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So um, gender neutral?
13 years ago
General
Since FA's a relatively friendly venue (and I seriously doubt that my mother would be trolling FA looking for me, haha), I'd sort of like to talk about myself a bit.
Since breaking free of the ideology I was brought up with, I've recently found myself free to explore who I am and learning to accept my own feelings about myself and who I WANT to be. Over the last couple of years I've discovered that I have a gender-neutral identity. Call it whatever, non-binary, neutral, genderqueer, "Just Me"... Either way the binary genders just don't fit me properly.
I don't feel like I can fully come out with this - not with my family, and not in any online places where they are likely to discover it easily. I have a pretty good (although geographically distant) relationship with them and I want to keep it that way if possible. It weighs on me a bit, which I guess is why I want to talk about it where I can.
Anyway, yeah. That's me. I don't have a preferred pronoun at the moment, because I'm new to this and it's not that important to me right now. I'm still in the figuring-things-out stages. I do want to connect and find support where possible, which is why I'm posting here. If anybody else out there wants to talk about this stuff I'd appreciate it!
Thanks for reading.
Since breaking free of the ideology I was brought up with, I've recently found myself free to explore who I am and learning to accept my own feelings about myself and who I WANT to be. Over the last couple of years I've discovered that I have a gender-neutral identity. Call it whatever, non-binary, neutral, genderqueer, "Just Me"... Either way the binary genders just don't fit me properly.
I don't feel like I can fully come out with this - not with my family, and not in any online places where they are likely to discover it easily. I have a pretty good (although geographically distant) relationship with them and I want to keep it that way if possible. It weighs on me a bit, which I guess is why I want to talk about it where I can.
Anyway, yeah. That's me. I don't have a preferred pronoun at the moment, because I'm new to this and it's not that important to me right now. I'm still in the figuring-things-out stages. I do want to connect and find support where possible, which is why I'm posting here. If anybody else out there wants to talk about this stuff I'd appreciate it!
Thanks for reading.
And I know how it's rather hard to come out in places less accepting, much less in real life to family.
If you ever wanna talk about it, I can always lend a fellow ear.
And look at the couple other people who commented! See you can find a group pretty easily in that regards here on FA.
So yeah like I said, we can always chat about it if you like.
It's taken me a good couple of years of looking at myself to figure everything out, and if I was to give any advice it would be this: Don't rush things. If you think you're absolutely sure about something, wait a few months and see if you change your mind. There was a point in time I was sure I was FtM, but then I realized I actually just hated how society treated me for being female bodied. I wanted to tell my family even, but I didn't, I waited a few months, and now I'm glad I did.
If you ever wanna talk gender, I'm up for it. It's one of the few things I'm genuinely passionate about.
With gender though, I remember as a teenager being unhappy about being a girl, but when I thought about it I didn't want to be a boy, either. I just wanted to DO the things that boys did (and also not have periods, lol). I became a feminist later on, and through that I started reading about transgender issues (I regret that I used to be quite transphobic because I didn't understand it at all). I've spent a lot of time struggling with whether my gender issues were due to "internalized sexism" or body hate or just plain rebelliousness, but in the end I decided that it was better to just accept positive feelings and reject negative ones about myself - and, well, I feel positive when I think of myself as neutral, because that's just who I am on the inside. I had come to terms with being a non-gender-performing female (sort of), but this just feels... better somehow.
Thanks so much for responding, I appreciate it!
But, really it is just one more manifestation of People are Weird. Thank god for that. Because otherwise life would be so boring.
It's a thing where you really have to try and understand how it hurts the person you're misgendering, though. If I was identifying as a guy it would deeply sting every time someone insisted on calling me a girl even after I'd told them how I felt about myself.
I'm still educating myself on this stuff. Lots has been written online about it, so there's really no excuse nowadays for anybody to be ignorant once they've reached the point of WANTING to understand it.
People sometimes call me "sir" - usually waiters and flight attendants - but I don't really mind. XD