Storify: Gender Non-Conforming (and why I'm not)

Storify is shutting down in May and has informed users that we have to migrate our content elsewhere if we wish to save it. This is one of my old threads.



Since folks come to my yard for trans stuff, here's a thread on "gender non-conforming" and why I don't use it for myself.

My gender is a nonbinary gender; my gender is demigirl.

I "conform" to my gender because it is MY GENDER. Anything I do is something a demigirl can do, by definition. I cannot say I am "non-conforming" to gender expectations, because my gender (demigirl) doesn't COME with expectations.

And I most certainly refuse to identify as "gender non-conforming" to womanhood because my gender is NOT a woman. If someone were to suggest I'm "gender non-conforming" because I'm not acting like a woman as assigned, that would be misgendering.

So these are some of the reasons why "GNC" isn't a 1-to-1 synonym for transgender or enby, and why I do not identify as GNC.

I love my demigirl gender, and I conform the fuck to it. My gender is the most comfortable set of clothes I've ever worn, molded to me. There's kinda a weird thing that some cis people do where they fixate on assigned gender at birth more than they should. I'm trans *because* my assigned gender at birth was incorrect, yes, but that doesn't mean that incorrect gender is always relevant.

It would feel very weird (to me! ymmv! talking about myself) to define myself as non-conforming to an incorrect gender assigned to me. I'm a brunette, I'm not a "non-conforming blond". (Even though I was blond as a baby, ironically enough for this thread.) I'm a demigirl who also happens to be transgender because they didn't put 'demigirl' on the birth certificate. So when people call me gender non-conforming (which has happened a couple times), I will correct them.

My gender is demigirl, and I conform to it beautifully. Whether I conform to any gender I'm NOT is irrelevant to me.

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