This post’s list of “stylized facts about men and women” left me feeling a bit nonbinary. Then I checked more carefully and — sure enough — of the thirteen items, for five of them I see myself as leaning strongly to the side described as masculine; five feminine; and for three, neither or both seemed to fit. (Both sides of the last one hit pretty hard.)
It turns out there are psychometric tests for this sort of thing, like the Bem Sex Role Inventory and the Open Sex Role Inventory. People who also find themselves not very well described by the “men” or “women” stereotypes in this post might want to look into those.
On your point about feeling non-binary, I think there’s broadly three ways men and women can adopt behaviors normally associated with the other sex.
First, just random variation that doesn’t mean anything. This would be a good explanation if someone is mostly gender conforming and just as a few quirks.
Second, some kind of gender dysphoria. This might be a good explanation if someone feels deeply that they are the wrong sex.
Third (and why I wanted to leave this comment), adaptive response to trauma. That is, a person’s life history may include some things where they were in a painful situation, possibly repeatedly, where the standard behavior for their sex was maladaptive and they identified that behavior as the source of pain, then swapped to the other sex’s behavior in that situation and it made the pain go away, so they end up looking non-conforming but would actually be more modal if they healed their trauma.
I bring this up mostly because I can think of several ways I was less male behaving in the past and am more male behaving now and mostly what happened is that I dealt with a lot of psychological stuff I was hung up on, and once the hangups were gone, my behavior flipped to be more typically male because, in mind sight, I was avoiding some male coded behaviors out of fear and thus getting pulled towards the female attractor as an alternative. This may be true of some other readers, so might be helpful to know there’s multiple possible causes of the same results from something like the inventories you link.
This post’s list of “stylized facts about men and women” left me feeling a bit nonbinary. Then I checked more carefully and — sure enough — of the thirteen items, for five of them I see myself as leaning strongly to the side described as masculine; five feminine; and for three, neither or both seemed to fit. (Both sides of the last one hit pretty hard.)
It turns out there are psychometric tests for this sort of thing, like the Bem Sex Role Inventory and the Open Sex Role Inventory. People who also find themselves not very well described by the “men” or “women” stereotypes in this post might want to look into those.
On your point about feeling non-binary, I think there’s broadly three ways men and women can adopt behaviors normally associated with the other sex.
First, just random variation that doesn’t mean anything. This would be a good explanation if someone is mostly gender conforming and just as a few quirks.
Second, some kind of gender dysphoria. This might be a good explanation if someone feels deeply that they are the wrong sex.
Third (and why I wanted to leave this comment), adaptive response to trauma. That is, a person’s life history may include some things where they were in a painful situation, possibly repeatedly, where the standard behavior for their sex was maladaptive and they identified that behavior as the source of pain, then swapped to the other sex’s behavior in that situation and it made the pain go away, so they end up looking non-conforming but would actually be more modal if they healed their trauma.
I bring this up mostly because I can think of several ways I was less male behaving in the past and am more male behaving now and mostly what happened is that I dealt with a lot of psychological stuff I was hung up on, and once the hangups were gone, my behavior flipped to be more typically male because, in mind sight, I was avoiding some male coded behaviors out of fear and thus getting pulled towards the female attractor as an alternative. This may be true of some other readers, so might be helpful to know there’s multiple possible causes of the same results from something like the inventories you link.