2. 🦷 when/how did you realize you were non-binary?
It would’ve been around my early twenties. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when and how.
I had some kind of awareness of transgender people since I was a kid, but I really only knew about binary trans people, as that was all I had seen in the media and whatnot.
I think it was then on Tumblr that I started seeing more stuff about gender identities. And I was like okay cool, so I’m like cisgender then right, cause I’m not trans. But something about that didn’t feel right. So I ended up researching more into trans and nonbinary identities. The fact that someone could be something other than just male or female resonated in particular.
And then as I read more about it and about other people’s experiences of being trans and/or nonbinary, things started to click. For example, that uncomfortable feeling of looking in the mirror and the image reflected back being wrong somehow, like it just didn’t match quite right with the me in my head somehow, which had been there for a while, at least since some time during puberty, and which I had always assumed was my low self-esteem. And how that kind of sounded an awful lot like one of the ways some people experienced dysphoria. So I guess it was somewhere around that point where I realised I nonbinary.
I did still stress out for a while after that about all the different nonbinary identities and which exactly I was and how nothing seemed to fit quite right. Until eventually I realised it was fine to just be nonbinary/genderqueer and that I didn’t have to identify as anything more specific than that.
I hope that answers the question! I tried to keep it somewhat short XD