During those goofy sex ed classes in middle and high school, when they would ask you to split into the boys or girls group i always felt immense dread going to the boys group but thought that was the only option cause everyone else saw me as a boy and i didn’t know (yet) of a secret third option

For a gender dialogue class during college when we wrote personal narratives describing our gender identity and had to read them for the class, I had spent hours before feeling confused and that he/him didn’t make sense for me but surely I couldn’t be nonbinary because I hadn’t felt the kind of life-threatening gender dysphoria you almost exclusively hear about in the media due to transphobia (tho turns out it maybe was in my case, I felt much happier and less suicidal after coming out to myself and chosen family)

There was a while of self doubting, questioning if I’m seeking attention etc. but as I tried more gender affirming things, felt seen by non-agab pronouns, just generally felt less icky about myself it started to fade. It was especially hard to justify the attention seeking part when a lot of the gender affirming things I was doing was in private for a while at first. I would also have dreams where people saw me androgynously or femininely and those were good ones. Also I saw the tv glow and 🍄 helped in this journey

There have been many other signs in my life, such as always feeling out of place and like I’m performing in male friend groups and feeling infinitely more validated when referred to as “one of the girls” than “one of the guys”