u/logielle

I sometimes see some people saying that they'd like to be more masculine (as a woman) or more feminine (as a man), and may even think of themselves as such, questioning if they're "really" GNC because their current presentation doesn't quite match that. Similarly, I've seen some men label themselves androgynous instead of feminine, not because they genuinely want to be more androgynous, but because they fear discrimination and harassment if they were to present more feminine. This is not to say that androgyny is somehow "less GNC" by itself, just that androgyny as compromise or proxy and androgyny for its own sake can be being quite different.

In a society that expects everyone to be either a woman or a man, and every woman to be conventionally feminine and every man to be conventionally masculine, many of us are unsurprisingly constrained by external circumstances and pressures and may find it harder to express our true selves. It's not that I've personally let those constrains deter me from expressing myself more freely, and to some extent, it's not really even practical for me to suppress every aspect of my gender non-conformity (e.g. deeply ingrained mannerisms). However, the very fact that I see the consequences first-hand, almost every day, makes it almost obvious for me as to why someone might make their gender non-conformity less visible, whether as an instinctive response to social pressure and discrimination, strategy, being in earlier stages of exploration, uncertainty, etc.

I do believe that whenever possible, it's best to not suppress yourself within a repressive status quo. At the same time, I don't think everyone's situation is the same, nor that the process of coming out would be identical for everyone. It's ultimately up to you to explore yourself and decide what and how much of it you wish to express to the world.

In any case, I don't think an appearance of "more" conformity means you are "less" non-conforming. You're not "less" GNC simply because you fear assault if you wear "women's clothes" in public. You're not "less" GNC simply because you're a teenage girl and your parents won't buy you that suit nor let you cut your hair short. The very fact that you might want those things, especially if persistently, might mean that your relationship to your gender doesn't quite conform to societies norms... wait... not conforming to gender norms... isn't that just gender non-conforming? Yes.

There's a difference between doing GNC things and being GNC, and so it's possible to be a feminine man who is conscripted into the military and is forced to present more masculine, while still being a feminine man, because that presentation isn't telling you that much about the person, just their circumstances. Ultimately, my point is that while more mainstream discussions of GNC are often about external presentation, it'd mischaracterize many of our experiences to assume that such presentation exists in a vacuum. You shouldn't have to wait for ideal circumstances before being able to recognize your unique relationship to your gender.

I often have this experience with mainstraights (and some queer people) wherein my gender non-conformity and GNC straight orientation as a man is viewed as a near-unique exception to how men tend to be and how they tend to relate to women. They do not imagine that similarly GNC straight men might exist, nor that there might be women who could possibly be compatible with me.

This makes sense from their perspective. When they hear “GNC people,” their mind first goes to tomboys and femboys. Their threshold for something being GNC can also be quite low, even though some femboys are sometimes portrayed as literally passing as feminine women, though not usually in a way most feminine women are portrayed. Even for these femboys, people might imagine they’ll “grow out of it” or that it only exists in private or sexual contexts, not as an authentic way to exist in the world. People might concede that young tomboys may be tomboys even in public and in a more persistent way, but it’s still often seen as a phase. Otherwise, they might think of it only in terms of an adjective, as in you do GNC things rather than being GNC. A literal dudebro crying at an ad is GNC enough to some people. When meant relationally and/or in terms of orientation in a straight/straight-adjacent context, they imagine something like a masc softboy x fem girlboss dynamic. The prevalent cultural imagination of GNC, whether meant as identity, internal and external experience, or as orientation tends to be quite limited.

This narrow imagination is usually due to a centering of patriarchal and cisheteronormative ideals, combined with exposure to different kinds of people and lack thereof. The former is not completely their fault, as it’s constantly drilled into all of us in one way or another. However, they retain a responsibility to deconstruct their individual biases stemming from it.

Some people with exposure to queer culture may be more willing to acknowledge or even celebrate cis GNC gay/mspec people, whether they be femme gay men, butch lesbians or something else. This is not too surprising as gender non-conformity has been an important part of queer history and has continued to gain more and more visibility through queer people. As almost anyone here would know, a large portion of people also have stereotypical associations between homosexuality and gender non-conformity. This kind of recognition (and stereotyping that comes with it) does not always hold when it comes to GNC trans people, as they can face notable friction even within trans communities. Trans people are often seen as either conforming to the norms of their gender “too much,” or as “failing” to do so. In both cases, the prevalent imagination paints them as having a gender conforming way of relating to their gender, whether in terms of hyper-conformity or failure.

The mainstream does not really do much justice to cis GNC gay/mspec people either, and that is a whole topic of its own. My point is that their existence is acknowledged more often. This is not a point about who is more or less oppressed, but who is more visible and seen as belonging to a group of their own. In my experience, even when people acknowledge my gender non-conformity and see how it differs from their otherwise narrow imagination, they do not acknowledge that there might be other people like me, that there are groups of people of the “opposite” gender also oriented toward people of my gender who are like me, or that this kind of non-heteronormative hetero-orientation is a “thing” at all.

Especially when it comes to mainstraights, I have a sense that this kind of selectively narrower imagination sometimes comes from group identification. More specifically, that it might come from a desire to maintain a feeling of normality and defaultism as a straight person. This feeling of normality is often derived from gender conformity, heteronormative relationships and life trajectories. When a straight person is gender non-conforming and non-heteronormative, acknowledging them as belonging to a potentially valid subgroup of straight people of their own can disrupt that sense of normality as a straight person. On the other hand, it can be easier to file cis GNC gay/mspec people as "other." This is definitely not the whole story, but it might be one mechanism that specifically targets GNC straight or straight-passing people rather than just GNC people generally, or being one that affects GNC cishet people as collateral damage from homophobia and transphobia.

Unfortunately, due to said lack of collective imagination, many people who might be genuinely GNC straight may themselves never realize that what they experience is a “thing” of its own, rather than just an unique exception.

People often come to have an implicit mental taxonomy that looks roughly like this: cis and cis-passing straight people (mostly gender conforming people live here), cis gay people (the highly GNC people mainly live here), trans people (only gender conforming people live here).

When mainstraights (and some mainstream queer people) encounter people like me, they resolve their cognitive dissonance by treating us like an exception to their taxonomy, like a map that doesn’t represent one tiny Island that no one will pass through, rather than evidence that the taxonomy warrants an update, like discovering that said tiny island is just one of the many like it naturally organized in a strange pattern hiding something deeper.