ripleys-read-it-or-not

[ripleys-read-it-or-not]

Please reblog if you think that “they/them/theirs” is a valid set of pronouns.

Of course they are

[ripleys-read-it-or-not]

This is who i am?

I think it’s really important for everyone to examine their gender and what their relationship with gender is. I saw a post somewhere recently, which I’m sure many people have also seen, which said something along the lines of “if you examine your gender, and come out as cis, you have levelled up.” It really think that is a great way to look at it. If you consider gender and how you view it, and then come to the conclusion that you are a cisgender individual, that means you now have thought and intention behind your gender, rather than just accepting the gender you were assigned. If we could normalize this, then that would be a huge step toward being more accepting and understanding as a society. 

So anyways, I started to examine my gender. I was assigned female at brith, and never really overtly questioned it or felt any major dysphoria about it. This is how I worded it to a friend of mine, who is nonbinary. It was a pretty offhand comment on my part - in that I didn’t plan my words, I just said what came out. When I said that, my friend looked at me and said something that a little bit rocked my world. 

They said: “Those are some pretty telling qualifiers there. If you never OVERTLY questioned and never had any MAJOR dysphoria, that sounds to me like ‘I questioned it a bit’ and ‘I had some dysphoria.’”

I was a smidge shook. They were totally right. When I said that I never overtly questioned my gender, what I meant was that I accepted it as being mostly correct. And when I said I never had any major dysphoria, what I meant was that I felt pretty at home in my body, but that I wasn’t always comfortable in how I was viewed as a result of it.

What I really meant - although I didn’t quite realize it when I said it - was that I didn’t feel quite like a girl/woman, but I was more than willing to accept it as ‘close enough.’ I knew that some days I definitely felt too masculine to be a woman, but I felt certain that I wasn’t a man. I also didn’t feel androgynous enough to be nonbinary, so I was just like alright, I’m a woman. 

Then I learned about being demigender. Then I realized that nonbinary people don’t owe the world androgyny or neutrality. So now I am reevaluating. 

I currently think of myself as a dmigirl, or maybe as like... semi-binary. I say semi-binary because I am still just not sure if i’ve felt the same amount of dysphoria that nonbinary people do, and I don’t know if I am a right fit for the label of nonbinary. But I don’t think I’ve finished evaluating and discovering my relationship with gender yet. 

So i guess this is to be continued...