Bigender/genderfluid (and to extent, other trans people), do you ever just... snap back? And how do you handle it?
First, bit of context.
I'm AMAB. I've questioned things about my gender for 15 years or so, and there are meaningful "signs" all the way back through my life. But, I never thought of myself as anything but cis.
Early this December, something clicked after some conversations and some research and some weirdness. In like 48 hours from a Very Important Conversation with a stranger, I told myself "heck with it, I'm probably never gonna be 100% certain I'm trans, anything from 51% to 99% is enough". I called it my "51% principle", and it gave me comfort.
Don't wanna bore you *or* summarise more than three weeks of intense soul-searching, research, conversations and help from my friends (who are wonderful and kept me going) with excessive briefness.
But, that 51% usually went closer to 90%. I was not sure if I was bigender or genderfluid, and I considered the possibility I might actually be a trans woman, or close enough to call myself that. The only thing I knew I probably am not (even less so than the "cis" assumption. Cissumption?) is non-binary. It doesn't feel right, all my feelings about gender - whichever one - are very much rooted in the gender binary.
Point is, it was a lot, but it was viscerally, meaningfully real. Whatever it was.
I came out to quite a few people online, and a few real-life friends, as well as my wife. I felt I was going forward. Slowly, but excited for whatever I might end up discovering.
And then today happened.
If I didn't remember the feelings and thoughts I've had, I would say with no hesitation that I'm a cis man, if someone asked me right now. It doesn't feel like my old "but I must be cis!" kind of denial. I don't *feel* anything female in my mind. If I didn't remember the last few weeks pretty well, I'd think there's not even a question as to that. I don't even miss those feelings. But I miss the feeling of missing them?
Maybe that's what being genderfluid is like, I honestly don't know. But I don't feel excitement about it. I don't feel anything. I'm a very emotional person always and this December, more than once I felt like I'd blown my emotional fuse, and I felt numb. But this does not feel like "numb". I'm not recovering from excessive emotion. I'm just on a "nothing" level.
And it's an ugly feeling. I don't miss the excess and inner turmoil of the past weeks. But I miss a feeling of direction and purpose and discovery. I don't know if this is dysphoria (it's different from anything else in my life I've identified as dysphoria), or if it's a depressive state due to brain overload (I did have to catch up on 15 years of complicated feelings in like a month), or if it's just a normal reaction to my AGAB - after all, what I've always publically been, what I've been socialised as, is not going to be that exciting.
But on the other hand - if I'm bigender or genderfluid, shouldn't I feel some connection, some satisfaction over my male gender, if it exists? I felt actual gender euphoria over feeling male (rare, but still) when I was half-ready to believe I'm a woman. Surely I should feel SOME gender euphoria now that I can't think of myself as anything else than a man?
Does anyone else experience that? Is that normal? Is that denial or just part of not being a one-gender-fits-all person? What should I look for in terms of feelings of thoughts to recenter myself? If feeling like a man at the moment is a real feeling, why is it packed in this sort of numbness? This doesn't feel right.
And how do I keep myself from gaslighting myself into thinking the past month didn't happen? Because I'm sure of what I felt. I gave myself permission to believe myself, but that "myself" feels like a stranger, and I'm afraid I'm about to revoke that permission.
I'm sorry this is excessively dramatic, but out of any questions or rants I've ever wanted to write on this subreddit (and there were many), this is the first time I genuinely have no clue how to proceed.
Posted Dec 28, 2021, 11:19 AM UTC
I don’t identify as bigender/genderfluid, so take this with a grain of salt, but all that interior abstract “do I feel more like a man or a woman?” soul-searching never helped me much (although god knows I did my agonizing fair share of it, for years). All my progress came from just doing concrete things that I really wanted to try - growing my hair out, “pretending” to be a girl online, buying tops from the womens department, making an appointment for HRT - and worrying about what that meant for my identity later. I’m well into transition and I still don’t really know what it means to “feel like” a man or a woman.
Are you in therapy? That lack of feeling you describe sounds a bit like depression to me. It can be helpful to talk to someone even if it’s not explicitly about gender stuff. (But it is good to find someone who has worked with trans people before, just because those who haven’t can be shockingly ignorant about this stuff.)
Thank you for your comment.
Framing progress as actually doing things makes a lot of sense to me, and you're far from the first person to tell me that. I *am* trying to figure out what I want to do, and how. But first, it's all very scary, and second... I dunno. I always live much, if not most of my life in my head. I like to understand and categorise and label things. It's not just a mental exercise to me, it's how I navigate life - in everything, not just in my transness or possible lack thereof. I genuinely get annoyed at people who say stuff like "screw labels", because I need my labels and no-one is taking them away from me. I acknowledge and understand some people don't really need them, but I do.
On the other hand - yeah, I can't move forward in a meaningful way based on feelings alone. So your comment does help in that I think it shows me that I maybe need to stop navel-gazing for a while, and find one small, practical thing to focus on actually DOING, even symbolically? So thanks for the advice.
As to therapy - I'm definitely considering it, and I was considering it for other reasons before this whole "gender" thing blew up in my face. But you know, maybe, how it is. As long as there is no immediate crisis, there's always too little time and money for therapy, and I always thought of myself as resilient enough (yes, I know this is extremely toxic and useless an attitude. I know). Now I'm pretty sure I need to figure out how to fit therapy in my schedule and finances. Although personally, I don't think depression's an issue in my case. Maybe I'm in a brief depressive period. But I don't recognise any signs of depression in myself long-term, and I've thought about it long and hard, many times, over the years.
(then again, I said the same thing about being trans, so who knows. Maybe I just know myself less than I'd thought in more ways than just one)
Again, thanks so much for the comment.
I can definitely relate to spending a lot of time in my own head. Like, I’m a furry, and the first 10+ years of my gender exploration stuff were all in the context of drawing and roleplaying characters who did not and could not exist. I kept that stuff private from absolutely everyone, totally compartmentalized from the rest of my life, until one day I actually thought about what it might actually mean and basically had a breakdown. And the fact that what I really, truly wanted was obviously an impossible fantasy made it harder to figure out that I could still have some of it, which was a lot better than nothing.
Just to give you a sense of the timeline, I had my “wait, am I actually a girl?” revelation in early 2017, didn’t tell a single soul about it until 2019, and didn’t start actively transitioning until early 2020.
It takes time to work through this stuff, especially if it’s been building up for years and years. Therapy helped. Another thing that helped, maybe even more, was to find a community of people a lot like me and realize that I wasn’t as weird and lonely as I thought.
I mean, so am I *points at her username*. The overlap between "furry" and "trans" is so huge, right?
I actually learnt pretty much EVERYthing about trans people other than "they exist"* from furries, and I mean it in the best way possible. And yeah, I explored my gender in the context of being furry a lot, the two are still weirdly intertwined in my mind. But for years, it was "yeah, OK, I'm cis, but my gender is weird in the context of my being a furry".
Furries as a whole were light years ahead in terms of knowledge about, and acceptance of, trans people in like, early 2000s. It's wild.
I attribute like 30%-60% of people shitting on furries online on it being a very convenient outlet for homo- and transphobia, with plausible deniability. Furries continue to be THE most LGBT+ accepting group out there, by a wide margin, that I've seen.
* - I guess it's "we exist" now. Still getting used to the idea that I'm somehow not on the outside looking in.
Yeah I didn’t notice your username/avatar until you replied and I was like “oh wait I think I know where she’s coming from.”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there are so many trans people in a community that’s fundamentally about the pleasure of imagining yourself with a different name, in a different body.