As much as accepting I’m genderfluid makes me feel free, there are days when it just sucks. Today is one of those days. I’m tired of the unpredictability of it all. My graphs indicate that in general I’ll not go more than four days without a shift, but there’s no predicting how severe that shift is going to be, whether I’ll get dysphoria or not, and even then there’s no guarantee that it won’t be more than four days. Recently I went for 11 days straight without a shift. How am I supposed to plan around that? I take both male and female colour combinations to my ballet class. Of course the one day I'm missing one of the female components would be the day that I’m hit with dysphoria (which luckily resolved shortly before class). Mostly my shifts occur when I can’t do anything about my presentation. I just have to sit there and put up with it. Sometimes my mannerisms and speaking style changes, other times not. I’m pretty sure that while I’ve told several people I’m fluid and they’ve been accepting, most of them quietly don’t believe me because they’ve never seen me when I’ve shifted to female. I don’t feel truly accepted. I wish my shifts would happen when my friends could see, and that they were more predictable. If I could say, “Tomorrow I’m going to be female all day” then I could do something about that, but I can’t. Instead it may only last an hour or two, or ambush me when I’m not ready. Finally, the less I think about my shifts, the less likely they are to occur. I know I can’t deny that I’m fluid because that just leads to a greater frequency and severity of shifts, but what’s the point in identifying as fluid when to do so is so impractical? I know I'm incredibly lucky in some respects, and I'm absolutely not trying to minimise others' struggles, but sometimes I can't help feeling I got the rubbish version of being trans. :bang:
I completely understand. I am in a similar situation, though my longest has been 3 months. That's especially frustrating when you're in an environment where it's unacceptable to be trans. I can't present feminine because of family and work expectations and environments, and while they don't necessarily occur more frequently, when I'm stressed the swing is harder. It's really random how it comes. Some days I've swung 3 or 4 times. Others, I go months without a swing. Longest in the past few months was 3 weeks on the femme side of the spectrum, but with just enough masc that I felt upset that I felt femme at all. That's a killer too, when you suddenly swing and you feel guilty and gross for having felt the other at all. S
