When I was younger, I have to admit I was a little bit confused by the struggles of people with gender dysphoria. I couldn’t understand why it mattered so much to feel like you were in the “wrong” body, because I couldn’t comprehend there being a “right” one - turns out it’s because I just never had a strong gender identity of any kind.
In my own head, I feel more like a genderless little forest goblin that scuttled out of the underbrush one day and has been pretending to be a human ever since.
Yeah, and between meeting and talking to trans* people and having a kid who appears to be cisgender (if she’s not that is fine but it sure looks that way), it’s been a real eye opener. Gender is real just… not like that for everyone.
sir all talks are going over my head so can you please tell me what cis trans thing is all about?
there are two prefixes, the same as in chemistry: cis- and trans-.
cis- means “same” and “trans-” means opposite.
so cis-gender means that the person’s gender (male, female) matches their external biology. For example someone who has male primary and secondary traits and is probably XY, and also feels male and in the right type of body.
About 97-99.5% of people are cisgender. Exact numbers are not clear and it depends how you count it.
trans-gender (previously called trans-sexual) means that the body and the gender do not match. So a trans person may have the physical characteristics of a male, but internally, they are female and having male body parts is usually very distressing to them.
This can go both ways, as there are both trans men and trans women.
this is a huge simplification of a very complicated situation. I’m not even getting into non-binary or different medical treatments. Although I will say, the majority of times, the medical solution that is most successful as measured in reduced depression and suicide, and increased happiness, is hormonal therapy often followed by surgery.
Ooh thanks for making telling me :)
I joined the project now that I’m out with my friends and family (who also use iNaturalist). It was only a couple years ago that I learned about asexuality and realized that I’m asexual.
Now I am confused about my identity too :) or I am worrying too much, I guess :)
I believe it’s probably not like that for anyone, it’s really a social construct as “feeling as a woman” or “feeling as a man” is really weird, other than having a body you’re born with there’s no difference, we think of ourselves as of humans, and it’s mostly other people who see us as one gender or another, so I think most of behaviour connected with that is just a try to please others with most appreciated behaviour you can do as male or female.
Back in 1974 (gawd, I sound like Grandpa Simpson), before I got educated in the University sense of the word, I ended up in a technical program at a community college training to be an offset printing press operator and darkroom tech. There were about 30 folks in the program and it was an interesting group of people. One of them was a gay activist, not a really common phenomenon in most places at the time. We had similar politics and hung out a fair bit on breaks and lunch.
He was putting together a small gay community magazine. One day over coffee he asked if I would be interested in being on the editorial board and helping put together the first issue. I was pretty sure he knew I was straight but I didn’t want any misunderstandings so I asked why he was asking me. He grinned and said “You can spell.” So began a really fun time in my life. To compress a kind of complicated and frequently hilarious story to its essentials, I ended up doing a regular column called Mr. Nice, in which my dim witted alter ego wrote clueless essays on how the route to liberation was niceness. I even got a membership in the local rights organization with a card made out to Mr. Nice. It got me a discount on entrance at the weekly gay dances where I was a minor (really minor) celebrity for a while.
I got asked a fair bit by straight friends why I would go to gay dances. My stock answers changed over time. Initially it was just that I was asked if I wanted to go by friends, I was curious and the beer was cheap. After a while I just found it to be a really pleasant social environment where I knew I would find friends and could be weird me around a bunch of mostly nice people of who didn’t care what got me through the night. I moved from that city years ago but I still have the membership card.
Glad to have found this topic. Sorry I missed it in June.
This is so colorful!!!
Just popping in to say it always puts a smile on my face when I look at the list of Projects for one of my Observations and I see the rainbow flag.
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It’s Pride Month again! Just published a new blog post about @humanbyweight and her new field guide The Social Wasps of North America.
Woohoo! Gay time
Great piece on Chris!
I think that is one of the best comments I’ve read in a long time!
the queers opened a close topic? yessss they did it!!
As a cis-male (born with male-parts, conform to mostly male-norms of gender expression) heterosexual (inclined to develop feelings towards female gender expression, is that right?), this is a really interesting thread and am glad it was reopened recently!
I really appreciated @pdfuenteb’s point about only humans expressing homophobia. Reading about @cazort’s experience’s with their church members’ labeling things as “divisive” to avoid discussion, and @charlie’s post about agender, where one doesn’t really lean strongly towards any expression.
Reading above has been eye-opening because cis/male/het-normativity is something that I’m normally not aware of, being in it. I’m oblivious to it because for me, it’s a default/starting point of view so it crowds out other peoples’ experiences, especially since I assume everyone else thinks the same way I do, by default.
I only have a casual interest in this author’s work, but after reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, my takeaway is that sometimes people can take up bigoted points of view with just feelings alone. The reasoning used is post hoc justified and the exclusion of others is used to reinforce the in-group at the expense of others.
What’s been most helpful for me is knowing that if I have a strong feeling about something, it tells me something about my relationship to the world/those around me, rather than about the topic in question. That and empathy.
Lastly, I wonder if iNat is a more inclusive community because we’re so used to having our feelings/thoughts challenged whenever our IDs are wrong? 
Hey everyone, we’ll be having another iNat/500 Queer Scientists virtual mixer hosted by our Cal Academy colleague Dr. Lauren Esposito this year!
When: June 30th, 5pm-6pm Pacific Time (see this in your local time)
Where: Zoom
Who: iNat users who identify as LGBTQ+ and allies
You must pre-register here.
Lauren will give a short intro and then break participants up into different groups for small conversations. It was a lot of fun last year, I hope you can make it!
Well I don’t know if this is the spot to put this but I think it would be really great if iNaturalist could have some sort of guide on how to treat trans people.
I decided to make my profile as educational as possible about the Queer identities I hold, for anyone who’s never heard of them before.
I’m trans, nonbinary, and aroace, among other things…
Eh, I’ll just copy the relevant section here so no one has to navigate away:
Pronouns are it/its, I am autistic, aroace, and nonbinary :)
-What does it mean that my pronouns are it/its?
It means that when reffering to me, you should use “it” in place of “she” or “he”, and “its” in place of “hers” or “his”.
Here’s an example:
“That’s nonbinary-naturalist, it’s the top identifier for small-flower pawpaws! It lives in Savannah, and is always taking pictures of birds and plants when it goes on walks or rides its bike!”
-What does nonbinary mean?
Nonbinary means not-binary. Binary means two, and in this case, the binary refers to the “gender binary” of “male/man” and “female/woman”.
Someone who is nonbinary is transgender, but instead of “going from” one binary gender to the other (male to female, or female to male), they are instead a gender that isn’t just male or female.
Nonbinary people can be no gender (sometimes called agender), both male and female, male or female and something else, constantly moving between genders, and anything and anywhere in between.
Anyone can be nonbinary, yes, even you reading this! There’s no age limit for questioning your gender. If you don’t feel that “man” or “woman” suit you, you can be nonbinary :)
I am nonbinary, and I am also aroace, otherwise known as aromantic and asexual.
-What do these words mean?
Asexual or ace = someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction, or only experiences it in specific circumstances, or very rarely. (This isn’t the same thing as being celibate, which is when people /choose/ not to pursue sexual relationships, usually for religious reasons.)
Aromantic = someone who doesn’t experience romantic attraction, or only experiences it in specific circumstances, or very rarely.
Aroace means you’re both asexual and aromantic in some way, and for me, it means I never experience sexual or romantic attraction, nor do I want a relationship of any kind.
My orientation affects my gender identity, since I am not attracted to anyone and don’t want anyone to be attracted to me.
So I like to describe my gender as being like a nonhumanoid alien who is visiting Earth for the first time, who is confused and alarmed by humans flirting with it.
My icon is a flower with a wasp on it in the colors of the aroace flag (orange, yellow, white, light blue, navy blue), and the flower petals in the colors of the xiqyne flag, which is the name I gave the way I describe my gender. It also includes the trans pride flag (blue, pink, white, pink, and blue) as the background.
Xiqyne is known as a “xenogender”, or a gender that is described using metaphors or comparisons, rather than just “I’m male” or “I’m female”. The xiqyne flag colors are dark magenta, magenta, sky blue, ice blue, pale green, and pale yellow. Xenogenders can be about just the way you describe your gender, or, like mine, they can combine your orientation with your gender to show a better picture of your experiences.
I am currently running a gofundme so that I can raise money to change my legal name. Here is the link if you would like to donate, any money left over at the end will go towards paying rent and other bills: https://gofund.me/4e46cfb8 It’s at $200 so far, but unfortunately that had to be used to cover rent :'(
And I’ve gotten a few private messages about it, almost all of them positive, with parents of Queer people thanking me for the information, other trans people waving in solidarity, ect.
But I just received another private message, this one not positive.
“By the way, it was nice to read about your profile, both about your interests and your personal facts! :) The only thing to say, you must be very beautiful just as you are, no need to surgery or any kind. Just like nature itself. Enjoy it :)”
And this is just such an invasive and creepy thing to say to anyone, especially as a complete stranger out of nowhere, with no invitation of any kind.
Nowhere on my profile do I talk about surgery of any kind, nor do I invite anyone to speculate on whether or not I’m beautiful or have hadm or am planning to have, any surgeries at any point.
If you’re not trans and you’re reading this thinking, “But they complimented you…how can that be a bad thing?”
Because this person has decided for themselves as a complete stranger that I, a trans person, should not change my body in any way that makes me happy because they, a random person who’s never met me or even seen what I look like, who has absolutely nothing to do with my life, and has no idea what my relation to my body is, has decided that that would be ruining the “natural beauty” of my body and they wouldn’t want that to happen, so their preference about my body is supposed to supercede my ability to have a body that I am comfortable in and happy with.
My profile also explicitly states I do not want people to be attracted to me. So someone calling me beautiful is creepy and offensive to me all by itself, even if it weren’t combined with the inherent transmisia and exorsexism of telling me, unsolicited, out of nowhere, that I shouldn’t get any gender-affirming surgeries because this random stranger has decided for themselves that that would be bad.
This person has decided that their opinion on my body is more important than my right to bodily autonomy, self-determination, and happiness.
And if you think I’m exaggerating or blowing things out of proportion, you need to spend more time talking to trans people and you need to pay attention to the things people who hate us say. This person has disguised their hatred for my transness behind a ““compliment”” that exists to do nothing but shame me for having surgery that makes me happy.
I sincerely hope that this person hasn’t sent anyone else messages like this. It is creepy, invasive, and blatantly bigoted. Everything about their message is just microaggressions couched in supposedly “complimentary” language.
The other two negative incidents so far are similar but along different veins of bigotry entirely and I don’t think I have to type them all out here for the issue to be made plain.
I think it would be incredibly nice if somewhere on iNaturalist there was a post of just general basic info on Queer /LGBTQIA+ identities, and some basic ground rules expanding on how not to sexually harass people.
And make no mistake. Sending random strangers unsolicited “advice” or “compliments” about their body based on their gender identity is literally sexual harassment. I’m not mad at iNaturalist staff or anything, I already flagged the message.
Most of the messages I’ve received in response to my profile description have been very positive and uplifting.
I just think it would be nice if there was like, a short glossary(?) or something explaining what different Queer / LGBT terms mean, and guidelines on How Not To Be A Bigot To LGBT / Queer people.
Like, rule #1 being Do Not send trans people unsolicited comments about their bodies, even if you think you’re giving them “helpful advice” or a “nice compliment”. Especially do not tell trans people uninvited that you think they shouldn’t get surgery because their “natural beautiful body is beautiful just the way it is”.
Sorry if this is negative, but it’s just really aggravating to get messages like this, especially because the first message this person sent me was inviting me to join a project. It’s safe to say I will do no such thing unless they apologize immediately and commit to not doing bigoted crap like this in the future.
And I doubt that’s going to happen :| Especially because they just replied say I’m the one being rude -.-
Yeah, a basic guide of How Not To Sexually Harrass LGBT / Queer people would be really great.
Anyways since that was pretty much all negtive, here’s a GIF I made of a dancing Pikachu in a pride outfit:
[ID: A gif of Pikachu from the Pokemon anime doing a cheerleading dance with fans, edited so Pikachu is standing against a blue sky with fluffy white clouds, with the fans and outfit changed so they’re pride flags.
The outfit has been painted over so that it’s a rainbow top and matching pants, and another rainbow has been painted on one of Pikachu’s ears.
The fans have been painted to show the transnonbinary flag, with symetrical stripes of purple, black, blue, pink, yellow, white, yellow, white, pink, blue, black, and purple. On the outside of each fan at the base is a black line drawing of a sun with eight rays like the lines on a compass.
End ID.]
The flag on the fans is a variation of the trans pride flag I created to explicitly and blatantly include nonbinary people, since a lot of exorsexist trans people insist nonbinary people aren’t really trans, and that the white stripe in the trans pride flag is “just for transitioning”. The sun symbol is to represent all the possible identities under the trans umbrella, since without light, there wouldn’t be any colors to see in the first place :)