What you describe as your liberation, sounds exactly like my own, just without the concern of being any kind of man or woman. My liberation, with the help of the structure I’ve described above, is that I can be any kind of human I want to be with any kind of expression and sense of self that I have. You being gay doesn’t make you less of a man, and neither does any of your ‘feminine’ pursuits. Because you are a man. And herein lies the disconnect that I was describing before, and why you and I can empathize and love each other, but how I would never feel truly understood by you.

Empathy is different from knowing. Empathy is always in a different pair of shoes, while knowing is the same pair. One example that’s been helpful for me is colorblindness. As a colorblind person, a person without colorblindness will never understand the way I see the world. Even with those images that depict what I see, they still see it with eyes that can see the full spectrum. When we look out over a crowd and they see dots of red standing out brightly from all the red clothes people are wearing, I only see the people and the muted colors of the cacophony. I can look as hard as I want and never see the red because it’s all jumbled and mixed together. I have no idea what they see or how those colors separate and stand out, because my colorblindness blurs the edges and makes them all wash together. I can look at a painting and try to describe what I’m seeing, but the language would always fail, because how do you describe a color? We all experience color differently, because none of us have eyes that are identical.

Gender is the same. We all know it when we see it, but how can you describe it to anyone else? If an alien from a genderless, asexual planet came to earth, how would we describe gender? How could we separate gender from sex? As such, how can you as a man truly understand what I experience with gender, or the lack thereof? From our conversation here, I think you’d find yourself confused, and I can tell you with certainty that I was, and often still am, too. When I started to dive into my sense of gender it was terrifying because I had no construct to deal with the tumult of realizing that I actually am different and that I actually don’t fit to the norm (couple that with my desire to conform, maybe you can see that it was a horrific experience). You say that you’ve never felt like a woman because of your pursuits, but I have felt like a woman despite my pursuits. But, the next day I’ll feel like a man, or maybe neither. I’ve had moments where I was unsure and moments where I was confident that I was something or neither, and I don’t think those moments were wrong, they were just impermanent.

What you’re doing is confusing pursuits, which are surface level activities, with gender. Tomboys exist without being gender-queer. Femboys can still be men. What they do and how they dress has nothing to do with whether they are men or women (my drag queen friend is a cis man, his pronouns are he/him). Tying pursuits and gender together is understandable within the context of growing up with the prejudice that gay men are seen as ‘less than’ straight men. The cultural ‘cure’ for that, until the culture can adopt liberation, is more masculinity to prove that you’re as much of a man as any man is. But for me… I’m not. I don’t want to be as much of a man as any man is, because that’s not who I am. I want to be as much man or woman as I am, or to be neither as I am. I live in a space where I am both and neither.

So yes, in my experience so far, there is a fundamental disconnect between us that can’t be remedied by empathy or love. But that’s the human condition and not unique to gender or sexuality in any way. It’s why we group with people like ourselves. It’s why gay clubs, and saloons, and pubs, and sports bars, and book clubs, and every other special interest group exists. I was talking to a trans-masc person that I’m seeing and told them about how I had someone ask if my pronouns were she/her and how excited I was about that and they immediately knew the feeling I had, because they had just had it when I told them my wife thought they were a man. Does that experience resonate with you? If not, how can that divide be bridged? I don’t think it can, because you can experience that feeling any more than I can experience seeing the full spectrum of color.

But, that does not, in any way, mean that the only way you can support is to be subordinate. I think you misunderstand ‘shut up and listen’. ‘Shut up and listen’ means, to me, that you hear people without interjecting your own experience. It’s to let people speak without saying ‘but wait, I think…’ or ‘are you sure?’ To support me, all I need is for you to believe me and then stand by me by using my correct pronouns and not deadname me. If you want to take it a step further, you can take on some of the labor of correcting others when they misgender or deadname me because goddamn it’s exhausting.

I, and any other gender-queer person, only define gender for ourselves. Full stop. We are not the arbiters of truth or the final authority on gender for anyone but ourselves. What I find interesting is that the thing you’re worried about is the exact thing that my former evangelical community is worried about with regards to any and everything cultural. You’re falling into a fear that ‘we’ are trying to take over when we are just trying to exist.

And with all due respect for your earnestness, you’ve put me in a position where I am defending myself. I don’t doubt that you’re an ally (I know that’s weird to say to someone else that’s LGBTQ, but when we are diving into these deeper things, I think we are all allies of each other) and respect my gender-identity, but your worry about how discourse is changing is the same worry that the generation before you had. Your fight is still being fought, and I am here with you. My fight is newer and maybe harder to grasp, but at the end of the day they are not different fights, just different flavors of the same fruity ice cream.

My vanity wants to say my struggle is deeper somehow, but I know that it’s not. It’s the same struggle to be accepted for who I am regardless of how different that looks from what’s socially acceptable or ‘normal’. I feel that maybe I can understand you a bit better because I have had a similar journey with regards to my sexuality as a bisexual person, but even then I grew up in a different environment and accepting that I am bi was far easier than accepting that I’m nonbinary—not to mention coming out. I have felt that I stand on the shoulders of giants who made it possible for me to go on my own journey, but I will never truly know the struggle you faced, I can only empathize, accept it, and stand by you. And when you speak I will shut up and listen, because your story is yours and it needs to be told without me coloring it in with my colorblind eyes. But the same is true for me, and I won’t have that taken away from me, least of all by another within the community.

I want you to consider something regarding your engagement with discourse on gender (because it absolutely does concern you): why would anything you say about gender come across to anyone as bigotry?

I think there are three possibilities. First, that you are approaching it with an unwavering, obstinate belief that you know what’s right about gender (which I don’t for a second believe). Second that you are using language that makes people you’re engaging with believe the first. Third, that you’re engaging with people who are so hardlined in their own experience that other transgender people like myself would feel othered by them (let’s be real, this is the internet and people are always emboldened by the anonymity).

My guess is that it’s a mix of the second and third. I see that you are here with good intent and a desire to understand. But nonetheless I’ve felt the need to defend myself to you whether it was your intent or not. Maybe it’s your defensiveness that has given me that sense, or maybe it’s something else. But were it not for the significant work I’ve done through my own journey, I may not have seen past it.

Thank you for engaging with me in good faith, it’s a rarity and I appreciate it.