Introduction
I think the best way to introduce this post is to simply present a variety of often-conflicting quotes from LGBTQ people about "gender nonconforming" people(like butch women and femboys):
"Femboys can take off being a femboy at any time, unlike trans people."
"The character expressed gender euphoria at being perceived as masculine, so they have to be transmasc, not just GNC"
(a butch woman speaking) "My initial reaction to getting called cis is to cringe... cis is viewed as the opposite of trans, so it implies I'm comfortable with conforming to my gender"
"Theres a long history of some butch women getting dysphoria for not being masc enough, sometimes going on HRT or getting top surgery."
(a trans woman speaking) "What is the material difference between me and my HRT femboy friends?"
"GNC people are not queer, queer is only if your identity or sexuality differs, and GNC people are cis"
"Nobody is assigned femboy at birth- they're essentially trans."
"If you take away lesbianism from being butch, then all you have left is dressing differently."
"Femboy is only an aesthetic descriptor, it has nothing to do with identity"
“We never see him dress masculine, he's ALWAYS dressing fem, so how can he just be GNC?”
These quotes, and many others, reflect varied, often conflicting perceptions of gender nonconforming people among even some trans people. So I suspect that a significant percentage of LGBTQ people have a flawed understanding of GNC people, and so I wanted to make this post. I think most of you basically get it but since I see some weird statements every now and then so i figure it may be helpful to convey this breadth a bit better, and that may help solidify it for some people.
(Also, to clarify a definition: I'm using "gender nonconforming" here to mean "someone who's gender expression doesnt match society's conception of their gender identity", ie butch women, femboys, tomboys, etc. As far as I can tell, this is a relatively recent definition for GNC. It has been heavily adopted as the primary definition in many LGBTQ circles(probably because of the vacuum it fills), but theres still people who use the term as an umbrella term for trans+nb+etc(which seemed to be the meaning before the recent shift) or people who use it to mean something like genderfuck, so I felt I should clarify. So, using it as the recent use of "not conforming to other society's conceptions of my specific gender" rather than "not conforming to society rules about gender")
Expression and Breadth
A source of the disparity in the quotes above is that GNC identities involve something like a spectrum. For example, for male-identifying cis femboys, you could lay out a demonstrative spectrum something loosely like:
1)A femboy who is arguably gender conforming outside of the fact that he enjoys the aesthetics of dressing fem. It has no emotional importance to him, he can "take it off" at any time, and his conception of identifying male has not changed much.
2)A femboy who is only modestly attached to being a boy(demi?), but doesnt identify as being a woman nor feels a particular pull towards nonbinary conceptions either. Feminine gender expression is important to him(cant "take it off" without emotional harm), much moreso than what gender he identifies as. His conception of male identity is loose.
3)A femboy who's combination of feminine gender expression and identifying as male is important to him. His conception of male identity has changed a lot from what was given to him by society.
4)A femboy who is very similar to 3), but has a much stronger need to be feminine and be perceived that way, going so far as to go on hrt to feel expressed and fulfilled. His conception of male identity has changed drastically from what was given to him.
These are just examples(multi-attribute things dont map cleanly to a linear spectrum anyway), and of course there are those in between each point. I also suspect a significant % of femboys are somewhere between 2 and 3- feminine expression is important to them, theyve opened up their concept of male identity a lot but are also kind of winging it(which is fine) and are more attached to femininity than male identity, and just have some movement towards certain values in reaction to things like gender restrictions and toxic masculinity.
You can of course construct this sort of demonstrative spectrum for other gnc identities like tomboys, men who identify as gnc but not feminine, gnc people who specifically value a mix(tbh a lot of femboys are like this), etc.
This illuminates a few things especially when viewed alongside conceptions of being trans. For example, theres a difference between:
-simply having "gender expression" without it having emotional importance to you
-gender expression being indirectly important to perception as a gender identity(like being seen as masculine as a vehicle to being seen as a man)
-gender expression being important as perception of a more specific gender identity(like being seen as a masc woman, not just a woman, not just masc, and certainly not a masc man or a feminine woman- the whole picture is key). Or expression being important by itself- like being perceived as feminine as being independently important for euphoria/avoiding dysphoria, with gender identity perception in particular not being very important
Part of why I bring that up is because some people seem to think that expression is only a tool to reinforce/convey identity, rather than sometimes an inseparable part of what's important to someone. (Also, just to mention: gender expression isnt just clothing.)
Another thing the demonstrative spectrum points to is breadth. The quotes at the top of this post pretty much all focus on a subset of this breadth of gnc people. Because of that, that makes some of the quotes flat out wrong(because they only imagined that identity as a specific thing- or are just stupid) and others just sound odd when you dont realize the part of the range they're talking about. Most GNC identities are fundamentally quite broad, partially because they point to a "mismatch" between identity and expression, but expression serves multiple different purposes as mentioned, and thus these identities are naturally broad.
Labels and Conceptions
Now, imagine the above spectrum, but broaden it from "cis male-identifying femboys" to "cis men". Now you have some gender-conforming men at the start of the list. Or do the same with a list for women, from gender-conforming women to butch women.
Having those side by side in the same list brings us to the next question: Do the gender nonconforming people have the same conception of their gender as the gender conforming people? Do they have the same "gender identity"? Is a butch woman the same "gender identity" she was assigned? Is identifying as a woman the same for a gender-conforming woman as for every butch woman who deeply needs to be perceived as masculine? Obviously, there’s some relation, but what counts as “the same gender identity”?
Before I continue on this, theres often some assumptions that go into "Trans" and "cis", such as:
-Being trans means having explored what gender means to you, having worked through discomfort with whats assigned to you and restrictions, and having thought about what resonates with you
-Being trans means gender divergence has a special importance to you
-Cis is thus often positioned as the opposite of these- hasnt thought about gender, hasnt self-realized, hasnt worked through discomfort on restrictions etc
-Gnc people are cis, and therefore etc etc
Again, like that quote above from a butch woman: "My initial reaction to getting called cis is to cringe... cis is viewed as the opposite of trans, so it implies I'm comfortable with conforming to my gender."
For a lot of gnc people(i dont know what %, of course, and have biased assumptions based on the communities im exposed to), their conception of their gender identity is about as shifted from their AGAB's gender conception as a nonbinary gender. But the fact that they use the same label(and probably still have some type of conceptual connection with their AGAB) obfuscates this shift, it obfuscates that they mayve gone through introspection etc. Questioning, exploring and understanding your gender identity doesnt just mean going from two identities with visibly different labels, but also includes going between two identities that have the same label(woman->(butch)woman)
Reconstructing a house can involve as much work and decisionmaking as moving into a new house. The ship of theseus, except gender. Virtually no boy is assigned a conception of manhood that can include being a femboy, nor needing to be perceived as feminine. That is a fundamental change they made/something they discovered while self-investigating, and those different needs demonstrate the differences. If a GNC person cant "just take off" being GNC because it makes them dysphoric/upset/deprives them of gender euphoric feelings, that points to the change and the pursuit of that different conception, and is hardly different from, say, nonbinary genders. Just as there are nonbinary fems who are close to indistinguishable in behavior/needs from very fem women but in a nonbinary identity, theres the same for male-identifying fems.
The "Nobody is assigned femboy at birth" quote initially took me aback because it sounds silly to even say, and while the phrasing could perhaps be better there's definitely a point: Nobody gets assigned very GNC conceptions, they dont start with that, even if you put clothing aside.
Of course, this doesnt mean all GNC people have a different conception of their gender than genderconforming people- again, the demonstrative spectrum before. Some GNC men still harbor toxic masculinity. You cant usually tell from outside signals what a person has thought about with their identity or what their needs are- this is true for every group. And sometimes change is not consciously thought out. But in any case I do think a considerable % of, for example, “cis” femboys basically reshape what being male identifying means to them and are essentially a form of nonbinary/genderqueer.
In general on this topic, I think this comic from https://somethingaboutlemonscomic.tumblr.com/post/678523447463313408/4x10-4x11-4x12-last-update-chapter is relevant:
Conclusion
Ultimately, my main points are:
1)i think some people need a bit more understanding that “gnc” and gnc terms like femboy are pretty broad categories and include some people who have extremely similar needs to trans people, as well as people who are just average cis people with different fashion, and everyone in between.
2)Cis and trans have multiple meanings that are positional/relative- see nonbinary people who hesitate to use trans depending on context, because they associate it with "having gone through a lot of things binary trans people are associated with going through". Similarly, GNC people can have an awkwardness with being called trans even if they have in mind everything i've said about being called cis. Being called trans is assumed to be like girl->boy/enby, rather than girl->genderqueer alteration of girl. Both terms can be perceived as off.
3)Gender identity changes can keep the same label, which can mask the degree of change inside those gender conceptions
This post may come across as like “many gnc people should count as nb and/or as trans”, and maybe, but honestly I don't care much about that, those words are fairly contextual and multi-purpose anyway and have moved so much over the years. That’s only perpendicular to my points of trying to convey GNC people more accurately and move past some assumptions.
In any case, if the fact that i'm walking near that claim is Wrong and Concerning im totally open to criticisms of my thought process etc, and i absolutely dont intend to conflate, say, “gnc people who just dress different but its not related to their feelings/self-conception/etc” with trans people or nonbinary people let alone the degree of their struggles/oppression, which is part of why its necessary to convey that gnc people are a range.
Like Shel said in https://cohost.org/shel/post/1221440-some-wisdom-about-be , people tend to get very confident in their specific experience of lgbtq communities etc, and similarly can get overly confident in what an average person is like. So I just caution you to be aware of the limitations of your own circles and small data sets. Like if youre about to say something like “all the [identity] people I know are <>” then you should probably immediately tread with caution because it seems to me that gender groups are usually considerably heterogenous in many ways.
A few clarifications and misc comments:
-I definitely understand that cis GNC people have privileges that usually help them avoid some problems trans people face. Like being able to avoid a higher amount of bioessentialist ire, less likely that medical gatekeeping prevents them fulfilling their needs, etc. I dont mean to downplay that. But I do want people to understand things like that butch women have faced intense hatred for a long time, and some of the most violent hateful fascist comments I have ever seen on the internet have been directed at femboys- these things point to important dynamics of how right wing hatred works.
-I used the terms butch/femboy predominantly in this post because I felt like they quickly convey the degree of GNC i'm talking about, but I dont mean for them to monopolize conceptions of GNC. Talking about GNC people is always messy compared to, say, talking about agender people. With "agender", afaik(correct me if I'm wrong!) almost noone who would be classified as agender dislikes the term and also it is very clearly about them specifically- it is both sufficiently broad and specific. In contrast, "GNC" is pretty vague, "Femboy" doesnt cover all very gnc men(such as ones who dont consider their expression to be fem), and "Butch" has very particular connections with lesbianism, etc.
-As alluded to at a few points, you dont have to be male identifying to be a femboy, although thats usually who uses the label. An accurate, inclusive definition of femboy would be "someone with a very feminine gender expression but still aligned with a mix of masculinity in some way(ie usually, identifying as male)". Somewhat similarly, butches are definitely not exclusively women, I was just focusing on that subsection of butches for the purposes of this post.
-Theres simply a huge overlap between the experiences of, say, fem trans women and fem gnc men and fem enbies.(and the same for the masc inverse) Theres a tendency to see a set of experiences and go "Oh! Same identity as mine!!!!" and not see whats shared across different identities rather than is particular to a single identity. Seriously the experience overlap is fucking enormous.
-The positioning of 2) in that spectrum is partially arbitrary but thats what you get when you try to map 4+ things to a 2 dimensional spectrum
-"Genderqueer" can be used to convey the meaning of "having a 'queer' version of your cis gender", but its has a ton of meanings and is very often used to just mean "nonbinary/trans", so its pretty impractical to try to use it to mean specifically that concept
-I focused on cis gnc people to make my points and comparisons more clear(isolating the focus to GNCness), but a lot of what I said is relevant to understanding trans gnc people, who are extremely based
-I do have some concern that I messed up in discussions of masc women/butch women/tomboys since I dont know those communities/identities as well as femboys. In general i'm very interested if people who identify that way have any comments.
Edit: I'm really happy that this post has gotten around so much. Just wanted to say that I absolutely love comments on this, so feel free to say something. I'm also particularly interested in what things were less obvious to people.
