What is, gender, really, when you think about it? It's a series of social expectations that will be different depending on what culture you're in and how people perceive you. More importantly, do you want those expectations placed on you? Would you be happier with the other set, mixing and matching things from both sets, or perhaps you're like me where you feel the expectations are unfair. I certainly didn't pick them. Why should I like sports because I'm AMAB? My sister loves watching baseball, I have no clue why, and if my grandfather was still alive, he would likely be really upset that she's a Red Sox fan. The things I like are the things I like, I don't want to change them for anyone. I tried to do that a long time ago when I realized liking N*SYNC and Britney Spears was likely giving up the game on me being gay, and in the mid 2000's society at large was still pretty homophobic so I felt I had to hide.

What I've learned in the years since is that was the worst thing I could have done. A couple of things happened to my personality because of this. The first is that through adopting detachment as a coping method, I managed to ruin my ability to enjoy anything. Uh oh! Sounds pretty bad right? Then, on top of that, add in an unhealthy dose of Cynicism because of all the visible racism and queerphobia present in society while you're queer and your next door neighbor is a Muslim with first-generation immigrant parents.

That means being around me meant you were blasted by a wave of negativity pretty much 100% of the time. My only saving grace in this regard is that I was (and still kind of am) shy, so I often didn't have alot to say. I'm not proud of who I was in my teens and early 20's. I definitely didn't like myself very much at the time. It took me quite a number of years to figure out what it was I didn't like about me, at least in terms of personality. When I was still working at Panera probably when I was 26 or 27, I think I was complaining about something inconsequential, like maybe the rearrangement of the equipment on the salad and sandwich line, it happened frequently enough. My cafe manager heard me complaining and bluntly said I needed to stop being so negative. It stopped me in my tracks, nobody had ever just *said* it to me before. It was like I had finally seen myself and went "oh no."

I'm still kind of negative, I am a complainer by nature, but on that day I had identified a problem with myself and wanted to change it. What I should have probably done was gone to therapy (certainly would've been faster) but instead I forged on making small incremental changes on my own. Did they work? I don't know, really, but I feel better about who I am.

Gender identity is an interesting one, because for most of my life, I didn't know the ins and outs of it. There was some point in 2014, referred to as the Trans Tipping Point, where all of a sudden *everyone* I knew online started coming out as trans women. Even my first boyfriend turns out is retroactively my first *girlfriend* and the depression she had leading to our breakup, turns out, was gender dysphoria. So, at the time, without everything I know now about what my options were, but knowing I was unhappy with being A Man, I had to sit down and think about it. Would I be happier as a woman? Ultimately the answer I landed at was no. I would just be trading some things I don't like for some other things I don't like, it didn't seem like a good deal to me. It still doesn't, I stand by that decision, I'm not a man but I am absolutely not a woman either, and to think of me as one is just as incorrect.

Most of my initial learning about trans issues was done through Tumblr. Lots of trans friends were like "well here's what its like and here's a bunch of signs that led me to figure it out and here's what we want (to be treated like normal people)" but those things were, especially in 2014 and the years immediately after it, was pretty much all about trans women and nothing about non-binary people. This makes sense, since everyone I knew that had come out at that point was a trans woman. And on tumblr, even if you see a post happen across your dashboard, you don't really get a sense of what the person who made that post is like all the time. Tumblr's got a focus on sharing posts which means if I see one funny post from one funny non-binary person, I don't go follow them, because I don't really know who they are, I just know they made a good post.

Around this time I had finally started letting myself be more of a furry. Posting on SA as a furry was always kind of a stressful experience. Oh did I mention that being a furry online in the 2000's was a great way to paint a target on your back? So behind the wall of detachment it went - always at arms length, lest I feel one of those dreaded emotions. In being a furry, you can shed your perception of yourself as a human and just like, be a dog. Being a dog rocks, dog's don't have very much gender binary to conform to. I can have a fat ass and big ears and bark and roll around on my back and wag my tail and just be a dog. I now know this to be Therianthropy. There's always words for how weird you are, you know? By 2018 I had fallen in with the radical leftist furry crowd to some degree. I had started dating my husband over the summer that year. In the fall, he pointed out that there was a mastodon instance all the leftist furries seemed to be creating, and I joined it, and boy am I glad I did. You can say whatever you want about snouts but those two years were some of the most fun I've ever had online. I have such respect for the people who created it and most of the people who posted on it. Many of those people are very dear friends now. This, really, is the place I finally got to interact with Non-Binary people outside of reading a comical metaphor for what genderqueer meant on Tumblr.

By 2020 some things had happened, let's say. I don't want to try & recount the dissolution of snouts because honestly it isn't my story to tell, and I would probably get alot of things wrong or leave things out that I don't know about. But more than that, the pandemic had forced everyone indoors. Suddenly I was alone with my feelings in my living room and trips to the grocery store were harrowing death-defying experiences. In the aftermath of this everyone's just okay with getting sick now, in a way that's really baffling. But until American Society made that stupid idiotic decision, everyone was trapped inside waiting for vaccines that took something like 14 months to arrive. Hot Vax Summer arrived and once again, many people I knew who were boys had been forced to reckon with the fact that they were girls and decided that running from themselves was not the right answer.

In late 2021, two things happened to really accelerate the braincells. The first, is in October my brother had gotten married. I attended the wedding wearing a suit. This, as it turns out, would make me feel like absolute shit. If you know me you'll know I am not much for Formality, had the pandemic not cancelled my graduation from College, I wouldn't have gone anyway. But mostly wearing a Suit makes me feel like I am not myself, that I am in a costume.

The second is that I had built up enough savings for a down payment and considered the idea that owning a house was probably a good idea. I do own a house now and I do think it was mostly a good idea (except for all of the problems.) To this end, I had some discussions with my managers about relocation, since we'd been in remote work mode for nearly two years. To which they said "lol, lmao, no" and since I was already in a very frustrating position at work, I said "fuck this" and began looking elsewhere with the intent to relocate. At first, I looked at Boston, saw how much houses cost, and then decided I would not be buying a house in Boston unless I won powerball.

As luck would have it, my current job was looking for someone with my skillset and was in the greater Philadelphia region, a city I could get down with. I applied, and waited.

The night before Thanksgiving that year I had an edible and epiphanies started going off in my head about maybe being non-binary. This continued after the edible had finished, and is still continuing to this day: I still think I'm non-binary. But the day after was Thanksgiving and the day after that, I got a call back to schedule an interview. I then spent the next several months parsing what being non-binary meant to me while: interviewing for a job, starting that job, buying a house, planning a move, and trying to get to grips with a new job.

In some ways I think piling on all this change at once sort of allowed my brain to go "hey so one more thing - now that I know what non-binary is all about I want in on that too, you're moving after two years of not seeing anyone in person, now is the time" and, knowing I had done a bad job at being gay because I had lived the 2000's in fear, I decided to go for it.

That being said, "going for it," particularly among the Non-Binary means wildly different things person to person. The big one is that many people will get on HRT, I didn't do that. I still don't think I will. Trading one set of problems for another doesn't seem right to me. I don't need tits. If they invent HRT that can TF me into a dog, then we'll talk. This, of course, ran counter to how I had understood the trans community - everyone's on HRT aren't they? Well, no, alot of people are, but not everyone.

Still, I then spent the next three to four months fighting off impostor syndrome, do I belong here if i'm not going to medically transition? Can't I just paint my nails, wear a skirt and get some cute dangly earrings and call it a day? The fact of the matter is, you can do that, and if you want to then do it.

I do these things in part because I think they are fun, look good on me, and because the only direction you can go away from masculinity, much to my dismay in some cases, is towards femininity. If there was some other axis I could travel along on the Gender Graph I would certainly do it. Being agender means, to me, that neither one of these genders are really for me, and that's okay. But I can pick and choose aspects from each as needed to feel like myself. You might feel like this, or you might feel like you want to be both genders and mixing the aspects is your only way to get there. Or you might be a boy or you might be a girl, I simply do not know, it is your business.

After I was done fighting impostor syndrome and tweaking my pronoun combos I landed at they/them and felt good about it, then landed at agender and felt really good about it, and now I am just me. There's still things about me I don't like, some of them are not fixable, some are, and one involves letting a woman blast my face with lasers every four weeks until my stupid beard hair falls out.

Anyway, if you invent a third gender, call me. Let's talk about it.