Everyone around me always assumed I was a boy (or later: a man). I never really felt like a girl and, growing up, I didn’t know there were alternatives. The performative masculinity of my peers never set well with me, I didn’t like all of the things boys are supposed to like, and often got along better with girls than most other guys. I just thought I was an open-minded, quiet, and feminist dude who wasn’t always great at performing masculinity.

Then I was really depressed for a long time and my gender wasn’t something I thought about a lot. I learned what non-binary meant and met a couple of non-binary people, but I didn’t hate being a man and figuring out how to live with depression had a higher priority than looking into my gender.

More recently my depression has gotten more manageable and I had more time and energy to look at other aspects of my life. Due to conversations about gender (with both cis and trans folks), I felt I should do some introspection. I didn’t hate being a man, but I also never really enjoyed it. There’s aspects of masculinity or my (rather traditionally masculine) body I appreciate, but not in a way that’s connected to my gender.

This is all fairly new to me, so I’m not good at putting it into words yet. When I see my hands with bright nail polish on, they feel more like my hands. Wearing a skirt gives me energy in a way other clothing doesn’t always do. When my girlfriend first referred to me as non-binary, I couldn’t stop smiling for an hour. It all just feels more correct.

Since realizing I’m non-binary I’ve found each much easier to exercise and eat healthily. I’ve started taking more care of how I dress and of my personal hygiene. I just feel more like myself.

There wasn’t like one moment, I just never really connected with masculinity in any real sense. We’d talk about masculinity in college or my grad program and I’d always be like “Well it’s all made up anyway, right?” As I got older I started making more trans friends and meeting non-binary people and realized I felt more comfortable identifying as non-binary than as a man.

i feel really lucky that i had a singular event where i realized im trans, even though it was way later in life than i would have liked. it was my first acid trip, like an hour in when it really started ramping up, and it just hit me all at once that i was a woman. it was like a geyser of thoughts and feelings all shooting up from my subconscious and crystalizing into the truth about myself that i had always known but couldnt really identify. i felt the tiny mental box id shoved myself into trying to perform man for the world, how limiting it was, and how much it hurt me. id never felt so feminine before, which im told is a relatively common experience for trans fems. interestingly i never felt that way on mushrooms, even marginally. anyway it being a singular event really helped me get past the imposter syndrome so many of us feel after our egg cracks.

I never really ascribed to gender roles or stereotypes, and then one day I heard the term non-binary and I said “that’s a thing?”

i don’t think that somebody told me, i just always knew. it’s like, why do flowers grow? what motivates them to do so?