ng_moonmoth | Layers of Gender

Once I concluded that I should no longer choose to warp myself to fit within the constraints of my presumed normative gender, I did a lot more reading. The more I read about “gender”, and what people referred to by it, the more complicated it all got.

From what I can tell, that's just the nature of the thing. There's even an all too common exchange: “What's your gender?” “It's complicated.” And even the reading I was doing that recognized the complicated nature of the topic wasn't doing much to give me an idea of how to deal with the complications.

To me, this lack of consensus and cohesion suggests to me that how to do this is necessarily personal: each person is responsible for defining their own framework, checking to see how their framework aligns with available knowledge, and using the framework as they organize what they learn. Because much of what I've been reading indicates that gender itself is a personal matter, this makes a good deal of sense to me.

The framework I have decided to place my gender observations and knowledge on is a layered structure, where each layer is defined by who is interpreting things. So far, I have three layers:

Identity, which is personal and private: my gender identity is what I say it is.

Expression, which is also personal, but public: my gender expression is how I present myself, and what I say and do to communicate my gender identity to others.

Perception, which is cultural: other people perceive my gender identity by evaluating my expression in their own cultural and personal frameworks.

The organization and terminology this structure generates for me is consistent with what I have been reading, so I'm content to use it for now. I'll be setting down what I know now about each layer, how it affects me, and what I'm doing, in subsequent posts.