#theres a secret third thing affecting my identity but either you already know or you will eventually probably

[doodlepede]

its so funny thinking about how the way i label and think about myself has changed, lets fucking chronicle this shit shall we? for fun

4-12: girl who was way too boyish to fit in with the girls but too female to fit in with the boys and they all made sure i knew it. i don't think you gain a gender until you gain even the dimmest awareness that you're a person and i think i was like four when that happened, maybe three idk. even when i was young, i felt somewhere in-between. i oscillated between phases of overcompensating to be one of the girls or boys in turns. one year I'd wear a lot of pink with my blue, because girls rule and boys drool, am i doing this right? next year, pink is nowhere to be found because im a tomboy, and pink is so girly and lame, right?

13-15: i discovered tumblr. i discovered that being trans is a thing one can be. i am repulsed by microlabeling, and stick to macrolabels. I'm into demigirl and then demiboy for a good while, most of a year i think, but drop it. its too microlabelly. i try genderqueer for a bit, but discover pretty quick (like two or three months) that attaching a synonym for freak directly to my identity is not healthy for me. eventually, i settle into plain and simple trans boy.

16-20: no more questioning, we're done, it's figured out, im a boy, im a man, im a guy and a dude. if you imply I'm anything else, anything less than a complete man, I'll kick your ass. it's a big comfy macrolabel, lots of room to spread out, like a stereotypical big hoodie. I'm cozy.

21: :)

I'm not actually questioning my gender, I'm still perfectly comfortable in my big ol boy hoodie, I'm just also grown enough to acknowledge the grey areas i wasnt comfortable enough yet to. here's the fuckin thing, autism can affect the way you understand your identity from a young age, and you're likely to make conflations about it, such as that if neither boys or girls will accept me as one of them, maybe I'm neither, or maybe i need to overcompensate to the point that it's undeniable what side I'm on. i did both, several times, the latter in both directions. i also am straight up trans either way, i desire to medically transition, and i would even if i were the only human left on earth and had absolutely nobody to pass for. so where the line is between which gender-feeling is autism and which is transness, idkkkkk both things are inextricable from my being, existence, and experience. i dont think it super matters either, its not like being a neurotypical trans makes your gender-feelings more pure in any way. the desire to separate autisitc gender-feelings from trans gender-feelings is the same desire as microlabels, its an oroboros, I'm not interested in dividing myself into bits.

honestly if asked, i think my gender is just trans. transgender, the trans kind of gender, gender in a trans sort of way. im in my comfy boy hoodie but it's not zipped up yknow.