Growing up, I didn’t really think about my gender all that much. To me, it didn’t hold any type of significance: I was raised in a very genderless manner (not gender neutral, genderless), which definitely contributed to the factor. My gender identity has never been something that’s at the forefront of my mind, because I don’t perceive it as an important part of who I am as an individual.

There are exceptions to this rule, though. One of them, maybe the most important one, is my identity as a lesbian. Lesbianism made gender important to me, as I was slowly discovering what it meant to be a homosexual woman. I was 20 years old when I finally realized this part of me that everyone around me had been begging me to notice for over a decade at that point – and that was when gender in all of its complexities became a core factor of my identity.

My parents never really honed in on the gender roles and norms for me when I was a Kid. They didn’t deny certain clothing items or toys simply because I was a girl and I was not supposed to like collar shirts and Hot Wheels. They never questioned any of my wacky gendered decisions, they didn’t treat me as any less of a girl as I was. But above all, my parents didn’t raise me to be a girl, to become a woman. They raised me as their child, my gender had no bearing on any of it. That’s why it has been very eyeopening for me now as an adult to figure out all of the strange gender-related roles and performances that people take part in. It sounds so foreign to me, but talking about it with my friends who have struggled with their gender identity and have since realized they were trans; it has really helped me tremendously to learn more about my own complex relationship with gender.

When I started to become comfortable with my queerness for the first time at around the age of 16, the way I presented myself outwardly changed pretty drastically too. Granted, there is no look to being a lesbian or being queer in general, but for me, my appearance choices in terms of clothing, hair, and makeup has always been at the forefront of me expressing my queerness. In my late teenage years, I started wearing men’s clothing more and more, comfortably presenting myself in masculine ways, sometimes to the point that people did mistake me for a guy. And as the years have gone on and I have learned more about myself, this habit of “making myself look like a guy” has become very common in my everyday life.

But how does all of this relate to my gender identity? BPD makes it difficult for me to really see who I truly am without outside factors influencing my perception of my selfhood. I am so easily swayed to one way or another that I have to really make sure I’m doing this self-reflection solely from the perspective of my own experiences. But the void that my personality disorder has created for me, the void that exists deep within me in the spot where my identity is supposed to reside, is very overwhelming at times. And that’s when I have my regularly scheduled gender crisis. These things are so complicated and so nuanced for me personally that it feels like I am never 100 percent certain of any conclusion I have come to. But now, at the age of 25, I feel like I have reached a point where I’m relatively confident in knowing what my gender identity is and how it correlates with my gender expression.

I am a gender-nonconforming lesbian. My gender identity is that of a woman, but my understanding of womanhood and how I experience it in my day-to-day life exists outside of the binary confines of womanhood. My womanhood is defined by extreme ends of the masculine-feminine spectrum, gender-nonconformity, and lesbianism. Gender-nonconformity makes me some flavor of genderqueer, but at the very core of the identity labels, I am a woman.

The talk of gender identity labels is an interesting one for me, but also something that I don’t necessarily feel a deep connection to. To me, it is the expression part of my gendered existence that matters the most, and my identity gender-wise is not something I view as a necessary extension of who I am to the outside world. Because of how personal all of this is to me, and how fucking complicated it is (just look at this goddamn article), I don’t find it relevant to divulge this information to complete strangers. I want all of you to perceive me as simply me, as an individual, and my gender identity does not matter in that context at all. The closest to a gendered identity label that you need to know is me being a lesbian.

Ichigonya, the character, is genderfluid because they are a personified representation of my inner selfhood. It felt natural for me to make them genderfluid because my own gender expression is so fluid and all over the place. But I, the artist, am not genderfluid.

Being outwardly gender-nonconforming is something I have to have, and if there is something that’s hindering my ability to go from one extreme to another, I experience genuine dysphoria because of it. Presenting in feminine ways when I feel masculine makes me dysphoric, and vice versa. I can’t have just one of the options: I have to have them both, and everything else in between, available to me at all times. Otherwise there is a contradiction in my gender experience and my outwardly appearance. Two years ago, when I was staying at the ward, I was forced to only be masculine presenting because my own stupid ass hadn’t taken any feminine attire with me when I was admitted. I became so dysphoric that I didn’t even want to look at myself in the mirror. The same thing has happened to me many times with masculine attire.

There is a character trope in animanga, particularly shoujo and girl harems, called “the girlprince”. That is a label I fuck with a lot, so you’re more than welcome to call me that if you’d like!

Fixing my tie,

ichigonya

What’s Up With The Gender?

Gone Would-Be Me