being multigender is such an odd experience. when i began to identify as bigender instead of transgender, it felt like i had been living in a pond and suddenly i had been dropped into a whole ocean of people like me. my understanding of myself and other people's understanding of me had been so... limited until then, and i sort of felt like an outlier among other ftm people. while i identified heavily as a guy, i had become more and more aware of the fact that..... i didn't mind being referred to as a girl much either. this scared me. i thought that maybe i wasn't trans at all, and i had been lying to myself for the past few years.
but that wasn't it; it's not that i wasn't transgender at all, it's that i was transgender in a way i had never considered before. before this year, i never realized that it was possible to be more than one gender at once - i thought the closest thing to that was being genderfluid, which of course was not what was i was feeling. i'm still not sure how it is that i found the term bigender, but i'm sure it must have been on tumblr or something, and my deepest thanks to whoever wrote the post that made me realize who i am. knowing that i didn't have to pick one or the other or neither was so refreshing, that i didn't have to shove part of myself down just because others wouldn't understand it, or pretend to be something i'm not.
and while the multigender online space seems to be incredibly accepting, the way that outsiders view us hurts. because they often have such a limited view of what we're like. jesus christ, if i ever have to read another tumblr post saying something along the lines of "ok you MIGHT CALL YOURSELF a BOYGIRL FREAK but we all know that secretly you hate TRANS WOMEN!!!!!!" im going to seriously consider deleting my account. it's just so incredibly weird to me and it honestly feels like they really do see us as freaks and want to attack us and the best way they can think to do that is by making it seem like all of us are on the wrong side of the Current Tumblr Dot Com Issue. it's always felt like a targeted attack on us. (don't even get me started on the people who try to make it seem like trans women and trans men are mortal enemies...... the people stirring up infighting are so odd.)
and to bring up another issue, i keep seeing people attack those who use contradictory labels. maybe at some point in the past, i would've even been one of those attackers - but now, having the perspective of someone whose gender identity itself could be viewed as contradictory - i don't really care. is the trans guy calling himself a lesbian because he heavily aligns with lesbian experiences really that big of a problem? isn't being a trans man and being a lesbian so heavily intertwined as well? i've read better explanations of this.... i know i might not be phrasing things that well but i hope i'm getting my point across. but back to the contradictory labels. in being multigendered, your label will always be contradictory. someone will always get upset over what you call yourself. i've literally seen a bigender lesbian get told that they need to identify as bisexual because they're also a man. which...... that's... not how it works... you can't just tell someone how to identify jesus christ... recently i've also discovered a term that i really like for describing my.. sexuality?? idk i specifically mean attraction in a romance way rn. i think it was sapphichillean/sapphic achillean. basically being attracted to girls as a girl and being attracted to boys as a boy. which. damn. that is so immensely accurate in a way that bisexual never was. my attraction to girls is strictly from my 'girl side', and vice versa with being a boy. idk how to end this so i'll end it with one of my favorite quotes from that one screenshot of a youtube comment. How strange it is to be anything at all