i found a lot of use in this thread, i get that the phrasing is a little bitchy (but that's allowed!) but i think the content is really useful and chimes with a lot of what I've been thinking about https://twitter.com/yungtyranny/status/1387437917644238849

i think the most generous way to approach this is: if people are using a framework - like transness - to express some need in a way that seems like a poor fit, we need to ask 'what is that need, and what better ways can we meet it?'

there's a tendency to assume these lines of thinking seek to police the boundaries of transness, and that assumption imo is rooted in the idea that transness is somehow the *only* valid way to have gender feelings, so to not be trans is to have your gender experience invalidated

increasingly i find it more helpful to think about gender as something you DO, as a set of choices and processes - what triggers those choices, or the potential change in them over a lifetime, i am far less interested in. to me this brings a lot of coherence to gender thinking

i get that it's very hard to talk about this stuff because it is essentially a discourse of validity operating at the same time as an onslaught of bigotry whose central tactic is to claim the in-validity of gender divergence. but we still have a responsibility to think clearly

and maybe it's good to think really critically anout whether the predominant discourses and public consensus that emerges at a time when both a community and an idea or under huge attack really are of the best quality, or indeed need to be set in stone?

(im probably not going to make myself very popular here but, im not here to sell tickets so whatever)

but i think undergirding a lot of these issues is a fundamental failure to allow for gender thinking and expression outside of immediate taxonimisation - whether of oneself or of others - even something like "cis" imo describes a relation more accurately than a category

saying all this stuff feels (in-scene) very taboo but it doesn't take more than a few minutes to realise that's nonsense. like, oh no, someone else who also thinks a lot about gender is going to yell at me because i think sometjing different. boo hoo so what (note to self)