December Days 2020 #27: A One Letter Off Error From A Male Goose

[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]

HTHRFLWRS offered some questions about gender for cis people to take a half hour and think about, because that means spending half an hour more than society thinks a person should take to look at their gender identity (especially if they're cis). Many of those questions are interesting for people who haven't questioned or thought about their identity at any point in their lives. I really think they would be good ones for cis men, because at least to some degree, because popular opinion has placed "happy blissful religious and submissive housewife and mother" and "career-focused, pants-wearing, no time for children or men feminist" on opposite ends of the gender presentation spectrum, women are often asked to think at least a little bit about their gender identity and presentation and how they want to navigate the world. And if masculinity was a lot less interested in retaining and reifying toxic behavior and made room for a bigger range of possible behaviors that would fall under the umbrella, rather than pushing nearly almost always to the fringe and policing each other's behaviors to stay on that fringe, I feel like a lot more men would be more comfortable in themselves and be less likely to engage in terrible behaviors.

So, here's one of the questions from that list

How do I visualize gender? What does my gender, in specific, look like?

( In its most compact form, call it 1-0. )

There's a certain amount of irony in definiting yourself to be "not that," because the thing that I'm "not that"-ing defines itself on a shifting platform of "not that" itself, where their "not that" is something that's been decided to be a womanly thing. Which changes all the time and in differing circumstances. But it's the best that I've got for trying to nail down what I am because most of the discourse that exists in non-binary space (right from the name) is that being enby is that you're not at either of the endpoints described as "man" or "woman". There are some specifically defined identities and presentations, and some gradations that talk about presentation in regard to how close they are to "man," "woman," "absolutely," and "no thanks," but there's not really a robust discourse that I've seen where people start coining identities for themselves or discussing other axes to talk about identity and presentation about that aren't related to the binary. (On the obverse of that, of course, the ten thousand things can cause jam choice problems, and there's still the likelihood that even with ten thousand possibilities to choose from, none of them actually fit.) Maybe I'm not hanging out in the right spaces.