#I think we're hiding in the pages of old queer anthologies

[kabretoss]

dinosaur kid in the 90s, never accused of being a tomboy and used to love dresses until I went 180 and rejected them when I realized they were compulsory Girl Formalwear

blissfully don't think about gender throughout most of my teens

straight because boyfriend? have a minor panic when said boyfriend comes out to me as bi. have a Homophobic Moment(tm) when I think about my boyfriend leaving me for a boy

promptly eat my words about a year later when I'm having a sleepover with my bestie at the time and the thought occurs, unbidden, "if she were down I'd have sex with her"

(never made a move on that one. though later I'll find out a couple of my Girl Crushes at the time were queer)

cautiously and tentatively start thinking of myself as bi

start discovering I enjoy wearing masculine fashion

the hammer comes down hard on that one from my mom

for the next 10+ years I dress almost exclusively in baggy pants and hoodies. i am still undoing this damage.

BUT: the next time I end up with a Bestie Crush, I make a move and it goes well (hi @cherrehc!) (I end up marrying her. like 15 years later) (we like to take our time with things)

20s are an occasional sexuality buffet (with Cherry's thumbs-up) and I confirm that yes I do enjoy sex, and yes I do enjoy it with multiple genders

still not thinking about gender: am aware by this age of Transgender People and am cool with them but I've never felt like a boy so that's not what I am, right?

(Even if, when puberty really took hold, I felt completely alienated from my secondary sex characteristics? that's normal, feeling like your body isn't yours but is a barbie's, right? I'm hot and I like being hot, so I'm a cis girl, right??? people like my tits and I like that so I must be a cis girl, right????)

at the same time find myself playing nonbinary characters in RP situations before they are in vogue in the wider community.

(reading some of my old RP logs is wild. it is all RIGHT. THERE. in text from when I was 20 and had never heard the word nonbinary.)

(I have avoided RPing men up until about this point because "I don't know how to play a guy". women are already strange to me: men must be aliens.)

(then a particular character occurs and something clicks.)

fast forward to my early thirties. one of my best college friends is on T, has been calling himself a male name for years, and comes out first as nonbinary and then as a man.

wait.

wait.

wait.

if I'm not a girl I don't have to be a boy? I don't have to be a boy to not be a girl? well that's closer, but what does that leave me?

I hear the word agender.

grief.

the loss of so much time. looking back on this timeline of events and feeling the most profound sense of something gained, late, not too late but still so late. It's never too late to know yourself, but you lose time. You lose the ability to experience parts of your life, ones you can never relive, as your genuine self. In my case, I also may have lost the window in which I can safely medically transition, as other health issues have cropped up since I was young.

I will never get to be a young nonbinary person: I never was, because I was never allowed to imagine myself that was.

I was a "girl". I was an alienated, lonely girl, who didn't understand why she felt, even when invited, that female spaces were wrong and strange. There are other reasons for that too, but I think a huge part is gender. I was invited repeatedly into the world of the feminine by good women in my life, but I never went there. I didn't feel the pull of it, even when I wanted the friendship and companionship that seemed to live there.

I lived in limbo. I felt like -- not a gender failure, but a kind of nothing. An empty space. a void. I didn't have something missing, I was something missing.

it's a big grief. It's ameliorated by getting to see young people living as the people they are, watching others grow up with the self-knowledge I was never allowed to come to.

I don't know where all the agender people my age are: odds are good that attrition bore them into silence or suicide, or that life has not yet introduced the opportunity for them to learn better than how they were raised, or they're (like me) just so very fucking tired and unable to build community themselves. I know a few of y'all here fall into that category and I'm quietly collectively rooting for us, here; I know one or two others from my union and animation work.

But it brings me so much joy to see younger queer communities embracing gender diversity. Treasure it. It may still be an uphill struggle, and newly dangerous in a different way to be visible, but at least you're not lost alone and blind in the dark woods thinking that sight is a myth: you have each other, and you know what you are.

LGBTQ+ folk what was your gender/sexuality pipeline?