For A While Now, I Had Been Procrastinating Thinking About How I Felt About Certain Things; How Uncomfortable

For a while now, I had been procrastinating thinking about how I felt about certain things; how uncomfortable I feel when people refer to periods as something that is a "cis woman" thing, how uncomfortable I feel when my friends send me posts or made comments which were directed at or about solely cis women, how disturbed I feel when people call me a "woman" or a "lady", the feeling of discomfort and disgust in my throat and tummy when people say things such as, "perks of being a (cis) woman", how I always felt that sick feeling when people gendered things, as if it were only for "cis females".

At first, I thought it was because of how cisnormative it was, how gendered - but then I realised that I've been feeling these feelings since I was small, since I was a child. I had absolutely no idea about the lgbtq+ community back then, I had no idea what "gender roles and norms" were, I wasn't even aware of what feminism meant- so it surely wasn't because of that. Then I forced myself to believe that I was in the process of getting over my internalised misogyny. After a lot of introspection, I realised it wasn't that either. With the help of a few of my friends, I could finally admit that it was because I wasn't a "cis female", it was because I was a demigirl (/an agender girl) - to myself and to them.

Figuring out my gender identity wasn't easy, it wasn't the same as figuring out my sexual orientation. There were days when I would beat myself up - calling myself a fake person, a wannabe. I didn't think that my feelings were valid because I didn't actually mind my body - I didn't have dysphoria; little did I know, back then, that body dysphoria wasn't the only type of dysphoria that existed, and moreover, I didn't have to experience dysphoria to be nonbinary.

I invalidated my own feelings, I refused to acknowledge them, I was afraid of talking to others about it because I didn't want them to confirm my doubts, my insecurities - so I shoved my feelings into a box and hid them away.

But now, after a lot of introspection and a lot of external validation, I finally feel secure with my gender. I am an agender girl, which means, though I do not mind the label 'girl', I do not identify with the meaning people have assigned to it; I do not identify myself as any gender, I am genderless. My pronouns are still she/her. I comparatively feel more "girl" than "agender" - when it comes to the label - but that doesn't make my identity any less valid, that doesn't make *me* any less valid.

My identity is not an oxymoron, my identity is not a buzzword which I find interesting, my identity is who I am, and who I am is not up to you to judge, who I am is up to me to own and accept.

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If someone asked me to explain my gender to them - eventhough I know I don't owe anyone any explanations - it would be somewhat like this :

Imagine you were born in a world with no labels, no categories. You don't know what gender is, you don't know what it means to be a girl or a boy or neither or either or both. Imagine you were a person with XX chromosomes, a uterus, a vagina and boobs and that was it. You don't know you have a gender, you don't know your parts and your chromosomes have a sex - you just know you have certain characteristics and that's it. Suddenly, a person from another world classifies you as a girl and you're okay with that, it's a simple classification, doesn't hurt anyone - but then they assign that label an identity, you. You are identified as that label, and on top of that more gendered labels are identified with you. But that's not you, you don't feel that way. You don't feel like boobs are a "female" thing, boobs are just boobs, when it's forcefully called "female parts", you feel sick, you feel like shuddering and curling into yourself. When people say that boobs are an advantage of being a girl, your entire body shakes with disgust, when they add meaning to the label "girl", you feel shaken up, you feel revolted.

But weirdly enough, until they assigned a meaning to the label "girl", it was just an empty word, and you were okay with that.

That is how being an agender girl feels like.

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