with a lot guys since I was not raised as one. I also found their talk about women to be alienating which I simply thought was because I was more aware of sexism, but I now think it is also because im not attracted to women.

 

Gay cis guys are somewhat more relatable due to general queerness and how some are gender nonconforming and how some parts of the bear subculture appeal to me but obviously a lot of being a gay man revolves around having relationships with men and I am not romantically attracted to men, and despite my slight sexual attraction to men I don't desire sexual relationships with men. So I still feel alienated from cis men as a whole.

 

I expected to relate to trans men, and I found that I did, at least in terms of dysphoria. Otherwise I felt as alienated to straight and gay trans men as I did to cis men. Bi and pan trans men were slightly more relatable but hearing them talk about attraction was just as foreign. 

 

I feel like attraction helps a lot of binary trans people have a reference for their identity and establish relation to cis people of the same orientation, but without attraction I have no place to reference my gender from, and I haven't came across many a-spec cis or trans men. 

 

Do any of you have similar experiences? 

[Mezzo Forte]

I'm a binary transman, so while my perspective is a bit different, I do relate to a lot of what you're saying, even if I treat my orientations and gender as fairly separate entities, in the sense that I think I would have been aro/ace regardless of my gender identity.

 

My gender-questioning process couldn't properly start until I figured out my romantic/sexual orientation. Before university, My disinterest in sex come off as a form of female straightness, because so many of the men were sex-obsessed, and how could I be a man if I didn't want sex? I yearned for romantic love, and even mistook myself for a straight girl because of my appreciation for the masculine form, but never could successfully fall in love, no matter how much I cared platonically. I needed to learn that I wasn't straight by default to understand that I wasn't cis by default.

 

Many of the years I spent in my extended gender-questioning process, I strongly suspected that I was nonbinary to some extent, and suspected I was androgyne for a bit, but that had more to do with my sense of being othered by extreme femininity and extreme masculinity. I was somewhat shielded from those extremes pretty much until university, and even then, musicians aren't always the most gender-conforming types. Doing a master's degree in business showed me the extremes of gender-conformity though, and I never felt so alienated in my life.

 

That said, I identify as binary almost purely because of my relationship with my body. The medical transition I needed was/is very binary. What I ultimately wanted out of my gender expression was/is very binary. My reason for starting transition was because I couldn't take the physical dysphoria anymore and I desperately needed medical intervention. Even if my mind doesn't feel super masculine, everything else pointed to a binary trans experience. As I transitioned socially, being read as male only felt more and more right. Transition made me realize that I was even more binary than I first thought.

 

Perhaps you could say that my mind isn't quite so binary. My upbringing was not explicitly gendered, but I do take some pride in certain feminine-coded traits of mine, and those traits are core parts of my personality. That said, my deepest friendships are with straight cismen, and all of them dissent from the extremes of masculinity in their own ways; ways that resonate with my own experiences. Strangely enough, my perception of my femininity does not seem to reflect how others perceive me, as I am apparently somewhat straight-passing as well as cis-passing.  In the end, I guess I used a more prescriptive approach with labeling my gender, as I decided not to factor the abstract elements of my mind quite as heavily as the concrete dysphoria that was degrading my quality of life.

 

In regards to orientations, I suppose I don't think about them in a gendered light nowadays. My aromanticism and asexuality transcend gende; my relationship with my body changed with transition, but my orientations remain constant. I'm already kind of eclectic anyways, so I connect with others over interests that aren't particularly gendered. I find the ways some men act around attractive women to be rather alienating, but I try to at least make small quips to establish that their tactics only make women uncomfortable. Thankfully, they're not the only straight men in my life, and seeing the difference stops me from labeling that shitty behavior as an inherently straight guy thing.

 

...aaannndd I started rambling. My bad. 

[Eklinaar]

I'm AMAB nonbinary.  I'm fairly masculine-presenting but I identify as mostly agender.  So, a lot of my fundamental experience is different from yours, but I think there are some similarities.

 

I find straight cis men to be almost universally repulsive.  However, this isn't because of their identity or because of dysphoria, it's because of their behavior.  I realize that none of this is inherent to the straight cis male identity, just that toxic masculinity is so pervasive that it's near-universal.  Most straight cis men behave terribly, say sexist things frequently, are unnecessarily aggressive and competitive, believe they deserve everything they want, and they hide a lot of this behavior from anyone who isn't also a cis straight man.  Because I'm tall and hairy and have a deep voice, most straight cis men assume I am straight and cis, so they let their guard down and behave in utterly repugnant ways when no women or queer people are around; the "boys club" mentality.  Younger men seem to be a bit better in this regard since they tend to be more aware of feminism and sexism, but it's still a big problem.  I already get pretty dysphoric when people treat me like I'm male because I know I am not, but people associating me with such a bigoted and violent demographic is very upsetting to me a lot of the time.  I have met some straight cis men who are very considerate and empathetic and thoughtful, and I wish other straight cis men would realize that these men are good role models for them.

 

Most of my friends are straight cis women, and while I enjoy our friendships, our relationships are often strained by their inability to understand my trans identity.  It's also hard when I know that a lot of women bond with each other in ways relating to their female identity, and I can't share most of that.  Our society has all these rituals for binary men and women to bond with each other over shared experience, and it can feel very lonely being nonbinary and left out of all that.

 

My experiences with trans people are very mixed.  I greatly appreciate discussing our trans experiences, but I find that a lot of binary trans people are wary of me, and some suspect that I'm "not really trans" because I'm comfortable with my body.  So even in trans community spaces I often feel isolated because these communities often revolve around the experience of body transition, which is not something I'm doing.  But the emotional and personal experience of being trans is something I can relate to very strongly.  I have had a few close trans friends, but for a variety of reasons, none of those relationships continue to this day.

 

I very rarely meet nonbinary people, and even when I do, we usually have such different personalities and interests that we can't really sustain a friendship.

 

As for me, attraction and gender identity are just totally separate things.  Gender has so much to do with behavior, appearance, personality, communication styles, and all sorts of other things that aren't related to attraction.  There are social rules for particular gender roles in relationships defined by attraction, but they still seem like separate things.  I'm sure not everyone experiences it this way, but to me, at least, it seems like there are pretty clear distinctions.  I don't feel like my experiences of attraction and my experiences of gender identity influence each other very much, since my gender identity is about who I am, and attraction is about who I want to be intimate with.

[SamwiseLovesLife]

On 19/11/2017 at 3:29 PM, Mezzo Forte said:

I'm a binary transman, so while my perspective is a bit different, I do relate to a lot of what you're saying, even if I treat my orientations and gender as fairly separate entities, in the sense that I think I would have been aro/ace regardless of my gender identity.

 

My gender-questioning process couldn't properly start until I figured out my romantic/sexual orientation. Before university, My disinterest in sex come off as a form of female straightness, because so many of the men were sex-obsessed, and how could I be a man if I didn't want sex? I yearned for romantic love, and even mistook myself for a straight girl because of my appreciation for the masculine form, but never could successfully fall in love, no matter how much I cared platonically. I needed to learn that I wasn't straight by default to understand that I wasn't cis by default

I relate to this so much

[Mark]

On 01/12/2017 at 2:26 AM, Eklinaar said:

I'm AMAB nonbinary.  I'm fairly masculine-presenting but I identify as mostly agender.  So, a lot of my fundamental experience is different from yours, but I think there are some similarities.

I'm similar in terms of being AMAB, masucline-presenting, though genderqueer. Can also see some similar experiences.
 

On 01/12/2017 at 2:26 AM, Eklinaar said:

Because I'm tall and hairy and have a deep voice, most straight cis men assume I am straight and cis,

I'm not tall, IME, cis women as much as cis men tend to assume this about me.

 

On 01/12/2017 at 2:26 AM, Eklinaar said:

It's also hard when I know that a lot of women bond with each other in ways relating to their female identity, and I can't share most of that.  Our society has all these rituals for binary men and women to bond with each other over shared experience, and it can feel very lonely being nonbinary and left out of all that.

I find this too Even to the point of feeing quite excluded, more often with women's than men's rituals.

 

On 01/12/2017 at 2:26 AM, Eklinaar said:

My experiences with trans people are very mixed.  I greatly appreciate discussing our trans experiences, but I find that a lot of binary trans people are wary of me, and some suspect that I'm "not really trans" because I'm comfortable with my body.  So even in trans community spaces I often feel isolated because these communities often revolve around the experience of body transition, which is not something I'm doing.  But the emotional and personal experience of being trans is something I can relate to very strongly.

I found it difficult to relate to the label "trans"  due to not experiencing physical dysphoria. Even with a high degree of social and emotional dysphoria.
 

[Roanic]

Deleted

[Mezzo Forte]

On January 2, 2018 at 9:50 PM, Roanic said:

I'm also a transman and this is exactly how I see my trans experience, what's most important to me is being read and seeing myself as masculine bodied, I am in fact getting sex reassignment surgery in a few months even though I don't even know or care if I will ever have sex with someone else again, the surgery is 100% for me to be more comfortable in my own body and has nothing to do with nobody else.

We definitely sound like we're on the same page about all this stuff, and I just wanted to say congrats about your upcoming surgery! I'm looking to have SRS myself within the next 1~1.5 years, (basically before I turn 26 and get booted off my family's insurance,) though I'm still figuring out some of the logistical things. I hope everything goes smoothly!  

[Alaska Native Manitou]

For me being aromantic, asexual & genderless seemed like the same thing; I only recently learned that it's different for other people.  I have been confused by sexual dreams & aesthetic interest, but I'm at peace with that now.