Category: Personal

My own gender identity and exploration process

At the Gym

I have always been an athletic person. I played baseball right from T-ball to high school, soccer in middle school, and was generally an outdoorsy kid climbing trees and exploring the woods around our cottage. I learned to swim, canoe, ski, and skate at our cottage, and learned how to sail, kayak, and ride horses at summer camp. This is where I first discovered archery which became my focus throughout high school and into university. Eventually life got in the way and I stopped training which also meant I became less fit and less active. In graduate school I briefly got involved in rowing and quickly remembered what I liked about learning new sports and being active. Then I moved and it’s been hard to keep up with. Now-a-days, in order to stay fit I have to go to the gym to workout. This is a very different experience from what I was used to growing up, especially with dysphoria added on top.

Gyms and other traditional workout spaces are not very friendly environments for people with dysphoria. There are change rooms separated into male and female, mirrors, revealing or fitted clothing, and a focus on your body which may be the greatest source of your discomfort. But at the same time, people who experience dysphoria often struggle with their mental health as a result and would greatly benefit from regular physical activity. Or maybe, being athletic is a part of their identity that is something stable that they can focus on when everything else feels like it’s in flux.

I enjoy working out at the gym. It makes me feel strong, satisfied, relaxed, alert, and more in tune with my body. It gives me a positive way to focus on my body and the strength in it instead of the ways it sometimes feels wrong. Working out at the gym is one of the best ways for me to relieve some of the tension that builds up from constant frustration, dysphoria, and safety math. I use the female change room but there is a gender neutral washroom down the hall that I could use if I want to. The gym is small and has mirrors along one wall which I avoid facing when I have more dysphoria. I generally wear a fitted sports bra and a loose shirt and basketball shorts or board shorts.

For some reason, different activities at the gym make me feel different aspects of my gender. On the female side there is steady, long duration cardio, lighter weights, core exercises, stretching, and pilates or yoga type exercises. On the male side there is heavier weights, more intense short duration cardio, and plyometric or agility type exercises. In the neutral category is balance, combination exercises, and interval type cardio.

Those lists of activities seem pretty stereotypical. To be clear, I am not suggesting that specific types of exercise are gendered in any way, just that this is how they feel to me and the effect they have on my gender. Not everyone will experience physical activity as having anything to do with their gender.

I’m not really surprised that my experience of my gender while working out is affected by stereotypes. Most of our experiences are in some ways. But knowing how different activities interact with my sense of my gender allows me to choose activities strategically. I can pick activities that will be in line with my current experience of my gender to minimize dysphoria. Or I can pick activities that balance out my experience of my gender. Typically this means picking activities that help me feel more masculine to offset being identified solely as female in my day-to-day life.

So, the majority of the time, I prefer the activities from the ‘masculine’ list. Until recently, I hadn’t identified this preference as a gender based thing. But that is definitely a component of it. Those activities help me feel more at ease with myself and more balanced whereas the other ones accentuate feelings of dysphoria or imbalance, generally towards the female side. In order to maintain my fitness the way I’d like, I’ll have to find ways of making the more ‘feminine’ activities feel more masculine for me or pair them with other masculine activities.

I have found other forms of activity that I enjoy as well. These are often more similar to the sports I enjoyed as a kid, home workouts, or workout classes specifically for queer/trans people.

My biggest difficulty is motivation, as it is for anyone trying to form a new habit of being physically active. When my mental health is suffering I mainly experience apathy. So even though this is when I need to workout the most, I have a hard time caring enough or building up enough energy to do it. I try to hold myself accountable by finding a workout buddy who won’t let me get out of it. Once I go I always end up feeling better and having more energy and less tension than when I started. Hopefully writing that down and sending it out into the world will remind me of that the next time.

 

How does working out or physical activity influence your sense of your gender? Do you struggle to be physically active as a result of dysphoria, environment, or mental health? What strategies have you found that help you maintain an active lifestyle? Leave a comment below with your thoughts and experiences!

 

My Physical vs Social Sense of Gender

My physical sense of my gender and my social sense of my gender fluctuate separately but can line up at times (here is my post about how I figured this out and tools I used to explore it). Here, I will describe what I mean by physical and social gender, what it feels like when my physical and social sense of gender match or differ in various places on the spectrum, and what strategies I use to manage dysphoria in each situation.

PHYSICAL GENDER

This is based on how comfortable I am in my  body as a female-assigned person. If my body feels completely right for me and I’m happy to show off my curves my physical gender is female. If I’m mildly uncomfortable with my curves but don’t necessarily feel like I should have a completely flat chest I’m closer to neutral. If I’m really uncomfortable and wouldn’t want to go out of the house without a binder on my physical gender is male. There are other physical aspects that play into this but shape and chest are the easiest to describe.

SOCIAL GENDER

This includes how various aspects of interacting with other people and being in public spaces feel such as pronouns, gendered language, bathrooms, social interactions, etc. What pronouns feel most comfortable on a given day is a big clue where my social gender sits (usually they/them but often she/her don’t bother me much). Often female gendered language (ma’am, ladies, girl) bothers me more than female pronouns but the days when I would prefer the equivalent male gendered terms are the days I’m likely socially male.

PHYSICALLY FEMALE, SOCIALLY FEMALE
  • Indicators:
    • Minimal dysphoria, physical or social
  • Effects:
    • Generally more at ease, more comfortable
    • More likely to socialize
    • Causes a feeling of invisibility or like I have to justify my queerness
  • Strategies:
    • Comfortable wearing name tag at work
    • Comfortable wearing bras and female clothes
    • Will make sure queer symbols are visible
    • Wear a piece of masculine jewelry to remind myself/express my masculine side but mostly female jewelry
    • hair up nice or down
  • Personal Reminders:
    • Enjoy the comfort
    • No amount of femininity invalidates my queer or genderqueer identity
PHYSICALLY FEMALE, SOCIALLY NEUTRAL TO MALE
  • Indicators:
    • Mild physical dysphoria but only when I’m putting on clothes to leave the house and picturing how people will see me
    • Internal cringes relating to female spaces or language
  • Effects:
    • Discomfort in social situations leading to fast social burnout and lots of recovery time required
    • Strange feeling of needing to wear a binder even though I am perfectly fine with my body when I’m on my own
    • Frustration at how people can’t just know that I’m a guy in a female body and be fine with that
  • Strategies:
    • Wear tight sports bra or binder
    • Masculine presentation including hair, accessories, and clothing
    • ‘Forget’ to wear my name tag at work
    • Avoid gendered spaces/bathrooms
    • Minimize social interaction at work
    • Spend more time alone, in nature, with my husband, or with queer friends who refer to me as Ray and use they/them pronouns
    • Converse/interact in more masculine ways
  • Personal Reminders:
    • I’m a female-bodied man
    • Think of myself as Ray
PHYSICALLY NEUTRAL TO MALE, SOCIALLY FEMALE
  • Indicators:
    • Physical dysphoria even when I’m alone
    • Minimal discomfort with female pronouns or female spaces
  • Effects:
    • Want to feel masculine but interact in ways that appear feminine
    • Socially comfortable
    • Difficulty maintaining focus, learning new things, or remembering information due to the distraction of constant dysphoria
  • Strategies:
    • Avoid mirrors unless clothed
    • Wear binder, baggier clothes, and darker/more neutral colours especially for tops
    • Lift weights
    • Move and posture in masculine ways but interact and converse in more feminine ways
    • Comfortable wearing name tag
    • Avoid multitasking
    • Write down all new information so I don’t have to retain it
  • Personal Reminders:
    • Acknowledge that I am Ray on the inside even if I’m comfortable being Meaghan on the outside
    • I’m a masculine woman
PHYSICALLY NEUTRAL TO MALE, SOCIALLY NEUTRAL TO MALE
  • Indicators:
    • Physical and social dysphoria whether I’m alone or going out
  • Effects:
    • Want to be seen as male and feel physically male
    • Difficulty maintaining focus, learning new things, or remembering information due to the distraction of constant dysphoria
    • Discomfort in social situations leading to fast social burnout and lots of recovery time required
    • Strong feeling of invisibility
    • Lots of cringing with female language, pronouns, interactions, and spaces
  • Strategies:
    • Wear binder and masculine clothing and accessories
    • Don’t wear name tag
    • Avoid gendered spaces
    • Workout
    • Spend time with queer friends
    • Listen to trans podcasts/watch trans youtube videos
    • Use self-care toolkit and listen to self-care playlist
    • Talk to my husband/commiserate
  • Personal Reminders:
    • Today is just a male day
    • I know I’m Ray even if no-one else does

I grouped neutral and male together because I am AFAB so neutral feels the same as male but less intense because it is still towards the ‘male side’ of my physical and social baseline of female.

Do your physical sense of your gender and social sense of your gender fluctuate separately? Do you have similar or different experiences to the ones I describe above? What strategies do you use to manage social or physical dysphoria and make yourself more comfortable? Leave me a comment below!

How I Conceptualize Non-Binary Genders

I’d like to explain a system for understanding non-binary genders that has really helped me make sense of myself and other gender non-conforming people. This system is only discussing gender which is a separate concept from sex. I treat gender as the internal sense of who someone is in relation to society’s views of the binary genders or the assigned gender based on their sex assigned at birth. I am also not talking about gender expression – how a person presents them-self to the world, only how they feel internally.

Typically in mainstream western society there are two accepted genders that match the two accepted sexes – male and female. This is what we consider to be the gender binary. So, when we are referring to anyone that doesn’t feel strictly male or strictly female, we can use the term non-binary or gender non-conforming. Not everyone will personally identify with these labels or use them for themselves but I will use them as a general category for the sake of this discussion.

So, rather than thinking of people as either male or female with no other options, I think of gender as a spectrum from male to female with ‘neutral’ at the middle. This allows for a sense of ‘femaleness’ or ‘maleness’ in any percentage that adds up to 100. But what if a person’s gender doesn’t feel part female and part male? What if they feels neither female nor male? Or fully female and fully male at the same time? These questions require a way to show ‘both’ and ‘neither’. I used to think of it as male to female on the x-axis with neutral in the middle and neither to both on the y-axis, crossing at the middle. When I tried to map some of the genders onto it I found it difficult or ambiguous. So I went searching for a better graphic and found this one:

Gender-spectrum
Gender Spectrum

It still has the ability to represent all the same things but with a lot less ambiguity or redundancy. I also like how it doesn’t represent male and female as opposite but on two completely separate axes.

There are infinite ways to represent gender on this chart. People with a static or consistent gender would place a dot at the spot where they sit. You can see some of them written on the chart – female, male, agender. Demi-boy would sit somewhere between agender and male, demi-girl between agender and female, gender neutral somewhere around the center of the chart.

People with a fluctuating sense of gender could outline or shade in the area that applies to them. Here is how I would represent myself at this point in my discovery process:

Genderqueer Spectrum
My Gender on the Spectrum

I have two stable components to my gender – one halfway between female and neutral and one halfway between male and neutral (represented by the dots). This is the core of my gender but my day to day experience of it is more like the second chart. When I combine two genders into one person one will be more dominant at a given time (represented by the outlined area).

Other examples:

Male to Demi-boy

Gender Spectrum demi-boy
Male to Demi-boy

 

Bigender with a stable female component and a fluctuating neutral to agender component

Female and Neutral to Agender
Female and Neutral to Agender

 

As you can see, gender can be infinitely complex and variable. Some of these genders could be represented in a few different ways. Some genders such as third genders may not fit anywhere on this diagram. But it helped me understand my own gender and maybe it will help you as well.

The best thing to do when meeting someone who identifies as non-binary is to use their preferred name and pronouns, and, if you have a more personal connection, ask them how they experience their gender. If you have never felt at odds with your own gender or how your gender is perceived by society you may not be able to viscerally understand how they feel but respecting their pronouns and giving them the opportunity to explain their identity to you in their own words goes a long way to earning their trust and showing your respect and support.

Did this change how you think about gender? Tell me what you think in the comments!

How would your gender look on this diagram? Draw your own representation and post it in the comments below with the labels you use or an explanation!

 

The Labels I Use And Why

Gay

I use this as a gender neutral term for homosexual. However, it is still a comparison of my gender to my partner’s and if society gets my gender wrong then they’re also going to assume I’m interested in people who do not match my partner (more on this here). This was a great label before I started questioning my gender and before my husband transitioned but has become somewhat problematic for society to understand since then.

Neutrosexual

This is a term I have made up (I think). It follows the same idea as androsexual (male-attracted) and gynesexual (female-attracted) which leave the person’s gender out of it and just specify who they’re attracted to. Neither of those work for me because I’m attracted to people who fall closer to the middle of the spectrum so I prefer neutrosexual. That way, if society still puts me in the female box, at least they’ll understand who I’m attracted to (once I explain the label).

Queer

A nice all-encompassing label. It can be misunderstood by older generations that weren’t part of the reclaiming process and also lacks the specificity I like from labels but has served me well. It can encompass sexuality and gender which is nice but I find that people assume it’s only referring to your sexuality until you specify. Thus:

Genderqueer

Fairly self-explanatory. All encompassing term similar to queer but specifying gender! Tends to represent people with a fluctuating sense of gender (which works for me) though doesn’t have to. Comes with its own flag of lavender, white, and green which also happened to be my wedding colours so I have strong positive associations with it (thus the name of the blog).

Gender neutral

This describes my day-to-day experience and expression of my gender the best. Though I do have both a male and female gender they balance out fairly evenly which lands me in the middle most of the time.

co-gender

This is the most accurate term for my gender but is a fairly obscure one. It describes someone who has two or more genders that exist in harmony with each other (such as co-existing or co-habiting). I have read descriptions of people’s experiences of being bi-gender or tri-gender where it feels like there is a gender war going on inside them all the time and they can fluctuate wildly day-to-day or even hour to hour. This does not match my experience at all so although ‘bi-gender’ technically describes me I prefer co-gender. Some people include this in their name for example Meaghan co Ray. Because of the ‘existing in harmony’ aspect it has a spiritual connotation which also matches my experience of my gender. For a long time the only label that I had heard that worked for me was Two-Spirit but as I am not Indigenous I cannot use that label publicly. Eventually I found co-gender which is a good substitute.

non-binary

I don’t mind using this term as an umbrella term to differentiate from binary experiences but as my sense of gender still falls on the binary spectrum I kind of feel like I am extra binary – both of the genders. I also generally avoid labels that describe the absence of something rather than identifying the presence or experience of something else. So non-binary doesn’t specifically resonate with me as a label but I’m fine with saying that I fall under that umbrella if that is the label that society ends up using for all gender non-conforming people.

So there you have it. At the most specific I am a co-gender neutrosexual (which sounds a bit bizarre) but I generally go by genderqueer and gay.

What are your labels? How did you find the labels that fit you? Are the labels that you use for yourself different from the ones you would communicate to others? Does society understand your labels or do people generally have a different definition than the one you use? Tell me your story in the comments below!

Intersections of Gender and Sexual Orientation

When my husband transitioned I was asked a few times if that meant I was straight. I knew this would be a question people would have but it took me a while to understand why that question was coming up and why I felt so annoyed by it. I tried to explain to a few people why I still identified as gay with varying success. I realized that the underlying issue is that although sexual orientation and gender are two completely separate aspects of a person, they are connected in society because of the labels we use to communicate them. This is my attempt to tease out these two aspects of identity and look at ways that they are entangled and misunderstood by society as a whole.

The basics

Sexual orientation is who you go to bed with.

Gender is who you go to bed as.

Though of course both are much more than that.

If sexual orientation was simply who you are attracted to or who you want to be in a relationship with the labels would mean something like ‘male-attracted’ or ‘female-attracted’ or ‘male and female attracted’ or ‘attracted to anyone regardless of gender’. Some labels do mean these things. Bisexual and pansexual for example. Or the more recently adopted terms of androsexual and gynesexual. But what about gender-neutral-attracted? Would that be neutrosexual? That’s the term I would use. Think it’ll catch on?

Where it gets complicated

The other sexual orientation labels require you to specify your gender as well as those that you are attracted to – homosexual and heterosexual (as well as lesbian and gay). Technically these labels mean ‘same-attracted’ and ‘different-attracted’ which requires you to first define your own gender so that society can identify who would fit into the ‘same’ category or the ‘different’ category. What if you’re questioning your gender identity and you don’t know what category you fit in but you are still attracted to the same people? Or what if your gender identity doesn’t match your gender presentation and people constantly assign the wrong gender to you (because who is going to ask your gender in order to clarify your sexual orientation)? This is where these labels intersect gender and become problematic for some people.

Take me as an example. I identify my sexual orientation as ‘attracted to people who are the same as me’. In order for society to understand who I would be referring to they first have to understand what category I am in. Because I am AFAB (assigned female at birth), they put me in the female box. Before my husband transitioned it was all good in society’s view – I was a lesbian. Though not entirely true or accurate it didn’t cause daily confusion. When my husband transitioned, society switched him to the male box and my sexual orientation label no longer made sense to most people. But rather than questioning their previous understanding of my sexual orientation or gender they would ask me if this meant I was straight. This is where their brain went even though nothing about me had changed.

what’s wrong with this question

The first problem is the feeling that society was policing my use of labels. Regardless of my own gender identity and that of my husband, I should be ‘allowed’ to continue to identify as gay if I felt like that label still represented my sexual orientation. I can understand people wanting to ask in order to make sense of how that works for me but that is not where their question usually came from. It was always phrased as ‘Doesn’t that make you straight?’ not ‘Does that impact your sexual identity at all?’

The second problem is seeing sexual orientation categories as absolutes instead of a spectrum. Gay does not need to mean 100% of the time attracted to same sex as myself, never ever anyone else. It is up to the individual where this line is for them. If 90% of the time I’m attracted to people like myself do I ‘qualify’ as gay? Am I ‘gay enough’? Or am I ‘required’ to use the label bisexual or pansexual if I’ve ever, even for an instant, been attracted to someone different from myself? What about if you identify as straight but you had a crush on someone who is the same sex as you once? Would you be ‘required’ to use the label bisexual or pansexual as well? Or would you have to be equally attracted to men and women in order to ‘qualify’ as bisexual? We need labels to communicate our experiences to each other but when labels become boxes they restrict people’s understanding and this becomes a problem. If my use of the label ‘gay’ was seen as a spectrum it would be possible for me to stay in the ‘female’ box society puts me in and be predominantly female-attracted but have fallen for this one guy, my husband.

The third problem was that society went from seeing us as in the same gender category to opposite gender categories. Gender should not be seen as two categories but also as a spectrum. If gender is a spectrum, it would be possible for me and my husband to still be closer to each other than either end and the label ‘gay’ (or same-attracted) would still make sense. Their question about my sexual orientation changing revealed their rigid understanding of gender and their assumptions about my gender identity.

The fourth problem with this experience is that it made it clear that people thought of my husband’s transition as a switch from being female to being male. Nothing about my husband’s gender was changing. He was still the same person, he had always represented himself in an honest way to me but just didn’t have the right words to express it to himself, to me, or to society. When he finally did, he had to transition in order for society to identify who he had been all along correctly but in my experience he barely changed at all.

This all sounds very rant-y and I suppose it is in some ways. But I’m not mad at people who ask me ‘doesn’t that make you straight?’ It just reveals their limited view of gender and sexual orientation. If they are the type of person that would be open to expanding their worldview and if I have some time (and energy) I’ll question why they think that would be the case.

How I answer the question

My personal crisis about my sexual orientation when my husband first identified that he was trans had very little to do with whether I would still be attracted to him. There was some doubt, sure, but the majority of my stress came from how I was going to explain my identity to other people who had only known me as gay.

When they ask ‘Doesn’t that make you straight?’ the options I came up with for answers were:

  1. I am still gay because I am primarily attracted to women but happened to fall in love with this man.
  2. I am still gay because I am attracted to people who are the same as me and we are much more similar than we are different.
  3. I am gay because even though I identify as female I am actually closer to the middle of the spectrum and so is Jake.

When Jake was first coming out as trans and I was getting the biggest number of these questions I was not yet comfortable discussing my own gender identity so I usually stayed away from #3. I felt like #2 was too vague and might be confusing or frustrating for people because it doesn’t specify anything about gender (which is actually what they’re asking about). A close friend of mine had a female friend who was gay and had been dating a guy for four years. She explained her identity as something like #1. So that’s what I went with most of the time. It still felt somewhat inauthentic but usually safety trumps authenticity (as most queer people can attest).

So that’s it. Pretty straightforward eh? Maybe next time I get asked that question, instead of answering I’ll ask them why they asked it in the first place and see if they can question their own assumptions instead of me doing it for them.

What is your sexual orientation and how does it relate to your gender? I am especially curious what you think of these ideas if you have never thought about your gender or sexual orientation before. Leave a comment below!

My Experiences of Gender Dysphoria and Euphoria

Personal Experiences

I have struggled to write this post because it is so intensely personal but I think it’s important for people to understand what dysphoria feels like. Many trans people talk about how their body has always felt wrong or as soon as they could talk they were voicing that they wanted to be the other binary gender. While dysphoria can present in this way, kind of like a big flashing sign, for me it is a lot more subtle and fluid.

For me, dysphoria feels like wearing a piece of clothing that doesn’t fit. You feel like you keep having to adjust it but no matter how you try it never sits right. It is a vague sense of wrongness. Like if I was a puzzle most of the pieces fit together but there are a few that sit slightly askew and I keep fiddling with them throughout the day to get them to fit. It’s irritating, annoying, frustrating, distracting, and confusing. It is also what I use to show me who I am which gives me a way to frame it in a positive way.

When I’m in an environment or around people who know who I am and are gender affirming regardless of how I’m presenting I get a feeling of ‘rightness’ or gender euphoria. This also happens when I put on clothes and look in the mirror and see a body shape that matches what’s in my head. The dysphoria is gone and because it is so uncomfortable when it’s there, the lack of discomfort feels amazing. These are experiences that cis people have all the time without realizing it because they’ve never felt the discomfort related to gender.

My dysphoria fluctuates day to day. Some days it’s barely noticeable and some days I’m doing everything I can to manage it and it’s still so distracting I have trouble getting through my day. Most of the time it sits at the level of a constant itch that you can’t quite track down. What things are causing dysphoria also fluctuates for me. Some days it is purely physical, some days it is purely social and my body feels fine. Most of the time it is a mix of the two. Separating these out has helped me find appropriate management strategies and allows me to cope much better and live more authentically.

Physical Dysphoria and Euphoria

Physical dysphoria is all those feelings that are centered on a part of my body. For me, this is typically my chest. Most of the time, I picture the shape of my chest being halfway between flat and curved. Some days it feels like it should be perfectly flat but more often I’ll have days where it feels normal as it is. I tend to feel more comfortable in clothing that doesn’t draw attention to my chest. So when my internal sense of what my chest should look like is about halfway flat I will wear a chest binder and that takes away most or all of the dysphoria.

I sometimes feel uncomfortable the shape of my body (curves, hips, thighs) for gender specific reasons ie because of how they are feminine, not because of my weight or size specifically. I generally wear clothes that are baggier or will hang straight down and avoid mirrors when I’m not dressed.

Things that I don’t feel dysphoric about that some people do: my lack of facial hair, size of hands and feet, body hair, or below the belt region.

Social Dysphoria and Euphoria

I generally experience social dysphoria when I’m feeling more male which feels at odds with how society sees me – female. I also experience certain aspects of social dysphoria when I start to have a feeling of invisibility due to no gender euphoria for more than a week.

The things that at times make me feel like I am at odds with how I’m being interacted with are gendered words such as ladies, ma’am, girl (as in ‘hey, girl!), my name, and female pronouns. Female gendered words and titles almost always feel wrong though I’m not sure if male gendered words would feel any better. Generally neutral words most consistently feel the best. Sometimes my name will feel too feminine. Unfortunately my job requires me to wear a name tag and introduce myself repeatedly throughout the day so the best I can do to alleviate this is ‘forget’ to wear my name tag.

Occasionally, female pronouns feel wrong though, again, I’m not sure male pronouns would feel any better on those days. As with the gendered words, neutral pronouns most consistently feel the best. So far I do not feel the need to use neutral pronouns at all times or change my name because my gender fluctuates to the female side enough that the hassle doesn’t feel worth it. I am open to the possibility of doing this in the future if that changes. I can also understand how, for some people, it would be necessary.

Wrap Up

As you can see, dysphoria is generally an uncomfortable experience which takes considerable effort to alleviate to the point of experiencing glimpses of euphoria. The strategies I use to manage dysphoria vary based on where my physical and social sense of my gender sit on the male to female spectrum. I will have a full discussion of this in a future post.

Even when my dysphoria is minimal it is still there at least a small amount and the fluctuations also can be frustrating and destabilizing. This takes a mental and emotional toll and can lead to burnout and difficulty coping with other life stressors. I will also talk about this more in a future post and what strategies I use to keep myself feeling stable.

I hope this description of my experiences helps you understand what dysphoria can feel like or helps give you the words you need to explain your experiences to the people in your life.

What are your experiences of dysphoria? How do you describe it to people who are trying to understand? Does anything here raise other questions you’d like to ask me? Leave a comment below!

My Initial Gender Exploration Process

WHAT I ALREADY KNEW
  • I am both male and female which leads to a fluctuating experience of gender centered at the middle of the spectrum
  • The label ‘non-binary’ doesn’t particularly fit because it’s more like I’m dual-binary
  • My physical sense of my gender and my social sense of my gender can be different from each other
  • I experience both physical and social dysphoria but don’t know in what ways or how to manage them
  • I also have difficulty with my queerness feeling invisible but don’t feel ready to ‘come out’ as something other than cis (one of the biggest reasons why I started this blog)
WHAT I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT
  • How far I actually fluctuate in either direction
  • What specifically causes my dysphoria
  • How to manage fluctuating physical and social dysphoria so I minimize the negative effects by feeling more comfortable in my skin and environment and therefore more authentic
  • How to alter my presentation in ways I’m comfortable with while feeling male or female but also that will be noticeable to the people I see every day so it will influence their interactions with me
  • Whether I will need to transition socially or medically in the future
TOOLS I USED

Gender Tracker

I created a gender tracker in my bullet journal that has a scale from 5 female to 0 (neutral) to 5 male. Each day I rated my physical feelings about my gender and my social feelings about my gender on this scale. The sense of my gender was based on a combination of what things made me feel dysphoric (feeling wrong for gender reasons) and what things made me feel euphoric (feeling right for gender reasons). I filled it in daily for a month and a half which gave me a good sense of how much I fluctuate (not as much as I thought), how these fluctuations related to other things going on in my life (most obvious influence was my menstrual cycle – of course), and how my sense of gender related to my mood (a couple very specific and useful correlations). I haven’t continued to track it objectively since then but I do use the same system in my head on a nearly daily basis and can now easily identify when my bad mood is related to dysphoria or when a shift in gender might happen.

You and Your Gender Identity: A guide to discovery

by Dara Hoffman-Fox

This is a step by step self-help style book that takes you through three broad stages: Preparation, Reflection, and Exploration. It combines advice and self-reflection questions/activities in a work book style layout. I started at the beginning of the book and worked through the sections that resonated with me and skipped sections that didn’t feel like they applied. I kept my notes in a journal specifically for this stuff so that I wouldn’t be afraid to write down my thoughts for fear that someone would see them in my everyday journal. The sections I found the most helpful were:

  • Fears
  • Positive Approach
  • Gender Questionnaire
  • Getting to Know Yourself Creative Prompts
  • Physical Discomfort
  • Social Discomfort
  • Exploration Ideas and Process

If any of these sound like they would be helpful for you I would recommend you get the book and work through it! It gave me a guideline so I no longer felt like I was floating in the middle of nowhere with lots of questions and no way to find answers.

Journal

Even before consciously starting my gender exploration process I started using a bullet journal to keep myself organized, track my personal habits and mood, and have somewhere to write down my thoughts and feelings. I found this very helpful during the later stages of my husband’s transition when all the stress and frustration had built up to burnout level. I have continued to use it since then and often journal about gender-based observations, experiences, and stressors. Mental and emotional wellness is difficult to maintain in the face of daily dysphoria. This journal gives me somewhere to put down my thoughts and feelings to help me process them, gives me a creative outlet, and keeps me organized so I don’t have to keep schedule or to-do list in my head.

Self-care Toolkit

Another idea from Dara Hoffman-Fox’s book that I talked about above. This is a physical box of whatever size you need to hold everything that goes in it. Mine is fairly small and I keep it at work as that is where I generally experience the most burnout type symptoms. It includes reminders for self-care activities and positive statements and sensory objects that will either override a negative mental or emotional state and give you something else to focus on or provide a calming and grounding effect. Mine includes:

  • Reminders for self-care activities that help me such as music playlists and phrases that I can use as a mantra
  • Scents that I find grounding or calming (sandalwood, cedar)
  • Tastes that are strong and distracting (mint, cinnamon) or enjoyable and comforting (chocolate)
  • Tactile objects that fit in my pocket and can be played with as a distraction or for calming effect (soft leather, worry stone, carved animal, chainmaille)

Everyone’s toolkit will be different. I put it together about a month ago and have used it about 3 times since but just knowing it’s there if I need it has been a big comfort.

DAILY PROCESS

When I get up in the morning I check in with my body to see where my physical dysphoria is at. When I’m getting dressed I picture myself at work and get a sense of how I want people to see me/interact with me which hints at where my social dysphoria is at. The clothes I choose (including a binder) used to be the hardest part of my day because they relate to both physical and social dysphoria and if one is female and the other is male it can be difficult. I have gotten considerably better at knowing when a binder will be helpful and what clothes I will be comfortable in since I started the more objective gender discovery process. I pick accessories to balance out my gender presentation. If the clothing I picked to feel comfortable is more masculine I will choose neutral or feminine accessories and vice versa. Throughout the day I check in with myself and alter my appearance as needed – put my hair up or take it down, take my name tag off or put it back on, engage in self-care activities as needed.

This post goes into more detail about what types of dysphoria I experience, what it feels like to have different male and female combinations of physical and social sense of gender, and specific strategies I use to feel comfortable with each version of my gender.

What do/did you use to discover or explore your gender? What parts of my process are similar or different to your own? Is there anything that I used that you might find useful or want to know more about? Let me know in the comments!

My Story So Far

Background

I grew up in a liberal family in downtown Toronto. I was dressed in practical clothes that I could play around in outside – overalls, jeans, shorts and t-shirts, running shoes. I was surrounded by people of all types. I had a couple close family members who were gay and who had partners that were accepted as members of the family.

I am fairly introverted and luckily, so is most of my immediate family so I was raised in an introvert-friendly environment which helped me develop self-confidence. I don’t know whether it is my introversion or just my personality but I tend to figure myself out using introspection rather than trial and error type experiences. This is probably why I was a bit of a late bloomer, sexually speaking.

Sexuality

Throughout junior high and into the beginning of high school, as my teenage hormones started to make themselves known, I realized I was more interested in the girls around me than the boys. This was partly an innate sexual experience but I do remember thinking about what personality traits I liked in other people and discovered that the females around me had more of these traits.

So at some point in grade 9 I told my mom that I knew I liked girls but I wasn’t sure whether or not I liked boys. She asked me a couple of questions to help me figure it out and I came back a couple of weeks later to tell her I didn’t think I liked boys. This is how I came out to my family. I was also out at school around the same time.

The only time I remember being in the closet was when I went to undergrad and wanted to see what my dorm-mates were like before coming out. That lasted all of two weeks. I couldn’t stand it.

As far as I could tell I had three labels to choose from – queer (nice all-encompassing label but misunderstood by older generations that weren’t part of the reclaiming process and lacking the specificity I wanted), gay (general term for homosexual but usually applied to men), or lesbian (women who like women). I never liked the label ‘lesbian’, originally because it’s a noun instead of an adjective. It felt like I was putting myself in a category instead of describing a part of myself. Now, I don’t like the term because it is strongly female gendered both for me and my partner. So I generally used the label ‘gay’ but I was also comfortable with ‘queer’. More on my labels here.

I didn’t start dating anyone until undergrad, mostly because I knew all the queer kids in my high school and wasn’t interested in any of them and didn’t know many people beyond that sphere. I met my now husband in the summer after second year and we were married six years later in a lovely gay wedding on a beach just outside Halifax.

When he transitioned from female to male I had a brief re-look at my sexuality, decided I still liked the label gay because of its gender neutrality, and attempted to field questions from family and well-meaning acquaintances about whether his transition means I’m straight (more on this here). I also like saying I’m Jake-sexual. At this point I am a person who likes people who are similar to me. I am attracted to that sense of same-ness in my relationship and for me, this falls squarely in the homosexual category, regardless of gender.

Gender

My first experience of my gender as anything other than female was about a year after I came out as gay. I started having days where I felt like a guy. I already had mostly tom-boy type clothes, nothing extremely feminine, and didn’t particularly like dresses, skirts, leggings, makeup, or painting my nails. But this was different. I felt like a boy. So I wore my most boy-ish clothes and tried to make sense of what was happening.

There was a guy in my year named Ray who had a locker down the hall from me and on the ‘boy’ days I felt like someone was talking to me when they called his name. It just happened.

After a couple of days up to about a week, I would switch back to feeling like Meaghan, feeling female again, and go back to wearing whatever I wanted. A week later, I’d have another few days of feeling like I was a boy named Ray. I ended up separating my closet out into girlier clothes and boy clothes so I could just go to one side or the other depending on the day.

After about three months of this I was confused, frustrated, annoyed, and had no idea how to explain what I was feeling to myself or anyone else. This was before google, and YouTube, where you can search for ambiguous things and hopefully find someone describing a similar experience. So, March break of that year while we were at the cottage, I took a notebook and found a secluded spot to sit. I wrote a list of personality traits that I felt like described me when I was Meaghan, and a list of personality traits that described me when I was Ray, and I connected the ones that were the same (about half of each list) and decided that these traits were me. I couldn’t have two people, or spirits, or genders fighting each other for supremacy all the time. I needed some semblance of consistency and identity and these traits became the core of that. For many years I forgot about this three-month experience and left my gender alone. For the majority of the time it remained slightly female of center.

When I was in undergrad I was part of the queer group on campus. I met a few people who were gender neutral or questioning whether they were trans, four or five of whom either transitioned during that time or have transitioned since. I was exposed to new language about gender identity and expression and learned the basics of what it meant to transition. The non-binary label was not pervasive in society or even queer communities yet. I felt a vague envy of the people who presented as androgynous and identified as gender neutral or gender-fluid but didn’t delve into it more than that. My presentation became more masculine, or androgynous. This has fondly been termed my ‘butch phase’ by my older sister.

I was thrown into the deep end of the gender identity pool when my husband started questioning whether he might be trans. With my full support, he explored various aspects of his masculinity and eventually came to understand that he was male and began his transition. Throughout this process we learned all about physical and social dysphoria, binders, packers, how to navigate the medical and legal systems for transition, and had nearly daily conversations about gender (and still do).

As he started being read as male we were suddenly seen as a straight couple. This partly bothered me because it took away our visible queer identity but it also put me squarely in the ‘female’ box. This was uncomfortable enough that it was partly what triggered me to revisit my own gender identity. But now, I had the language to understand it and the tools to explore it.

My experience of my gender and process for exploring it are significantly different from what my husband went through but, seeing as we were both assigned female at birth (AFAB), many of the same strategies are useful, not to mention having a partner that intimately understands what I’m going through. So far my exploration process is mostly on a personal level (which I will now be sharing with you) but I haven’t ruled out the possibility of some component of social, medical, or legal transition in the future.

On the Horizon

Fairly recently we have also been trying to conceive. This in itself has been an interesting process for a number of reasons and is the other part of what triggered me to revisit my gender identity (see the Pregnancy and Parenting section for more recent updates). Hopefully, at some point I will be pregnant which I am anticipating will come with its own shift in gender and dysphoria, requiring new management strategies and tools. And then of course, there will eventually be navigating being a gender queer parent. Exciting times ahead!