Postby dEhiN » 2015-10-01, 5:47
So the "Superseding 'Gender'" thread and in particular Koko's comments (in that thread) plus the list of genders in the poll at the beginning of this thread has gotten me thinking. About my gender. Which is something I never thought I'd do. I'll share a bit of background first before I get into my current thoughts. (Warning: this post may become a bit long).
I'v never questioned my gender before. But then yesterday or the day before I started thinking how even though I am able to split gender from biological sex wrt to others who consider their gender to be non-cis male or non-cis female, I've never done it for myself. I'm comfortable, due to my sexual orientation, to thinking outside the non-binary spectrum. But I realized for myself I still had gender and biological sex attached. So I thought of myself as male since I'm biologically male and have no desire to change my external sexual characteristics (and of course I know that those alone don't make up the biological sex designation). Anyway so as I started to open my mind and split the two concepts as they applied to me, I looked in the mirror and didn't quite see myself as male. Then I saw the poll on this thread and read the terms of demigender/boy/girl/enby. I looked them up - bigender, demigender, demiboy, demigirl, and demienby. And demiboy seemed to possibly fit. For some reason demigender sits with me more so than genderfluid or agender. But I haven't actually looked up all the different gender types to see which fits the best. I do know that demienby doesn't quite fit, but I'm also not sure if demiboy fully fits.
I'm quite confused right now when I stop to think about it. I was hanging out with a friend today, someone who whenever I've hung out with her, I've always felt really drawn to her. And now as I analyze that feeling, I wonder if the drawing comes from some part of me that wants to be female. Or maybe not female. But some part of me that wants to be her. To be in her skin. To experience a female point of view. (When I say "to be her", "in her skin", I'm envisioning an idea of everything that's me separate from my physical body - so like personality, soul, etc. - be in her physical body). Now afaik she identifies as cis female and has always done so.
But another thing that confuses me is that in the past I've been someone who gets swayed by other people easily. It's due to people-pleasing tendencies and stuff that I never worked on until recently. So I can still get that way sometimes. So basically I'm not sure if I'm being influenced at a subconscious level by what I am focusing on - others who are questioning their gender or who don't identify with cis genders - or this is actually something that is within me and has just taken 32 years to start to come out.
On top of all that are questions and fears about if all this questioning turns out to be the real me, and I realize that I'm not cis male (anymore?), what does that mean for how I relate to friends and family? Would I be able to tell them this? Would I need to? If I do (either because I need to, or just choose to), how would they react? When I came out as pansexual, most of my friends and family were very supportive. But even then I felt the need to quickly switch terms to bisexual so it was something others could get.
I think I'm not really sure how to proceed here. I'm not really sure how to figure out what's going on within me.
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