Continuing the discussion from I'm a victim, too!:
My icon is taken from the game Glitch, and glitchen were actually explicitly without gender. My province allowing an “X” (rather than an “M” or an “F”) on the driver’s license for gender starting next year and I’m going to be availing myself of that option. For a long time I have chosen to present myself without gender online (though I recognize I’ve chosen a “feminine” name) by simply choosing not to correct anyone in how they address me. I think having a space where I didn’t know how people were gendering me helped me figure out things about myself.
I think I alluded or outright stated above in this thread that I’m not very well rooted in my self-conception. I was resistant to the idea that gender identity was purely a question of self-identification simply because it would leave me without a gender (and I think I hurt a trans person I know by being resistant to that). But one day I said, “If I don’t know what gender I am, then I don’t know what gender I am, and that’s okay.”
Since then I’ve been much more comfortable with a lot of things in my life. I hadn’t realized the extent to which I had been play-acting being a man in my life. For example, if a woman asks a man to hold her purse (not that this happens often), the man will tend to hold the purse away from his body in a way that clearly indicates he is merely holding it. One day I was handed a purse and I decided to sling it over my shoulder, and the feeling of doing so was a bigger relief than it seems like it would be (the woman in question seemed disturbed by my violation of gender boundaries). Maybe that sounds kind of minor or dumb, I’m not sure.
I think there are a lot of ways I could interpret my gender. Maybe I’m just a man who feels so alienated from male cultural norms that he sees himself as a gender outsider. Maybe I’m a trans woman who is just taking the journey in small, digestible steps. Maybe I actually am a rare person in the middle of the bi-modal gender distribution. Maybe I’m so fundamentally uncomfortable with being an individual that answering the question of what gender I am would never feel right.
I was pretty careful to guard any comments about my own gender for a while, but I’m gotten comfortable enough that I don’t feel like I have to do that anymore. So the end result is that I don’t define myself being any gender and I genuinely don’t care what gender others think of me as or what pronouns they choose to use for me. At the same time I’m conscious of the fact that looking like a man to people I meet gets me all kinds of privileges that I wouldn’t have if I looked like I woman or if I presented myself in a way that left people confused about what gender I was (which might not even be possible with my body).