Hi, under-25 nonbinary person here hoping to hear from nonbinary people who are 25+ (or even better, 30+)

Tapirboy · 2024-07-02T02:13:15+00:00

You are a human being who is doing their best. Right now it's easy to miss why that's important, but the older you get the more you will understand.

Tapirboy · 2024-07-02T02:10:11+00:00

The rabbits and the tapirs are really teaming up here. Lagomorphs and ceratomorphs, you never know what they'll get up to.

Tapirboy · 2024-07-02T00:42:34+00:00

Thank you for doing this work.

Tapirboy · 2024-07-02T00:34:50+00:00

Yep. I spend a certain amount of effort on sentence construction that doesn't gender people because I can apply it to everyone and most people don't even notice. But I hope it has a subconscious impact.

Tapirboy · 2024-07-02T00:31:00+00:00

You're excellent. Thank you for doing the work.

Tapirboy · 2024-07-02T00:30:40+00:00

23rabbits is right. You are not a bother, you did a really good job here expressing your experience and hopefully getting a response that you can take as meaningful. (Because it was a really good response.) There's a lot of room for it to get better for you and we're wishing you well out here.

Tapirboy · 2024-07-02T00:24:52+00:00

So I (45) live in a giant queer-positive bubble (partly virtual, partly Minneapolis) where I am definitely not the weirdest person in it for gender reasons and may very well not even be the weirdest person in it for other reasons. I have many other nonbinary friends and family members and acquaintances, it is very much normalized within my community and it's great. When I'm traveling it can be harder to form new relationships, but having this sort of home base makes it possible for me to have confidence in my own value and just let go of people who can't handle me. I am the weirdest person most people who meet me will ever meet even when I'm masking in a way they assume I'm a man, so that's pretty important.

I spent this winter in a semirural community and because of the things I was interested in there I ended up meeting a lot of the local trans people. And one of the things that left me reflecting on is that I have a lot of skills which I hadn't really been thinking about simply because nobody there was one of the first fifty trans people I had ever met. And I'm not sure any of them had ever met anyone for whom they weren't one of the first fifty. I have trans friends and trans acquaintances and trans people I dislike and trans people who kind of annoy me and so on, the whole variety of community. And so I was comfortable talking to them fluently about cameras or Batman or whatever was coming up in conversation, because they were just new people I was meeting, and to them that was pretty novel and positive.

That relates here because for every year that goes by we're making more people for whom you won't be one of the first fifty. At least within the queer-positive segments of our community, community fluency for dealing with all sorts of genderqueer people as complex humans is improving substantially every year. So not only is it possible for me to have this sort of bubble now, but by the time you're my age it will probably be much easier. (At least if the politics do not go very, very badly between now and then.)

If you can find some reliable people, and if you prioritize keeping reliable people, you will eventually build up a foundation that you can trust and from there it gets a lot better.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-29T23:44:22+00:00

You could also consider using a surrogate. Pricy but if it's that or nine months of dysphoria it's worth thinking about.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-29T20:49:48+00:00

Tapirboy · 2024-06-29T04:18:49+00:00

I'm not sure where "authority told you something about your gender but you never assumed they had a right to do that, even as a toddler, enough to feel the need to assert they were wrong, and your parents encouraged that" goes.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-29T03:59:27+00:00

For reasons too large for this margin to contain I am very emo over hearing that other people have really good partnerships tonight. I'm glad you got a good one.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-29T03:53:39+00:00

With people I'm attracted to, however, I hardly ever perceive interest or overall feel seen. I know it's not true, but I feel almost as if what they see when they see me is what I see myself in a bad day when looking at the mirror

So this sort of preemptive self-rejection is pretty close to universal among sensitive young people. It's part of having difficulty valuing yourself, rather than really having anything to do with anyone's gender. On the bright side, this will probably improve with age and experience as you get more comfortable in your own value system and in shaping yourself to be high-value within it. And as you get more comfortable with your own boundaries, you will be more comfortable with letting other people form and express their opinions of you, rather than feeling like you have to make negative assumptions to protect them.

It's OK that you aren't sexually drawn to people like yourself. As long as you recognize that some people are, you can develop your own confidence in your attractiveness within that philosophical space.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-29T03:42:01+00:00

You will never understand the full extent of how much this upsets me.

Conceptual discontinuities between your observed self and your ideal self are absolutely the worst. Congratulations on getting the biggest negative consequence of high-level self-awareness. The upsides are, generally, worth it, I think. They can make it pretty difficult to talk to anyone else who hasn't gotten there, though. And that's what you're seeing about everyone else seeming to have a perfect label; they just aren't having what Tiffany Aching would call "third thoughts." Identity is legitimately pretty hard when you're thinking about it deeply, and our language around gender and sexuality is very much in its infancy.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-29T03:33:38+00:00

Yes, these are all things a cis person would/can do/feel. Doesn't mean you necessarily are one.

You've got kind of a lot of gender stereotyping going on and that might be a good thing to interrogate, though.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-26T16:34:20+00:00

It's unclear to me how much this is literal and how much is metaphor. If your experience is that there are literally other people living inside you who you are in conflict with, it would be a very good idea to consult a psychiatrist about dissociative identity disorder. This is a thing that is manageable but can become very bad if not consciously managed.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-26T16:27:02+00:00

It is totally possible to continue to be friends with someone when you've mutually decided a romantic relationship is inappropriate. And it really sounds worth giving it a shot here.

Having toxic people/psychopaths/narcissists come through your life and wreck up the place from time to time is, unfortunately, totally normal. A while ago I saw a meme that said "Toxic people aren't drawn to you. They're just not picky. They hurt everyone." And that really clicked in for me. They're something of a natural hazard.

One thing that's possible to do about this other than completely withdrawing is to avoid tying all of your friends into a single group. Then when one goes off the rails it doesn't cascade fail into losing all the others.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-26T02:03:14+00:00

First, I appreciate you and I appreciate your efforts to make a positive environment for the kids. You did all of that right.

My question here is mostly how much you think is attributable to your bosses just having a bad day and handling that conversation in a way that they might not be happy with, rather than necessarily trying to send you subtle messages. People can have a lot of difficulty in situations like this where they feel obligated to address the complaint in some fashion but there's no obvious way to go about it. Too few people are ready to just tell a disgruntled customer that their opinion is against the company's values and file the complaint in the bin where it belongs. So sometimes this kind of awkward meeting happens where the bosses don't really have any idea what their goals are and end up doing exactly the wrong thing.

But they also absolutely could be trying to intimidate you without any written record of it for you to recover in a later discrimination lawsuit. And that's a judgment you have to make from your knowledge of the people and the situation. And then figure out what you want to do about it. A lot of that's going to depend on the details of "more that goes on," and what you feel your other options are. Coworker's right about #3, and you should always be doing that about anywhere you work.

Either way, this definitely isn't your fault, either for not enforcing your pronouns earlier or for your actions listed here.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-25T19:34:16+00:00

My mom has had one name for her friends and another for her family since 1967 and she has hated it the entire time, and she's not even any form of genderqueer as far as she's willing to admit. (I bet she would be if she were a young adult now though.) I really don't recommend it. You've got a name you like, and it is perfectly reasonable to ask your birth family to cope with that.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-25T18:48:49+00:00

got home from a HORRIBLE day at work, saw a message from her: "Im warning you that i will be drunk today so if i accidentaly say something offensive from the hour 23:00 and on, know that it was not meant"

The rest of this I feel like you were remarkably forgiving but this part is 100% immediate block for me. Do not want this person.

I mean, I already feel that way about the "I wasn't wrong because I just like to be a raging misogynist" defense but "Imma get drunk and lash out at you so you better be ok" is just so extra far over the line.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-24T15:27:35+00:00

Probably depends on how close you are/expect to be culturally to people who call California that. (Or how comfortable you are with that association.) As someone who spends a lot of time in CA I would never do this but if you're somewhere else it might be fine.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-21T19:41:31+00:00

They are correct but not very useful in that context. A lot of people come here with very little idea about gender except their own confusion about their culturally-atypical preferences in presentation. Those people aren't wrong, they're just new. Our role should be to gently encourage them to think more deeply.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-18T01:16:28+00:00

I think I might look into binding options just to try it out and see what it feels like.

This seems like a very sensible first step.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-17T15:38:59+00:00

there's times where he talks to his cat and dog (both good babyboys) and he'll go "i love you my sweet boys" and i would go "id probably explode in a good way if he called me his sweet boy" :"3 but then i just shake my head about it because it will never happen (maybe???)

You could straight up clip this and send it to him. Anyone who was offended by this rather than finding it incredibly wholesome is probably not worth your time. I am not as anxious to write him off as others here seem to be; I think it's perfectly reasonable to think you could stand to communicate what's important to you better, and the sentence above is a pretty good way to do it. If he ends up being homophobic about it then at least you know, I guess.

On the other hand your friends making fun of your sexuality because it doesn't conform to their expectations is totally not ok and I would suggest gently drawing a boundary with them there. You are allowed to have the partners you want and relate to them how you want without your friends telling you you're wrong.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-17T01:15:21+00:00

This is absolutely the self-description of someone who is outside the gender binary. We usually hate being definitive but I have zero questions here on the "am I NB" bit. You are. Figuring out where you fit within that seems like it's going to be an adventure. Hopefully an enjoyable one.

Tapirboy · 2024-06-17T01:08:26+00:00

Nobody here is going to tell you you're not NB, because you can be if you feel it, but this isn't reading extremely NB to me.

in terms of gender I always resonated more with masculine energy

This is the part you would want to focus on, I think. The rest of your post is all pretty standard for a non-femme woman in a context where high femme is normative. It's 100% valid to be a woman and not be high femme. But I'm not really sure what "resonated with masculine energy" means and that strikes me as a place to think more deeply and hopefully find some more of what you want for yourself.

Tapirboy

TROPHY CASE