I’m sure people have noticed by now that my pronouns are they/them. That’s because I’m nonbinary. Nonbinary falls under the trans umbrella, though you don’t have to identify as trans to be nonbinary. I myself do identify as trans, though I have no desire to medically transition. You don’t have to transition to be valid. After all, not everyone wants to, and not everyone safely can. There are also a lot of problems in the medical community with trans bodies that a lot of people struggle with. From gatekeeping via unnecessary hoops to flat out denial of services it can be traumatic to deal with.  

Of course, nonbinary is also an umbrella term, one that other identities fall under. There are many, but for myself I’m genderfluid transmasculine. I spend most of my time feeling like a feminine dude. The genderfluid part just means that I’m not consistently masculine feeling all the time. It’s really strange to me when I feel femme. I’m not used to it, even though it happens more often nowadays.  

Dysphoria is something quite a few trans folx struggle with, but dysphoria is different from dysmorphia. Dysphoria, in the case of gender identity, just means that certain things are a painful reminder that your assigned gender at birth (AGAB) doesn’t match what your gender really is. Dysmorphia is a mental illness, however, and it’s when what you see when you look in the mirror doesn’t match what you actually look like. It’s found alongside things like eating disorders, when the person thinks they weigh more than they really do, though that’s just one example of many. There are different types of dysphoria as well. I mostly get social dysphoria, which means that things that remind me of my AGAB cause me distress. Pregnancy was absolute torture when it came to dysphoria because I couldn’t just go to another room to calm down. I love my kid more than life itself; I just wish there had been an easier way to have them.  

I’m also relatively new to being out as nonbinary. I honestly never thought of myself as trans until I was about twenty-eight, when I happened to stumble upon the label genderqueer. As I read more about it, I started screaming because I didn’t realize there was a term for how I felt. I’ve rarely minded presenting feminine, but more often than not how I felt inside didn’t match how I looked to everyone else. I know that I don’t need to transition to please other people. I don’t owe others androgyny or a more masculine presentation. That has no impact on how I feel inside.  

This comes with a disclaimer that I only speak for myself, not anyone else. If you’re curious, you can spend some time on Google. There are many identities that fall under nonbinary, and even nonbinary itself is a valid label. After all it means you’re not part of the gender binary. Whether or not you want to expand on that is up to you.