That last selfo made me wanna 5am post about some genderfeels I’ve been wrestling with lately. Bear with me here because gender is fake and so describing it requires describing fake things...

For a while now, on any new social or dating profile, I’ve been using the term “transfemme” or “transfeminine”. The reason for this is because I struggle to identify as a woman. Womanhood was never really the goal anyways, but it’s not something I feel good leaning in to.

I don’t have a concept of what it means to be a woman. I wasn’t raised with role models of womanhood that stuck with me. All I have is this very strong aversion to manhood, and the gestures, cues, and aesthetics of masculinity. I don’t want those things in my expression.

Non binary people I know tend to operate more on a premise of spectrum fluidity or tend to see their transition as little more than their key to broader expression. That’s amazing, but it’s not me either. I know what segment of the spectrum I’m aiming at, but...

The aim is very vague. I know that I want to land at something that is “Avery; she” where “she” means I emit and telegraph femininity. This somehow feels different than “Avery; girl” where “girl” means “binary trans woman.”

Part of it is this aversion to a segment of (usually older) trans women whose stated express purpose was to fully stealth and integrate into patriarchal cishetnormative society as the archetypal Woman that belongs in that context. I don’t fuck with that at all.

I’m crazy proud of being trans. I want people to know my story. I don’t want my life as Him to be erased for the sake of Avery. I want the continuity of my life to be intrinsic to my character. My story makes me who I am.

My transition was never about burying the past, erasing Him, or pretending I was always Avery. Not only because none of that is true, but also because doing that would dilute the authenticity of my expression.

What I want is to be Avery, a person who elicits the general sentiments and attitudes people have towards women, but is not, herself, a woman of any kind. I’m a continuum. A march of progress, away from one system of semiotics to another one.

Being a woman in the context of “binary trans woman” just doesn’t sit right, because I’m not swinging for the fences like that. But “non binary trans woman” doesn’t feel right either because I have no desire to source anything from what’s behind or around me.

Being NB, to me, would feel more like fluidity; something I experimented with early on. Not so much waking up a boy and going to bed a girl, but more like quantum genderstate where my gender isn’t known until you engage with it. But, this is not me.

I know the facets of the expression I want. I know the aspects of that expression’s social intersections. I just...lack good terms for it. If I wanted to be accurate, my gender is just a link to this thread. Which is fine, but inconvenient.

It also means any time I want to analyze the issue on my own, it becomes easier to get bogged down in the weeds about the nuances.

So I say “transfeminine.” The goal is to feminize, not to womanize (sorry Britney).

And no, a womanizer is not a predatory and promiscuous man. It is a person who turns other people into women. Like how a pulverizer turns things into pulver.

My gender is actually “shitposting piss locker.”