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document updated 14 years ago, on Sep 30, 2010
There are various axes/spectrums that an individual's gender identity can be described as being on:


Private openness — to what extent do they feel accepting of themselves to explore the ENTIRE BREADTH of gender identity in the privacy of their home?
    Some people don't need to explore much because they know who they are. In reality though, most people have a ton of internalized transphobia, and forever assume that it's not acceptable for them to explore at all, even in the privacy of their own home.

    The problem with this is that without ever exploring, they really have no idea who they are. If you only eat peanut butter sandwiches, how will you ever know if you like salmon or risotto?

Private knowledge (self knowledge) — Once someone gives themselves permission to explore, they begin the long journey of figuring out how they feel inside (how masculine, how feminine, etc). One of the most important things is to be authentic to yourself.
    Like tastes in food, their identity probably fluctuates in the short-term ("I've had eggs every day this week, I'm feeling bored with them"), and evolves over the long-term ("Twenty years ago, I thought coffee and grapefruit were way too bitter, but now I enjoy them").

    Being authentic is important because there are always others who want to push you in one direction or another. Sometimes people say "Oh, I see you're trying more unusual foods. That's cool, but the people I hang out with won't think you're really cool unless you enjoy sushi and fried scorpion." The proper response is to not feel pressured to pretend to enjoy things you don't really enjoy. On the flip side, many people will think you're uncool if you eat too many strange things. Do it for yourself, not them.

Public openness — to what extent someone permits themselves to go out in public dressed in atypical ways
    Unlike in private, it's not strictly necessary to explore the entire breadth of gender identities in public. Being authentic may be more important.
Public knowledge (discursive knowledge) — to what extent is someone familiar responding to different ways they could be "read" — how involved are they in the "conversation" that defines and gives meaning to gender
    Even if you have full self-knowledge, there are still two aspects to gender identity: how you feel at a given moment, and how other people read you (the conclusions they draw about what sort of identity you're trying to convey). It's important to realize how big of a gulf there can be between the two: effeminate men and butch women are usually read as gay, but many people don't realize that this is an artificial cultural convention, or that it can mean more than one thing (gender variance instead of sexual orientation).

    Because there's such a large gap between the two, people often end up outwardly conveying a slightly different persona than how they honestly feel inside. Maybe that means their outward persona is a little more extreme ("I'm biologically female, so cisgender people have a tendency to discount my masculinity, so I have to present as more masculine than I would in queer spaces in order to get people to read me the way I feel inside"). Or maybe it even means they like the ambiguity and enjoy being read multiple ways simultaneously, or they enjoy genderfucking.

Gender abolitionism or not? — To what extent do you view your gender (and the gender of others) as irrelevant? On the flip side, to what extent do you view your gender (and the gender of people you're attracted to) as being important to your (or their) identity?
    In some genderqueer spaces, the genderqueer ideal is that of gender-blindness — that gender has been considered far too important for far too long in everything from backpacks to how medical staff are interacted with, and that we should ignore it completely. Other transgender people view their gender as more important to their identity, especially those who felt transgender from the very beginning.

    (To some extent, I doubt that many people are truly genderblind. Rather, I think it's similar to the way that atheists relate to clerics in D&D games — they recognize that religion has a certain amount of cultural currency (ie. "it's important to others, but not to me"), so they use the symbology for mockery, or as a foil to express other things)

    Note: Androgyny is NOT the same as abolitionism. People may strongly identify as androgynous, and feel like that identity is important to them, while others may present androgynous, but think that their particular blend of masculinity/femininity is of relatively little importance.

    Gender fluidity is also not the same as abolitionism. Some people may feel fluid because their internal identity varies quite a bit (eg. situationally). Others may present as very fluid as a way to dispel other people's notion that their own gender has any significance.