DECONFORMING
Just a genderless person trying to be myself in a gendered society
Recent articles
Gender dysphoria: what is it, and what does it feel like?
Gender dysphoria is a nightmarish state that’s really difficult to describe, but in this post, I’m going to do my best to describe it. It has to do with the sense that who you really are is being distorted into something different and wrong. Many (but not all)...
LGBTQIA+: the reason for each letter
It wasn't too long ago that the pride movement was just using four letters: LGBT. Then it was LGBTQ. Then it was LGBTQ+. Then we added the I. And now we're around to LGBTQIA+. That's a lot of letters. So why do we have all these letters, and what do they all stand...
The difference between gender, sex, and orientation
Every person you meet has a sex, an orientation, and a gender identity. But what do these things mean? And what's the difference between them? In this post, I break each one down and explain how it's different from the other two. What is a person's sex? A person's sex...
What it means to misgender someone (and how to avoid it)
Misgendering is the act of labelling someone with the wrong gender identity. It can happen in many different ways. However it happens, being misgendered feels terrible. Most people have probably experienced being misgendered at least once in their lives—even if they...
What does it mean to be nonbinary?
Most people today are either men or women. But those two categories don't include everyone. There are people who are somewhere in between, a combination of both, or something else entirely. The word for this is nonbinary. the nonbinary symbol Male and female are known...
How to ask someone about their pronouns
The more you learn about gender, the more you learn that the things you've taken for granted as true are very likely wrong. Your sense of the dimensionality of other people's gender identities becomes more nuanced and heightened. Where in the past, you might have just...
What is truscum? (And is it bad?)
The word "truscum" refers to a group of people who believe there are true transgender people and fake transgender people. It's pronounced "TROOscum." Their criteria for who they believe do and don't count as real transgender people can vary. They're proponents of a...
Gender pride flags and what they mean
Gender is very nuanced and complex. As you learn more about it, you're learning about something deep and expansive—like wines, for instance. At first, you might think there's just white wine and red wine. But there's a huge variety beyond that. There's different kinds...
What does it mean to be cisgender?
The word "cisgender" refers to any person for whom the gender assigned to them when they were born is accurate to the person that they are. In the 21st-century American culture I live in, almost all people are either designated to be male or female when they are born....
What does it mean to be transgender?
You might think the word "transgender" refers to someone who used to be one gender, and then became another gender. That's actually a common misconception. the transgender symbol Transgender refers to any person who was assigned a different gender when they were born...