Author: Cryptic Anomaly
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about my relationship with gender and, the more I sit with it, the more I realise that my issue is not simple enough to fit into the neat conclusions people often expect. Gender questioning is usually spoken about in a linear way. A person is either comfortable with the gender they were given, or they eventually uncover a different label that explains everything. My experience has not been like that at all so far. It has been more layered, frustrating and difficult to explain because it does not unfold in a way that sounds dramatic or obvious. The first thing I know for sure is that my body is not the issue. I do not want to change my feminine body and I am fine being female. She/her pronouns do not bother me either. Additionally, the terms “man”, “agender” and “non-binary” do not fit me. Genderless does not feel accurate to me in that deeper identity sense. That is what made all of this confusing at first, because if all of that is true, why did the word “woman” still feel uncomfortable?
For a while, I kept trying to understand whether that discomfort meant I had to belong under some other gender label. That seems to be the assumption a lot of people make. If “woman” feels wrong, then perhaps the answer must be non-binary. If the idea of gender itself feels exhausting, perhaps the answer must be agender. However, the more honest I became with myself, the more I realised that my problem is not that I secretly feel like a man or that I have no gender at all. The problem is that the word “woman” rarely arrives on its own. It comes carrying an entire script. It comes with baggage, expectations, stereotype and role. It comes with a social image that often feels too narrow, heavy and full of assumptions that I never agreed to carry.
When many people say “woman”, they are not simply speaking in a neutral biological sense. They are also attaching an entire social identity to it. There are assumptions about softness, emotional labour, warmth, communication style, appearance, priorities and even how a woman is supposed to hold herself in the world. Even now, in a time when people like to pretend that gender expectations are more open, those pressures are still present. They may be hidden more carefully although they are still there. You can feel when people are not only seeing you but reading you through the role they think you should naturally fit. That is where my discomfort lives. It is not physical discomfort or a wish to become male. It is not a deep internal sense of having no gender. It is the tension between simply being female and being expected to identify with everything society piles onto womanhood.
At one point, the idea of having no gender felt appealing to me and I had to stop and ask myself why. At first, I wondered whether that meant I might be agender or something similar. However, when I sat with it properly, I realised that the appeal was not that “no gender” felt deeply true. The appeal was that it felt freeing and relieving. It felt like a way to escape the social weight that seems to come with womanhood. That distinction turned out to be very important. Wanting freedom from gendered expectation is not always the same thing as internally feeling genderless. Wanting distance from a role is not always the same thing as having no gender identity. Those two things can look very similar from the outside although they are not identical. Once I understood that, I stopped trying to force labels onto myself that did not actually fit.
This is where gender non-conforming started to make sense to me. It felt more honest because it names the actual point of tension. It says that I do not conform to the expected mould of womanhood. It says that I do not naturally fit the stereotype, role or assumptions attached to that category. It allows me to still say that I am female, while making it clear that I do not align with what society tends to build around that fact. In that sense, it fits without stretching me into an identity that does not belong to me. I do not think I am a manm, non-binary or agender. What feels true is that I am female although deeply disconnected from traditional womanhood as a social role. “Female” feels descriptive to me. “Woman” often feels loaded. That difference may seem small to some people but to me it matters.
Additionally, I think part of what made this harder to untangle is that society often treats sex, gender role, personality, expression and internal identity as though they are all the same thing. They are not. A person can be female and still feel no loyalty to the role traditionally attached to women. A person can use she/her and still feel alienated from the expectations that come with those pronouns. A person can reject the social script without necessarily belonging to a completely different gender identity. That nuance gets lost very easily and perhaps that is why so many people end up feeling pressured to find a label that sounds more definite than their actual experience. Forms do this too. Many of them blur sex and gender together as though they are interchangeable and then expect one tidy answer. Real life does not work that way. In medical or body-based contexts, female is the accurate answer for me. In reflective, personal and conversational terms, gender non-conforming feels closer to the truth.
Ultimately, this whole process has taught me that my questioning was never really about wanting to become someone else. It was about trying to understand why a socially loaded word kept feeling too small and too heavy at the same time. It felt too small because it narrows women into roles that do not reflect the full range of who they can be. It felt too heavy because it carries centuries of expectation, stereotype and projection. Once I realised that, the conversation changed for me. The real question was no longer, “What other gender am I?” It became, “How do I describe myself honestly when the category available to me carries meanings I do not claim?” For me, gender non-conforming is the closest answer I have found. It does not solve everything, however, it tells the truth more accurately. I am female. I am she/her. I am not a man. I am not non-binary. I am not agender. I simply do not conform to the heavy, restrictive, expectation-filled version of womanhood that society so often assumes should come naturally.
The Anomalous Press 