This time I'm going to talk about my gender identity in the past and how I discovered my gender identity.
I'm an AFAB (that means I was assigned female at birth). Growing up, I never questioned whether my gender was different from what I was assigned. However, as long as I can remember I've known there was something 'different'. I always just put it down to me being weird. I was always a little isolated from other people. I had friends and I wasn't lonely, but a lot of my childhood memories are of me on my own. I think this is why I don't recall having any strong gender stereotypes imposed on me whilst growing up.
This has just reminded me of the time that my mum bought me some new pajamas. My mum realised once giving them to me that she'd accidentally picked them up from the "boy's" section. She didn't take them back or give them away. She just said something along the lines of, "Oh well!"
This isn't the only example of not following strict gender roles that I have. I've always had a mixture of male and female friends, and growing up I wasn't restricted in what toys I could play with. I used to have a lot of toy cars. One of my favourites was an old model of Ferrari which had openable front doors and headlights that could be flipped up. I was more interested in nature documentaries and science books than I was toys growing up, both of which aren't really the sort of thing people would associate with being for one gender or the other.
During my early teenage years (12-14) I still had that feeling of being 'weird' but I now felt 'different', too. I was the sort of person who would share "I'm not like other girls!" posts on Google+. Spoiler alert: That's because I'm not a girl! Another type of post I used to share was those "Option A or Option B" things. One of them said "Tomboy or Girly Girl." My answer to that one was that I definitely wasn't a girly girl but I wasn't really a tomboy.
When I was 14, I met a new friend. After several months of getting to know this new friend, they came out to me as genderfluid at the same time as a few other people from my school. They explained to me what genderfluid meant. I didn't relate to this term myself but this was basically the start of me figuring out that I was part of the LGBT+ community. A week or two later, this friend suggested that I get an Instagram account, so I did. Because the first person I followed was my genderfluid friend, this meant that Instagram suggested LGBT+ pages to me. This was when I first started properly learning about the trans community.
I started finding more trans people via Instagram and learning about what it feels like to be trans. YouTube became a source of education on trans topics around about late February 2016. I related to trans men quite a lot. After considering my gender for quite a few weeks, I finally came to the conclusion late at night that I was a trans man. Five minutes later, I had doubts!For the next few weeks, I was rather confused, uncomfortable and unhappy. I related a lot to trans men, but calling myself a man just didn't seem to fit, as much as I wanted it to. I even considered whether I was genderfluid, but I knew I wasn't because I didn't feel like my gender was fluid at all. Luckily, I stumbled across a few videos on YouTube about being non-binary. I can't remember who made the video but I remember them saying that you can transition and be non-binary. This struck a chord with me. I could identify as non-binary and yet still transition like I felt I wanted to. I discovered that some non-binary trans people could have the same feelings as binary trans people, yet still identify as non-binary.
This discovery was quite a relief for me. All the 'weird' feelings I'd had within the past few years started making sense. It was great to have a label. Eventually I realised my gender identity was agender (genderless or gender-neutral). I knew that it was okay for me to want to transition and not have to identify as a binary (or even non-binary) trans man.
Over the past two years, I have doubted my identity at times. Upon addressing these feelings, however, I always realise that these doubts were caused by me thinking too much about what other people may think about trans and non-binary people. One day, I might make a post in this series about self-doubt and how I overcome it.
This post is a brief overview of my gender identity in the past and discovering my identity. I plan to make more detailed posts on certain topics to do with my past and discovering my gender identity, such as dysphoria, self-doubt and how my gender expression has changed. Thank you for reading and goodbye until next time!
~Jay
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