12/17/2023
I recently posted a shorter form of this to a few closer friends online, and I'm going to expand on this a little more here for wider audience. tl;dr Snarky is enby. Feel free to skip if you're not down to read about gender stuff.
When I originally began trying to explore and connect with gender, even before I realized I was trans, I had discovered a concept called "bigender" which in the late 90's seemed to describe being equally comfortable in either role, or embracing both masculine and feminine aspects, and perhaps was a forerunner to concepts of gender fluidity and non-binary genders. At that time, it was what I thought I might have been.
I sorta started out my journey, as many did, with just doing crossplay and crossdressing, and for a long time, I thought that's all it would end up being. Then in 2006, things clicked and I realized I was trans in a big way. I started my journey, life happened, I was enjoying discovering what it meant to be a woman. But then I discovered that the medical community still seemed very mired in the gender binary, and in order to access care from many providers, you still needed to "pretend" (ie, transfemmes need to embrace femininity sufficiently to convince providers of your transness)
As I've gotten older and progressed in my journey, I've always sort of embraced being butch and a tomboy, because while I occasionally have my moments of wanting to be 'pretty' or 'girly up,' most of the time I just want to be comfortable and practical for life and the things I like to do. But even moreso now, with age and time and depression and exhaustion and a whole host of other things, I'm realizing that even though I'm still mostly secure in my internal sense of being a woman, I've largely disconnected gender from my external presentation. I'm just kind of exhausted about "performing" gender. Ie, I just kinda don't care anymore. It's too much damn work to try to wear specific clothes, hair, makeup, and all the other accoutrements to make the rest of the world see me a certain way when most of the time it doesn't work anyway, and the world's already fu**ed with trying to enforce my legal rights and bathroom access anyways, I've only got so much time left alive on this mudball, and I'm spending my energy on enjoying that time, worrying about my physical health, mobility, fulfillment, etc, and playing by society's gender norms no longer gives me any joy or satisfaction, it's all just more or less wasted effort to pacify society and make me more palatable for their consumption.
In a lot of ways, it's like Autistic masking, which I've largely gotten away from except for minimal levels to exist in neurotypical spaces like my job, etc. Performing Conventional "Gender" is Masking, and I'm fu***ng exhausted from trying to play their game for close to 20 years. Honestly, I don't think I was all that good at it to begin with, (I know friends will argue that point, but, well, our own worst critic, etc..)
So where does this leave me? Essentially, for a long time, I've been very hesitant and reluctant to consider myself non-binary; my strong internal sense of "woman," always made me feel like that excluded me from being non-binary somehow. But as the community has grown and learned and I've grown and learned, it's become pretty clear. While I'm still not quite sure which labels (if any) I feel strongest towards, I've been pretty much genderfluid / genderqueer / non-binary in some form for probably the last 10 years.
What does this mean for you, my friends, chosen family, and loved ones? Honestly, not much. I'm still SnarkyT, I still generally consider myself a woman, more or less, no legal changes or anything (Dear lords once in my lifetime was enough, thank you) although while I never formally 'announced' it, I added they to my pronouns (she/they), this is mostly just kind of solidifying something that I've been ruminating on for a very long time.
Other than that, I'm still me, still the same SnarkyT you know and love, still a transgender woman, just adding non-binary to the adjective list. I'm just kind of throwing in the towel on performing gender standards to any sort of external societal pressure. I'm too damn tired to worry about that anymore.
