7/5/24 - Update on my quest to customize my [irl] avatar ~

Like many of us lost souls in the modern age....I've been on quite the gender journey. There's been so many advancements in transgender medicine, and now with the advent of AI generated images, I have finally found my One True Gender...

BEHOLD! It's the REAL....ME.

How'd I do? Adequate instantiation of the platonic form above? Or still further to go? They don't show up in mirror selfies, but I've got some chin hairs, hope that'll do for covering the whiskers..?

This one's got the tracksuit down....missing the ears, but I feel i'm exuding kitty energy nonetheless

But in all seriousness...I did have some kind of falling in love reaction when I saw this picture ahaha. There's just something about it....It's inspired some outfits for sure, and probably more to come.

In even more seriousness...I feel compelled to write a blog post about how my personal identity has evolved. I identified as non-binary for around 6 years, and for so many years before that going back to high school and even middle school a bit, I've had more nondescript thoughts and feelings about gender. I either didn't have the language to explore it and articulate it properly back then, and/or didn't quite hit that tipping point into finally accepting that's what was going on. Every step of the way, I've been on some kind of quest towards personal authenticity. It seemed really elusive and hard to pinpoint at times. At other times, I felt super triumphant and gender euphoric, like i'd "found it". There were moments like this at nearly every stage (well...except the really early stages that were just a blur of first puberty hormonal fluctations and confusion). 2023 was the year that I made my most recent breakthrough. Gradually something shifted where I was kinda like...man. I just haven't been able to find peace and that sense of finality of this is it! i've arrived! i KNOW who i am and what my gender is and here are my pronouns, world!! even after all these years of earnest reflection and experimentation. I never felt enough as the gender I was assigned at birth (girl)...not pretty and popular or desirable enough, and not enough like I wanted this role for myself. I remember in middle school thinking I would have never chosen to be on this path to being a "woman." I rebelled against it. Trying to be the other option...which for me was "mildly masculine" or "androgynous other thing" more so than "man" has ever felt like an option...at times really did feel like a revelatory empowering experience. Somehow I always felt like an imposter though, and still I never felt enough, no matter which identity I tried on. There was always someone more readily recognized as masculine or androgynous, and it made me question if my gender was really real or just something in my mind. Even identifying as nonbinary, that thing in between, that gender that sort of represents the idea that maybeb we don't want to pick a side maybe we can just be ourselves in all our fluidity and nonconformity, I still felt like I wasn't coming across as something truly in between 90% of the time. It's hard to believe you really are what you are when 90% of people still immediately assume you are what you were always told you were: a plain and simple girl. It cuts even deeper when it's your own friends, who so intimately know every step of your journey, still struggle to use the pronouns you ask of them.

Over the years I saw how my neuroses around preocupation with how others perceive me weren't really going away, it was more like pushing a bump around the rug. Not livin up to womanly standards, not feeling comfortable in that box...okay, let's try something more masculine or androgynous. ermmmm still not quite a fit! So what was up?? I would have little mental spiral meltdowns on this topic regularly and to some this is a non issue in their lives but if you can at all relate, you KNOW what a shit situation this is to be in. It feels like you never chose it. You never chose the sex you were born as....and you honestly never chose the trans life either. And for some, taking that route solves their problems, or at least the problem of having an existential crisis on the regular (being trans undoubtedly opens up a lot of social difficulties, even if the internal dysphoria is now on the decline). but for others, it just opens up a differnet host of problems. I really resented being trans/non binary for a while. I felt trapped, just as trapped as I felt in my AFAB-ness. 2023 was a turning point year where finally some things clicked for me and gradually by the time 2024 rolled around, I feel I finally found genuine peace and freedom. So what was the golden ticket? Honestly, it was finding a deeper sense of self acceptance that allowed me to see myself as something so much greater than labels in the first place. It always rubbed me the wrong way when people would just be like "fuck labels," because to me that felt unrealistic. The fact of the matter is, we DO live in a society that wants to know your gender or at least pronouns for virtually every interaction you have, and that pressure is uncomfortable and needs some better solutions than to just avoid the issue altogether. To me, tha twas a thing that either cis people or highly naturally androgynous people would say....people who have the privilege of being naturally comfortable with the label they were assigned, and people who were naturally androgynous and recognized readily by everyone as such and who hence have never had to deal with the shitty situation of being someone who isn't comfortable with the label they were assigned at birth and who also feels they feel most at home in a label that hardly anyone recognizes them as belonging to, because physical appearance wise they are so far from what that group of people is expected to look like. But somehow, now I've become sort of a "fuck labels" person. At a certain point it just dawned on me that this whole gender identity politics thing is one bottomless pit of thought loops. It gets heady. Recognizing how mind-based it can become when you go the non-binary route (not necsesarily the straightforward binary trans route), and how much extra explaining comes with insisting on keeping up with trying to come up with words and labels that fit ever-changing fluctuations in gender expression and inner identity, just started to agonize me and put me off. I've found the most healing in my life from getting to deeper and deeper levels of embodiment, and shedding my ideas of myself. At a certain point I recognized that I'm never going to come to a satisfying word or explanation or even pronoun protocol to encapsulate how I feel. And honestly, recognizing how on an energy level, that nature of being ever-changing and shifting and flowing...IS FEMININE ENERGY in the spiritual sense rather than societal norms sense...that made me realize wow...I AM A FEMININE BEING. And that spiritual definition of the word "feminine" is something I embody so well, so much of the time, that I feel truly at home in that.

I don't think I'll ever feel at home in any category of gender rooted in societal norms and conventions, even if it's an evolved trans-friendly one. Because we are spiritual beings in a human body at the end of the day. And something clicked where I didn't feel pressure anymore to conform to cis expectations OR trans community expectations. And truly I think any person, no matter their identity, can come to a similar realization as this and not feel the need to change how they identify....I believe there's people who are authentically trans, authentically non binary, authentically cis....but for some reason, for ME, this revelation did naturally lend way to a coming home to what I now think is my true gender identity: NONE /female if I'm asked. I think living in the world as it is today, I feel more comfortable just owning and conceding to people, no matter who's asking and from what paradigm they operate in of gender---evolved or traditional---, that I AM FEMALE. I am an androgynous female at times, and other times I'm feeling totally the utmost of womanliness (though still a bearded lady), and I also feel in touch with my mildly masculine side. Perhaps at some point in the future, I'll feel more in touch and hae more development in htat mildly masculine side. But for now, I'm feeling so much more a sense of freedom in being female than I ever have before. Above all else, I AM ME. i am simply me, indeed.

I think that frankly a lot of people sadly do, whether they recognize it or not, approach their gender journey like the whole anecdote with teh IA hello kitty picture above. They're scouring the internet to find somebody embodying a combination of gender identity and presentation that they see themselves in. They're looking for a mirror. I finally felt I found that for the very first time when I stumbled across a tumblr page by someone a little bit older than me in high school who was a trans guy who still dressed very girly in some respects. I was SO captivated by that blog, almost to the point of obsession. And it was important for me to discover that at the time. It gave me permission to be something I never knew was possible. But eventually, I realized that no external "idol" will give me the gender freedom and self knowledge I seek....we slip into emulation and self comparison so SO easily in this internet age. Truly you can only find true knowing from within. Somebody could have told me all this a while ago, but I really had to go through everything I went through to truly truly understand it and know it honestly for myself. You may be reading this and be like pshh whatever...only to years later have a similar shift within yourself. It's truly a journey of the soul. Gender dysphoria really is a manifestation of disconnection from your soul, as is any ailment. But really identity issues gets at the heart of the nature of EGO...and how we create false selves almost as a form of self protection from external situations....Many of us, myself included, have trans identity origin stories in trauma of some kind, whether it's gender violence to your mom's projected gender-coded expectations to lack of belonging in school with your same sex peers to rejection from opposite sex peers to just plain living in a society inundated with beauty standards, misogyny, trans-phobia, toxic masculinity, and whatever else. THIS DOESN'T MAKE YOUR IDENTITY INVALID. the only thing that makes it invalid is a lack of inauthenticity. And you're the only one who can truly discover that, even if at certain times it escapes you and you're out of touch with your deeper, truer self. But if we're all being honest, we all know at least one person in our lives, whether they identify as cis or trans or whatever, who seems a bit lost. They say they're one thing, but they're pretty much embodying something entirely different. Don't invalidate their gender journey adn their own autonomy over that and how they'd like to be addressed, BUT ALSO don't totally gaslight yourself out of your own intuitions, because especially if you love that person and knwo them well, YOU MAY BE ONTO SOMETHING. but it's only for that person to really come to understand about themselves in their own time. And another thing....being non binary is kinda something almost everyone is to some degree. Don't get me wrong, not everyone relates to the same experience that people who actually seriously question their gender and go on that path of identifying and possibly modifying their body and pronouns...i'm not trying to erase that and collapse it all into a we are one type of thing BUT....truly I think everyone has some amount of masculine and feminine energy within them. You don't have to have a whole existential crisis just because you realized you're not wholly the man or woman you were raised and told you were.

To conclude...I don't feel so attached to words like trans and non binary anymore, but I also don't feel totally disidentified with them anymore either, like that was some phase or a misunderstanding within myself during that long period that I did identify those ways. I feel that no matter who I am now, I had a genuinely, thoroughly, almost even quintessential trans/nonbinary experience. But people evolve. And as you change, you realize you were never those things you referred to yourself as, no matter how much they resonate or almost fully resonate. You're so much more than any words could ever describe.

My life just feels simpler now that I have kind of let some of this identity stuff go, if that makes sense. I can exist in cis spaces and feel totally comfortable being called she/her and telling people yep I'm female, adn I feel liberated by no longer feeling like others around me are wrong for assuming those pronouns and treating me accordingly. I don't mind when women call me sister, and I feel I generally relate to most of the female experience when sisters share theirs and I can relate. It just feels like I also have a nonbinary/trans experience whereas they may not have that added part like I do. And boy, I sure as hell feel glad I don't have to explain myself or how pronouns work in those cis spaces, which is something I always felt weird about and which made me question if I really was trans, even though I understand that a lot of trans people also feel that way and it's precisely because they are truly trans but they are in a context that operates on a different paradigm of gender adn that translation difference can be exhausting to navigate. All this is true about how I feel I do actually belong in women's spaces after all, because in some sense I feel I really am a woman and always was on that path, but somehow simultaneously I also feel comfy in trans/nonbinary spaces still like I belong there as well. Talking about my trans experience, relating to others with similar experiences, and being called whatever pronouns they want to call me or I ask them to call me, all feels great as well.

I rarely offer up my pronouns of my own accord anymore, whereas I used to get irked when people would be informed i'm they/them only to easily forget later and have to be reminded. Now if someone does ask me my pronouns, I say ANY PRONOUNS. and WOW that has been the biggest shift and revelation. I feel so at home being an any pronouns person. In the past I used to wish I could be that person, but i just wasn't comfortable with that because something about my true nature felt unrecognized unless I advocated for myself as being they/them and those who don't get it right are wrong. but now that i've shed so many layers of confusion, I've realized I am that, actually. And it feels great. Part of this shift also came from feeling so much discomfort in noticing when people use the wrong pronouns and wanting them to get it right, but also not wanting to talk about gender all the time. Eventually i realized you know what, I'm fine with whatever others might perceive in me. And in fact, something felt almost intrusive about insisting they see me as how I see myself. I wanted to free them of feeling pressured by me to take on my reality, and free myself to stop being preoccupied with whatever the hell is going on in someone else's gender reality. Our realities don't have to line up like that, when there are so many other ways to connect and find things to align on naturally. Because my true center is within me, not outside me in other people's perceptions of me and their vastly fluctuating ability to recognize me for my true self. Our realities don't need to line up. And that's where i think a lot of my trans/enby siblings out there get themselves lost....placing too much emphasis in how others perceive you. Doing things like having natural inclinations as a bisexual person towards dating men lately, but then judging yourself and questioning yourself for it and being disappointed in yourself even because it's making you less queer. Like...what? You just made a category, or opted into an existing one, then trapped yourself in it. You're allowed to Be outside the Boundaries of who you once thought yoh were. Why let that limit you..? At that point you can't even blame society or peers...yoh just did that to yourself. and isn't the core of the gay/trans rights movement and all that supposed to be about being yourself? why distort that spirit of freedom to become a new norm that you're constrained by. why not let yourself just be and shift as you may? This is how people fall into fetishizing queerness and ending up reenacting the same pressuring norms dynamics you see in society, both towards each other and towards themselves. Being queer isn't inherently better...

I mean really everybody does this kind of thing though, really, of caring what others think and seeking belonging and confusing identity /roles with who you really are. Even cis people have a complex like this more than they often reconize, on gender itself. it's just trans/non binary people who are forced to reckon with it because their internal reality regarding gender feels so true to them and their own community constantly clashes with society's. I think 90% of dysphoria is rooted in that: social dysphoria. You can know who you are, but still face so much friction from being in the world and having other people's perceptions and expectations projected onto you. While I have for so many years resented being referred to by the wrong pronouns...eventually I realized that I would experience a lot less of this social dysphoria friction if I didn't have a rule about what hte correct pronouns are for me anyways. People could see whatever they wanted in me, and in a way, no matter what they see and refer to me as, it all resonates with my nature as someone highly fluid (even if mooost of the feedback from people is that i'm seen as female, i still have had enough experiences being seen as male or androgynous that i feel secure in that androgyny being a thing). But still, I truly feel for so many trans /enby peers of mine who just don't feel comfortable with just anybody's choice of pronouns for them. I didn't feel comfortable with it at all for so many years, and it used to feel more empowering to announce my pronouns as they/them and assert that paradigm even in contexts where they weren't up to date....until for some reason, it just stopped being empowering and started seeming more like the root of my discomfort in the world was within me rather than in society. At leat I felt I could find more power in choosing to see it that way, because then I could actually do something about it, whereas it's a lot more energy to change others to see things your way and take on your gender norms. I realized i could find more empowerment by accepting the reality of the dominant paradigm of gender and my non-consented-to role in that dichotomy, when I have to. And yet i still recognize, this is just not where everybody's at and not where they should be expected to jump to if it's not authentic. a true friend would be sensitive about what kind of gendered language they use towards you if they're aware you're on a gender journey. I guess just for me, i got to a place where i felt free enough within myself from these societal pressures around how to view and conform to gender, that i felt freer in freeing up other people from the expectation that they conformto my own views about gender and conform their language to fit it.

There's something so exhausting about existing as somebody who identifies as trans, and especially nonbinary, because it thrusts you into an everyday constant activist role in a way, constantly having to explain yourself or be pressured to explain yourself. constantly not really fitting into the dominant paradigm of gender is a LOT. and honestly, whether you end up identifying a certain way or not, we are all feeling that weight to some degree. I just want to be myself...and it hit a tipping point where i realized that i think i want even less to be in that gender-revolutionary role, constantly pushing back on the dominant paradigm just by existing as i do AND on top of that identifying as i do and having pronoun preferences as i do, even more than i want to be free from the category of "womanhood." i realized that that category has more space in it to be authentically me than i originally thought i would be able to find for myself. i realized that even being content with floating in and out of that category, that contentment does not confine me to it. so why not choose to be content..? why push myself to become more trans so that I can finally feel like i have a category that fits? It feels so simple, yet for so many years this was a major inner conflict....of wanting to be trans (a big part of being trans is this experience of wanting but not quite embodying...having a gap between what you are and what you REALLY are on the inside) but not wanting the burdens that come with reconfiguring my identity and how i move through the world around it. for a while i felt ashamed for feeling that way. [feelings of not being trans enough coming in again...] but now i realize... you dont have to do all that. you just have to EXIST as yourself. you don't have to eb trans enough or prove that you're trans or act like you're trans or talk like youre trans or call yourself trans or be properly trans by accepting certain burdens of being trans that some trans people feel and others don't as much. such similar thought complexes arise from engaging with even cis gender identities like cis womanhood. it's all just a MESS and an ILLUSION....none of that really matters. you just have to BE. and sometimes that happens to be something that fits what people would call cis woman, and sometimes that fits what some people would call non binary/trans. It just DOESNT MATTER that much to me anymore. It's an impossible game, and gender was built like that from the beginning.

So why try to win? Why try to make gender better at all? Why even try to eliminate it? Why not just dance and play with it, as you would with an art project that's not going to get graded by anyone? (fuck the haters, bc there will always be some people who just don't get it who will judge anyways). Gender should be fun. Gender is playing with archetypes and energies. Be like a kid with it, in awe and wonder and experimentation. But don't get so invested in this silly game of Self that you lose track of your own true soul. You can only find that within. I swear a lot of you tiktok generation pals are shopping online for the perfect avatar ahaha. People really treat gender like that. It's hard to admit, but so did i, to some extent. Sure I feel some resonance with this AI hello kitty baddie image but like...that's not the Real Me at the end of the day. You might think that's ridiculous, no one's doing that but...uhhhh. I kinda think people lowkey are lol !! Disconnection from the self can be hard to recognize. You know something's off when you're on a path of more an dmore, nothing is quite enough..whether it's trying to reach some gender ideal so that you finally belong and are reconized as your gender, or you're tweaking out on getting the perfect gender label down so that then you can finally stop questioning it. You know you've found the truth once you just KNOW and you stop questioning it. Sometimes you've found the answer already, just as I had considered that maybe I'm not as robustly non binary identifying as i thought, but it just hasn't landed in a place deep enough within you for it to finally click in and stop those spiraling thought loops once and for all. THat's why i'm saying...every gender journey is a journey of soul retrieval...it is a journey of the soul to discover the true Self. Its' so much more than a dressup and roleplay game of validation. Its a journey of learning to discern between Mere Mind Stuff and the Spiritual Reality of the Soul. the gender identity journey is just one flavor of that archetypal soul journey of illusion and truth. It's human nature to get lost, and to seek outside ourselves for the perfect mirror to show us who we really are...but we never find it until we turn inwards.

You are not something to "figure out." Truth is something to embody and experience and to behold, rather than something you think and arrive to through a lot of mental acrobatics. Coming into deeper authenticity is more about stripping away, than about adding anything or changing anything. That's why the saying goes "BE yourself," not "THINK yourself." ;)