Even among cis people there's more than two genders but everybody just keeps glossing over it

all of the cis people who would tell me i'm "not a real man" in an accusatory way would get mad at me if i agreed with them

This was a big part of my experience of gender. I was a gender non-conforming kid but didn't really know you could just like, demand to be a girl and see a doctor and then you'd get to be one. So I was just like, a very effeminate boy who everyone would assume was a girl until told otherwise.

When I hit puberty, I came out as gay, and everyone was like "yeah, duh" and my gender, for all intents and purposes, was "gay boy" not "boy." There was not an abundance of gay poeple in my community. I was the only "gay boy." I was slotted into specific social roles, such as "gay best friend (GBF)" and "one of the girls" and encouraged to pursue specific interests (theater, fashion, writing, cooking, music, anime/manga with pretty boys in it) while being deterred from others (sports, leadership, STEM, video games, comic books, partying, anything involving physical contact with men). Girls treated me as innately belonging in The Girl Group, except when specific topics came up (mostly menstruation, occasionally pregnancy scares or sex) and then it would be "Ummm, can we have a girls-only moment." Meanwhile, guys did not treat me like a guy. Initially, I was bullied violently for "not being a boy" or "not being a man" and called "a girl" derisively. Once I was safely positioned The GBF within a group of girls, there came to be a social obligation to be civil towards me if they wanted to get close to the girls. Guys who I were genuinely friends with would be protective me, like they were towards girls, and would not only abstain was roughhousing with me but would interfere to prevent other guys from being rough with me, the ones who perhaps didn't yet know that I "wasn't one of the guys." I would rarely be invited to "guys only" social occasions like I was to "girls only" occasions, reserving me mostly for mixed gender situations. If something called for "separating the guys and girls" I would often not be placed normally, either getting sent to the girls' side, placed only with specific men who were asked first if it was OK and who would treat me differently, or even just placed on my own.

I did feel some gender dysphoria especially with the onset of puberty, and I did often have the thought "I wish I had been born a girl" but didn't think it was realistically possible to like, change that. I was pretty content in my almost-girl social role. I even had guys say shit like "I wish you were a girl so I could date but you I'm not gay" completely unprompted.

But when I went to college, where gay people were a dime a dozen, I was no longer a "gay boy" (third gender) I became a "Cis Gay Man" (despicable and much despised subset of Men) and the way the dysphoria was... it was like I caught on fire. Like only now was I living life as a "man" and having expectations of masculinity placed upon me. All of my gender nonconforming behaviors were now scrutinized as "appropriating femininity" "annoying" "attention-seeking" "overly soft" "trying to be special" etc. etc. and many of my behaviors now took on a totally different flavor. "Entertaining the girls" became "taking up too much space As A Man." Hanging out with female friends became "invading female spaces." My experiences of homophobia and violence for being gender non-conforming and queer were now downplayed and treated skeptically as "Cis Gay Men have it the easiest and everyone loves them." It was all completely novel to me. It was like I had been newly reassigned to a gender with entirely different expectations. And while previously I had been viewed as basically an asexual being, I was now having my body scrutinized and classified in new ways. I was fucking immolated with gender dysphoria. After four month of that I pretty quickly concluded I was not a man did not want to be a man could not stand it did not want it and it was time to transition ASAP. Interestingly, during the earlier years of my transition, the people who criticized me for being "A Cis Gay Man who Has It Easy" all kept insisting I "wasn't really transgender" and was "really a gay man appropriating the trans experience." My assigned gender that I was transgressing by transitioning wasn't actually Man, but Gay Man.

If you watch media depictions of gay people, especially pre-2015, it's pretty clear that "effeminate gay men" were not considered a type of man for a very long time. Queer Eye For The Straight Guy did not star five men, it started five Gaymen. five dandies. Five faggots. The same goes for butch lesbians

Not to mention how gender is racialized and the idealized conceptions of European womanhood are basically never made available to the average Black Woman, who is depicted and perceived as masculine and aggressive no matter how she behaves. Even though our culture says "there are two genders" it is in fact the case that every intersection of gender and race has a completely different manifestation, depiction, and expectation in this culture.

one of the weirder ways the intersection of gender and race manifests is in a doubling-down on a phenomenon i'm sure plenty of trans girls have experienced that i guess i'm just gonna have to call "overaggressive gender support" — that thing where certain cis allies sort of overact your femininity and, in doing so, demonstrate that they don't really see it as a natural part of who you are but as a performance that demands constant applause. anyway it turns out that this is also how a lot of people treat black women, and there was definitely a particular section of white gay male culture that really embraced that stuff, mostly in the aughts and early 2010s but still to some degree even after. my usual asterisks: i'm indian, colorism associates darker-skinned folks with masculinity but is not interchangeable with antiblackness, etc., but suffice it to say that being visibly Ethnic as a trans girl can absolutely win you a double dose of yass-queening that "normal" women seem not to merit.

i say this not to be like "and it was all gay men doing it, so the hostility to them was justifed" because it wasn't. most of my interactions with cis gay guys have been basically the same as my interactions with cis gay girls or cis bi people of either binary gender, which is to say "basically pretty relaxed." but i do think it helps demonstrate how easily and widely access to """true""" womanhood is revoked regardless of birth-assigned sex. there are two "correct" genders but a multitude of failed ones, and there's plenty of cis people who hand those out like candy well before they ever learn we exist