Recommended reading: This is how "gender is all/only performance" is harmful »

Recommended reading: a life lived in fragments talks about the difference between gender identification and expression, and how the conflation of identity and behaviour is harmful:

youarenotyou:

[Trigger warning for cissexism, gender binarism and policing]

when you question how I can be both femme and agender, or tell me that being assigned female at birth and femme just means that I’m a woman, what you’re really saying is that there is a specific way one must perform a non-binary gender identity.

and this has little to do with how the individual feels and relates to their gender, and everything to do with how they are perceived.

THERE IS NO ONE WAY TO BE AGENDER.

if a cis man who is read as male were to wear lipstick, you’d say he was being subversive. he’s going against expectations. he’s “breaking out” of his gender role. but when a trans man is femme, you think that’s different (especially,especially if he isn’t perceived to be male). because your ideas about gender are narrowly defined. cis people are allowed (to an extent) to play with gender and express themselves, while binary trans people are expected to conform to rigid conceptions of male or female. and non-binary people don’t even factor into this equation.

so when you first start to learn about non-binary people, you may think a non-binary gender must fall in between “male” and “female” on some sort of scale. and that if a person is non-binary but perceived to be female, they need to butch it up; while if they are perceived as male, they need to be more effeminate. the overall goal of a non-binary person being: to fall in the middle. you think that’s what it feels like to be non-binary; to be in between. (hint: gender isn’t a scale)

you think because I identify as not having a gender, that somehow I must present in a way that will result in me not being gendered (impossible). you think that my goal should be to confuse people who will try to gender me based on my appearance, by not conforming to expectations for women since I was assigned to be one and am continually assigned female every day.

my femme identity means often meeting others’ expectations of how I will look and act, because I am perceived to be a woman. to you, this means I’m not authentically non-binary. but to me, the way that I present myself is the way that I feel comfortable. it is unrelated to what others expect of me. only when I started to let go of where I fit into the binary gender system did I start to make sense of myself; I don’t fit into it. but in a cissexist culture, the gender I am assigned every day is defined by how I exist in relation to that system. in other words: what looks “androgynous” is defined by the binary gender system. 

my goal when I get dressed every day as an agender person is not to avoid being gendered when I am out in the world. the validity of my gender identity does not rest upon the ability of others to correctly assign my gender. my gender expression does not determine my gender identity.

there is more than one way to challenge the oppressive gender dichotomy. if the way I describe my gender confuses you, then how can you tell me i’m not subverting anything?

Very well said!

I have observed a tendency in some circles to conflate androgynous appearance with nonbinary identity or to imply that those who are androgynous (or who take or once took hormones, or who have transgender surgery, or who use gender neutral pronouns) are ‘more successfully’ nonbinary than those who express their nonbinary gender in other ways.

We must resist any implication there is only one way to live outside the restrictive gender binary. We all have different comfort points, we are all individuals. We should not re-create the hierarchies of ‘success’ and ‘passing’ seen in other trans* communities. We should be united in the cause of gaining greater freedom to be our authentic selves, express our genders in whichever way is right for us, and celebrate the diversity of identities possible outside of the rigid binary.

Nobody ‘passes’, nobody fails, nobody left behind.

(via youarenotyou-deactivated2012022)