It's definitely easier to talk about my queer identities a little at a time, rather than trying to tackle the entire tangled web all at once. My sexuality is fairly straightforward, my Mom's noted I like "girls with boys' hair", which is like one thing in a complicated puzzle but she's not wrong. Bisexuality has always just felt like the default way to be in the universe, to me.

Gender on the other hand is already a sketchy concept, and mine doesn't go out of its way to be all that straightforward. It's difficult for me to decide where to start. I guess we start with my assigned gender at birth.

So obviously I'm male, and my folks weren't terribly militant about me being a man. They asked me if I wanted to do girly things all the time growing up, and now and again I'd try it, like an 80s My Little Pony toy or something, but most of the time the girly stuff didn't interest me. I may not be a man, but I was definitely a boy.

I was comfortable being a boy. I was happy to be a boy, and I didn't see too much of a functional difference to being a girl, especially when I caught movies like To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) and lived in coastal California during the 90s. Clothes were just clothes and people should wear what they like, was basically the long and the short version of how I felt when I was a child.

My Dad told me a story when I was a little kid, of when he moved away from West Virginia to Cleveland in the early 50's as a little kid himself. A lot of folks in the tiny little coal town came out to say goodbye, one of them being what my Dad described as "a man in a dress." My Dad asked his dad who that was and what his deal was, and my grandpa responded "oh he just doesn't know if he wants to be a man or a woman" which my Dad found to be a satisfactory answer, but his mother (being a fundamentalist wackjob) objected to the description but ultimately let it go. Back in those days, it simply wasn't anyone's business.

My Mom on the other hand has always been freaked out by the depictions of cross-dressing, to say nothing of deeper transgender expression. She comes from a very traditional Korean background, her father being a village elder and her family being a prosperous farming enterprise. She feels herself repelled by outwardly queer people, but even she has always said that it is none of our business and people are free to do as they please, even if it "freaks [her] out".

Ultimately though, I just didn't think about my gender very much as a kid, if ever. I didn't really notice much difference between girls and boys except for the aesthetic ones, and any sort of "boys vs girls" sorts of things just felt to me like a silly game that we drop when something important happens.

I didn't hang out with many girls growing up, because I was afraid that people would think I was gay. I was already aggressively hiding that I liked boys, I didn't want anything to implicate me. The environment I grew up in was a very conservative one for Santa Cruz, California, and the culture was not friendly to me in many ways. I did my best to be a boy, but still often got accusations of being fruity.

I think I tried picking on one of the out gay kids once, but it left a bitterness in me that I couldn't explain at the time and I made the conscious decision not to ever do that again.

So what does this all have to do with gender? Well, my relationship with other boys is at the heart of my gender. Being a boy seemed to mean something different for other boys than it did for me.

To me, being a boy meant GI Joes, knights in shining armor, Sonic and Mario. I loved all those things. Being a girl meant Barbies, My Little Pony, Cher and the like. One wasn't better than the other, and if you wanted you could like stuff from one side or the other and it didn't matter. But as I got older, being a boy meant "becoming a man" and that's when things got confusing to me.

I didn't dislike a lot of girly things. I liked My Little Pony (though I never watched the new series for some reason), and I adored Sailor Moon. I kept it such a secret that I watched Sailor Moon, but in the 4th and 5th grades it was my favorite show, which I told nobody about except my Mom, who as always encouraged me to do what I like and to hell with anyone else.

So my whole life my Dad was basically my model for being a Man (tm). He was a pretty manly man, aesthetically. He had a big white beard with long white hair. He looked like Santa Claus if I'm being honest. He was strong, stronger than anyone I've ever met, just herculean in everything he could do physically. He'd been doing physical labor since he was a pre-teen, and his dedication to stoicism had him ignore physical pain a lot. He was a former Army senior NCO, a Sergeant First Class (and was briefly one of the youngest SFCs in the army during the 70s). Essentially, nobody could really ever question his male cred.

His ideas of being a man revolved around stoicism. He was a big fan of Epicureans and Marcus Aurelius. He felt that personal understanding and introspection were key to being a man. That part didn't bother me so much, it made sense to me. This culture is both savage and male dominated, being able to power through to your goals is an important virtue to hold.

My Dad had a couple times where he would get frustrated with me and what I came to see as a personal weakness. When one of our cats died a few days after the 7th grade, he wanted me to take the cat to the vet to see what killed her, and I was so upset at having to touch the body I couldn't do it. But my Dad yelled at me over the phone that I had to be a man and take the dead cat to the vet. Once in a while he'd talk to me like that and it would always sting a lot.

Like I said earlier, it seemed like everyone else had this idea of being a man that was different from my idea of living. The people around me sorta insisted that a man should be the sort of person to treat gays and girls like shit. Yes, girls, not women. To be a man meant exerting force constantly. I thought it meant things like Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons by this point, but it felt to me like people around me were becoming more cruel and violent and it left me feeling very isolated, alone, and vulnerable.

But still, I tried to be a man. Hell, later on it seemed to me like if I finished some military training I would def be a man by then, right? But I could never really ignore the fact that whenever anyone refered to me as a man, even in a complimentary way, I would feel uncomfortable. I didn't even like it when a girlfriend called me a man.

So at university I got exposed to quite a bit of queer theory. I joined the bisexual club on campus and eventually became one of its officers. I learned a lot about gender, at first enough to convince me there wasn't much to it, and then later enough to convince me that nobody knows jack shit about gender. I was exposed to terms like genderfluid genderqueer and had no idea what any of it meant. I wasn't planning to get much into it, but I still learned about it.

So one night I'm talking to one of my closest friends from high school, Izzy, and I toss a couple terms around and he asks "what is genderqueer?" I had dated a genderqueer/genderfluid person briefly about a year or two before, so I answered that it was generally a personal rejection of the gender-binary and a feeling of residing somewhere outside of it. My friend Izzy, at the time a conservative, stated that can't be right because that's how he feels. I did some thinking and realized it's how I felt, too.

Izzy eventually fell into what some folks call cis+, someone who is cis, but has become a lot more aware of his gender and the role of it and others in our society. Me on the other hand, I kept thinking. Something I've been told I do a lot.

I thought to myself that I had struggled to be a man despite doing all the important stuff it involved. I felt like I would occasionally hammer myself into a new shape at the behest of what a man was supposed to be, and every time I did it, I felt like someone wearing a costume playing some kind of game.

I had been exposed to this radical idea that existence wasn't supposed to be constantly and unendingly uncomfortable. I decided that it must be true, and if it was true I had to tussle with the question of why did I get so uncomfortable when a girlfriend called me "her man."

I mean, I am a son. I am a brother. I've already rambled about being a gentleman. I love wearing vests and ties and trenchcoats. I love swords. Those things are important to me and I didn't want to change them. But reading through queer theory, I realized that none of those things made me a man.

I mean, I didn't see the need to change anything. Whatever I was, I was a human doing their best to navigate a chaotic universe. But it became increasingly obvious to myself that I wasn't a man, and I didn't want to be one.

At some point, being a man meant that I was supposed to strive to be all these important things, and all it did was make me irritable, neurotic, and ultimately sad. I found myself avoiding certain behaviors because they were too manly, and I didn't want to come off as an aggressive person so I dialed back many masculine behaviors.

But sometime in May of 2016, during a dinner at this lovely (shitty) little restaurant they used to have in my neighborhood called the Blue Danube, I made the realization and announced to my college friendgroup that I was nonbinary and would like to be refered to with they/them pronouns.

People would start taking that seriously about two years later.

In the meantime though, having turned in my man-card, I realized I was comfortable with certain masculine activities again. I got really into weightlifting and car modding, and dived deeper into my love for knights and got a suit of armor for myself. I felt a lot happier to be in my skin as a nonbinary humanoid, free from toxic expectations.

But as I touched on a little earlier, there are often people who don't accept it very much. After all, I like suits and ties and I don't plan to stop wearing them. I tried on a dress once at a hippie thing in the woods once, and it didn't feel like me. Well, I've had one person insist that me dressing masculine while being amab and nonbinary is "confusing." I like to add a few pieces of feminine clothing here and there, mostly shawls and the like, but for the most part it's all about the vest and tie.

And I also don't really feel like I'm trans. Like, there's nothing about my body or presentation I'd like to change fundamentally. Adopting the nonbinary label was about clarification rather than transformation. Whether I am cis or not seems to matter very little, but I have been told once not to take offense at someone's transphobic behavior (which was unintentional on their part tbf) since I myself am not trans.

People still used he pronouns with me for a while, until I noticed one day that people on my IT team at my corporate job used they for me (having come out to my boss in casual conversation a year before or so), so I insisted to my friends and everyone I meet to use they/them for me exclusively.

So seeing as how I obviously have a very loose grip on my gender, this actually feels like it answers very little. I am not sure if my attempt at clarification is an indication that I do not understand or if maybe it's something that nobody really understands at this juncture.

But that is basically a quick primer on what my gender means to me. There's still other aspects to my queerness that don't cleanly fit in the sexuality/gender slots, so there's def more to talk about.