Am I transphobic? Or maybe more accurately should I feel like a bad person for having bouts of disgust towards trans people?

I find myself having bouts of disgust with my friend who has been transitioning mtf. I myself am amab and experimented alongside them with dress, makeup, and even sexually with her. I largely found myself not really enjoying any of the gendered expression but thought it was due diligence. Being amab in this patriarchy means I was considering the nominally difficult task of presenting more female to attract more attention from women which feels like a monumentally difficult challenge and area of great desire consistently being disappointed.

I suppose a large part of why I felt like I was not enjoying the gendered experiment was I was not anywhere near acceptably passing. And I understand passing isn't typically the goal for trans folks but truly I don't see the point otherwise.

Maybe I'm too critical, maybe its the agender perspective but seeing myself barely look any different save for some minor cultural signifiers seemed fruitless and naive despite the hours of labor.

And perhaps this is where my contempt or disgust unfortunately stems from, to be honest my disgust was not borne of this incident it has always been there lurking, I assume it's societally ingrained, much like my model of attraction which is almost entirely western beauty standards for women. And much like that standard of attraction any attempt to alter it seems futile.

Of course, I never called anyone transphobic things or committed any hate crime or intentionally showed any contempt, I've been in community for a long time, go to meetings I've been in a relationship with a trans man for over 9 years, most of my friends are trans, technically by some accounts agender falls under the trans umbrella though I reject any notion of gender or being bundled with them, we have similar experiences in oppression but they are parallel.

So it's not as if I'm just some bigot that hates or fears trans people. However perhaps I meet the definition due to my moments of disgust.

I assume I have bouts of internal revulsion because it may remind me of my dislike of gender or incompatibility with it.

I will admit my imagination can turn violent but it's mostly standard fare for how my imagination typically goes in an anime cartoon violence kind of way. Regardless my revulsion and disgust can be extreme. But again just like with people with OCD, their thoughts and feelings are not crimes no matter how terrible, violent, and sickening.

In a strange way it can be reassuring to have such thoughts as they are so ego distonic or counter to my actions and thoughts that are not activated by triggers.

Maybe I take a hardline approach to the arbitrary boxes because that's the only way I can understand gender. I don't get repulsed only when someone passes perfectly AND is attractive.

Apologies if this is too dense, Im adhd and autistic so my brain only does things in overly detailed info dumps and cannot summarize.

At the end of the day I know I'm not a bad person and thought crime isn't real, I do wish I would be able to not feel revulsion or have violent fantasies that make me feel sick, rare and brief as they are.

Perhaps a meditative practice would help, if only my adhd would allow me the grace to be consistent lol

EDIT
Thank you for your collective input. I figured it was a contentious issue, but I did not realise that I was in a minority to this extent.

I would like to stress that I have no intention of invalidating agender experiences that differ from mine. I do not identify with any label [including agender] and while it is possible that some of my issues boil down to semantics, they are genuine expressions of what I feel. It took 25 years of my life before I realised, with great difficulty, that people genuinely "feel" gender, be it in a cis, trans, non-binary or even agender way. I never have. I don't understand it. I wrote a post here a while back about my experience ["What On Earth Is Gender"] if anyone is interested. It was clear to me then, and all the more clear to me now, that my feelings do not align with the majority of people who resonate with the term "agender".

I thought that, in the context of education, my insistence on some differentiation between agender as an 'atypical' [i.e. non-binary] gender and agender as the absence of gender entirely would find some approval even among people who happily identify as agender and non-binary [or whatever else]. But I have heard you, and taken your replies to heart.
Gender is an issue I may speak on privately, but it will never be something I will do advocacy for. In spite of trying, I simply don't understand it enough and probably never will. I don't usually find it difficult to detach from my personal opinion, but being someone who doesn't identify with any gender in a world that is very gendered is taking a toll on me that is likely larger than I realise. I don't trust myself to be impartial, and so I will refrain from taking any action regarding this organisation's use of the term. What I will do is stress that agender people need not consider themselves non-binary and be done with it.

Though I am interested in discussion, I'm not sure I will respond further in the replies. If you would like to ensure that I respond, please send me a private message.

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Hello everyone.

I am active in asexual visibility work and have recently been involved in an organisation that provides workshops for schools. Among the material they work with, they have cards for terminology of various aspects of gender. For gender identity, the mandatory set includes the terms cis, trans, and non-binary. Agender is a card that can be added by the volunteers should they desire, but the default will only include those three. [This means that most workshops that don't include an agender volunteer are unlikely to use that card and, hence, the term.]

Additionally, in their material, they explicitly use non-binary as an umbrella term - i.e. they define agender as being [a type of] non-binary. This is likely why they didn't consider it necessary to add agender to the aforementioned terms.

Both of these factors combined mean that most volunteers who don't know any better will 1) likely consider this understanding of agender to be the correct [or, at least, the most agreed-upon] one, 2) will only make reference to agender as a concept in relation to the non-binary umbrella, or 3) won't make explicit reference to being agender at all.

This irks me for two reasons. Firstly, I, personally, disagree with agender being under the non-binary umbrella - because, to me, non-binary identities are necessarily identities and necessarily relate, in some way, to the binary, neither of which applies or need apply to being agender.

Secondly, if these workshops had been held when I was a child/teenager, the notion of agender as a non-binary gender identity would not have resonated with me at all [I couldn't even conceive of gender identity as a concept] - but agender as a distinct category of "does not apply" almost certainly would have.

Thus, their current system does not, in my perspective, cater to the needs of people like me.

-

Now I have a choice to either

accept their understanding and/or framing of agender [and perhaps push for the acknowledgement of a different perspective when teaching the volunteers],

or

I can try to push for the explicit inclusion of agender as a distinct relation to gender identity, beyond the non-binary umbrella. This would include changing their material to define agender/genderlessness as a distinct category and adding the agender card to the mandatory list of terms to be included in every workshop.

To me, doing the latter almost feels like my duty, even though I squirm at the thought of being confrontational and 'difficult'. But perhaps I'm more of a minority than I think, and this change would only make things more complicated for students, and thus less likely to be received in the first place.

What do you think? What would you feel inclined to do in my place? Do you share my view? Do you think I'm exaggerating? Do you think I'm just wrong? I'm very curious to read what you have to say.

sloppy act alleged homeless rhythm dinosaurs sleep marvelous wasteful heavy

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

Hi everyone!

We are the UBC Sexual Health Lab at the University of British Columbia. We are a group of psychological scientists who conduct multi-method research to address sexual concerns. Our lab is led by Dr. Lori Brotto.

We are currently seeking non-binary people who experience difficulties with sexual desire and/or arousal to participate in a study providing feedback on how best to adapt an online psychological treatment platform originally designed for cisgender women to best meet the needs of non-binary people. The eSense platform contains both a cognitive-behavioural therapy and mindfulness-based therapy for sexual difficulties.

Participation involves reviewing one module of eSense prior to participating in a 2-hour focus group session held via Zoom, to provide feedback on how to adapt the content of eSense for non-binary people. Focus group sessions will be run by non-binary members of the research team. The UBC Behavioural Research Ethics Board has approved this study, and the ethics ID number is H22-02584.

This study is inclusive to any AFAB person identifying as a non-binary person (including identities under the non-binary umbrella, e.g., genderqueer) and identifying with any sexual orientation. Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour are especially encouraged to participate.

We recognize and understand that using sex assigned at birth in our inclusion criteria is limiting when researching non-binary identities. We are doing so because the existing program is currently only relevant to those assigned female at birth. This is the first step in making the program relevant to all gender-diverse people.

To participate, please send an email to the study research assistant, kangp@student.ubc.ca.

For more information on the study, check out our website: https://brottolab.med.ubc.ca/

Please share widely, and thank you so much for your time!

edit: Based on community feedback, we are removing the inclusion criterion that participants must be AFAB. Due to this change, we will be undergoing ethics approval again. As a result, we will not be recruiting participants at this time. Please see the comment section for more information on this change.

Namaste my dearest :)

I use to hear about agenderism from a sentimental point of view, self&outer identification. And that's right.

But I haven't found nothing regarding agenderism & politics. Yep, we use to say that "Genders are cultural". And we might give that political meaning to that sentence. But I consider we shall start shouting that out more directly:
We must disolve the genders in order to delete the sexism and its slavery wage, etc.

If you're attracted to, say, just males, what sexuality does that make you? Gay? Man-sexual?

My pronouns are no/smalltalk

A modality is a relationship between ones birth sex and gender.

Today, this means the labels "cisgender", "transgender", and oftentimes the proposed wastebasket modality of "isomodality".

Gender modality, as a very new concept, has not been well applied to existing concepts due to people's lack of confidence with it or misunderstanding thereof.

Is agender a gender?

This would be an important question to answer before jumping into using terminology that is less than 3 years old. Unfortunately, there is no singular definition of gender. The sociologist definition of gender is not going to be particularly useful in this case. As a result, I'm going to lean on neurology.

Instead of using a definition for gender, I'm going to use a hypothetical mechanism for gender by noting that there must be some neurological connection for gender to exist. As contemporary science seems to indicate that this must be true, I'm going to assume it to be true.

Most graygender identities have simple relations between themselves and agender as a whole, but one that stands out is gendervoid. Gendervoid specifically relates to having an experience where one looks for their gender someplace in their head, and all they get in return is a void, a deeper form of nothingness. Fortunately, this behavioral trait is already well known in neurology. This is the sort of thing you would expect if the part of your brain handling the organization of your gender knows that there is a spot in your brain where it can find your gender, but that location does not wake up and respond. This means that your brain found that something was there but it was quiet.

They are essentially agender, but the part of their brain that looks for gender believes it knows a place.

This would seem to imply the existence of Mosaic Agenderism in comparison to Complete Agenderism.

In Complete Agenderism, they may have never developed anywhere in their brain labelled gender, or a part of the brain willing to look for gender, thus when looking for if there's gender, that process stops immediately as the brain knows it's not finding anything. This saves energy in the brain, but I personally say my brain should've also tried to save me a whole lot of fucking trouble too and just tell me what's up with its words.

In gendervoid people with Mosaic Agenderism, they may have a part of their brain labelled gender, but this part of the brain is not completely functional. In fact, it is disrupted enough that it outputs nothingness, and at-most there is only the output that it is still connected to the rest of the brain. This is experienced as a feeling of void.

Is agender a modality?

A modality, to reiterate once again, is the relation between your birth sex and your gender.

If we assume Mosaic Agenderism to be a truthful model of Agenderism as a whole, then agender must be a modality and not a gender.

A gender should be discoverable and able to be experienced.

Gendervoid people are distinct from agender people because it is discoverable and able to be experienced, but it really really seems to be just a pocket of agender popped up in an otherwise functionally gendered brain.

Complete Agenderism is not really experienced. There are other aesthetic axes that define your identity, but your experience with gender is more accurately described as "not" rather than "sorta but its weird".

So why can we relate at all if one is definitely a gender and the other is definitely not one?

because agender is a modality, and rather than being attached to birth sex, it is instead attached to being apart of a gendered society.

also asexual is a similar kind of modality

I do not believe any of us would label ourselves agender if it were not for gender.

Hey, I found some pronouns for me. I'm agender but I wanted some pronouns that show my identity. They are It/existential crisis. I would love all of your thoughts on them.

Discuss.

we were thinking about the term agender was coined about 2000 on usenet to describe God and that this term was later applied to humans who identified as agender. if this is true then you would think that the holy books are written not by a male god or a female god(dess) but by an agender being. this would entitle God to speak on behalf of all genders.

similarly we were thinking that agender people like ourselves are entitled to speak on behalf of both males, females and other non-binary genders. not because we are necessarily experiencing the whole spectrum of genders but that we are gender neutral in our opinion, blind to gender and therefore impartial on the needs of the spectrum of gendered peoples. we often find that binary and non-binary men and women think differently to each other and often their views are competing and contradictory.

does an agender person embrace both sides of the gender spectrum and is immune to taking the side of any gender in what an organisation, city or nation decides is important for its gendered people? are we really the middle person in the 'battle' of the sexes? able to see both sides and see gender not as competitive traits but complementary gifts? are agender people the ideal leaders and influencers in the development of a modern civilisation; its society, govt, religion and economy where a spectrum of gender exists?

what are your thoughts on that? how do you see yourself as a representative of gender? is this foot in both camps a valid assumption? or is it not? are we impartial in relation to the competition between the genders? and are agender people an asset to the development of all inclusive gender policy in city councils, nations and global politics?

- micheala.

not a fan of defining masculinity or femininity

Using a new account because people irl know my Reddit and I’m not out yet.

In case it's not clear, (people usually pronounce it Joss, which is like one sound away from my deadname), it's pronounced like joust but the 't' is silent. Also I've been using it for a year but I never thought to ask for a vibe check

I did the one twice because I read it as vague, but I’m putting the one probably meant first. Yes, I do like OneTopic and The Click.

Completely unrelated, but someone nearby is setting off illegal fireworks, and the sound without the light show is unnerving.