This whole process, it’s a matter of letting go of enough to let me tack a more-or-less static point. My gender isn’t fluid; it’s been the same as far back as I can remember. It’s just, its exact nature was obscure to me.

What makes it tricky to identify is that it’s not a binary identity. I don’t get the gender binary. Both extremes weird me out, and strike me as performative nonsense. But, I’m clearly not male! Never have been. I feel no affinity with even non-toxic forms of maleness. Quite the opposite.

With some distance now, disentangling some of my wiring from the expectations of all these years, I’m more clearly able to see what’s happening, why this process has been so complicated. I’ve been coming at it from the wrong perspective. I’ve been taking it as a retreat from masculinity, but… I was never male to start?

It’s more accurate to flip the board. The question isn’t about maleness, because that’s not a question. The question is about femaleness—because I don’t feel, never have felt, entirely female, but, importantly, I do feel a basic connection to this sphere. Just, not all the way.

There’s a specific point where my mind has always been. It’s something like 40% female, 60% nothing-in-particular. And, I’ve always felt the most in common with individuals in that general range: gender non-conforming women. This is the kind of non-binary we’re looking at—which is to say, demigirl/demigal/demiwoman: kinda female, kinda not. But, the specific conflict is of femininity versus neutrality.

This has always been how I’ve thought of myself. I just, it’s been difficult, and scary, to get to the point of seeing and identifying and acknowledging and accepting and, now, embracing. I’m genderqueer, yes—from the other angle than I’ve been grasping.

Right now in terms of expression and identity I feel like I’m kind of lapsing back from a center that I’ve been clutching for many decades now, more deeply into a basic underling femininity that doesn’t fully define me, and I wouldn’t want it to, but is… there, clearly, nonetheless, and reassuring to touch base with. Which is the basic dynamic I feel.

I’m getting close to a final word, as far as figuring out what’s going on with me. I’m, when I’m in a place that I can afford it, I intend to go on HRT. This should help to put a few more tiles in place—neurologically more than anything, frankly. Catch me up more fully with myself. Get me on the correct timeline for once. Put that missing piece of my brain where it belongs.

What I find kinda interesting is how all of this goes along with sexuality. I’m clearly aroace. I just, I don’t work that way. But, I now understand some of the confusion I’ve felt, in a variety of situations. What I’ve often confused for romantic or sexual attraction, it’s more empathy; identification. I haven’t known how to process what I’ve felt, and so I’ve done it poorly, through a bad model that someone else handed to me. It’s curious to go back; see how this maps over the years—how really what I was feeling in most cases was, “I see myself in you.”

(But, not like… that.)

I guess that’s a thing about the way I approach concepts: I have intuition, right. And my intuition is often well-founded and correct, at least in regard to things I’m prepared to make conclusions about, but I’m not prepared to accept it until I establish the detailed reasoning. The intuition, it’s just this radar. I see blotches, and they seem to form a pattern, and I may have an idea what that pattern means—but it’s not enough to know for sure, and jumping the gun will tend to get me into trouble. Never mind exhaust me.

Often in the process of reasoning it out I realize I’m off on the wrong track, or I’m mistaking what I see due to that whole autistic tunnelvision thing—missing relevant details, that would suggest a different reading. So there’s this paranoid rigor I need to commit before I’m satisfied. If something doesn’t fit, and I don’t have a reason why it shouldn’t, it really sharply bothers me even if the overall picture seems consistent and right. It takes forever for me to procedurally web through and tie off all these tiny threads. And I’ll probably go back; revise!

Anyway. This whole shift of perspective here, that lines everything up in my head and my experience—it establishes other parallels I hadn’t considered. I’ve never bought into masculinity; what I’ve worn all my life is this noncommittal neutral mask, much as one masks for autism. It’s never been a lie, exactly; much as one’s autism mask is a projection of one’s least objectionable and most functional qualities for passing in allistic circles, so as to avoid being singled out, this gender mask never served to pretend something else was there; just to deflect from what I knew better than to show.

Fact of the matter is, the best I could do was cling to the truth of this neutral space: I don’t do this gender binary, but here, have this… confusing void to misinterpret, because that’s the best I can give you. This is as male as I can project: this… absence of other things.

Which was never ever convincing! My whole life, everyone around me has known there’s something up. Without a guide to read this limbo I present them, often they conclude I’m gay and get very concerned about that—a dynamic which has complicated, and is complicated by, my asexuality to no end. (In a sexualized society, a lack of attraction is never quite good enough. You gotta commit!)

I’m terrible at masking. It’s exhausting, and I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m also very bad at lying except by omission, which just leaves these conspicuous voids. Then there’s the whole demoralizing element, knowing that who you are is so objectionable you can never let go. You internalize everything. And every time you slip, which will be constantly, others will be quick to jump in and let you know. You just learn to dissociate. You’re awful and wrong and not worth thinking about, even on a basic level; even to take care of your daily needs. All you’ve got are these thin, cracked masks that aren’t fooling anyone, and this swirling, anxious void behind them where all you can do is find things to lose yourself in because the alternative is facing this loathsome monster that everyone keeps identifying for you.

Again, though, that gender mask, it’s based in truth; my gender, it’s not binary. I don’t get the gender extremes. They’re so strange and performative. I think, what are you people even doing, and why? I’m, like, 60% agendered. So, that’s what I’ve held up to hide the rest. But as I’ve been saying since I’ve started to be honest with myself, when I have to pick one or the other on a form, the obvious answer is female. I’m not a woman, exactly, altogether, but the other option doesn’t apply at all! Not a little. And, I’m not absent of gender entirely.

Genderqueer is the best descriptor. It captures that essential ambiguity, as well as a tone of icon-smashing defiance. Take down the patriarchy! But now I’ve established the what and where and how of the ambiguity. More precisely defining myself as a demiwoman, under the range covered by that blanket of queerness, resolves most or all of those conflicts. So now this mild sense of disquiet, of knowing that I wasn’t quite getting something right and nervousness about what that might be—that’s pretty much evaporated. I’ve assembled a pretty good sense of myself, at least as far as this dimension is concerned. Now I can move forward.

There are still many dynamics to unpack, and this will probably take the rest of my life. But. I’m at least on a course to allow this to happen. And, it’s happening.