My other partner is genderfuck-masculine, biologically female

Kiya, can I borrow that one? I’m not so genderfucked as to be a he, but that’s pretty bang on, actually. There’s something I don’t like about “genderqueer” but “genderfuck-masculine” makes sense to me. :)

As far as the others commenting in here: I’m complicated. I don’t actually know how I feel about all this stuff, or what feminism should and shouldn’t lobby for in utopia. I just know that when I try to be proud of the more masculine (I’m trying to use this term as neutrally as I can) features of my body, my presentation, my way of moving, I’m often told that I need to reframe this as “strong and feminine” and that puzzles me greatly. And feels like an attack, because people don’t just *say* this, but *insist* on it, as if their gender or their worth or their something were based on putting their label on me, a label I really don’t have use for.

I know what “strong and feminine” looks like to me, and I’m not it. Not because, say, I have muscles and someone else doesn’t, or something reductive like that, just because strong and feminine, well, makes me think of something like this or this… and those are not me.

How to describe what is me? That’s a bit more complicated. I was going to try, but I’d really have to do a deeply personal post in my own spot to get at it I think, where I could get poetic and interesting.

Of course, those things do get gender attached to them in this ridiculously sexist and binary-opposition-obsessed society, and so terms to describe how they get gender (falsely) attached to them are necessary and useful, but, y’know, they are also something we should be working towards the obsolescence and eventual abolition of…

I’m genderqueer in about the same way that Dw3t-Hthr is. I’m biologically male, but TBH i’m not sure if i’m “a man”. Man means adult, male and human, and while i technically am all those things, i’m not sure if i feel any of those things… for all practical intents and purposes, however, i am always going to be percieved as a man (i’m 5′11″, with no body fat whatsoever, lots of facial hair and size 10 feet), so i might as well be one…

“Passing” is a big thing in the disability community as well - there are both advantages and disadvantages to those of us whose impairments are “invisible” enough to pass (more or less) as non-disabled. I kind of semi-pass - my facial expressions, mannerisms, ways of moving etc are unusual enough to be percieved as “odd” or “not quite right”, but not stereotypically-autistic enough for me to be instantly or obviously seen as “autistic” (instead, i tend to fit people’s “alcoholic”, “schizophrenic” or “drug addict” stereotypes… until they hear me sounding like a stereotypical middle-class academic, at which point i just confuse people).

A lot of the time i actually wish i didn’t “pass” (either as neurotypical/non-disabled or as normatively-gendered male) - then it would be obvious to people that i’m something different from a “normal” person, and they’d be more likely to show their prejudices openly if they were disablist bigots, or to accept my unusual behaviour if they weren’t (for example, at least one autistic blogger i read has described being much more “accepted” by “normal” people when using a wheelchair, because then her other “oddities” were “clearly” due to a disability, rather than to her possibly disliking them or whatever)…

And there is some evidence for what you describe, in studies of erotic attraction. Certainly, there is a great deal of social construction in what qualifies as “good reproductive material” (consider, for instance, the ideal of the “paleolithic Venus” vs. modern images), but there are fundamental features that seem to persist.

Oooh, I see the conversation is on sexual dimorphism in human beings, albeit in a social context. Interesting stuff. I always wondered wheteher identified -as- masculine and identified-as-feminine anatomical features can be selected by the evolutionary process. That is, as in the example from Elizabeth above, men will prefer to mate with feminine-typefied rather than masculine-typefied women and so the majority of women will eventually look “feminine”. The reverse would be true for men of course.

That’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question. As in, did males first select females for their “feminine” features, or did they find the women with feminine features to be predominant first? The truth is that erotic attraction towards certain anatomical characteristics seems to be innate (”hardwired”) as in the case of separated twins sharing sexual orientation. At some point down the line, there *must* have been some sort of differentiation process though, even if we’re talking the age of amoebas here!

SInce I think this way, I also tend to think that gender stereotypes are a result, rather than the root cause of sexual dimorphism. I’m saying that people react to what they see and form views and opinions based on that. Which can simply mean that we develop gender stereotypes because they’re convenient and we can’t be arsed to make exceptions for the few people whose life would be so much easier if we did. I think that’s been said before.

genderqueer (to the extent that calling me either ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ or most any other gendering word puts me on guard until I figure out which sort of othered I’m being)
biologically female
a woman

I have no idea how my primary partners would consider their gender expression; I would describe them as ‘masculine geek’ if I wanted to convey the right idea. Both are biologically male and men.

My other partner is genderfuck-masculine, biologically female (in transition somewhere), and a man. His primary partner is, I believe, genderfuck-feminine, biologically female (not sure where he is in transition), and also a man.

I wrote about sex and gender a couple of days ago at my place.