<TLDR>My internal sense of my gender tends towards nonbinary; my gender expression tends toward female for lots of reasons; I need to acknowledge my cis privilege and not hide how I feel. But it all gets complicated.</TLDR>

So. Yeah. I tend to identify as she/they/them/her/hers/theirs for pronoun purposes. The order changes based on my mood. I think my own identity is somewhat fluid, perhaps in part due to my age and not knowing how to describe my feelings around gender at a more formative age in a way that felt legible. More on that later or in another posting. Some people seem annoyed that I don't "choose" and I haven't really felt the need for their approval. Some people are more curious about my embodied reality. Some of y'all don't know me at all.

From a young age, I knew I wanted any breasts I would grow to be small. Needless to say, I have had large breasts since the onset of puberty. I have not felt good about them. I stopped playing soccer when shirts vs. skins got awkward and the only two girls who played had to go into the woods beside the field to change into these "pennies" made of mesh jersey material and left me feeling more uncovered than I was comfortable with. I stopped swimming competitively throughout the year for similar reasons having to do with my feelings around my changing body. I was teased about my breast size by my classmates, boys and girls alike, including some I had trusted. I wore minimizer bras to try to fit into clothing, be appropriate, and have less explaining to do. Some of this behavior may have been around gender. Some of it may have been around wanting to reduce my own body and presence in the world. The breast-size teasing seemed to be a subset of broader teasing making me feel undatable. My mom tried to help by saying people paid money to have breasts like mine. That comment made me feel gross and like my body was some sort of commodity. I was a fairly depressed kid, but I kept it together in public more or less.

Midway through 8th grade something changed in me. I realized I didn't particularly care about the judgment of the people around me. To clarify, I knew it could (and would and did and does) hurt my feelings, but I was tired of living under the thrall of my fear of how others viewed me. I wanted to play with the way I presented to the world. I took my denim jacket, and inspired by the 80s metal heads, began to adorn it with pins. The buttons advertised bands like Iron Maiden sure, but I didn't want to stop there. I wanted it to show all of me. There was a pink kangaroo pin I had acquired as a child that held Avon perfume. There were buttons from causes my grandparents had supported. There were buttons from my dad's high school. There were jokes, some of which made me laugh, and some of which were no longer funny to me. I didn't want to hide me. Around the same time I realized how uncomfortable my body felt squeezed into minimizer bras and the occasional girdle. I realized the physical discomfort and emotional shame were related. I committed to never again wearing a minimizer bra. (I've mostly stuck to the letter and spirit of this commitment, the only exception being an attempt at drag for a purimspiel political protest.)

So where did that leave me? I wanted to let my body exist and be itself. At some point, I think I also wanted to feel attractive. I didn't want to be in pain hiding my breasts. I started playing with gender in easy ways, wearing a necktie (convinced my dad to teach me to tie one when I was in second grade), sometimes with a skirt, sometimes with pants. I would go into men's stores and explain that I needed to try things on in the dressing rooms. I felt more free when I was exploring gender presentation. Still though. Even when I could somehow make shirts work out, pants were uncomfortable and awkward looking. I was able to borrow a tuxedo from a rental place for free once, but it did not feel like a good look. Between internalized fat phobia and the way clothes are cut and I am shaped, I came to rely on dresses to cover me. I felt more attractive, like I could have control over what I would show and what I would hide. But overall down the road and especially over the past few years, the clothes that fit my body feel more feminine than I sometimes feel. I got used to them. I wonder what I am missing.

So the she/her/hers part of my gender identity owns this gender expression and the they them theirs tends voices my internal identity.

And then over the past couple of months I've been feeling more female, so I'm not quite sure what's going on with that.

Note on gender, makeup and "professional"as performative gender forthcoming. LibraryCats say it's way past my bedtime.

I'm back. So back before dating apps there tended to be personal ads. The first lines tended to include at minimum one's marital status, race, gender, and the characteristics of the desired recipient of ones affection. These terms were frequently abbreviated. So a personal ad might begin