![]() ![]() I was lucky to have a supportive family as well, being surrounded by a community that supported and affirmed me, I could truly be myself. When I shared this identity with them first at seventeen – asking them to use my new name, use gender neutral pronouns – it was a safe way for me to confirm that being non-binary feels like home to me. I had friends who were having a lot of the same feelings. A deep dive through the internet, combing through explanatory breakdowns of queer theory, to expansive lists of gender identity labels, left me to land on simply identifying as the label I felt suited me best – non-binary. Research being a favorite dual purpose coping mechanism/hobby of mine, and human psychology and sexuality being an intersection of special interest, I dove into researching why I felt the way I did about gender. Long curly hair, a girlish nickname, and she/her pronouns just weren’t feeling suited to me – like a sweater I could admire on somebody else but fit me all wrong. ![]() The absolute joy I got when people saw me as my full self in other facets just wasn’t clicking when it came to my gender. I remember feeling like, as much as I experimented with clothing, I wasn’t getting the gender euphoria I wanted. It was no shock the same normative standard would apply to gender. Early on, I understood the expectation of heteronormativity – the societal expectation to be heterosexual as the standard – already having come out as bisexual at thirteen. As I got older, this internal acceptance of difference, though sometimes hard-fought, made it easy to interrogate, accept, and love my non-binary identity. I had an understanding that being a little odd would always feel more comfortable to me than changing parts of myself that I cherished to fit an expectation of normalcy. But I owned that early, befriending fellow playground weirdos and saying “thank you” anytime another child would bestow the word “weird” upon me in an insult. Research from a 2020 study cites gender-diverse people are three to six times more likely to be autistic than those that are cisgender.īefore I even knew I was trans or autistic, I knew myself to be strange – both because other kids called me that, and because it was one of those lingering suspicions. I am not the first, and I’m certainly not the last, to be at this intersection of identity. But neither were surprising to me, truthfully. I knew I was non-binary before I knew I was autistic. ![]()
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