A Response to ‘A Complicated Story About Gender’
Tags: Gender, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Identity

Holy shit did this ever hit me like a ton of bricks flying at supersonic speeds.

Well, since this has put many things into perspective for me I feel like I have to write something. I don’t think there are many things like this written from the perspective of ‘cis white males’, because like the previous story said, they’re probably the last people you’d want to hear talk about this subject. That being said, that’s the best description for myself, and you know what? I think this might be a bit of an unfair stigma, especially coming from an area where acceptance and . So that being said, this is my journey.

I think the weirdest part about reading this for me is that gender was never a big part of my life. That being said, let’s start at the beginning. Similarly to the other story, I have two siblings as well, but they were very barely a part of my life since they were 9 and 12 years older than me. Some of my interests and stuff came from them but very little in my sense of identity, so for all intents and purposes I was an only child. While growing up I lived a happy life; I had a stable family life and I could get along with people at school. I never really had reason to be sad, but when I got to university and reflected on myself a little bit more I realized that I had never had much reason to be happy either. I just… coasted. I was just there. It was like I was a bystander in my own life with all of my decisions being made for me. My parents did what they could in terms of putting me into many different types of activities, music, sports, etc., but none of them really stuck with me. I did them because my parents told me to, and eventually once I was given the choice they all fell by the wayside. It struck me a few times while growing up that, “Hey, I’ve never really done an activity because it *interested me*”, aside from small things like individual video games, which became a huge escape for me because of this.

Highschool was also a relatively uneventful time in my life, for the first while at least. I always had a lot of people that I was ‘friendly’ with but very few actual close friends, in fact only one or two, one of whom I’ll mention again later. The only really difficult thing for me was, once again, my identity; I had to make a big decision about my future, in terms of where to go for university. Turns out, I chose the least-committal option I could; an open-ended program with lots of flexibility, or so I was told, to explore what I truly wanted to do. This is a theme in my life. Well, even while writing this I don’t know what it is that I want to do.

Don’t worry, I’ll start to relate this back to gender soon. That being said, what I talked about above means that I never really developed any sense of identity at all. I was sheltered, even though I didn’t realize it. I could see things that happened in the world but I had no frame of reference since so little had actually happened to me. When I did get to university, I ended up in a very similar spot to where I was in high school. I had many friends, as I could get along with people, but very few close ones (one or two). There was a running joke that I just “didn’t exist before a couple years ago”, or “I just popped into existence”, because I had seemingly no knowledge at all of pop culture, nor had I experienced any of the formative events that had befallen the people around me. There was no one I looked up to, nothing I idolized, nothing that inspired me.

After a couple years in university I reconnected with an old friend from elementary school that I had lost contact with, that I mentioned earlier. They had changed their name, come out as nonbinary, started HRT, and became a full-fledged LGBTQ+ activist while hiding that up until and after the point at which I lost contact with them. As I said before with having experienced very little, they were my first personal acquaintance that had this level of knowledge and experience with gender as a concept and the world around it.

In the later years of university everything sort of began to fall apart. I didn’t feel safe in the environments that I was in and started to isolate myself. As school became more and more specialized I had to face the reality that the degree I had chosen was forcing me down directions I had no intention or willpower to follow. Staying on theme for me, however, I basically didn’t make a decision. I just stuck with it, eventually trying to switch degrees into the most basic one I could manage so that I would graduate with *something* instead of spending 5 years of my life for nothing. Since that’s still where I’m at we’ll see how that turns out. So far the answer is not well, but we’ll see. During this time I got pretty depressed and I’ve been dealing with clinical depression and being on antidepressants pretty much ever since then. My only real social interactions happen over the internet, which I like but isn’t super sustainable.

Up until this point, I had never really questioned my gender. Then again, I never really questioned anything about my life, so there’s that. It was around this point, partway through university, that I entered my first and only actual long term relationship. It was long distance, so that sucked, and that was eventually the catalyst to the relationship ending, but we still met up almost every weekend for about 8 months to 1 year. During that time, however, the relationship never became… intimate? It was like, when confronted by myself in that sort of situation I was instantly just horrifically uncomfortable. At the time I justified it by saying “oh I just don’t like it, maybe I’m just a little asexual”, but I don’t think that was necessarily the right label for it. I honestly don’t know enough about that to make any definitive statements on the matter but I knew for a fact that I wasn’t ‘aromantic’, so it didn’t feel like I should call it that. Plus, how do you come out as asexual when you’re in a long term relationship? :P

It occurred to me recently while looking back that I always thought of myself as male, but only in the waking world; whenever I would daydream or nightdream (lol) it would always be from the perspective of a female. This was consistent from probably mid elementary school. I would always brush it off as fantasy, like I was reading a book or something. And who knows, maybe that’s what it is. It’s not like I’ve reached any conclusions here. As far as I know I’ve always felt comfortable enough in my skin to not question

It’s also a somewhat recent realization that I’ve been basically crushing on other guys. And this is sort of the hardest part to put into words because I’m not sure on a lot of things in this respect. For instance, where is the line between close friendship and a relationship without the physical aspect? If two people start a long distance relationship and never meet up: how would you define that? Obviously after a while people would *call* it a relationship, but why? After what point? There are pieces of people that I would say that I’m attracted to, but like at what point does an attraction become a crush or become a fantasy, etc. I’ve just never felt comfortable exploring things like this because of my view of myself.

I don’t know how to word this other than bluntly, so that’s what I’ll say: I feel like I’m romantically attracted to both genders, but I feel like I’m not sexually attracted to either while the disconnect between who I am and the image that exists in my head is there. It’s like there’s a longing for something, some vision, some being that I can never achieve or become, and because I have not achieved it everything else feels wrong. And that’s why the story this is in response to hit so close to home. I wish I could figure out a way to express myself in ways that make me comfortable; but I feel like that needs me to be way less self conscious and self deprecating and a million other things. It feels like there’s a world in which I can live with both aspects of my personality and being. Getting to that world is a journey that I have to travel, but I don’t know how to take the first step.

So where does that leave me? Well, I wish I knew. I still can’t fucking make decisions for myself, I still have no idea what to do with my life, and I still feel like maybe I’m trapped somewhere between a cishet male and a bisexual female. Do I ignore the gender dysphoria that seemingly exists within me and try and continue on with life how it’s been, sort of just scraping by? I don’t know. I just don’t know. I love you, and hope you love yourself too. I just wish I could follow that advice.