"not only can live outside those systems, I can thrive as who I am."

[cosmolinguist]

I see so much of myself in this person's life! I knew they were my age before they said, just from their description of junior high.

And of course so much is different too. I wish I could write anything as good as this.

Comments

[barakta]

If you wished to share, I would totally read things you wrote on this.

The OP writing about their experience of gender reminds me (in a 180 degrees opposite kind of way) of a lesbian friend who used to be cool to trans folk (helped with legal paperwork) and indeed changed her own name to a trad-male one (albeit after a religious figure who was female) gone TERF who can't seem to conceptualise that just cos she interrogated her internal gender for 2 years and decided she is a cis woman and biology matters to her, it doesn't mean trans/NB people are wrong when they come to a different conclusion and wish to define as trans, (or wish to transition and not define as trans)... ExFriend seems to think her own gendered view is everyone's and that people who misgender her (she looks pretty butch and has this male name) are doing it out of spite and it's ALL trans people's fault that outsiders don't know what to call exfriend, rather than just "I get it, we seem similar but my name is xx and pronouns are yy I consider myself cis".

ExFriend forgets that each of us gets to think about our own gender (or lack thereof) and should be allowed to make our own decisions internally and externally and even similar wordings can be different outcomes/decisions/internalisations/externalisations and that's not just okay, but cool and interesting.

And it's great to read people talking about less commonly seen narratives whether they are rare or just not known or not.