Cis By Default: My Continued Exploration of Gender in the 21st Century
By: Deborah Baudoin, She Her
Tags: Transawareness Week, Nonbinary Identity, Lgbtqia, Gender Identity

November 13–19 is Transgender Awareness Week, leading up to the Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20.

At birth, I was assigned the sex “female.” My little baby self had female parts, and so the medical professionals attending did what medical professionals did back in the day: they marked the little box “F” for Female.

Because of this, I was raised female. I was given a code of behavior considered acceptable for girls and future women. I was given clothes that matched the expected norms for female people. I used the girls bathroom and locker rooms in school.

But, honestly, that was pretty much the extent of my being a girl. I wasn’t girly or particularly interested in girly things. I wasn’t a tomboy, either. I just liked books and music and non-gender specific things.

This feeling only grew more pronounced as I got older. I was certainly not interested in boys romantically or sexually. I wore the minimal amount of make-up required by society for as long as I could stand it (before giving it up completely in 1993). I chose clothes for comfort, not style. In the 1980s, when perms and vertical bangs were the norm, I wore a simple ponytail or braids.

When She Became He

Like most of us, I never thought of gender at all except in the most abstract ways. Politically, socially, and spiritually, I considered myself a woman and (later on) a lesbian. I fully embraced feminism (still do) as something the world critically needs if it’s ever going to heal from its self-inflicted macho wounds.

That all changed in the mid-2000s when I learned a friend I’d lost touch with had died. In my frantic search to reach out to her partner, I kept getting a weird address. My friend’s partner was Jane, but the email address our mutual friends sent me said “Jim.” It took three attempts before I realized that “Jane” was now “Jim.”

I won’t lie and say I handled it well. I was still reeling from the loss of a woman who had been a mentor to me. For a while, Jim’s transition felt like a second loss on top of everything else. I felt like I’d lost two mentors, one to death and the other to something I just couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around.

But I knew I had to get over my damned self and be good with it. Because that’s what friends and family do — they support you, even if they can’t even begin to understand. You get good with it because you love them unconditionally.

How Do You Feel Like a Woman or a Man?

Intellectually, I didn’t have a problem with Jim’s transition. Jim was the real person all along; he’d just been wearing an “Jane suit” for the bulk of his life. Now he was wearing his own skin. Cool. Got that. I’m good with that.

But this started me on the subject of gender dysphoria —the feeling that you are a gender other than the one you were assigned at birth. It was something I’d never thought of before. And it wasn’t long before I realized, I had no idea what it felt like to be female. I just was. The more I thought about it, the more the entire thing eluded me.

How do you feel like a woman? Is it the clothes you wear? The way you talk or act? What exactly constitutes womanness in a person, and what does that feel like? Jim transitioned over a decade ago, and it was only recently that it finally dawned on me that I don’t feel any gender at all. I identify as female because it’s what I’ve always been told I am, but I don’t feel female.

Today a writer on Quora put it in a way that summarizes exactly how I feel: “cis by default with no internal sense of gender.” I experience no actual feeling of gender one way or another (which would technically put me on the nonbinary spectrum), but I have no corresponding dysmorphia about my body or pronouns.

So What Does it Mean?

Did I just come out as nonbinary? I don’t know. I’m pretty comfortable with being identified as a woman, so my friends and family are not going to have to start using new pronouns for me.

I just wanted to share this because it illustrates that gender identity is not so simple as it appears. You may have been assigned a gender at birth and truly identify with that gender. You may have been assigned a gender at birth, and resonate completely with another gender. You may not feel any gender at all.

And guess what? You’re still you. I’m still me. Jim is still Jim.

If you’re struggling with this from the outside, please, please, just relax. It’s okay. If you are not affected by it personally, that’s cool. But gender identification not some big, scary, world-changing thing you have to be afraid of. It’s just how people feel about themselves and how they want to be seen in the world.

It’s not rocket surgery, folks. It’s just treating people the way they want to be treated.

You got this.

P.S. I got Jim’s permission before using his name or story. Because outing people who have transitioned (even if you don’t use last names) is not cool. That’s their story to tell, not yours.