Girl Now: Second Muse
I guess what all this is, is I actually had no sense of or relationship with gender at all until this past year. At first, recognizing that I was non-binary was about noticing that lack of a relationship beyond this vague resentment and disgust toward the thing I was expected to be. I realized I didn’t get gender, didn’t care. It had passed me by like so many things.
As I aged I never learned how to be anything in particular, and I sure didn’t want to be what was expected of me, so mostly I ignored it. It was clear that I wasn’t male and never had been, but until recently I’ve never had the liberty or awareness to explore other options, and wasn’t thrilled with the concept of a hard binary just in principle. Which I never will be. It freaks me out. Feels fashy.
I just preferred not to think about myself any more than I had to, to keep safe. Ergo, even after concluding everyone was wrong about my gender, I didn’t know that I was a girl until I knew what it meant to me to be a girl. Other people’s examples, their descriptions of what it was like… well, they weren’t me. They sat weird. Ideologically and just constitutionally I don’t do binaries, but now that I know some of what gender is and how to relate to it, there is no question that I have always been a girl. I have just been… regularly misidentified, as people will sometimes be before puberty hits.
I have talked about how underwhelming my first puberty was, and how poorly it stuck. I never went through those thoughts and feelings or really major body changes, beyond my absurd height and a decades-long creep of thin, weird facial hair. Now I finally am having a pronounced puberty—and God, I am feeling it. I feel myself becoming a person, finally taking some kind of a solid form. I am developing ideas about who and what I am, what I like, what I want, what I need to be healthy. I am becoming real.
I feel like a teenager, in a way i never did before, and all this stuff is rushing around inside me, and it just feels so obvious where this is going. How right it is. On my own terms. Like my life is just starting now. I am waking up into what it means to have a gender—which is a new experience to me. As far as transition goes, it’s not that I’m undoing or reconsidering anything, much. I was just basically in suspended animation for 30 years: physical and existential limbo. Now I’ve woken and am proceeding broadly as other people would have decades ago.
So until very recently I didn’t have the emotional language or connections to be able to conclude, yeah, I’m clearly a girl, especially since my only understanding of that came from examples that didn’t quite apply to me—but I am growing up now. And in my own way, this makes more sense than anything ever has.
It’s only now that I actually have a gender. It’s like I sort of grew one, emotionally, over the course of transition. This is my first gender, really, and it was weird and slow for me to recognize, same as all these strange feelings I now have: this happiness, boredom, loneliness—things I never really experienced.
I guess that’s the flash I had just now. Words are hard sometimes when you’re decompiling something irrational. It’s that I finally do have a gender, now that I understand how gender works and now that I can feel it. And it’s not one I landed on lightly, but rather with an enormous resonating thud.
This is part of a natural process of evolution, of my finally developing as a person—and it’s nothing like arbitrary. Now that I finally get it, the it I get is so obvious. It’s not even a question. Of course, this is what I have always been. I just never knew what it was, how describe it, how to related to it. The only uncertainty is, how to be me—what else do I not know about me yet?
I feel like this is all a lot of nothing, but, well. I’m working through a vague yet to me vitally important point here. I didn’t decide on a gender; I grew one, same as I grew my breasts—though independently of those signifiers. (Bodies are just bodies, yo.) And, it was always latent. Always there, always me. I just had to grow into it to understand.
And now, I am growing. Now I get it. I finally get to be me.
I used to be non-binary in the sense that I had no real internal gender and that gender completely baffled me. Now I’m non-binary in that I have found my gender—and though it falls in a spectrum that a word can meaningfully describe, it doesn’t conform to this preordained binary reading. I am unambiguously some kind of a girl—just, on my own terms.