Hi everyone, I’ve just returned from a month’s holiday back home with my family (I live abroad) and during this I essentially felt as I’d always been, as if my mind and everything had been reset and I no longer had any gender worries, and I was happy in the boy gender role. Then, two days after I was back, BAM! I had a dream in which I felt like a boy feeling “like a girl” again (this was slightly different from the “I’m a girl” feeling last month) but combined with a sense of excitement and a craving to cross-dress because of how I “felt” inside. I woke up in a panic feeling disconcerted and disturbed. I’m beginning to think that somehow my girlfriend, who lives in the same flat as me, is acting like a trigger when I’m around her – she doesn’t care which gender I identify with, she loves me all the same and she wants me to acknowledge and accept any feelings I have about myself rather than run away from them. That’s not to say she wants me to be non-cisgender or non-straight, she just doesn’t want me burying my feelings if I have them, because that’s unhealthy. In other words, because I feel safe around her, feelings that are hidden are coming to the surface. When I started dating her two nights before starting my holiday, I discovered that in accepting that I loved her I could accept that she loved me regardless of everything, and I was finally able to accept this bit of me that I couldn’t accept – that I may not be the straight cis man I thought I always was and that was not only okay but it didn’t disqualify me from being romantically acceptable to girls (yeah, I know, can you say “teenage angst”?). I’m still going in and out of the bargaining stage with my orientation – technically I’m somewhere around bi or pan. I’m definitely not entirely straight, but that’s the only title I’m comfortable with at the moment because of the societal baggage which goes with any other title. I’ve come out to a couple of friends as possibly not being cis, but it made me feel like a fraud, like I was making it all up. It’s kind of like I don’t have the personality of a girl so I can’t be one, but I know I’ve had a concrete internal feeling of being one inside before (or what I think was one), even if for only short periods of time, hence my confusion over what I was inside. I don’t really know where I’m going with all this. Looking at my diaries from April and the first week of May, some entries of which I didn’t publish here, they are full of angst, worry, and contain some pretty serious statements about my feelings and confusion surrounding my gender identity, including a couple of rants about being a girl at least some of the time. I think what’s really bothering me is that I could go around not worrying and just be myself and try and forget about it all. I pass convincingly as a male; I know how to live as one, and hey I went a month without feeling uncomfortable about that. Perhaps my worries around being acceptable to my girlfriend have been giving me false positives and that I’m just a cis male who’s been confused and fooling themselves. Perhaps I’m just a feminine male and I can’t accept that, so I’m reaching for something to justify it. Maybe I should just try and stop worrying and accept that I’m probably cis. Perhaps that would be the healthiest thing to do. But at the same time, I worry that my feelings about not being cis are in fact genuine and by deciding not to accept them and try to identify the correct label for them now I’ll only bury them further and pay for it later. April, May and now is like a big emotional wobble which came out of the blue and then disappeared as if nothing had ever happened. I don’t know what to do. :icon_sad:
Sorry I keep going around in circles. Maybe I should just make an executive decision and hope for the best.
You know, being temporarily secure in one gender doesn't make you "not genderfluid." In fact, I think that's what makes you genderfluid. Having the "right gender" for you change over time, as it seems to do. I think it might be helpful for you to keep a journal or a log of what you feel about your gender from day to day. For me it's a spreadsheet, because I like numerical representations, but anything that can give you a sense of your gender over a long period of time can help you understand what's going on.
Thanks, Delta. You reminded me that I created a spreadsheet similar to yours with percentages of girl, boy, and other, together with columns for my notes/feelings and triggers, and ran it for about 11 days starting with the day I felt 100% feminine after reading the newspaper article (29th of April). The results are interesting. It was a bit difficult to calculate the percentages and I wasn’t always sure whether “other” was just feeling myself, but on the 5th of May I had two spikes of 60% and 100% girl respectively, and then on the 6th of May two spikes of 100% girl and 100% other (definitely feeling myself) respectively. So there’s definitely been more than one occasion of feeling 100% girl, and there’s evidence on the other days of sliding around a bit. I do see from my notes, posts here and diary entries that there was a considerable amount of worry around those days which may have influenced the percentages and feelings somewhat, but two of the four incidences of feeling 100% girl are associated with happy feelings. So it seems my mind doesn’t object to feeling 100% female per se, it’s the societal baggage and implications, and the fact I don’t have a female “mind and soul” which bothers me and makes me doubt myself, or want to scream Luke Skywalker-style that it’s not true, it’s impossible: I must be a boy who's fooling himself. Then again, 11 days isn't much. It may be prudent to run it for a month and see what happens.
