If I fantasized

Discontent with who I am

If I cut my hair and changed my name

And called myself a man

Well, I guess all I can say is

I just wouldn’t quite be me

I’d be Helena in a masquerade

Playing games of make believe

It wouldn’t satisfy my longings

Change my worth or give me joy

I have not the natural character

That belongs, alone, to boys

I could spend my time in idle dreams

Wishing to be someone new

But things are ordered as they are

That’s the good old fashioned truth

You see

I’m head over heels in love with life

I have all that I need

And while boys are wonderful, I’ll have to leave them be

For I’m busy being lady-like-original-old me.

i don’t want to be a different gender, but i also don’t want to continue being my current gender (more like the gender i was assigned, i’m still closeted). i want to be just...me, i guess. i don’t want to be a girl or a boy. just me. i want to be treated fairly regardless of my gender. i want to be able to live my life the way i want to regardless of my gender. i want to be given the same opportunities as everybody else regardless of my gender. but most of all, i want to be able love myself regardless of my gender.

i’m AFAB (assigned female at birth), and most people, or i guess, all people assume that i’m a girl, and i don’t blame then. i present feminine because masculine looks and outfits just don’t fit me. i’d love to present masculine, but it just doesn’t look good on me, so i just stick with presenting feminine. and because of that, it makes sense that i get called “lady”, “ma’am”, “miss”, and have people use she/her pronouns on me. but that doesn’t mean i’m ok with it. i’m non-binary and use they/them pronouns, so hearing things like that being used on me makes me dysphoric and overall, just awful.

i used to think that i wanted to be a boy then. if i didn’t want to be a girl, then a boy must be it. but after a lot of thinking and crying, i realized that i didn’t want to be a boy. i didn’t want to be either. i don’t want a gender. i wanted to be me, just a person. i guess that’s why the term non-binary just felt right. because it was me, it was who i am. me. i’m me, regardless of what my gender is or what i choose to identify as, and i want the world to be ok with that.

of course, the world won’t be. not the whole world, just some. people will tell me that my pronouns aren’t “gramatically correct” and that being non-binary isn’t a real thing. but there will also be people supporting me no matter what, validating me and making sure that i never feel ashamed of who i am, and i’m glad that there’s people in my life like that. i hope everybody gets the chance to meet people like that. those people care about and love me for who i am, regardless of my gender, and i hope to get to that point some day.

like the title says, gender is stupid. it’s a social construct that does more harm than good. i'm not sure if it even does any good. who cares if men want to wear dresses or paint their nails? doesn’t make them any less of a man. if women want to wear suits and look masculine and not dainty at all, let them be, they’re still women. at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself:

“are they hurting me, others, or theirselves?”

if the answer is no, then move on. it’s their life, let them live it. if the answer is yes, it’s probably not because of what they’re wearing. if it is, you’re either dramatic, or their beautiful and stunning looks are killing you /half-joking (this a dialogue tag for those who don’t know, usually looks like -> /hj).

that was a rant and a little off topic, but still needs to be said. stop dictating other people’s lives.

so i guess what i’m trying to say is, gender just doesn’t do it for me. i don’t want to be the gender i was assigned as, and i also don’t want to be a differnt gender. why should i have to be put into this little box and have it define me for the rest of my life? that's not who i am or who i want to be. i’m me, a person. not a girl or a boy, me. i’m me, and that’s good enough for me.

Puberty hit me like a brick at age nine. I remember the day vividly. It sucked.

I had no clue what the hell a menstrual cycle was - I just remember suddenly bleeding, and then my mother having to sit me down to explain that this would be the norm for the next thirty to forty years of my life.

There’s an old joke in the hills - “Never trust something that bleeds for a week and doesn’t die.”

Gods, I felt like death that day. I was so utterly depressed. It felt like my entire childhood had suddenly just been ripped away by the horrors of cramps, hormones, and bleeding like a stuck pig every. single. month. My mother let me stay home from school for a day, just to adjust. Also because my stomach felt like that Alien movie.

I hear men bitch about how they deal with other men, war, work, shit they’ve mostly created themselves (again, other men) - and I’m sorry but if you haven’t had to bleed every month of your life, then fuck you. I was a happy-go-lucky kid playing on a swingset and then suddenly I was a monthly horror film.

And not only THAT but THEN I had to have the talk - again, at AGE NINE - about exactly WHY I bled, and all the wonderful risks / responsibilities that came with it. My mother at least was a sex positive soul - she tried to teach me that sex wasn’t evil, it was natural and you just “had to be careful”.

Careful. Yeah right.

If I sound bitter here it’s because not a single fucking boy I ever grew up with got the “reproductive responsibility” bullshit I had to deal with at AGE NINE, AGAIN - LIKE WTF - and they just ran amok like stupid idiots without a single care in the world. Gods, did I resent them. If I ever fall into a man-hating stupor you’ll have to excuse my bloodlust. Like, literally - if it weren’t for my raging hormones I would have signed up for lesbian land long ago. Like hell did I want to make my situation worse by dealing not only with the excrutiating pain of menses but also the utter degredation and body-wrecking experience that is nine months of hell followed by hard labor - which can also still kill you. Goody.

I hated knowing that just because I had to be born a girl this was my lot in life. I mean, it’s already shit knowing you’re gonna be treated as weaker, stupider, “nicer” (again - bloodlust anybody? really?) while being expected to stay home and do all the shitwork everyone takes for granted. Then there’s all the fun worry about getting attacked/knocked up pretty much every day you decide to go outside because again, men don’t deal with this shit so why would they care who they subject to more suffering? Meanwhile the boys get to go run and play in the hills and the dirt and the trucks, la la la. Fuckers.

Besides it’s natural for girls to have kids - that’s why we program them to love little dolls from an early age and play “house”, so they understand and adjust to their future role. I mean, it wouldn’t do for them to want anything else - they’re already suffering, best to just stay home. I used to watch my girl friends in grade school plan out their future dream homes and husbands and honestly wonder what the hell was wrong with them - how could they want this crappy life?? Especially more than one kid? Are you insane??

...

I’ve been told my programming was missed, somehow.

Like I said, puberty hit me like a brick at age nine. Maybe if I’d had a little more time to be innocent - a little more time to not utterly dread the future - my programming might have kicked in properly.

But otherwise - nah.

Tell some little boy his ass is gonna bleed every moon cycle for the rest of his life until he shits out a watermelon after hauling a keg belly for nine months, and tell me how well he adapts.

Being female kinda stinks for a lot of reasons.

1) We get paid less

2) .

3) People expect more

4) We’re written off as overly emotional if we so much as state our opinions

5) Speaking of our opinions, people have a hard time wanting to hear them

6) pregnancies

7) There are people in the world who will read this and think I’m an idiotic FemiNazi.

I was assigned female at birth and I identify as female but it kind of stinks.

two boxes

❏M

❏F

opposing sides,

forever at war

pink and blue

like black and white

yin and yang.

no one

can upset

the balance.

you must choose.

no one likes

when you mix the paints

in the watercolor tray.

suddenly

you're the bad guy

just because you feel like

purple.

male

or

female

?

i have to pick one.

i want to pick one.

but nothing feels right to me.

so all i can do

is suffer in the impossible inbetween,

full of dysphoria that

doesn't exist.

at least

that's what people tell me.

these thoughts in my head

are ramblings of a lunatic

and i just need to

get over it.

i have to close my eyes

swallow my vomit

stop looking in the mirror

ignore everyone

ignore even myself

and choose.

on the tv show

the walking dead

every woman has

shaved arm pits

but how in hell

would that matter

in the apocalypse

asking for a friend

who isn’t a man

but a woman instead

we fight to the death

zombies and bloodshed

but at least we’re hairless

I am me eternally.

Forever a gender with so much predjudice weighing it down.

Forever a gender looked down upon.

Underestimated.

Overlooked.

But I would be me, eternally,

even if all of the world said no to me.

Because the world can't say no

if I don't let it say no

to me or her, to she.

I am proud to be me, to be her, to be she,

because I delight

in proving people wrong

when they say that I can't be.

So this is for all the rulebreakers

all the boundary breakers

Who choose to agree with me, eternally.

All the queens, the mes,

the hers,

and the shes.

There are times I wish I was a boy, only because of all the times that I have been grouped with the boys or the men due to my name. That wish only lasts a minute until I get a room by myself.

I am a female, and I don't personally wish to know what its like to be a male. There is alot of things that society does not teach males about females. I do not wish to know the secret horrors that males have to go through that no one teaches us.

I bet you are confused that my first statement I said boy/girl and the second I said male/female. The reason why is simple. I do not believe that gender and sex are the same things.

The reason why is a simple thing. Everything in this world has been catergorized by how it functions and how it functions with the others. We give them the label "sex" for the function. Reproduction, and how the lifeform grows to complete this function. Gender is connected to what we as people think of what a person is when we say boy/girl/man/woman. Do we think about the hormones in the body that is built? How the organs develop? What changes to make way for certain organs? What weakness happen because of that? These things make marked changes, permenate changes. These changes will make a person different on a biological sense.

How a person's hair is styled, what kind of color they can like, and what they are dressed like is not biological. It is how the culture shapes a person based on what they want a person to be, the roles they fulfill, and what they want the person to want. That is NOT biological. Like names, they change overtime with the ages. They flip when the cultures switches values and they are only attractive when the culture deems it to be. The prizes and the punishments are also assigned by what is and isn't acceptable by that person's role. That is also not based on sex. A person's sex will not determine if they are more or less guilty of a crime. But a culture can and will decide it.

Our culture that buys everything wants to put a price on everything, including things that are natural to a person. They want to package and resell you your own idenity, and the easiest thing will be to link two things that should not be linked.

I might sound crazy but this is my own thoughts. There are those that do not agree with me and that is fine. This is just me and me thought of gender

All my life, I've never exactly been comfortable with my body. I'm just one of those people who are naturally self-conscious(about everything) but I somehow managed(mostly) to push back those insecurities; after all, I'd never discriminate against anyone else's body, so why should I cause myself to suffer such irrationality(feed my insecurities unhealthy, not to mention, uncalled for, critiques that only serve to shame and scorn) but it's a helluva journey; with more back and forth's than I can keep up with. So I know body issues. But I don't think anyone other than recipients are fully able to understand the torture of being the wrong gender. Someone close to me has tried to explain it to me and though I felt their heartbreak, confusion, isolation and incomprehension, I knew I couldn't come close to understanding living with it every single day. Knowing that heartbreak, confusion, isolation and incomprehension as long as you have known that you are not what you were supposed to be. What you want to be. I know this is probably not what this was supposed to be about but I need to say; to my beloved and anyone out there enduring the same struggle, in a world that is, all too often, harsh and cruel: I personally do not think God makes any mistakes and God definitely did not make a mistake with you. You are exactly as you are meant to be. If you were born a different gender, you wouldn't be who you are and the world needed you, exactly as you are. And though there are too many who believe different, most of the world knows and will continue to ratify; you can be exactly what you want to be. You be exactly who you want to be! God didn't give you this struggle for no reason. I've seen a bit of the strength it takes to go on living, to try to understand and accept yourself in a world that, all too often, simply refuses to understand and accept others; it takes resilience that not everyone possesses. I know I couldn't possibly come close to understanding but I applaud it. I applaud you. And I pray for your continued strength, endlessly blissful happiness and much, much more.

I don’t want to be a woman or a man.

I want to be me.

I collect Hot Wheels and comic books,

and was made fun of because only “boys like those”

which wasn’t true.

I was a girl.

I liked them.

I collect make-up.

books.

I wouldn’t want to be a man.

the unrealistic toxic traits they are judged for.

Money.

Power.

Physique.

Happy.

That’s what I want to be.