Gender role abolition is a critical part of transfeminist activism, and acceptance of people who defy gender expectations is necessary in order for trans liberation. But the responsibility for gender role abolition does not fall onto trans people. I am expected like every other woman to adhere to certain gender expectations in society. I’m only responding to the same social pressures every other woman is. Just because I’m a trans woman doesn’t mean I’m going to be at the forefront of defying gender expectations. It would be aggressive to say to a cisgender woman “you’re reinforcing gender roles by liking pink and wearing makeup”, its just tolerated against trans women because our womanhood is not considered as valid as cisgender women’s.

Being trans means everything about me is under a microscope. My body, my personality, how I talk, how I move, how I dress, how often I pass, and so on. And any of those variables can be used to dismiss me either way. Your voice can be too soft or too abrasive, either way your womanhood is invalid. You can dress too in-line with female gender roles, or you can dress too non-conforming. And either way you’re wrong and not a real woman. Those same things are used to dismiss the womanhood of cisgender women too, it’s just rightfully called misogynistic when it happens to cis women. When it happens to trans women its rarely ever called out for the misogyny that it is.

Why is there so much pressure on trans people to put themselves into one box or another?

Many reasons, some or all of which play in to any individual trans person’s experience

• Trans people are punished more harshly for not adhering to gender norms than cis people are.
• There is a long legacy of denying trans folk access to transition and health care if they don’t fit in to a binary gender. So a non binary trans person often knows that they’re not cis, and consciously or unconsciously tries to force themself to be binary, because that’s the only path available to them.
• Gender performance, gender identity and dysphoria overlap and interplay with each other. Whilst they are all distinct, when you’re trying to tease apart your own experiences with them, it’s often hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, which in turn creates confusion and pressure. For example, you talk about gender fluidity freeing us from sex based boxes and norms. I’m a trans woman, but I’m not gender fluid. My experience of gender has been consistent my whole life, even before I understood it. I have zero desire to be constrained by sex based norms, and I have little time for gendered restrictions on expression, but that doesn’t mean my gender is fluid. Yet it’s hard to distinguish those concepts sometimes…

Hi there, I’m a non-binary trans person, might be able to shed some insight here.

So, trans is a spectrum. You can be mtf, or ftm, or somewhere in between. Mtf and ftm are “binary” trans identities, because they fit into the typical gender binary. Trans women are women, trans men are men.

But there exists a whole spectrum in between there, which is where I live, which contains many different gender identities. These include genderfluid, demiboy, demigirl, agender, bigender, genderqueer, and many others. The shared characteristic is that they are not part of the binary male or female. You may also hear the umbrella term, enby (phonetically derived from NB, for Non-Binary).

These are still trans identities, because they are not cis. Cis means you identify with your assigned gender at birth (AGAB), trans means you don’t.

What is right for any given person is really up to them to know what feels right. As for why we need labels in the first place, it’s because it gives us a sense of belonging. It helps us feel seen. Like we’re not going through this alone. Not everyone will identify with labels, and that’s fine, but I’ve found that for the majority of trans people, having the labels helps them come to terms with who they really are.

When I was first figuring out that I wasn’t cis, it was very confusing. There’s a lot of information out there and it can be overwhelming. But seeing all the different labels helped me to learn how to talk about my experiences, and which genders I identified with more than others, and overall just made me feel like this was just something to figure out and think on, rather than it being something wrong with me. I knew I’d figure it out eventually, it was just a process of trial and error.

I can now proudly say I am bigenderfluid, which is a gender that I think I may have invented. But to me, it means that while my “ratio” of femme to masc presentation varies day to day, I always feel like a little bit of both. So, there’s always two, thus bigender, but it’s not firm, thus genderfluid.

Hope this helps! And I’m always happy to answer (good faith) questions, so feel free to ask any follow ups you may have.

I’m not the best at answering these kinds of questions but I’ll try to give my perspective

I sometimes feel pressured into choosing who I am and using labels, when inherently I know labels will never perfectly describe the complexities of being human. But because everything in the Western world seems to demand conformity into such restrictive labels, I honestly just am left feeling like I’m not truly being myself.

(An example is on paperwork for many things still demanding binary gender markers when my ID labels me as non-binary)

Maybe I am gender fluid, but I think I’m scared to admit to it because it’s such a change from my previous Perception of self before hormones?

Summed up, I feel there’s pressure to pick a box and stay in a box, but I really don’t feel like any box really fits me

Transfem (but not really (but kinda)) here, part of the problem is I don’t really “know” outside the binary, if that makes sense. All my life I’ve only really known the very binary standards and have been expected to uphold them. Since I’m AMAB I try to lean to a more feminine side since it is destroying the main binary I know, but I know fitting into the fem binary isn’t it for me either.

Tldr the binary is all I’ve known but I know I’m not but I don’t know how to not be binary.