The long and short of it is that I looked at and studied and thought about gender and gender roles so much and for so long that they lost all meaning to me. In exactly the same way that if you say a word too many times in a row, it ceases sounding like a real word at all. It’s called semantic satiation and it ruined my perception of gender for ever. I’ve examined every piece from tone of voice to gait to language patterns and I can’t work out how to reconfigure the elements into ‘male’ and ‘female’ any more. They all fit in to every box, and I get genuinely confused when a cis person tries to
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