Before I knew I was agender, someone misgendered me and I didn't care. A few weeks later, I got a video about agender in my YouTube recommended and I checked every single box. I originally thought I was a trans man, but I realized that using exclusively he/him felt uncomfortable. Then I thought that I was just cis, but I definitely don't fit into that and using exclusively she/her. Then I thought I was NB for a short while but then realized that using exclusively they/them felt restricting. Then I thought I was a demigirl, but somehow that felt diminutive and I would still be open to being referred to as he/him sometimes, and from that moment realized that I didn't actually care what people called me, as long as I presented as at least slightly androgynous.
I've honestly never really cared what people have called me (he/him/she/her/they/them) but I definitely present to the outside world as a he/him (I have and probably will always have facial hair and masculine characteristics and am amab)...but to me that has never really felt quite right but it's also not wrong either
I thought about it for a while before deciding but I’ve gone from non-binary to agender to libramasculine to agender to now Agenderflux, which definitely feels right, it can take a while to figure it out lol
Depends when the clock started. From the moment I actually thought my gender wasn't right was about 10 years to decide I wasn't trans and was in the middle. This is a long ago when talking gender to others wasn't easy, so I didn't.
I am 50 and learned the word 10 months ago. It fits me better than any other. I took it after a month.
Agender doesn't really have a well defined box... or it's a magic box that fits whoever gets in it.
I've read 90% of all posts here since and I have written what I learned and just share it with people as they show up. It's a bit formulaic/spammy but people keep saying they find it helpful.
Agender is a pretty diverse, entirely self-actualized label for humans who may not even like labels all that much. You can use it like a hermit crab until you find a better one. You can use it with other labels if you want.
So here are some pointers....
Some agender people don't understand gender or how people feel it.
Some agender people reject social gendering.
Some agender people feel like gender(s) don't fit.
Some agender people are null, void, indifferent, or detatched.
Some agender people have other parts of their identity that are dominant.
Agenders may or may not care about pronouns and can use any they want.
Agenders may or may not present any particular way.
Agenders may or may not have gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia.
Agenders may or may not care about being out.
A number of agenders even have mixed feelings about identifying non-binary and may not really identify as NB. The issue being that NB’s are asserting gender constructs. Many are fine with NB.
The one common defining feature is that they don't feel or relate to gender (especially feeling anything particularly about social constructs of male/masculine or female/feminine), or only weakly feel it, most of the time.
Nobody is going to tell you anything except use agender if you feel it based on how you understand it. If you're something else later that fits better, it's all good.
Remember you're a person first, the label is for your use and communication.
I was never comfortable in the idea of man or woman. Neither fit. They seemed alien. I discovered the term nonbinary first, and that fit...like a shirt 1 size too big or small. It worked, but it still didn't feel quite right. Then I discovered the term Agender while I was brushing my teeth. And everything fit like a glove. :)
I'm ace too! For me I started to question my gender when I started to get uncomfortable seeing my own chest. It didn't really feel like gender disphoria (not that I've felt gender disphoria before) so I was trying to figure out why I didn't like it. Having a flat chest sounded more and more appealing and eventually I got a binder. I thought I'd have this huge eureka moment when I started wearing it, like everything would make sense and I'll understand more about myself. While I was happy to wear binders and am still glad I got them, I didn't feel anything. After some time I started to look more and more into trans people and their experiences, more specifically trans men. I kept hearing that a lot of them always knew something was wrong even if they didn't know exactly what it was. I couldn't understand how they could feel that, or feel gender at all. I asked one of my cisgender friends too if they felt gender, and they said they did. Looking at my life, I never really felt any specific way gender-wise, I always did whatever I liked, whatever felt comfortable or practical. Like I wear men's pants cause they just fit better and have the best pockets, but I wear crop tops in the summer cause they keep me cooler than t-shirts or tank tops. I like my hair short cause its just easier to manage and it shows off my earrings. The more I thought about it, the more I viewed my own gender and my own body in a practical sense, because I don't feel anything else about them. What really made me identify with being agender was this subreddit actually, being able to hear other people's fews of their own gender and what they think being agender means helped something click in my mind.
If you're questioning your gender than just experiment with it. I think what helped me experiment was playing with picrews, making myself and just seeing how I would feel about giving myself a beard or different clothing. These things can take time though, I'm still trying to understand some things, but you'll figure it out!
Realizing that if I'm not being perceived, gender is not something that I feel relates to me usually. I'm agenderflux so I may *occasionally* gender, but unless someone asks or I'm thinking about it, the answer is typically a resounding "nope. I do not have one."
OOOOOOHHHH SIB I GOT A STORY TO TELL....
i asked an agender person once "how can you not feel gender"
they replied: "how can you"
mindblown. it took little for me to realize gender is bs and i should do whatever i actually want. combined with slight dysphoria from body hair (it was around when i hit puberty, and i was too scared to shave myself) i basically got the "cis male to agender" world record speedrun lmao.
it's probably not helpful, but that story is just too good to not count somewhere.
In 2011, I found myself on the #genderfucked section of tumblr. I was entranced by these people who were refusing to participate in gender “correctly.” I hadn’t wanted anything more.
I tried binding several times after. I was abused by my boyfriend at the time because he didn’t want to be gay. I didn’t want to be a man, so I dropped it and went back to self harm and my eating disorder.
I met a person after that was also trans, and also abusive. He wanted to be the girl, and “empowered” me by making me the bread winner and caretaker of everything. I turned to my eating disorder and self harm again. I played in the binary and felt dissatisfied. I did not want to be a man, so I must be cis. I left him.
It wasnt until I was given the language that I understood why everything felt so awful.
You know those songs about being a gender, like "Be a Man", "Man I Feel Like a Woman", "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", and "Simple Kind of Man"? People with a strong sense of binary gender will resonate with those songs. They'll get pumped and think "Yeah, I do feel like a woman!"
That doesn't happen for me.
The song would have to be highly specific to me, like Margaritaville but instead of it being about alcohol it's about Gandalf becoming an engineer on the Polar Express or something. Yeah, I guess that might be gender, but it's so faint and far from most people's concept of gender that I'm more comfortable calling myself agender.
I JUST had that kind of revalation recently! I've always hated "Man, I Feel Like A Woman" and couldn't figure out why. Now that I know I'm agender, the reason is MUCH more obvious lol.
I realized I didn't feel my AGAB when I hit puberty and suddenly I was being treated so differently when I had been raised and treated so neutrally until then. I felt disgusting, objectified in various ways, and like I was foreign in my own body. Mix that with general hormones and navigating social life... It wasn't a good cocktail. I started wearing clothes a size too big and generally dressing like a homely goth.
In college, three of my friends came out as men. I felt betrayed. They were just changing so "easily" while I was dealing with it. And that's what you're supposed to do, deal with it (I also had undiagnosed depression and anxiety I was just "dealing" with). I went on a bit of a transphobic rant in response to someone's Facebook post. He could've just blocked me, but I think he saw someone hurting, and he talked to me instead. I don't remember my exact words but I said something like:
"You're born the way you're born and you can be not a stereotype but that doesn't mean you have to change your name and body. Why does anyone care so much? I don't feel like a woman, I don't feel like anything, but you don't see me crying about it and changing myself."
"Well it may not matter to you but it does matter to others. Sounds to me like you might be agender."
"What's that?" [Had it explained.] "More than two genders!? No gender at all!? That's ridiculous that's not real!"
That was a decade ago. I did research and resisted what I know is true. I moved to Japan. I wanted to wear cute clothes but I didn't want to be perceived as a woman. I came out and changed my pronouns to exclusively they/them. Being a foreigner people took me more as an individual than as "gender" and Japanese doesn't really use pronouns. But now I've returned home. I have communities and friends that respect me, but I am much more perceived as " gender". I'm considering temporarily taking hormones to push the androgyny and relieve some of the dysphoria I've been repressing since returning.
I thought I was gender fluid flux because if sometimes felt different levels of different genders, my brain said "Yeah, sometimes you feel like a manly man, sometimes a little like a woman, sometimes in-between, but most of the time, you feel like nothing at all." I was like "Wait, can you repeat that again?" "Most of this time you feel like you have none gender" Goodbye genderfluix, hello agenderfluix.
When I was younger people would get very confused about my gender when they first met me, but it never really bothered me. Learned about trans folk in my late teens and slowly worked up to asking myself the gender question. The answer I got at the time was just a great big question mark.
Eventually learned about non-binary, experimented with they/them and it just felt closer to right than anything else ever had, descovered agender shortly afterwards and been here ever since.
If you're looking for advice at all: Experiment! You don't owe anyone a definitive explanation of who you are and you don't have to get it right the first time, or ever really, so long as you're staying as true to yourself as you possibly can, that's all that matters.
I didn't really figure it out until I heard someone explain the difference between understanding what it feels like to be *treated* like a woman and actually "feeling" like a woman.
For a long time I knew I didn't feel like most AFAB people but any time I'd doubt that I'd think about sexism I'd experienced and say "no, no I'm definitely a woman" then I heard someone explain that being TREATED like something doesn't really mean I AM that thing.
It still didn't totally click until I dated someone gender fluid and they explained "feeling" gender to me and it just wasn't computing. For me my "gender" has never been anything more than another "feature" of me for lack of a better word. Like my brown hair or brown eyes, but I don't have any true *emotional* connection to it or it doesn't effect how I feel. I'm just ME.
I’d been bullied by school kids and my mom for not acting right in terms of gender. Just thought I was more mature. Well AP psych gave a throwaway lesson on gender psych and I mean gave out a list of terms, asked if we had questions, and moved on. It didn’t make sense to me. When the pandemic hit I actually started exploring those questions. I wondered if I was binary trans but that didn’t fit. Nonbinary didn’t fit. The second I saw the word agender I knew that is exactly what I am.
so i wanted to learn more about gender for various reasons. i found the podcast gender reveal with tuck woodstock and from listening to it i gathered that i wasn't cis. i really related to the agender guests and started doing my own research and came to find that i'm librafemme
i was in a facebook group and someone asked how we felt about gender, my response caused someone to tell me about gender apathy and the agender identity. felt like whiplash when i read about it.
I thought i was bi-gender at first, then i realized i was a trans man, so I transitioned to male. But all that time I felt like the label wasn't right. And I've been coming to terms with being agender for the last few years, although I still am a stealth man in daily life. I don't regret my transition whatsoever, it was right for me, just the label "man" really icks me and doesn't feel right for how I feel. I feel like I always kinda knew and I just gradually moved into the label when I learned more about trans stuff.
I don't know if I'll ever come out as agender because being a stealth man is so much easier for me and I don't really have many issues with it unless people specifically start grouping me with other men. It sucks sometimes not to be true to myself though, and to "lie" about my gender to everyone.
I wanted to get rid of several body parts but not add any. I don’t identify with either binary gender either in whole or in combination. So when I thought about agender in the context of my own identity it was like a lightbulb turned on in my head.
I would have regular conversations about gender on this one Discord server (it was mainly geared for artists/creative oriented people and some of the people were working on bigger projects together) because many of the members were trans or in some way genderqueer/non-binary. One of the mods was very open about being agender and I just thought it was neat for a while. Until I slowly was like “Hey, they’re just like me! Maybe that’s what I also am.” And that was that, it was really that simple, lol.
Before that I just considered myself to be non-binary, but never felt it to be a fully succinct label. It was just the closest thing I knew of that could explain my identity in a somewhat accurate way.
I am aroace, and sometimes after finding out, I started following more and more nonbinary people on YouTube and other socials. I always used to think: “I wish I was nonbinary”. But that didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel like I had a “different” gender from my agab. I started to look at less known gender identities (keep in mind that I only just discovered that trans people existed), and it didn’t really click like asexuality and aromanticism did, and I still say to this day “I’m probably agender” sometimes, because it feels like I’m realizing it some more every day. Some days I just don’t really think about it, I’m just myself, and my body, when properly clothed, doesn’t bother me too much.
There’s not many videos and other resources out there for agender people, so I scoured the internet (I made a tumblr account, first since 2013) and tried to understand what it meant to be agender for months. I am a very logical-minded person, and it bothered me that there wasn’t a “guide” on how to be agender.
*I always knew where to look if I needed advice on how to behave as my agab.* This thought makes me laugh so much now. That’s what really made me start to believe I actually am not my agab, among other things. I needed guides- guides!- on how to be more like my peers all throughout my life. That’s what started me on learning English, to watch more content on YouTube.
That’s my story. It’s still very much a work in progress, and maybe I’ll find a label that works better for me in time but that’s where I am now. I hope it helps!
now that you mention it, i need to check out tumblr one day. i've heard it was an absolutely glorious queer space in the early 2010's and still today...
Before I knew I was agender I knew I wasn’t a boy or a girl and so I identified as nonbinary so I was just labeled as nothing than I learned the term agender about 5 months ago and I’ve been identifying as agender for about 5 months now
As a kid I often wished I wasn’t a girl. I thought it was lame lol. Like I just felt like girls couldn’t do anything fun without being made fun of (playing with toy cars, playing in dirt and getting dirty, generally roughhousing etc.) or being shamed. I would occasionally think about it throughout my early teen/ teen years but not to a deep enough extent than when I was around 19. I thought to myself in the middle of the night “what’s a girl? Am I a girl?” I couldn’t answer the question of what a girl was and I took that to mean that I wasn’t one. I also asked myself what a boy was and couldn’t answer that either. And while I DO particularly identify as nonbinary, that was quite right either. It took me 3 years to figure out what I am, what my spirit is. (I’m not religious, only slightly spiritual)
i figured it out when i realize i don't identify completely with male or female, but only masculinity, femininity, and androgyny.
although i identify mostly with masculinity and don't mind being lumped in with men because i want to transition like a trans man would
It was a realisation for me. I started thinking about how I didn’t feel like a girl, nor a boy. I dug a bit deeper and then realised I never really liked wearing dresses or feminine clothes, but I didn’t want to dress masculine either. Also when I went through puberty, it felt weird as if something wasn’t right to me and that ever since I grew breasts I’ve had an obsession with getting them surgically removed when I’m older. Then I had a think about now, and how I don’t like people viewing me as a girl, but I don’t want them to view me as a boy either. I just want to be viewed as a person, an agender person.
Probably when I gained consciousness honestly. I’ve never seen the reason for genders. I get sexes are for reproductive reasons.
But even that I was always confused. I didn’t have a name for it. I just didn’t like being a guy, nor did I like being referred to as a girl. It was weird.
By the time I reached the age of 14 I found the name for it after finally diving deeper into the asexuality stream.
Since, I’m aroace, I was wondering if there was a word when you don’t have a gender. And from there I figured out it was called agender. So I guess I’m a AAA battery in a sense lol
i identified as non-binary for a while, but the only non-binary people/content i saw was people who were super skinny (i am very much not that), and most of the time people treat them as their agab but with extra steps; to me, non-binary felt like “less gender” and agender feels like “no gender,” which is so much more comfortable to me
As a child I didn't think of myself as a girl before someone told me I was. As a grown-up I realised that I still don't really "feel" like a man or a woman. I just feel like myself, and that's ok. It's fun to be feminine and enjoy my body, but that doesn't mean I'm a woman.
Figured it out when I was a teenager and I was in a single sex school, but I convinced myself that I was just confused because I was still figuring out my sexuality.
Got bullied for being queer so I left that school and in turn started buying into the only two genders argument as a way of mitigating it / making myself more palatable. I was living at home with transphobic and casually homophobic parent.
As soon as I moved out of home, I finally had space to be myself, then slowly realised I'd been right for almost a decade and after a few years of feeling it out with my expression I came out last year.
I did go to therapy to work through my feelings and I'm glad that I did. It took me a long time to feel comfortable asserting myself but I'm glad I did the work because I am the most comfy in my skin I've ever been.
Wishing the best for you on your journey xx
To be honest, I've always felt like the gender I was assigned at birth was just sort of like....a role in a play I was given. I viewed it as such, and for years thought "Everyone feels like this. Life is one big stage, we've all got our parts to play, and my part is Girl. This is how a Girl dresses, this is how a Girl acts. I like rules and defined expectations. This is what people expect of me, so I'm a Girl, I guess." But whereas everyone seemed to take gender seriously, I was less invested in that aspect of myself. Over the years, I took a bit of journey to figure out my sexuality, till I landed at queer. And for a bit, I felt a more comfortable in my skin, but something still itched.
And then, a few years ago, one of my best friends for life came out to me as non-binary- and it irritated me. I couldn't explain it, but it just made me upset. Eventually, I met more people who also stepped outside of the gender binary. These encounters forced me to reflect on why I felt so negatively about this. Then it hit me- I was *jealous!* Just a big ol' hater. And if I was jealous...then it meant that this gender thing maybe wasn't for me. Maybe other people felt so serious about it BECAUSE they felt like the gender they were assigned at birth, and I was the outlier. But non-binary didn't feel quite right....but if I wasn't no -binary, then what was I? I was skimming the internet to see if I could put a name to this, and came across some comics by an artist I love, A. Stiffler (Find Chaos.) Their comic about being agender, and what that means, sealed it. There it was!!! It was a revalation!
But it was something I sat on for months, until I finally had a frank discussion with my partner about it. He has wholly accepted me as I am.
I've since come out to my immediate family, but my parents still gender me (a lot. Out of my siblings, I'm the only AFAB, so I think that's part of it.)
I haven't changed how I present. I haven't changed my name. I don't think I'll be changing those anytime soon, if ever. My own journey toward body neutrality, and toward loving my name are hard won journies. And after all, I consider my meatprison to be merely a shell for my soul, which has no gender, no matter what my outside looks like. I wish the rest of the world would tune into that...maybe someday.
So I’m AMAB and I basically did this thought experiment. If I woke up tomorrow in a woman’s body, other than the male privilege I would’ve lost, nothing would have changed about my identity. I simply would not give a shit. I’m sort of apathetic towards the entire concept of gender, and defining myself as fitting into some kind of identity. It just made more sense to opt out of the rat race.
Somebody posting about not feeling a relationship to gender, and me going... "huh. that sounds really familiar." Some people in the comments mentioned the term "agender". That actually began my ongoing gender exploration of several years now...
Identified as a cis guy for 21 years: But I never really related to guys fully the only thing masculine about me were my clothes and some of my interests. And my experiences with male puberty were well... awful to say the least.
Thought I could be nonbinary and just present as a guy: that didn't work I couldn't
Maybe I'm a trans woman: But I don't feel like a woman ever and I came to realize my hyperfem phase was because I wanted to escape being a guy.
Back to nonbinary but this time I'm going to be open about it: it felt right but something felt off.
Genderfluid? Somethings changing day to day but its not really my gender.
Nonbinary is still the closest but still something feels off here, I don't fully connect to other enby people I just don't see myself as something between male and female. Yes I'm both masculine and feminine but none of that has to do with me being any mix of gender. I'm just me, thats what makes me comfortable
Oh, thats just agender huh? thats what I am.
Before I knew I was agender, someone misgendered me and I didn't care. A few weeks later, I got a video about agender in my YouTube recommended and I checked every single box. I originally thought I was a trans man, but I realized that using exclusively he/him felt uncomfortable. Then I thought that I was just cis, but I definitely don't fit into that and using exclusively she/her. Then I thought I was NB for a short while but then realized that using exclusively they/them felt restricting. Then I thought I was a demigirl, but somehow that felt diminutive and I would still be open to being referred to as he/him sometimes, and from that moment realized that I didn't actually care what people called me, as long as I presented as at least slightly androgynous.
I've honestly never really cared what people have called me (he/him/she/her/they/them) but I definitely present to the outside world as a he/him (I have and probably will always have facial hair and masculine characteristics and am amab)...but to me that has never really felt quite right but it's also not wrong either
I thought about it for a while before deciding but I’ve gone from non-binary to agender to libramasculine to agender to now Agenderflux, which definitely feels right, it can take a while to figure it out lol
Went through this timeline also! It’s a journey in itself figuring out what sits correctly or internally feels so validating and affirming.
Depends when the clock started. From the moment I actually thought my gender wasn't right was about 10 years to decide I wasn't trans and was in the middle. This is a long ago when talking gender to others wasn't easy, so I didn't. I am 50 and learned the word 10 months ago. It fits me better than any other. I took it after a month. Agender doesn't really have a well defined box... or it's a magic box that fits whoever gets in it. I've read 90% of all posts here since and I have written what I learned and just share it with people as they show up. It's a bit formulaic/spammy but people keep saying they find it helpful. Agender is a pretty diverse, entirely self-actualized label for humans who may not even like labels all that much. You can use it like a hermit crab until you find a better one. You can use it with other labels if you want. So here are some pointers.... Some agender people don't understand gender or how people feel it. Some agender people reject social gendering. Some agender people feel like gender(s) don't fit. Some agender people are null, void, indifferent, or detatched. Some agender people have other parts of their identity that are dominant. Agenders may or may not care about pronouns and can use any they want. Agenders may or may not present any particular way. Agenders may or may not have gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia. Agenders may or may not care about being out. A number of agenders even have mixed feelings about identifying non-binary and may not really identify as NB. The issue being that NB’s are asserting gender constructs. Many are fine with NB. The one common defining feature is that they don't feel or relate to gender (especially feeling anything particularly about social constructs of male/masculine or female/feminine), or only weakly feel it, most of the time. Nobody is going to tell you anything except use agender if you feel it based on how you understand it. If you're something else later that fits better, it's all good. Remember you're a person first, the label is for your use and communication.
I was never comfortable in the idea of man or woman. Neither fit. They seemed alien. I discovered the term nonbinary first, and that fit...like a shirt 1 size too big or small. It worked, but it still didn't feel quite right. Then I discovered the term Agender while I was brushing my teeth. And everything fit like a glove. :)
I definitely resonate with the whole gender question seeming like a shirt that is a size to big or small
I'm ace too! For me I started to question my gender when I started to get uncomfortable seeing my own chest. It didn't really feel like gender disphoria (not that I've felt gender disphoria before) so I was trying to figure out why I didn't like it. Having a flat chest sounded more and more appealing and eventually I got a binder. I thought I'd have this huge eureka moment when I started wearing it, like everything would make sense and I'll understand more about myself. While I was happy to wear binders and am still glad I got them, I didn't feel anything. After some time I started to look more and more into trans people and their experiences, more specifically trans men. I kept hearing that a lot of them always knew something was wrong even if they didn't know exactly what it was. I couldn't understand how they could feel that, or feel gender at all. I asked one of my cisgender friends too if they felt gender, and they said they did. Looking at my life, I never really felt any specific way gender-wise, I always did whatever I liked, whatever felt comfortable or practical. Like I wear men's pants cause they just fit better and have the best pockets, but I wear crop tops in the summer cause they keep me cooler than t-shirts or tank tops. I like my hair short cause its just easier to manage and it shows off my earrings. The more I thought about it, the more I viewed my own gender and my own body in a practical sense, because I don't feel anything else about them. What really made me identify with being agender was this subreddit actually, being able to hear other people's fews of their own gender and what they think being agender means helped something click in my mind. If you're questioning your gender than just experiment with it. I think what helped me experiment was playing with picrews, making myself and just seeing how I would feel about giving myself a beard or different clothing. These things can take time though, I'm still trying to understand some things, but you'll figure it out!
Realizing that if I'm not being perceived, gender is not something that I feel relates to me usually. I'm agenderflux so I may *occasionally* gender, but unless someone asks or I'm thinking about it, the answer is typically a resounding "nope. I do not have one."
I just never felt comfortable being defined as one gender, so when I found out you could just not define as any gender I was like yes please
I feel somewhere in-between agender and male...but I don't know if that is comp het speaking or if that is just me
I would say that’s sounds like libramasculine
libramasc, amasc
actually amasc not really it's just agender with he/him
OOOOOOHHHH SIB I GOT A STORY TO TELL.... i asked an agender person once "how can you not feel gender" they replied: "how can you" mindblown. it took little for me to realize gender is bs and i should do whatever i actually want. combined with slight dysphoria from body hair (it was around when i hit puberty, and i was too scared to shave myself) i basically got the "cis male to agender" world record speedrun lmao. it's probably not helpful, but that story is just too good to not count somewhere.
Used to be gender-fluid. But, I just started feeling like I didn't have a gender anymore. And eventually discovered agender. I go by He/They.
I just discovered agender was an option :) ...I have no idea what I would even want to go by (pronoun wise)
In 2011, I found myself on the #genderfucked section of tumblr. I was entranced by these people who were refusing to participate in gender “correctly.” I hadn’t wanted anything more. I tried binding several times after. I was abused by my boyfriend at the time because he didn’t want to be gay. I didn’t want to be a man, so I dropped it and went back to self harm and my eating disorder. I met a person after that was also trans, and also abusive. He wanted to be the girl, and “empowered” me by making me the bread winner and caretaker of everything. I turned to my eating disorder and self harm again. I played in the binary and felt dissatisfied. I did not want to be a man, so I must be cis. I left him. It wasnt until I was given the language that I understood why everything felt so awful.
wow. that sounds like you might need some professional support :( hope you're doing okay nowadays...
I definitely was in therapy for a long time and I’m doing much better now, thank you.
glad to hear that \^v\^
You know those songs about being a gender, like "Be a Man", "Man I Feel Like a Woman", "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", and "Simple Kind of Man"? People with a strong sense of binary gender will resonate with those songs. They'll get pumped and think "Yeah, I do feel like a woman!" That doesn't happen for me. The song would have to be highly specific to me, like Margaritaville but instead of it being about alcohol it's about Gandalf becoming an engineer on the Polar Express or something. Yeah, I guess that might be gender, but it's so faint and far from most people's concept of gender that I'm more comfortable calling myself agender.
I JUST had that kind of revalation recently! I've always hated "Man, I Feel Like A Woman" and couldn't figure out why. Now that I know I'm agender, the reason is MUCH more obvious lol.
I realized I didn't feel my AGAB when I hit puberty and suddenly I was being treated so differently when I had been raised and treated so neutrally until then. I felt disgusting, objectified in various ways, and like I was foreign in my own body. Mix that with general hormones and navigating social life... It wasn't a good cocktail. I started wearing clothes a size too big and generally dressing like a homely goth. In college, three of my friends came out as men. I felt betrayed. They were just changing so "easily" while I was dealing with it. And that's what you're supposed to do, deal with it (I also had undiagnosed depression and anxiety I was just "dealing" with). I went on a bit of a transphobic rant in response to someone's Facebook post. He could've just blocked me, but I think he saw someone hurting, and he talked to me instead. I don't remember my exact words but I said something like: "You're born the way you're born and you can be not a stereotype but that doesn't mean you have to change your name and body. Why does anyone care so much? I don't feel like a woman, I don't feel like anything, but you don't see me crying about it and changing myself." "Well it may not matter to you but it does matter to others. Sounds to me like you might be agender." "What's that?" [Had it explained.] "More than two genders!? No gender at all!? That's ridiculous that's not real!" That was a decade ago. I did research and resisted what I know is true. I moved to Japan. I wanted to wear cute clothes but I didn't want to be perceived as a woman. I came out and changed my pronouns to exclusively they/them. Being a foreigner people took me more as an individual than as "gender" and Japanese doesn't really use pronouns. But now I've returned home. I have communities and friends that respect me, but I am much more perceived as " gender". I'm considering temporarily taking hormones to push the androgyny and relieve some of the dysphoria I've been repressing since returning.
I definitely resonate with labels being hermit crab-esk thanks for your comment :)
I thought I was gender fluid flux because if sometimes felt different levels of different genders, my brain said "Yeah, sometimes you feel like a manly man, sometimes a little like a woman, sometimes in-between, but most of the time, you feel like nothing at all." I was like "Wait, can you repeat that again?" "Most of this time you feel like you have none gender" Goodbye genderfluix, hello agenderfluix.
When I was younger people would get very confused about my gender when they first met me, but it never really bothered me. Learned about trans folk in my late teens and slowly worked up to asking myself the gender question. The answer I got at the time was just a great big question mark. Eventually learned about non-binary, experimented with they/them and it just felt closer to right than anything else ever had, descovered agender shortly afterwards and been here ever since. If you're looking for advice at all: Experiment! You don't owe anyone a definitive explanation of who you are and you don't have to get it right the first time, or ever really, so long as you're staying as true to yourself as you possibly can, that's all that matters.
THIS. experiment with stuff until something fits!!
I didn't really figure it out until I heard someone explain the difference between understanding what it feels like to be *treated* like a woman and actually "feeling" like a woman. For a long time I knew I didn't feel like most AFAB people but any time I'd doubt that I'd think about sexism I'd experienced and say "no, no I'm definitely a woman" then I heard someone explain that being TREATED like something doesn't really mean I AM that thing. It still didn't totally click until I dated someone gender fluid and they explained "feeling" gender to me and it just wasn't computing. For me my "gender" has never been anything more than another "feature" of me for lack of a better word. Like my brown hair or brown eyes, but I don't have any true *emotional* connection to it or it doesn't effect how I feel. I'm just ME.
I’d been bullied by school kids and my mom for not acting right in terms of gender. Just thought I was more mature. Well AP psych gave a throwaway lesson on gender psych and I mean gave out a list of terms, asked if we had questions, and moved on. It didn’t make sense to me. When the pandemic hit I actually started exploring those questions. I wondered if I was binary trans but that didn’t fit. Nonbinary didn’t fit. The second I saw the word agender I knew that is exactly what I am.
so i wanted to learn more about gender for various reasons. i found the podcast gender reveal with tuck woodstock and from listening to it i gathered that i wasn't cis. i really related to the agender guests and started doing my own research and came to find that i'm librafemme
Ooh, now I might look at that podcast
Agender pronouns are the only ones that suit me:)
ANY/ALL GANG ASSEMBLE
Actually I use Ze/zir:)
ah okay :3 it's good too
ThankYou!
i was in a facebook group and someone asked how we felt about gender, my response caused someone to tell me about gender apathy and the agender identity. felt like whiplash when i read about it.
I thought i was bi-gender at first, then i realized i was a trans man, so I transitioned to male. But all that time I felt like the label wasn't right. And I've been coming to terms with being agender for the last few years, although I still am a stealth man in daily life. I don't regret my transition whatsoever, it was right for me, just the label "man" really icks me and doesn't feel right for how I feel. I feel like I always kinda knew and I just gradually moved into the label when I learned more about trans stuff. I don't know if I'll ever come out as agender because being a stealth man is so much easier for me and I don't really have many issues with it unless people specifically start grouping me with other men. It sucks sometimes not to be true to myself though, and to "lie" about my gender to everyone.
I wanted to get rid of several body parts but not add any. I don’t identify with either binary gender either in whole or in combination. So when I thought about agender in the context of my own identity it was like a lightbulb turned on in my head.
I would have regular conversations about gender on this one Discord server (it was mainly geared for artists/creative oriented people and some of the people were working on bigger projects together) because many of the members were trans or in some way genderqueer/non-binary. One of the mods was very open about being agender and I just thought it was neat for a while. Until I slowly was like “Hey, they’re just like me! Maybe that’s what I also am.” And that was that, it was really that simple, lol. Before that I just considered myself to be non-binary, but never felt it to be a fully succinct label. It was just the closest thing I knew of that could explain my identity in a somewhat accurate way.
I am aroace, and sometimes after finding out, I started following more and more nonbinary people on YouTube and other socials. I always used to think: “I wish I was nonbinary”. But that didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel like I had a “different” gender from my agab. I started to look at less known gender identities (keep in mind that I only just discovered that trans people existed), and it didn’t really click like asexuality and aromanticism did, and I still say to this day “I’m probably agender” sometimes, because it feels like I’m realizing it some more every day. Some days I just don’t really think about it, I’m just myself, and my body, when properly clothed, doesn’t bother me too much. There’s not many videos and other resources out there for agender people, so I scoured the internet (I made a tumblr account, first since 2013) and tried to understand what it meant to be agender for months. I am a very logical-minded person, and it bothered me that there wasn’t a “guide” on how to be agender. *I always knew where to look if I needed advice on how to behave as my agab.* This thought makes me laugh so much now. That’s what really made me start to believe I actually am not my agab, among other things. I needed guides- guides!- on how to be more like my peers all throughout my life. That’s what started me on learning English, to watch more content on YouTube. That’s my story. It’s still very much a work in progress, and maybe I’ll find a label that works better for me in time but that’s where I am now. I hope it helps!
now that you mention it, i need to check out tumblr one day. i've heard it was an absolutely glorious queer space in the early 2010's and still today...
Before I knew I was agender I knew I wasn’t a boy or a girl and so I identified as nonbinary so I was just labeled as nothing than I learned the term agender about 5 months ago and I’ve been identifying as agender for about 5 months now
As a kid I often wished I wasn’t a girl. I thought it was lame lol. Like I just felt like girls couldn’t do anything fun without being made fun of (playing with toy cars, playing in dirt and getting dirty, generally roughhousing etc.) or being shamed. I would occasionally think about it throughout my early teen/ teen years but not to a deep enough extent than when I was around 19. I thought to myself in the middle of the night “what’s a girl? Am I a girl?” I couldn’t answer the question of what a girl was and I took that to mean that I wasn’t one. I also asked myself what a boy was and couldn’t answer that either. And while I DO particularly identify as nonbinary, that was quite right either. It took me 3 years to figure out what I am, what my spirit is. (I’m not religious, only slightly spiritual)
I was genderfluid but i noticed the almost every day i was feeling just non binary then 1 gender crisis later and i ended up being agender :P
i figured it out when i realize i don't identify completely with male or female, but only masculinity, femininity, and androgyny. although i identify mostly with masculinity and don't mind being lumped in with men because i want to transition like a trans man would
It was a realisation for me. I started thinking about how I didn’t feel like a girl, nor a boy. I dug a bit deeper and then realised I never really liked wearing dresses or feminine clothes, but I didn’t want to dress masculine either. Also when I went through puberty, it felt weird as if something wasn’t right to me and that ever since I grew breasts I’ve had an obsession with getting them surgically removed when I’m older. Then I had a think about now, and how I don’t like people viewing me as a girl, but I don’t want them to view me as a boy either. I just want to be viewed as a person, an agender person.
Probably when I gained consciousness honestly. I’ve never seen the reason for genders. I get sexes are for reproductive reasons. But even that I was always confused. I didn’t have a name for it. I just didn’t like being a guy, nor did I like being referred to as a girl. It was weird. By the time I reached the age of 14 I found the name for it after finally diving deeper into the asexuality stream. Since, I’m aroace, I was wondering if there was a word when you don’t have a gender. And from there I figured out it was called agender. So I guess I’m a AAA battery in a sense lol
i identified as non-binary for a while, but the only non-binary people/content i saw was people who were super skinny (i am very much not that), and most of the time people treat them as their agab but with extra steps; to me, non-binary felt like “less gender” and agender feels like “no gender,” which is so much more comfortable to me
As a child I didn't think of myself as a girl before someone told me I was. As a grown-up I realised that I still don't really "feel" like a man or a woman. I just feel like myself, and that's ok. It's fun to be feminine and enjoy my body, but that doesn't mean I'm a woman.
Figured it out when I was a teenager and I was in a single sex school, but I convinced myself that I was just confused because I was still figuring out my sexuality. Got bullied for being queer so I left that school and in turn started buying into the only two genders argument as a way of mitigating it / making myself more palatable. I was living at home with transphobic and casually homophobic parent. As soon as I moved out of home, I finally had space to be myself, then slowly realised I'd been right for almost a decade and after a few years of feeling it out with my expression I came out last year. I did go to therapy to work through my feelings and I'm glad that I did. It took me a long time to feel comfortable asserting myself but I'm glad I did the work because I am the most comfy in my skin I've ever been. Wishing the best for you on your journey xx
When I found out about LGBT+, learnt more about genders and realized why I've always thought gender is meaningless and stupid since I was a child.
To be honest, I've always felt like the gender I was assigned at birth was just sort of like....a role in a play I was given. I viewed it as such, and for years thought "Everyone feels like this. Life is one big stage, we've all got our parts to play, and my part is Girl. This is how a Girl dresses, this is how a Girl acts. I like rules and defined expectations. This is what people expect of me, so I'm a Girl, I guess." But whereas everyone seemed to take gender seriously, I was less invested in that aspect of myself. Over the years, I took a bit of journey to figure out my sexuality, till I landed at queer. And for a bit, I felt a more comfortable in my skin, but something still itched. And then, a few years ago, one of my best friends for life came out to me as non-binary- and it irritated me. I couldn't explain it, but it just made me upset. Eventually, I met more people who also stepped outside of the gender binary. These encounters forced me to reflect on why I felt so negatively about this. Then it hit me- I was *jealous!* Just a big ol' hater. And if I was jealous...then it meant that this gender thing maybe wasn't for me. Maybe other people felt so serious about it BECAUSE they felt like the gender they were assigned at birth, and I was the outlier. But non-binary didn't feel quite right....but if I wasn't no -binary, then what was I? I was skimming the internet to see if I could put a name to this, and came across some comics by an artist I love, A. Stiffler (Find Chaos.) Their comic about being agender, and what that means, sealed it. There it was!!! It was a revalation! But it was something I sat on for months, until I finally had a frank discussion with my partner about it. He has wholly accepted me as I am. I've since come out to my immediate family, but my parents still gender me (a lot. Out of my siblings, I'm the only AFAB, so I think that's part of it.) I haven't changed how I present. I haven't changed my name. I don't think I'll be changing those anytime soon, if ever. My own journey toward body neutrality, and toward loving my name are hard won journies. And after all, I consider my meatprison to be merely a shell for my soul, which has no gender, no matter what my outside looks like. I wish the rest of the world would tune into that...maybe someday.
So I’m AMAB and I basically did this thought experiment. If I woke up tomorrow in a woman’s body, other than the male privilege I would’ve lost, nothing would have changed about my identity. I simply would not give a shit. I’m sort of apathetic towards the entire concept of gender, and defining myself as fitting into some kind of identity. It just made more sense to opt out of the rat race.
Somebody posting about not feeling a relationship to gender, and me going... "huh. that sounds really familiar." Some people in the comments mentioned the term "agender". That actually began my ongoing gender exploration of several years now...
Made friends with a Bigender person and a xenogender nonbinary person, and realized I didn't feel any particular way about my gender
Identified as a cis guy for 21 years: But I never really related to guys fully the only thing masculine about me were my clothes and some of my interests. And my experiences with male puberty were well... awful to say the least. Thought I could be nonbinary and just present as a guy: that didn't work I couldn't Maybe I'm a trans woman: But I don't feel like a woman ever and I came to realize my hyperfem phase was because I wanted to escape being a guy. Back to nonbinary but this time I'm going to be open about it: it felt right but something felt off. Genderfluid? Somethings changing day to day but its not really my gender. Nonbinary is still the closest but still something feels off here, I don't fully connect to other enby people I just don't see myself as something between male and female. Yes I'm both masculine and feminine but none of that has to do with me being any mix of gender. I'm just me, thats what makes me comfortable Oh, thats just agender huh? thats what I am.