I think I have a somewhat unique perspective on this because I actually transitioned to female for a few years and later detransitioned.

I kinda came to a similar conclusion as you did. Living as a woman, going by she/her and a female name didn’t make me feel any different once it had become normal. Not any better or worse. Once I realized that, I made the decision to just go back to being a cishet guy because it was infinitely easier and required less effort.

I still like a lot of feminine stuff, I still have a bunch of women’s clothes that I wear sometimes, but not because I wanna feel girly but rather because they’re in my closet and I don’t care about my gender presentation anymore. I don’t identify as non-binary, at this point it’s more like “okay, whatever, male I guess, who cares”.

This is not meant to sound dismissive towards people who do care a lot about their gender, who make their gender identity their whole thing, uncritical support to all of you. But for me, I’ve gone through my journey of self-discovery and I’ve come to the conclusion that how others (or even myself) perceive my own gender just doesn’t make much of a difference to me.

I’m cis and het as far as I know, but tbh I’ve really never felt strongly about my gender and if I was nonbinary or something I don’t think I’d change my presentation at all, as I barely “present” in the first place. Is wearing hoodies and sweatpants when I’m not working masculine? I feel like it’s just lazy.

I’m not an expert on this by any means but I think it’s helpful to consider gender on a spectrum.

There are men who are hypermasculine whose gender identity is extremely important to them, there are men whose gender identity is largely incidental to them, and there are shades of grey between those two points of being a man.

Obviously beyond that point you have non-binary folks but I don’t think there’s one certain line that you can point to and say “Aha! They’ve crossed over the boundary into being non-binary!” and instead I think it’s more like as the importance of your gender identity decreases your nonbinary-ness increases.

You might be a man who is ambivalent about being a man or you might be a non-binary person who leans towards masculinity by virtue of your own biology or your upbringing or how you feel internally (or a combination of more than one of these factors). How you define it is completely up to you.

I feel unsure about my gender.

Perhaps I’m non-binary?

I feel androgynous, in a way.

you could be agender and just coasting on what you’re used to in a society that affirms what you were assigned. there’s probably a lot of that since cis people are rarely forced to introspect.

on some level it’s kinda arbitrary for the rest of us whether you’re actually cis or just go along to get along and don’t care in your heart of hearts. for me that means understanding how i appear to society and not trying to date lesbians.

Cis straight guy here, I feel somewhat the same. Being male is easiest and most affirming for me right now, and I wouldn’t mind if people perceived me as non-binary or agender, but being female sounds like it would be a lot of work and less affirming for me. I’ve been working on getting in better shape lately, and having more strength and muscle definition feels good, not sure if that counts as affirming my male identity but it’s the closest thing I could think of.

In the last few years I’ve known a few people who transitioned, and it made me question my gender a little bit. Maybe I was just jealous because they had figured out their problem and had a clear path to solving it, whereas I’m still trying to figure out my own mental health issues (not to say that being trans is a mental illness, or to minimize the complex issues regarding transitioning, this was just my knee-jerk response). Seeing people who cared enough about their gender to go through the trouble of transition also highlighted to me how little I care about my gender. Or maybe I’m just taking it for granted because being a cis straight white guy is like playing the game on easy mode, and I haven’t been forced to think about it. My personal conclusion was that if I woke up tomorrow as physically female, and/or people perceived me as female, I wouldn’t live my life any differently. I probably wouldn’t dress in a feminine way, wear makeup, shave body hair, etc., but I also probably wouldn’t care too much about pronouns or medically transition to be more male.

Not sure if I’m using the right language, feel free to correct me if I said anything wrong. Maybe I need to read Trans Liberation and explore this further.

I enjoy and feel comfortable with my masculinity and cis man identity. However, I feel like if I woke up a woman one day, I’d be pretty cool with it.

I feel very similarly to you. I relate at least somewhat to everything you describe. I’m ostensibly cis, but I rarely think of myself as having a ‘gender’, and I struggle on a personal level to relate to how others think about gender is such strong ways. (And just to be clear, I love and support my trans comrades all the way ).

When I’ve described this to others in the past, people have just labelled me as ‘sort of trans’ or ‘agender’ or ‘non-binary’, and being assigned these labels makes me a little uneasy, but I understand the motivation (and like you, I’m also wary that I may be speaking from a position of relative privilege). Personally, I’ve reached the point where I basically present and describe myself as ‘male’ because it’s the easiest thing to do, but as far as a gender identity goes, I don’t believe I have one.

I liken it to not really identifying with a name (mandatory mention of P.U.F. <3), you might let others call you by a name for practical reasons, and you can easily call others by their names, but you wouldn’t really see yourself as ‘having a name’. I let people label me with a gender because it makes life easy, but I don’t feel attached to it in any meaningful way. As a social construct I just don’t find it useful to view myself through that lens, though I very much understand that others do.

I guess. Like, I had a gender panic last year. After some deep thought I realized my assigned gender is well and good, just fits a little more loosely than I previously realized. Finding more “gender-neutral” wear has made my brain simmer down. (Tldr: Gender is a spectrum and there’s nothing odd about cis and a little loose with it.)

I’m also a cis man and I feel almost exactly the same way you do. The only difference is I don’t mind people referring to me by they/them at all. I’ve also wondered this just because this site has such a high number of enbies and discusses it often. Honestly, at times it is hard for me to understand the intensity of people’s feelings on their gender, but I want to respect everyone regardless.

Have you ever tried to actively experiment with your gender expression? Because there can be a big gap between thinking about it and experiencing it. You might find that you feel more comfortable/discomfort with certain gendered expressions. Alternatively you might be right and are just agendered, which is a thing you can be too.

In 👇 this 🏠house, ❗modes of expression exist 🦅independent of ➕ and 🕛 prior to 📊 schemes of categorization, and we will make ❌😠🚫 no 🏋️‍♀️efforts to🔀 modify our behavior to⛑️ rescue the 🔬 empirical ✔️ adequacy of such 📊 schemes.

There’s no like metaphysical essence of nonbinariness. This sounds like you being nonbinary if being nonbinary vibes with you.

Definitely yes. I like the term “gender ambivalent” to describe this feeling, but I would hardly class someone whose identity is “conforming to what society assigns me because it’s easy” as an lgbt identity.

As to whether it’s an NB thing, I would ask: do you ever feel female, or do you feel equally ambivalent about the prospect of being female as your current fate of being male?

There’s a spectrum (more of a phase space really), and there are also attractors on that spectrum. Think of it like electron clouds (trying to simplify gender by comparing it to probabilistic quantum states might not be the best way, but still). Most people are going to male/female/bigender/genderfluid/agender etc. But some will fit those categories more closely and some might not at all.

Others might move between them, either through self knowledge or because gender is an amorphous collection of physical, social, mental and cultural properties that can change.

This doesn’t make your identified gender any less real or less important, any more than something like the economy, which is also an amorphous collection of the above, is unimportant.