Nonbinary Enough

Gender identity is complicated. It’s fluid. And gender is a social construct anyway, so I don’t know why I think about it so much.I was assigned female at birth and am perceived as a girl. I get called “she”,“girl” and “daughter” on the daily. And I used to not care but at some point it started bothering me. I don’t know exactly when or how or why.The internet is slowly becoming more diverse and I’ve been following trans creators, nonbinary and gender non-conforming people. I never thought I would become one of them but then I started questioning my gender, feeling uncomfortable in pink dresses, cringing at feminine words and unnecessarily gendered products.

Gender is a lot like sexuality in a way. As in, once you’ve started figuring out your sexuality and realized that it doesn’t conform to the societal norm, you often end up questioning your gender as well.

For a lot of sapphic people (non-men attracted to other non-men), this is especially typical since society’s idea of a woman is so connected to the idea of attraction to men. So once a woman figures out she is not attracted to men or romantically likes other genders as well, she often starts questioning whether she is a woman at all.When I first started questioning my gender identity, I still felt connected with femininity, though not completely, so I started identifying as ademigirl. I then came out to a good friend who was very supportive and is also queer. 

Soon after that, I started feeling a strong connection to the label genderqueer. It seemed like a great word because it leaves a lot of options open. There’s no one way to be genderqueer. And it includes the word queer, a word that describes my sexuality, a word that used to be a slur but has been reclaimed by an entire community, a word that encompasses an abundance of different identities.

I came out on Twitter as nonbinary and genderqueer and people were lovely about it. I had some great conversations about gender with other nonbinary people. And then I started feeling more masculine. I started hiding my chest in oversized shirts, wearing sports bras instead of regular ones, feeling drawn to androgynous and masculine clothes. A bew label I liked was transmasc but I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about it.

Now that phase is over. I’m feeling more feminine again. Last week, I made plans to cut off my long hair and made an appointment. Last night, I took a bunch of selfies with cute Snapchat filters and loved the way my long wavy hair framed my face. I feel like a fraud. Like I’ve been lying to myself the whole time, like I lied to everyone on Twitter when I came out as genderqueer on there.

What if I made it up for attention? What if I just said all of it to seem more interesting? Those are my thoughts and I feel guilty for thinking them because I am invalidating myself and the very real experiences I had. I did not make up my gender for attention. I hardly told anyone about it, so how could it have been for attention?The nonbinary people I follow online did not “turn me nonbinary.” It was the opposite. I started following them because I was fascinated by them and their confidence in their identities. I was intrigued because my own identity is similar to theirs but it’s hard for me to accept that.

I don’t know what my gender is right now. I still like the label genderqueer. And that’s okay. I’m trying really hard to be kind to myself, which is something I’ve always struggled with, and tell myself that I can still be genderqueer even if I feel more feminine on some days and more masculine or more androgynous on other days. The experience I’m having right now does not invalidate the experience I had yesterday.

However, the fact that those experiences are so different is making me think that I might be genderfluid, another label I never thought I would use. It’s interesting to me, the girl I used to be who thought she would never identify as anything other than cis, who secretly used to think that people who questioned their gender were kind of weird, and how different and unlike me she seems now. 

I’ve changed and I’ve grown and I know now that no identity is “weird,” that it’s okay to take time to figure out what to identify as. I know that labels are fun but not necassary, that gender does not necessarily say anything about the pronouns someone uses. And I know that different experiences with gender are all valid.

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Accepting yourself is hard. Transitioning physically or socially is hard. Coming out to people is hard. And those things apply both to sexuality and gender and also to other identities. 

For me, it’s helpful to talk to people I trust and sometimes overshare online. And it’s been really helpful for me to know that no one actually knows what they’re doing here, we’re all just figuring it out as we go along. No one is alone with what they’re experiencing.

So, yes, I do sometimes make myself feel bad when I think I’m not nonbinary enough but then I realize that other nonbinary people struggle with the same thing. There are enough transphobic people out there, so I’ve decided to try to leave the hateful and invalidating comments to them. I’ll try to accept myself instead.