Hello There,
Today I wanted to talk about my long journey to understanding that I am genderfluid. I'm hoping this post helps anyone out there who is struggling with figuring out their gender identity. This certainly wasn't a conclusion that came to me overnight; it took years of struggling with my gender identity to finally understand what I was.
When I was a kid I was sometimes interested in playing with dolls or playing dress-up as a princess. But because of my assigned gender I never felt it was acceptable for me to do so, despite my strong desire. Flash forward to when I was a little older and I started trying on my Mom's clothes, I started googling what it meant for a boy to wear girls clothes and discovered the crossdressing community online. So at this point I started identifying myself as a crossdresser, a man who enjoys wearing women's clothes. But it always felt like more than that, yes I enjoyed wearing women's clothes as a boy but I wanted more, I wanted to be a girl. So after some more research I discovered what it meant to be transgendered, having a gender identity different than my sex assigned at birth. Now I started identifying myself as a transgender girl, and did so for years. But I started to notice a problem, despite the fact that I was identifying myself as a trans girl, I really didn't have any interest in fully transitioning into a woman. I wasn't interested in not transitioning out of the fear of doing so, I just really wasn't interested in living 100% of my life as a woman. A lot of times I enjoy being a guy and feeling masculine, I didn't want to loose that, but I also often wanted to feel cute and feminine.
I found myself at a weird crossroads, I'm more than just a crossdresser and I'm not transgender, so what am I? For the past couple years I've lived in this weird limbo of not really being able to identify myself. Well I very quickly had to figure out my gender identity last year when I was going to come out to my new roommate. She was bisexual and chill with the LGBTQ+ scene, so I knew that I'd be able to freely express myself around her when I lived with her. But if I'm going to come out I need to be able to call myself something. So I started thinking really hard about myself; "Sometimes I feel like a guy, sometimes I feel like a girl, and it flows back and forth between genders. My gender identity flows, like a fluid, gender-fluid, I think I've heard of that let me look it up. There we go that's what I am, genderfluid!" I'd finally found my answer after so many years of not understanding myself. It made me so much more comfortable with myself at long last knowing and understanding who I was as a person. For those of you out there who haven't totally figured out your gender identity, I highly recommend you do some research and really think about who you are and what you want. Once you finally understand yourself, you'll feel so much more comfortable in your own skin!
-Carly
