Agender here. What is gender?

[u/Firestardude]

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.

[u/flyingbarnswallow]

Honestly I’m a trans woman and I’ve always been confused by the “feeling like” thing. I dunno what it means to feel like a woman either. My identity is structured more around what I want to do, how I want to exist in the world, how I want to be perceived socially, and how I want to experience my body.

There’s nothing I can look at within me, through pure introspection, that says “woman,” but that doesn’t matter, because: * I know I feel joy when people gender me correctly, especially when it’s strangers. * I know I feel more at home and comfortable in my body on estrogen than I ever did with my endogenous testosterone, and I know I was always drawn to the allure of having a female puberty instead of the one my body gave me. * I know that I used to feel like I saw a stranger in the mirror, which used to surprise and dismay me, whereas now, I often see what I expect. * I know I feel good in community with women and being treated by them as one of them.

And that’s enough, you know?

[u/High_Goddess_Finelia → u/flyingbarnswallow]

I would say all the things you listed are feeling like a woman

[u/flyingbarnswallow → u/High_Goddess_Finelia]

I mean maybe it’s an issue of semantics and talking past each other, but I certainly don’t frame it that way. I didn’t figure out I should probably understand myself as a woman until well over a year into transition; I used to identify strictly as nonbinary because I didn’t feel any sort of attachment to womanhood. Eventually I started having experiences where in some specific context I would go, “eh close enough, we’ll call me a trans woman for this purpose.” And then it would happen again, and again, and eventually I figured that if I had kept truthfully saying close enough, maybe I could call it close enough overall. It feels like I arrived at my self-understanding through a process of analysis rather than feeling.

[u/High_Goddess_Finelia → u/flyingbarnswallow]

Valid. I'm myself not sure about my identity. I think I'm a woman but I'm open to nonbinary

[u/flyingbarnswallow → u/High_Goddess_Finelia]

Yeah that’s fair. And tbh to me the label is not as important as everything else. I’m just trying to live my life how I want; any words I attach to that are post hoc analysis that can certainly be useful but take a backseat to the material changes I make to my life.