Fair warning - this journal is just going to be a stream of thought with little to no decent ordering.


A part of me wishes that I'd never been thrust into awareness of multitudes upon multitudes of different genders, because it feels like I'm searching for a specific needle in a very large stack of similar but not identical needles. With so many labels floating around out there, I've been putting a lot of energy into trying to find the right one, and it's...sort of distressing. Like, I like it when things can be placed and sorted into neat, discrete categories - there's a reason that I plan on pursuing systematics, taxonomy, and phylogeny as a career - but gender in general and my own gender in particular refuses to fit into a box.

Right now, I think that my gender is best described by "neutrois", since because I have never felt like a man and have never liked the pressures and expectations society puts on women, my internal experience of gender is kind of neutral. At the same time, though, I have a hard time reconciling my oscillation between more feminine behavior (the times when I feel most comfortable in skirts and dresses, when I walk with an extra sashay) and more masculine behavior (when I feel most comfortable in dress pants and button-downs and abhor "women's" things) with the label of "neutrois". Genderfluid as an identity doesn't quite feel right to me, though, and genderqueer is so broad as to be dissatisfying. Just saying "nonbinary" feels wrong, too, largely due to the fact that my interactions offline with people who identify as such has been almost 100% negative, and I associate the term with them and those memories of them.

Another sort of internal conundrum that I've been wrestling with is whether or not the fact that I don't quite fit into the category of "cisgender" makes me any kind of transgender. I mean, I feel fine using she/her, the pronouns associated with my sex. I don't feel any sort of discomfort with my female body, though I kind of want to give chest binding a try for the aesthetics. There was - is - no intense feeling that the gender I was thrust into by virtue of my being female is somehow the "wrong" one. I don't want to change my name (though the fact that my birth name is gender neutral probably plays a big role in that). I don't want to "transition" because I don't have anything to transition to. Basically, my experiences don't line up with what I feel it means to be any kind of trans.

Questioning my gender is also making me question my sexuality as well, because I don't feel that it makes sense to say that my gender identity is neutrois or whatever and then say that my sexual orientation is bisexual; it doesn't feel like the two dovetail very well.

I don't know. My gender has been occupying my thoughts a lot lately, and it's been bothering me a lot, not least because I don't really have a lot of people to talk through it with - my mom believes firmly that there are only two genders, and I feel as though I'm pestering my friends whenever I bring it up.

Any input from y'all would be very, very much welcome.