Foreign Feeling

Shame and Denial- Trans/Nonbinary

When I was in middle school, I was denying a lot of who I was before I was even aware of it.
My aunt had gotten me a shirt with kissing/hugging girls on it. I don't think it was inherently queer looking and it was cartoon. Probably a "gals being pals" kind of thing..
End of story:
I never wore it. It was hot pink and my internalized homophobia made me fear being seen as gay. I was afraid of people judging the person I was even more then they already did. I learned later on it didn't matter what they think (within safe reason considering safety).
   When I think back to it, that shirt was an early indicator in my memory of my dysphoria. One of my few times I can recall a memory pertaining to such. I hated how it made me look "girly". My memory fails my accuracy, which is something that is frustrating when trying to recognize "signs", but I don't need to have that to validate who I am NOW.
    It is hard for me to untrack the difference between frustration at sexism and my lack of gender connection many times, yet it goes beyond rejection. It is a lack of connection clearly. I connect to the struggles, yes, but do I feel as if I am part of the binary? Absolutely not.
     I would feel overly enthusiastic when treated well. I desperately wanted to prove gender norms wrong in believing I was weak, so it felt good to go against "masculine" traditional roles. I think I just wanted to be separate of those sickening pressures that undermined me.
     It went beyond that though because it made me feel as if they didn't see me as a gender, but a person by going against these stereotyped ideas. It was freeing.
      I don't believe that is what made me be who I am; agender though.
     I loved to be a "girly girl", but that concept is so aggravatingly stupid. Selecting interests and clothing; restricting them to sex is horrible. You take away capability and freedoms.
     I liked feeling good about myself. I didn't feel as if I was praised much as a child.. When I dressed up people would put me in a box and parade me around saying oh this is my child! Aren't they a beautiful ____? As if my beauty was a strict trait for worth. I had two brothers and as a middle child, the differences in treatment were extremely apparent to me.
     I felt that if I had a more "sexual" body I would be liked because society told me so. I acted femininely and disgustingly polite in order to appease others.
     I conformed. It didn't help.
During quarantine, I was given the gift of not being stuck in the middle of  a classroom. I had been running on nothing for so long. I was finally starting to learn who I was. I was in a dark place. A very dark place.
    I wasn't in the same social places I had known my whole life; a bubble rejecting differences. I wasn't as pressured being separate from those kids my age.
   As I learned more, the more I felt clarity and a willingness to be open about who I was with myself/ I denied a long time.
    A part of me after realizing I was watching one too many binding videos, as well as recognizing my gender crisis, preyed on my insecurity. I was scared of exploring who I was and being wrong or of somehow invalidating others, which was ridiculous.
     When I started my gender journey, I was still highly uninformed and held prejudice/implicit bias. I had a very unstable mental health. I was processing much more than who I was in queer terms, but reassessing the traumas and childhood I had experienced.
     I felt so freed when I went to an in person program for a couple weeks (therapy). People did not judge me for being who I was. I trued out different pronouns and for a while had been using a new name. I delved into pronoun closets and closely examined my own feelings and interactions. It felt right when I recognized I was agender. I felt the pressures I didn't know I had for years lift off from me.
      For a while I went by multiple pronouns, but it annoyed the HECK out of me when people didn't use anything other than the one's assigned to me at birth. I soon realized it went beyond that and I didn't feel comfortable being viewed or talked about that way.