Goyavoyage on mars’s newsletter

Found your substack per chance, through you liking a comment of mine on ND Stevenson's. The title of this post drew me in, and I don't regret a single moment of it. Thank you for writing this. I'm coming from the other side of all this - transfem, more or less a nonbinary girl, as you mentioned, whatever that means - but I agree with so much of it. A couple of parts that really stuck with me: "“I think I wouldn’t mind identifying more explicitly as nonbinary and using gender-neutral pronouns if it were coming from the other side.  Like, if people saw me more as an androgynous boy with a more fluid understanding of gender, rather than being a nonbinary girl, whatever that is.”" I'm really feeling that part in my bones. For quite some time now, I've felt like I had to transition and be perceived as a girl, period, *before* allowing myself to move toward something more enby; else, people would keep seeing me as a boy in the first approximation, and possibly a "failed boy" for that matter. It's like, I want to explore nonbinary identities, but *from the girl side*. So I feel like I really, really get what you're writing here. It sucks, and I'm sorry, that you've been pushed toward a X gender marker as a "substitute" to anything; and overall that enby identities are not acknowledged at all, crashing onto the binary that people imprint on you. I hope... I don't know. I hope it'll get better? Not sure how, considering society, but, I hope you'll be in a better place someday about all this. "Maybe one day, my backbone will outgrow my desire to please." This particular sentence will stay with me for quite some time, I think. Thank you for writing it. "I want to shout that everything I’ve gone through has been a means to an end: feeling like a person in my own body.  Is that so hard to understand?" ... Yeah. In spite of years thinking about my gender, it all boils down to this, in the end: what do I want for my body and for my self? What would make me happier? The rest is optional.