When You Don’t Feel Cis or Trans Enough
Navigating your identity without a community
I’ve been questioning my gender identity since middle school. Probably longer. I don’t question it because of overt gender variance. I don’t fit that narrative of the female-bodied individual who doesn’t conform to society’s expectations of gender.
I don’t get along better with boys. I neither have traditionally masculine interests nor do I have predominantly masculine traits. I don’t consider myself to be a feminine person, but I’m certainly not masculine either. As a result of this, I’ve spent years pushing my gender identity to the back of my mind. However, it always finds a way to resurface.
Externally, I do not stand out among most women, but internally, I’ve never felt a sense of belonging. For some time, I rejected femininity to find some answers on who I was. I wasn’t fond of wearing dresses or carrying handbags because in my mind, those things were associated with women.
Then I realized that the problem wasn’t wearing dresses or expressing femininity. It was trying to fit myself into a binary gender and convincing myself that I was a girl.
When I accepted I may not have been cis after all, wearing dresses, putting on makeup, shaving certain parts of my body and doing other things deemed…
