Hey internet,

I’ve been off this blogosphere for a while because well life has been pretty hectic and I’ve been just absorbed in work and then self-care.

In this time, I’ve become far more comfortable with my Gender, even though there are a lot of things that I still have to work out. But well I guess I wanted to talk about the whole thing just cause I do.

Ya, I am a badass like that.

(regret saying that instantly)

Anyways, I started questioning my gender orientation a couple of months after I had come to terms with my sexuality but I shoved it deep into the closet.

This was because a large part of me felt like I was far too different and this would just further catapult me to someone who was unrelatable to most people, someone who was well, alien to most.

But well I began to indulge myself, every single day, just a little bit, I’d think of myself as the gender I felt like.

I wouldn’t tell anyone else, just me, if today I was a boy, a girl, or neither. I hated the word neither however so I swapped that out with alien. A species that was devoid of gender, in my head.

The more I began to allow myself to do this, the harder it became to have the world around me misgender me and this dysphoria led me to finally talk about it with my best friends.

The American Psychological Association defines Gender Dysphoria as:

A conflict between a person’s physical or assigned gender and the gender with which he/she/they identify. People with gender dysphoria may be very uncomfortable with the gender they were assigned, sometimes described as being uncomfortable with their body (particularly developments during puberty) or being uncomfortable with the expected roles of their assigned gender.

A concept I was unaware I was even experiencing until I sat on Google, hoping to find other people who felt like this, felt like me.

Most people in my life and even those who barely know me, now do know that I’m genderfluid but even then I’m not sure how many of them really understand the importance of that word to me, and my everyday life.

To be honest, I am a little unsure how to let them in on it.

Recently however I’ve noticed that my gender identity during a period of time, changes quite a lot about my posture, my manner of speaking, the way I address other people.

It’s quite vast how your gender identity influences your behavior, sure I’m still me but there are ways you present yourself that change.

For example, I tend to say the words “bro” and “man” more casually when I’m feeling masculine, in comparison to when I am feeling more feminine.

But that’s not what genderfluidity is as a whole, that is just how I sometimes experience a difference in who I am.

A lot of stuff is said about how genderfluidity is just perpetuating traditional gender stereotypes and that if the society we are currently living in is already breaking those gender stereotypes, well then it is safe to say we all are nonbinary or genderfluid.

This is something I’ve struggled a lot with as well.

Wanting to dress in typically masculine clothing one day and typically feminine clothing on another day, or wanting to use expressions that are traditionally more masculine than feminine, isn’t genderfluidity.

It’s Gender Expression.

It’s how I cope with my gender dysphoria.

Gender expression is a person’s behavior, mannerisms, interests, and appearance that are associated with gender in a particular cultural context, specifically with the categories of femininity or masculinity.

Gender expression is still very much in alive and thriving, but being genderfluid is a question of internal personal identity.

I can be feeling masculine and still be ok with dressing as more traditionally feminine because one is my gender and one is gender expression.

It’s just very likely that when you meet someone who is transgender these stereotypes truly do affect how people see us on a day to day basis and so we want to look like the stereotype of what my gender today is so that we don’t get misgendered throughout the day, or so that our gender dysphoria calms down a little.

I repeat: Gender expression is how we cope but it does not define me being Genderfluid.

And maybe we can learn to respect that because it takes nothing out of your day to respect someone’s personal identity.

I remember hearing this explanation from various genderfluid blogs and individuals that gender is a scale, and on one end is femininity and the other is masculinity and while most individuals can deviate slightly from their extremes, you never hit polar opposite.

In fact, most of the time you’re probably fixed about your gender.

That isn’t how gender works for me.

My gender keeps fluctuating, constantly.

It could change in the span of hours, days or months, but I do feel extreme dysphoria when it happens.

That’s the difference between a cismale/ female or transmale/female and me, a genderfluid.

I don’t know if this was of any use to anyone reading.

I hope it is.

–

Alien Snig.

FYI THE FEATURED IMAGE IS OF A CHARACTER, ALEX FIERRO, (FROM RICK RIORDAN’S SERIES MAGNUS CHASE AND THE GODS OF ASGARD), THEY ARE DRAWN INFRONT OF THE GENDERFLUID FLAG.