#girlproof

As it is, I am not out to folks here. Spanish doesn’t so easily permit gender neutrality, and it’s a concept very difficult to grasp here for the same reason. If someone asks, I respond honestly: I believe gender is a social construct, and if given the option I would answer I don’t ascribe to it. Even a scale of feminine to masculine doesn’t quite encompass my gut reluctance to identify as either extreme, since some days I wake up more one than the other.

The nonbinary/genderfluid label is what best suits me as a whole but over the years I’ve grown fine with that being a reality for me only online and only to a few of my close friends. It’s not ideal, but it’s enough for me.

(In a way, I express this multiplicity of self through my OCs. They are, in a very honest way, an extension of many ‘what-if’ version of myself, and I can safely express identifying as one or the other or neither through them in art and kind of, calm the storm that is my gender dysphoria, and no one has to really find out if they don’t want to.)

I’ve dated men and women (no one nonbinary yet :V) during my life and despite it, precious few people have realized I’m bi. I’m very candid about it if asked -- and a couple of people have asked, at this point, so I’m sure the information is floating out there -- but I’ve never made it a habit to be vocally open about it. Why would I? I’m not aching for a life partner, and I’m not aching to join a movement or any branch of politics. My life has many facets, among them my lgbtqa+ status, but if I made a huge fuss about it offline, it would be the only thing people irl think about when they see me, as opposed to simply seeing a person that could help them.

Perhaps this reflects badly on me? Not shouting it from the rooftops, as it were. Its very entrenched that for you to be a good queer person, you have to be loud. Out and proud, etc. But I was taught to be quiet, and I’ve grown comfortable with the quiet. Life online is very different from life offline, and that’s all right. Not everything has to overlap. As much as I wish it were so, I don’t live in an ideal world -- I actually very much live in a third world country -- and I very candidly place success and financial and social security as well as humanitarian acts ahead of my personal drama.

I tell myself doctors don’t really have a gender in an emergency, or even during the day to day life. I will exist, hopefully, as a person who can offer professional medical help, and that is the kind of quietlypresenting nonbinary life that I can live with in tranquillity. Gender, after all, is something I strive not to care for. Even if it sometimes hurts that I have to ascribe to certain gender rituals to survive a successful professional life (because boy o boy, do Mexicans love segregating boys and girls into neat boxes), I know I don’t have to give it the mental importance if I don’t want to.

I can run myself ragged hating the body I was born in, and I can tear myself to pieces trying to force it to be something else, but the reality of the fact is I won’t ever be happy if I set my focus on it. So I’ve decided to change the focus.

Online I don’t have a body, I simply have a presence and I can communicate via words or art or a summarized history of what cool things I’m up to, and that’s beautiful. I love that inherent gender neutrality of the internet, and I will fight to keep it because it’s my little gateway to venting a lot of the stuff I’ve got in me, and meeting people that have similar issues and bonding with folks from all over the spectrum.