My Journey with Gender

When I was 14 years old, I had a fascinating dream.

In this dream, I was attending the evening of my high school senior prom, 17 years old and aglow with the confidence of someone who had survived the 5 worst years of anyone’s life. I recall the venue, with its black marble walls, its burgundy carpet flooring and its golden chandeliers, the sound of feminine giggles and masculine come-ons surrounding me as I chatted happily with my handsome-yet-nondescript date. I remember knowing that I was in my body, but not my clothing — I wore a black prom dress with silver linings, modern and sleek, my feet sitting comfortably in a pair of matching black pumps. I remember, too, that my hair was different: a black bob-cut just shy of gracing my shoulders. I also remember that the people around me were referring to me as a girl.

I remember that it felt good. So good, in fact, that I groaned in displeasure as I woke up that morning, slowly feeling that dream slip away as I returned to the body of the boy that I was.

As the following school day passed by me idly, the dream continued to haunt me. I thought about it in passing as the teachers droned on about numbers or science or what have you. I thought about it still as my friends were exploding with laughter at recess. Even on the drive back home, after all had been said and done, my mind refused to leave it alone. It presented me with a single question: What did such a dream mean for me in terms of my gender identity?

Bear in mind that at that point, I had been aware of my same-sex attraction for about a year. I knew that I liked boys, and I knew that I wasn’t particularly masculine, but regardless, the pleasure I got out of that dream troubled me. At age 14, I was quite attached to being a boy; I didn’t want to worry about the complexities of being gender variant. Still, however, the notion aroused my interest enough that I coped with it the only way I knew how: research.

That very night, I began a personal inquiry into the spectrum of nonbinary identity. Over the course of a few weeks, I familiarised myself with a whole slew of terms: genderfluidity, genderqueerness, genderflux. I learned about neo-pronouns, like xe/xir and zhe/hir; I looked into definitions, read firsthand accounts of how it was like to embrace some of these identities. I saw pictures of people who strived for androgyny, all piercings and unnatural hair colours, smiling wide with the knowledge of who they were.

One particular concept caught my eye, then: the idea of the demigender. Identifying partway into the binary, demiboys and demigirls, still connected to these polarised notions, if only tangentially. I read the heaviest on this, stalking a Tumblr blog dedicated to demiboy appreciation and reading up on their responses to all the questions that other curious minds had sent before me. Such an idea enticed me. It encompassed some part of my experience, I thought, still agreeing to an extent with the gender I was assigned at birth, but not entirely. Grinning, after two weeks of searching for an identity to call home, I decided that I had found it. I decided that today onward, I would identify as demiboy.

Unfortunately, that fizzled out after a few hours.

Thankfully, I had only told a handful of people, who were all very kind to me after I told them that same evening that the identity decidedly did not resonate with me. Looking back, there were a few reasons for this: first and foremost, I had dived into this new gender identity without giving it any serious thought. I simply saw the word “boy” and decided it was close enough to what I already identified as that it would cause me the least trouble. Second, I was (and still am!) uncomfortable with using they/them pronouns, something I thought was integral to the demiboy experience. Third, I thought that identifying a certain way meant I had to change everything about me, from the way I talk to the way I dress. Thus, out of procrastination, I chose instead to simply “go back” to being a boy.

So went my early (and brief) experience with questioning my gender. For the next few years, I - for the most part - shelved the idea of being nonbinary. I was comfortable with simply identifying as a gay male, at least partially because I knew that such was how I would read to the average stranger. Even if the noise of gender dysphoria hummed ever so quietly at the back of my skull when someone was too generous with referring to me as their “bro”, I decided to ignore it for years until I left high school and began university.

Now 18 years old and in a completely new environment, I spent quite a few of my first nights in my dorm room revisiting those 14-year-old queries into my identity. Perhaps, it was being removed from the familiarity of high school and, implicitly, my teenage cis male identity that stirred these thoughts up again. Alternatively, it might have been that my move to university presented me with a chance to reinvent myself, to allow myself to change my identity freely. A small part of me also wants to cite the queer-friendly atmosphere of the student community for encouraging these gender explorations. Regardless of how these thoughts came to me, I was having those gender doubts again, and this time, I intended to see it through.

Unlike last time, in which my efforts consisted solely of self-contained study, I decided to take a different, more cooperative approach. At the time, I often had sleepovers with my friends in my dorm room, with our conversations lasting ’til just before we fell asleep. It was in this in-between of asleep and awake where we would be the most honest with each other, as many would agree, so I used these moments to discuss the topic of gender identity with whoever I had next to me. Although these conversations coloured many of my first-semester nights, I still remember the most important of these post-midnight, early-morning talks: I was speaking to a fellow queer friend, a girl whom I had grown very close to over the semester. I was telling her about what I felt regarding gender, what terms I felt made me feel good, what terms I felt did not. As I was telling her how I didn’t feel like genderfluid was the right term for me, she said softly, sleepily, the sentence that would change my life:

“Actually, it sounds like you’re bigender to me.”

Suddenly, in the dead of night, everything clicked for me. I felt something in me sing, however soft it may have been, like I had reconciled with a long-lost love. I didn’t say anything, anything at all, because everything in me was far too loud with the sounds of euphoria.

I had found my name. I am bigender.

The next morning, I thanked that friend, told her how much it resonated with me. I began repeating this new information to my closest circle, all of whom reacted (thankfully) with support and love. Then, I began telling others, going from a need-to-know basis to a far clearer closet. Over the course of the next few years, I began introducing myself as nonbinary and bigender to new people, put my pronouns in several of my online account biographies, and began getting accustomed to living in my own new normal.

This is not to say that my journey with gender has concluded. Far from it, actually; every day, I learn new things about myself and my relationship with my identity. 7 years into questioning my gender, I still find myself asking and asking incessantly, trying to better understand how I perceive and perform gender in relation to the world around me. What I will say, however, is that I am happy I took my time with it. I’m grateful for the experience I had with learning more about myself, and I regret nothing, not even that hours-long stint into demigenderism. The way I see it, all of these experiences were necessary to culminate in me finding a satisfactory label for myself.

As it is, the journey to coming to terms with one’s gender is oftentimes a harrowing one. However, I promise that if it’s a journey you’re interested in undertaking, whatever you find at the end of the rainbow is worth absolutely everything.