So two years ago I came out here on EC as genderfluid. I felt great. It made sense of how I was experiencing gender and I finally felt free - the happiest I'd been in ages. Coming out on Facebook last year made a huge difference to my happiness and my relationship with my partner. The thing is, as time has gone on I've started to question my gender increasingly often. I feel like I'm being pushed towards binary trans. It's been a while since I've felt exclusively male and I'm beginning to wonder whether my default setting isn't just me locking down on an exclusively female identity. Often if I try and picture myself, It's like I'm happy to be genderqueer or with a drive to present androgynously, but I want to start from an afab body, not the amab one I have. I'd rather be an afab trying to look amab than the other way around. Conversely I don't feel that if I identified as exclusively female that it would be enough. What would I do with my masculinity which I feel is a valid part of me? It's like I'm a tomboy but I feel like often I'm just too masculine for that. I do get dysphoria. It sucks. But I worry a lot that transition wouldn't solve my problems. I do still have days where I'm happy with my body and being perceived as male, that I am male. Why is this happening? I thought once you'd found your gender, that was it. Sorry I'm panicking - It's hard not to when I feel the gender rug has been pulled from under me again.
Nah, for a lot of people the self discovery lasts years. Especially in stories like yours. I don't intend to transition with hormones etc but for many years I identified: - firstly as a demigirl - then as agender - then as gender fluid - then as androgynous Only to find out after several years that it was about me feeling male. On the way, I changed my gender expression and went further and further, and one day, I was trying to be androgynous and people started to repeatedly see my masculinity instead of androgyny, once I reached the threshold that they noticed somethig gender-y was happening. And I saw that too. Indeed, this whole time the reason for this whole quest was "I am a girl, but I have a male brain".
Gender can be confusing. It's always sort of murky. It's not as simple as you "find it' like you find a lost object.