4 comments that prevented me from identifying as non-binary

 

It's been a long time coming.

I was assigned female at birth, and for two decades I didn't even know I could identify with anything else.

While I don't experience dysphoria, being a "woman" doesn't resonate with me either. Going through puberty was daunting when I realized that people would begin to interpret my body - and therefore me - as feminine. I told my friends I wanted to be a boy.

Not really, but I had no other way to say I didn't want to be a girl.

During college I learned that some people who were assigned female at birth identify as male and vice versa. I wondered if there was something in between.

A google search revealed the word pangender, which I liked because it acknowledged that someone can have both male and female characteristics.

For two decades, I didn't even know I could be different.

I tried to identify my friends like this for several months, but I soon gave up because people didn't believe me. It was exhausting justifying my gender identity to everyone.

This summer I went on a retreat that forced me to reflect on how my upbringing has influenced me. I realized that my gender was one of the many things that best binary software I let my parents and other people dictate rather than asking myself what I really thought.

After that, I started describing myself as non-binary in some of my writing.

According to Gender Wiki, "non-binary" includes "any gender identity that does not fit into the male-female binary." This can mean someone who considers themselves both masculine and feminine, someone who is somewhere between masculine and feminine, or someone who does not identify with masculinity or femininity at all.