Physical comfort is a term used to describe how someone is comfortable looking. One might be comfortable wearing a specific type of clothing, a specific haircut or even having a specific genitalia. Society often categorises these with concepts such as masculinity, femininity, or androgyny. It’s important to know that all of these concepts are social constructs that might vary depending on one’s society and culture.
Types of Physical Comfort
There are two types of physical comfort that someone can experience:
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Physical-Aesthetic Comfort
This is how someone is comfortable when dressing, cutting their hair, wearing certain accessories, and other aesthetic features. One might feel dysphoria if their look doesn’t fit them.
Physical-Sexual Comfort
This is how someone is comfortable with their genitalia and other sexual features like body hair, wider hips or shoulders, or their chest. One might feel comfortable with the sex they were born with, others might suffer dysphoria and try to change their body via surgeries and treatments.
Physical Comfort vs Gender Expression
One can decide to express their gender through clothes, haircuts or even their body and organs. This is called gender expression. Although, the physical comfort of a lot of people doesn’t match their gender and they prefer to look one way while they feel another way. For example, not all the trans women want a feminine look or a female body and some cisgender individuals are more comfortable wearing the opposite gender’s clothes.
Physical Comfort vs Preferences
The main difference between physical comfort and a preference is that a preference is a choice, while one can’t choose how they are more comfortable. One might choose to wear specific clothes because they prefer it that way for multiple and diverse reasons, like a performance, but others might feel dysphoria if they don’t look the way they are comfortable with.
Formation of labels
The labels referring to physical comfort are formed by the combination of the word “physical” and the corresponding gender, joined by a dash (physical-xxxxx). For example, if someone is comfortable looking slightly like a boy or a man, but not completely, they are called physical-demiboy.
Those who are comfortable looking like their assigned gender at birth are referred to as being physical-cisgender, and those who feel uncomfortable looking like their assigned gender at birth are referred to as being physical-transgender.
Flag
The physical comfort flag was designed by the wikia user 1MoreUser on August 30, 2021. The blue stripe represents men, the pink stripe represents women, the light blue and light pink stripes represent demigenders that are partially, but not completely, connected to masculinity and femininity respectively. The violet stripe represents multigenders because the violet is the mixture of blue and pink. The two yellow stripes symbolise the large number of non-binary genders. The black triangle represents the lack of gender or agenders, the grey one symbolises the partial lack of gender and the white one represents those who are gender neutral. The two stripes located at the top and bottom of the flag allude to the skin and hair, incorporating different tones to express that everyone can be part of the community regardless of their colour. The skin and hair represent two of the physical features of the human. It’s important to emphasise that these stripes are specifically located at the end of the flag to incorporate in the community all the groups represented by the stripes in between them.