Francxs here

[francxs]

Hi all. I’m Francxs. I’m 60, genderqueer and in a happy long term monogamous relationship where I can be myself (not a foregone conclusion for someone my age!). Pronouns aren’t important to me, but if I were twenty I’m sure mine would be they/them.

I’m so glad to read the sensitive and balanced introductions to the board. I’ve been on similar boards for years which offer different kinds of things but have been feeling like I need to reach out in different directions.

My profession means I work with young adults and keeps me current in thinking about gender and sexuality. I think this makes me “younger” in outlook than most folks my age. Most folks on the other groups are kind of mystified by non-binary or gender-queer presentation/identity which has pretty much always made sense to me. There is also too much trolling for sex or whatever. Not my scene.

I look forward to this. I’m happy to be the senior citizen in a younger group but am curious about the age spread of this group.

[Trinity]

Jul 21, 2023 14:12:55 GMT 8 francxs said:

Hi all. I’m Francxs. I’m 60, genderqueer and in a happy long term monogamous relationship where I can be myself (not a foregone conclusion for someone my age!). Pronouns aren’t important to me, but if I were twenty I’m sure mine would be they/them.

I’m so glad to read the sensitive and balanced introductions to the board. I’ve been on similar boards for years which offer different kinds of things but have been feeling like I need to reach out in different directions.

My profession means I work with young adults and keeps me current in thinking about gender and sexuality. I think this makes me “younger” in outlook than most folks my age. Most folks on the other groups are kind of mystified by non-binary or gender-queer presentation/identity which has pretty much always made sense to me. There is also too much trolling for sex or whatever. Not my scene.

I look forward to this. I’m happy to be the senior citizen in a younger group but am curious about the age spread of this group.

At least two of us are in our 60's.

I'm not on here much, detransitioned except for physically.  I was also able to keep my marriage, with a lot of help.  Late transition was tough and I had swung hard to the mtf side of it.  I live as a stealth male, mostly, but also am out as being nonbinary.

I have conflicted feelings about it all in a number of ways now.  But I don't think it could have gone any other way with me.

Welcome to the forum.  Hope it works out for you.

No trolls here.  They get eaten....

[francxs]

Jul 22, 2023 1:10:00 GMT 8 Trinity said:

Jul 21, 2023 14:12:55 GMT 8 francxs said:

Hi all. I’m Francxs. I’m 60, genderqueer and in a happy long term monogamous relationship where I can be myself (not a foregone conclusion for someone my age!). Pronouns aren’t important to me, but if I were twenty I’m sure mine would be they/them.

I’m so glad to read the sensitive and balanced introductions to the board. I’ve been on similar boards for years which offer different kinds of things but have been feeling like I need to reach out in different directions.

My profession means I work with young adults and keeps me current in thinking about gender and sexuality. I think this makes me “younger” in outlook than most folks my age. Most folks on the other groups are kind of mystified by non-binary or gender-queer presentation/identity which has pretty much always made sense to me. There is also too much trolling for sex or whatever. Not my scene.

I look forward to this. I’m happy to be the senior citizen in a younger group but am curious about the age spread of this group.

At least two of us are in our 60's.

I'm not on here much, detransitioned except for physically.  I was also able to keep my marriage, with a lot of help.  Late transition was tough and I had swung hard to the mtf side of it.  I live as a stealth male, mostly, but also am out as being nonbinary.

I have conflicted feelings about it all in a number of ways now.  But I don't think it could have gone any other way with me.

Welcome to the forum.  Hope it works out for you.

No trolls here.  They get eaten....

Sounds like a long road. And yes. I think these thing have a logic of their own. I often wonder if my identity is more as a bit of a wanderer or explorer than any thing stable. I’m pretty mercurial. Thanks for the welcome. I’m glad the trolls get eaten. Best thing to do with trolls.

[Ativan Prescribed]

I'm very early 70's myself and I won't let trolls take a thing from this forum, many have tried and it isn't hard to just eliminate them, we have enough to deal with in life without the narrow-mindedness of trolls.
One thing is that the forum is pretty small so really trolling it is a waste of trolls time and effort, the other is members are very aware and report any trolling right away.
People looking and asking for sex is not a thing here, they will be warned once for blatant requests and if they want to strike up a personal message thing they can, but one complaint will be the last complaint.
Again, members have their lives to live and using the forum for the wrong reasons will in general get you nowhere with members. Plenty of other places for those things.

[Yuki]

I’m a little younger, but still not in my 20’s anymore lol. I’m mid-30s.

I’m not always on here though, depends on my energy levels and how distracted I get. But yeah anyone trying to be weird doesn’t get very far here.

[Leena]

I'm in my late 40s. I don't post as often as I used to because I ended up more binary aligned and living as a somewhat stealth trans woman at work and my daily life. I wasn't really thinking it would work out like it has, but I'm not unhappy about it.

[francxs]

Jul 25, 2023 10:49:23 GMT 8 Yuki said:

I’m a little younger, but still not in my 20’s anymore lol. I’m mid-30s.

I’m not always on here though, depends on my energy levels and how distracted I get. But yeah anyone trying to be weird doesn’t get very far here.

Thanks for the note. Glad to hear about that.

[francxs]

Jul 25, 2023 12:50:50 GMT 8 Leena said:

I'm in my late 40s. I don't post as often as I used to because I ended up more binary aligned and living as a somewhat stealth trans woman at work and my daily life. I wasn't really thinking it would work out like it has, but I'm not unhappy about it.

Interesting. If you don’t mind me asking, what do you mean by stealth? Thanks for the note back btw.

[Leena]

What I mean by stealth is most people in my life don't know I'm trans. They just see me as a woman.

That is, people who didn't know me before I transitioned. Obviously my family knows, and they unfortunately seem to still see me as a man.

[Ativan Prescribed]

Jul 25, 2023 12:50:50 GMT 8 Leena said:

I'm in my late 40s. I don't post as often as I used to because I ended up more binary aligned and living as a somewhat stealth trans woman at work and my daily life. I wasn't really thinking it would work out like it has, but I'm not unhappy about it.

You may be more binary aligned, but you have the same grasp on NB as most NB have.
Life is the accumulation of experiences and knowing those experiences and having that ability to navigate through them is what makes a person, not arbitrary labels.
We choose our directions and we choose to change directions, it's the ability to adapt that makes us what we are, to learn from what we accumulate in any given direction.
It's kinda like saying where you are from, it isn't where you live at the moment, it's everywhere you have lived.
It's more than a resume', simply listing jobs you've had and experience based on those alone are to the point, but far from the point.
You've been more than was that and are now this, there is a lot of experience making the transition that applies to transgender but also NB life and living.
While you do seem to have always been on the path to a binary gender, you also have been a valuable source to this forum and your experiences are as valuable to NB as they are to transgender.

[francxs]

Jul 26, 2023 10:46:50 GMT 8 Ativan Prescribed said:

Jul 25, 2023 12:50:50 GMT 8 Leena said:

I'm in my late 40s. I don't post as often as I used to because I ended up more binary aligned and living as a somewhat stealth trans woman at work and my daily life. I wasn't really thinking it would work out like it has, but I'm not unhappy about it.

You may be more binary aligned, but you have the same grasp on NB as most NB have.
Life is the accumulation of experiences and knowing those experiences and having that ability to navigate through them is what makes a person, not arbitrary labels.
We choose our directions and we choose to change directions, it's the ability to adapt that makes us what we are, to learn from what we accumulate in any given direction.
It's kinda like saying where you are from, it isn't where you live at the moment, it's everywhere you have lived.
It's more than a resume', simply listing jobs you've had and experience based on those alone are to the point, but far from the point.
You've been more than was that and are now this, there is a lot of experience making the transition that applies to transgender but also NB life and living.
While you do seem to have always been on the path to a binary gender, you also have been a valuable source to this forum and your experiences are as valuable to NB as they are to transgender.

There is a lot of wisdom in that (although I might also say it confirms all my prejudices!). In some ways I've been pretty static in my position at the middle of most spectra (bi-sexual, tending to hetero-romantic--but only tending-- and with a nebulous gender identity). But like most of us, I've had to try on various ways of being (and the attached labels) to figure myself out. Certainly, getting older has made a difference by taking the "edge" off or reducing the urgency that testosterone provokes.

I'm curious about the way in which the labels actually inform how we think about ourselves. I am thinking of how writing or talking is often part of a thinking process. You have to externalize to reflect on it. Alternatively, the the lack of a concept (such as the lack of a notion of a gay, lesbian, or trans identity prior to the 18th century) means that people (who may or may not have been any different in the way they felt) thought about themselves in different ways.

I am entirely sympathetic to the current concern with pronouns, and am sure that were I young like my queer kids, I would embrace it like they do. But I can't say it's something I feel. On the other hand, it's making me think and re-evaluate.

[Leena]

It isn't just because of how I label myself that I don't post as much, it's also that I had a lot more to write about when I was transitioning. My life is currently kind of boring.

For a long time, I labeled myself as genderfluid though I wasn't really sure until strangers started seeing me as a woman. There was a really awkward period when I'd be shopping and some people would call me sir, some people would call me ma'am, and some people would go out of their way to not gender me at all. What it really comes down to is that I pretty strongly do not want to be called sir, and while I am reluctantly OK with not being gendered it became clear that wasn't what I wanted either.

I'm not sure how we think of ourselves is all that important. I have been able to convince myself that I was a guy quite a few times. It never lasted, probably because it wasn't how I really wanted others to see me, though it made life easier.

[Ativan Prescribed]

I've been so many different people in my life, none of them seemed important at the time but later it turned out I was and made a difference.
I've never put a lot of thought into my gender, its always been a go with the flow kinda thing, it could flip on a minute it seemed like and still does.
A lot of life is playing the part as it comes up, not insisting that others recognize me as anything specific, if they think of me as this way I often react that way.
But I have spent my life just watching others and listen to how they think and and I'm super sensitize to body movements and how peoples body language is.
I have a tendency to mirror others a lot of the time, I really don't know why but its interesting to me if its different from the usual me, I learn a lot from others that way.
I've mostly never cared that much about what others saw in me and I have wondered at times what they do see but its their interpretation and the bottom line is its them and not me.
I do fit in with most people and groups but I have a more introverted outlook and usually wait for others to say what they want to say to me especially about me.
It just seems like a never ending journey and adventure and I get bored easily and wander from group to group and end up doing things I never really considered and that makes life fun.
The biggest problem I have now is simply getting old and living within my SS benefits, its enough and I can still pick up new things to do that interest me and I certainly don't have to be anywhere for anyone so things are pretty wide open.
But I've been so many things and so many places that there is nobody who really knows me totally and that suits me just fine, I had done and been so many things and places that by the time I was thirty I had done more than most people will do in a lifetime.
I've never figured out how to go backwards into the past so its a constant of moving into the future and to stand still is really a nothing existence so forward it is, every day is another chance that it will be the last so tomorrow is always what I look forward to, times can be rough but even then there is a lesson in that and only once did I ever actually give up and that low time in my life taught me a lot even just the same.
There is no honest way to explain it.

[Leena]

I feel like I lived many different lives, and felt like I was living dual lives at times earlier in my transition. Most of my problems now don't really have anything to do with gender. I sometimes wish I had done a few things differently, but I guess they worked out the way they did.

[Ativan Prescribed]

I hear people say all the time that they wished they had done things differently and I wonder why they didn't unless they didn't know it at the time.
Name one person who has had a life agenda that worked the way they wanted...
It's easy to make the claim that things worked right and that life was easy, but it's easy to just be full of your own BS as well.
We learn from our mistakes far more than we learn from the things that happened to work out right.
Learn to laugh at the mistakes and learn to pick yourself up and brush off the dirt of criticism, ignore the spectators in life and move ahead, move ahead of them if need be.
I really liked having the opportunity to work in R&D and was given a lot of latitude to make mistakes and I did, most of them I was never sure of the outcome and it's in the most off of those that I learned the most.
One corporate policy had tied everything to going in one direction until they wanted something that defied that policy, the end result was the development of something so profound it became a national security interest for the next several years.
It was just one simple change in the policy that resulted in the ability to invent and develop something that virtually affected every single person on the planet and still does, life would be very different otherwise.
It spawned so many new things and technologies it's mind boggling, and even though I had nothing to do with any of those, it was just one simple thing that changed the course over the years.
It was the simple action of taking the research done previously and taking several of those things and combining them into something new, all technology is done this way, even Einstein did this, he simply elaborated on what had already been done.
Granted he did have a complicated mind that had the ability to take abstract thoughts and make them a reality, but abstract is how everything is viewed until it can be told in a way that others understand.
It left me with the same idea that there are things in our lives that the one simple thing we did, the one simple change we made for ourselves, the one choice at the right time or even just thereabouts changed the course of our own paths.
Most of us can take the time and wish we had done this or that at some time in the past and things would be very different, but not that many people recognize the one thing that changed everything for us, it's in our nature to retrospect our mistakes.
But its in the course of our paths that just one simple thing changed that course and here we are, never really thinking it was that one thing that propels us forward and to a changed life.
Change is good, staying the course can be but if it is going stale, look for that thing that will brighten or freshen up stuff and maybe, just maybe give us the ability to move forward in a better direction, standing still and hoping for the best hardly ever works out that way, its eyes wide open, mind ready to accept something new, it has little to do with keeping the pulse on the world around us, it's about keeping track and having the foresight to see our paths evolving into the unexpected.
We get used to doubting our abilities but we always have the ability to process changes and its in those changes that despite having some doubts about them that greases the wheels of change that we are riding on all the time.
Be the kid that takes his bike over that homemade ramp for the first time, make the leap, never give up or be afraid to do just that, it's the thrill of living that makes us grow and love life.
It took one person to take a piece of fire into a cave that made it possible for art on the walls to be preserved for others to see, that gave others ideas to expand on what someone already knew, it took a long round rock rolling down a hillside to spawn the idea of a wheel, it changed the course.
It wasn't the wheel itself so much as the ability to see that an axel was all it needed to be truly useful.
Life is talking to us all the time, it's a matter of listening and putting the pieces together, it might come as a fit of sudden knowledge or it might take some time to see that one last piece before we can put the puzzle together.
You don't have to live in the past to see that the path has led us to here.
You don't have to know the future to know that the path will take us there.