My Experience with Gender Identity
by Emil Tinkler
Everyone’s experience of gender and identity are different. For some people, it can be very fluid and for others it can be something more fixed — but everyone’s experience and journey with gender is different. My own experiences are by no means universal and my experiences should not be used as a template for what other people’s experience should be.
My name is Emil Tinkler and I am a Nonbinary (more specifically Agender) person, but my labels have varied and changed the more I have come to understand myself. I had always felt weird about being a girl. Other girls seemed to really vibe with the whole girl thing, but I never felt like a girl or that I was one. It didn’t really suit me, but I figured I was just a tomboy or that I was “just not like other girls.” As I got to middle school, I started to pick out more clothes from the boys and men’s section because “I just like their clothes more Mom! They look cooler.”
I was very lucky that my parents allowed me to experiment with different types of clothing in middle school, but very quickly I realized other girls did not dress the same way I did. So once high school started to get closer and closer, I quickly started to wear makeup and girls’ clothes and continued to dress the way people expected me to. Then the summer before my senior year, my family moved to Florida and things changed. Maybe it was finally being away from the homophobic family on my dad’s side or being in a whole new school with people who didn’t know me, but I quickly went back to wanting to wear men’s clothes again.
There were a lot of more openly LGBTQ+ students at my new school, and through them I was able to learn more about the community that I could be a part of. I had always been aware of transgender people, but I guess I never thought or even considered I could be transgender until a friend of mine talked to me about it in debate class. At the time I was very new to the trans community and did not know much about it beyond the fact that there are transmen and transwomen, so to me, obviously I was a transman, and I did not put much more thought into it. I like to wear men’s clothes, appearing masculine makes me feel good about myself and my body, and He/Him pronouns felt way better than She/Her so obviously I must have been a transman. So, in 2016 not long before I was supposed to graduate, I came out to my family and friends as a transgender man and changed my name to James.
I identified this way for several years, got involved in my college’s GSA, and really started to become an active member of the community. This introduced me to many wonderful and different people with different experiences and identities. Some identities I had never even heard of but was ready to be educated about.
The more involved I became, the more I learned, and the more confused I became. While I had always enjoyed appearing masculine, I never really felt like a boy or a man. At first, I thought this was because I had not started to physically transition. Then I started having mild dysphoria when being misgendered as female. Again, I thought this was just normal for me being a transman. But the worse it got, I started to realize a lot of my dysphoria didn’t come from not being physically male or not being male — it came from being seen as female and other people’s expectations of how a man should dress and act. I was trying to hyper masculinize myself so that other people would approve of me and not think that I was faking being trans. I refused to let myself wear any women’s clothes even though I love crop tops and leggings. I stopped letting my roommate practice their makeup skills on me because I did not want my parents to think I was going to be a girl again. I let other people’s expectations of me control my life.
After a lot of soul searching and talking to the people closest to me, I realized that I identified as Agender which is to say that I do not really experience gender at all. When I first came out as transgender, the terms I had to describe my experience with gender was limited, so I grabbed on to what seemed to fit me best and didn’t give it a second thought even though I had never really felt like a man. I just assumed because I had never felt like a woman either, that it had to mean I was a man instead even if I didn’t really feel like a man either.
I recently changed my name to Emil because James was just too masculine and honestly it never really suited me well; I was just desperate to be accepted when I first came out and picked the most boy name I could find to go by. I’ve also been trying not to let myself limit what I am allowed to wear based off of other people’s opinions. It doesn’t matter how you identify — clothes are clothes and we should all wear what makes us happy. I feel much more comfortable in my own skin now, but I am still struggling with dressing the way I want to, but I am trying my best to truly be myself.
About the Author:
Emil Tinkler is a 21 year old college student living in Central Florida. They are a gay agender person. Emil is a psychology major and a humanities minor. They want to be a therapist one day and help trans kids access medical care, and they love Harry Potter, Bad Suns, and LGBTQ activism. Emil was Vice President of the LGBTQ group on their campus for a year, and will continue to keep activism close to their heart in everything they do.
