So. This is something I’ve never talked to anyone in my real life about, but for whatever reason I’m more comfortable asking a bunch of strangers on the internet for advice. Deep breath.
I am coming up on 40yo, and since I was 16 I’ve mostly been in dedicated heterosexual relationships. I have always considered myself a cis male and maybe a little bi but things are… changing rapidly, I guess. I am single for the first time in years all this freedom and time means I’m doing some long overdue introspection. I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly happy with my body or my gender. I am finding myself much more attracted to people with penises, and more importantly, I am finding myself wanting to play a different, more submissive maybe, role in the bedroom. I finally have an opportunity to try new and different things with all sorts of different people, and that’s sort of exciting, but I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing or even what I’m feeling.
I see a lot of trans folks self-actualizing and I’m super happy for them. I envy them for knowing what they want. I don’t know what I want and it’s driving me a little crazy lately. I would kill to have that level of knowledge of who I wanted to be. I am not a particularly masculine man, but I don’t think I feel like I would be more comfortable being more traditionally feminine, though that doesn’t necessarily repulse me, either. I would certainly be happier with less body hair. When I was I kid I wanted to be a robot. Now as an adult I maybe just want to be a robot who fucks occasionally, gender irrelevant. Fully functional, you might say. I don’t really know what to do with that feeling, though.
Any advice on how to navigate literally any of this would be awesome. I feel like a teenager again, no idea how any of this works or where to even begin. I don’t have the knowledge or the language to talk coherently about any of this stuff, and certainly no experience. I am doing my best you guys but all of this is confusing as fuck.
Nonbinary identities are a thing. You don’t have to fit into being traditionally masculine nor feminine. You can even reject the idea of gender for yourself and just say I am “me” or you can be multiple genders at a time or evwn feel like one at a time and feel like the other another day. All that matters is that you are comfortable in your body. Like the others said a gender therapist might be able tp help you explore understand this part of yourself.
A gender therapist is a good suggestion.
On the one hand, there is so much social pressure to not live as a non-binary person, and to conform to binary notions of gender, there are probably many enbies who feel they need to conceive of themselves in binary ways and to follow typical gender roles.
But on the other hand, I used a non-binary identity to rationalize away my binary gender feelings and dismiss the need to medically transition because it was more comfortable to just say I was in-between and keep living as a man even if I was “technically not a man” in some sense, causing a lot of downstream harm later by not stopping androgenization of my body. I used similar rejections of gender and “just being me” as a way to deny myself from transitioning.
It’s hard when trans people are victims of epistemic injustice, it’s hard to even describe your own experiences and know what you’re feeling and the denial and repression is so extreme that it can be difficult to have transparency and self-awareness (let alone to then turn that awareness into words or thoughts). This is admittedly worse for enbies, who have even less support in terms of interpreting their experiences than binary trans people.
All the more reason to work on it with a therapist (though my therapists have been mostly useless, there are good ones out there I hear, lol).
This has always been my experience, except for one guy, who was great. He unfortunately retired a few years ago. Still working on finding another good one.