Firstly, my obligatory “I hope this kind of post is acceptable here”. Now with that out of the way.
For the last few years, I have been finally starting to address a lot of things about myself that I pushed down or away for a long time. Among those things was gender. But I’m also likely ADHD at least, and have been pretty burnt out for years now, so I’ve become a lot worse at research and looking into things than I used to be.
So only about two years ago, I finally looked up “non-binary” on Wikipedia, and felt like I was reading about myself. And since then it’s been quite a journey (all internally because I basically never tell anyone irl what I’m going through). From imposter syndrome or feeling like I might be a fraud, to half assurance that I’m on the right track but still not fully comfortable or satisfied in the answers so far, to feeling or registering dysphoria for the first time and regularly since and thinking I might possibly be transfem. But I’ve always preferred and got along better with women and am extra angry with men in general these days, which might be playing a big part in me wishing I was afab these days.
And putting together my personal journey over the last few years, with what I’ve awakened to with regards to both mental health and gender identity, I remembered something about the hidden curriculum. And how it was my history teacher in school (one of the only teachers that ‘got’ me and who I wasn’t constantly fighting with) who brought it up and looking back, he clearly knew that I was different in a number of ways. When he brought up the hidden curriculum, one of the sentences that he specifically used and that I’ve remembered since, was how it “teaches boys to be boys and girls to be girls” (I was outraged by this and the whole idea of the hidden curriculum btw).
Which brings me to why I am agender. I literally never learnt how to be one gender or the other. And it’s not because I wasn’t taught, it’s because I rejected it every step of the way, or just didn’t even notice that it was a lesson. I was raised by my mother and two sisters, who acknowledged me as a ‘man’, but didn’t exactly push me into sportsball and shit. I was very much raised by sisters in particular because my mother means well, but has always been kinda vacant. And in school, I was too busy resisting and fighting every step of the way to learn how to be a ‘man’ there.
So yeah, that’s it. I wrote an essay just to say: I am agender! I finally found the exact label that makes me feel like it’s been so obvious all along. And 100% confident in saying that I belong to. I am agender.
Wow, very clear explanation, I appreciated the link to Wikipedia it did clarify your description.
Makes me think about my upbringing.
The main separation throughout school that I remember was bathrooms. I also did do soccer and karate in elementary school and i strived for an A in all of my classes including PE which put my skills in the higher skill group when my high school PE teacher (in a very blue US state and city and probably thinking about having at least one trans student) split the class based on skill for supervised sportsball games. I got into computer science at 5th grade through Khan Academy and through my older brother who was studying Computer Science in college at that time. So I’m not sure if my agab got me into computers and programming (which would later use programming socks to develop my sense of girliness and fashion) or if it was just my brother spreading his influence and knowledge in the field. Like if I was afab would my brother have helped me get a gaming pc for my birthday? Would I be socially attracted or rejected by girl groups at high school? Would I still be a lesbian?
Haven’t been here around the Fediverse for a while. I’ve been on a bit of a journey through the parts of the internet where people show their faces. I’ve been wanting to come back here for a while, and thought I would revisit this post a year later for a start.
From what I remember, not very long after making this post, I realized that I still had some searching to do. And maybe a little playing and testing my own boundaries. I had a “they/them” attached to my username for a while, and in the public internet where there are people who know me irl seeing what I post, I’ve tried to kinda “come out” as non-binary maybe three or four times now before deleting everything a couple of minutes later.
And after the last time of aborting the mission, I suddenly realized why trying the pronoun pin and trying to come out like I have a big confession to make all just feels wrong to me personally. That is all just another performance to me, something else that wasn’t part of the curriculum or my socializing growing up. Probably if I was born later, or in a more socially progressive country, it would’ve felt more natural to me and helped me to feel like I had something or somewhere to belong. Or maybe I still would’ve been too punk (I say that sarcastically, what I actually mean is too full of shit) to conform to anything and would’ve come to the conclusion that I have now anyway.
I am 100% definitely agender. I also recognize how everyone under the non-binary is my sibling though, or me in another time and place. And why that’s the umbrella.
When I originally made this post a year ago, I was actually still awkwardly trying to perform a role and hadn’t really found myself yet. It’s nice a space to talk about this stuff with people who get it but going by the title I had alone, I was still trying on different outfits, then drawing attention to myself to see how it really suits me. And that’s actually just not me. That’s the one thing that has felt a little bit wrong to me and like a ‘new’ thing I was trying out, ever since I started this self discovery.
I am just me. Back where I started in a way, just more in touch with myself and armed with more words to describe my experience of life.
But I’ve always preferred and got along better with women and am extra angry with men in general these days, which might be playing a big part in me wishing I was afab these days.
Just want to address this too because this is an assessment that I got wrong. I very much have had the wishes and sometimes the ache of wanting to be in another body. And it definitely increased a lot since I started exploring what gender means to me, which seems natural to me, considering that what I’ve really been doing is addressing old wounds that I pretended never existed for a lifetime.
But with everything I’ve read of other people’s experiences, this seems to be a common theme with non-binary people in general, regardless of what they were assigned at birth. And makes sense to me if you’ve gone through life feeling like something ‘other’.
