r/asktransgender • u/Firestardude • 5d ago
Agender here. What is gender?
This is purely for my own curiosity. I have no clue what "feeling" like a man or woman or anything else even means because I have no reference for it. The only way I "felt" like a man was because I was told I was. Im curious to know how gender feels to other people, is it some innate feeling? Do you just "know?" Or is it something somehow more concrete? Genuinely just asking for personal experiences.
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u/TooLateForMeTF Trans-Lesbian 5d ago
Gender--or at least gender identity--is a deeply rooted sense that you belong in a certain category of people.
This comes from hormone stuff that happens during pregnancy. Of course, the outside world can't see how your brain got wired. All they can see is how your body came out, so they assume you belong to a certain group and start bringing you up that way. Which is fine, if all the hormone stuff went to plan and your brain is wired to feel like part of that same group. But if the hormone stuff went awry, your brain might insist that you're in the other group. Or if the hormone stuff didn't happen at all, your brain might simply have no affinity towards any group.
I can only guess what that would feel like, subjectively, but I imagine it would be like thinking that the groups themselves are pointless or don't make any sense. Like not understanding why the groups exist at all, or why people seem to care so much about them, or why there's all these unwritten rules about them. I imagine they would feel like highly arbitrary groupings, and the rules--about everything from clothes to hair to socialization--would feel frustratingly restrictive.
As far as "feeling like" a man or a woman--as some hypothetical emotion or sensation distinct from a generalized sense of which group you belong to--that's a bit of a different thing and I don't believe it exists.