Gender Identity Breakup

The Clothes Have No Emperor
3 min readNov 14, 2023

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I am going through a difficult breakup with my gender identity. We spent a whole lifetime together. When we got together, I was pretty sure that this was the right one for me, mostly because the only other one available (or so I thought) was definitely not right for me. And I really wanted to be in a relationship with a gender identity. Everybody else was.

Over the years, we worked out how to be in a relationship. And it was a lot of work. I met other people and had kids and realized there were a lot of other gender identities than just the two I picked from. But that was for my kids, mostly, not for me — after all, I was already in a relationship with a gender identity and had been for decades.

My teen has something of a love-hate relationship with her gender identity. They got together when my teen was six. She’d been in an arranged relationship with a different gender identity, but that was a really bad match from the start. She went through a messy period of seeing other gender identities and even pretended for a time to be staying in her first relationship (for appearances sake). By second grade, however, she had settled in, for better or for worse, with her current relationship. It is still a bit of work for her, but she manages and I think they are going to be together for the long haul.

One of the two younger kids (they are twins), has a very comfortable relationship with her gender identity. She always has. She knows she is different from her siblings in having this comfort. She is empathetic to their struggles, but she is very happy. She knows that this can change in the future, but she doesn’t expect any changes (and neither do I, frankly).

The other twin dumped their gender very early on. Like their older sister, the arranged match was just not right. Everyone could see that. Unlike older sister, however, this one had no interest in getting into a new relationship. They quite enjoy being unattached — sure, there is a label that they use, but for them the label conveys a specific meaning: “I am me and I do what I want.”

Seeing these relationships develop over the years, I often considered how my own relationship with a gender identity was going. Not well, really. I mean, I did try, but it did not feel reciprocal. At least not reciprocal enough. I felt like I always had to set aside the things I wanted and needed the most. “Sure, those things were okay to want and need … but not just now, okay?” “Maybe later, maybe after this or when you are done with that.” It was like this for decades, really.

Last week, I considered when we first started our relationship. I wondered for the very first time what that child would have done if there were more than two choices? That was easy, I realized — there were so many other choices that would have been preferable to those two!

So, I decided that it was time to break up. We’d been hanging on to an empty relationship. It had never worked well and I only chose that relationship because I thought I had no better options.

As with any decades-long relationship, it feels so strange to be broken up. It is sad. I cry every day, it seems. And it is happy — calmer and more relaxed.

I am looking forward to seeing what is out there. I doubt I will stay unattached for long, because I am the kind of person who likes to have a gender identity to hold onto. I don’t think I will be getting back together with my previous gender identity, ever — we are done. It feels to me like a weird age to be going through this, but probably it feels that way at any age.

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