My Agender Pride

So today is agender pride day. How wonderful! I've decided that I wanted to celebrate by telling my story and showing how I celebrate my pride.

In the beginning. . .

I was just an ordinary kid. Gender wasn't really that big of a deal at first. I had an incident at church where I had a hard time getting a yo-yo because I was a girl and they only wanted to give the yo-yos to the boys. (In the end, I got the yo-yo, so all was well.) But other than that, I had no care for my feminine presentation.

When I got into kindergarten, things changed. I started to interact with other girls, and I started to feel like I wasn't girly enough. I wanted to do the things I saw other girls do: have sleepovers, be in Girl Scouts, wear makeup and high heals, date boys. . . stuff like that. But my mom wouldn't let me do any of it. I was only allowed to sleep over with someone if my mom met the parents first, which was only one person at the time. Girl Scouts was too expensive, so my mom wouldn't let me be a part of it, and I was one of the only girls that wasn't a Girl Scout. As for the other stuff, my mom said I was too young.

All of this devastated me. I thought that I wasn't a real girl. So I spent a decent part of my childhood doing everything possible to be a "real girl". I celebrated when I started wearing training bras. I jumped on the opportunity to transfer to an all girls school. When I started getting my period, I even said to myself, "If I ever forget that I'm a girl, my period will be here to remind me." Yeah. . . it was pretty bad.

My teenage years. . .

This was around where I first started learning about gender. This was also around the time that I met my first gay friend and my first trans friend. Before this time, my only exposure to the LGBT community was what I saw on TV and what my mom and grandma told me. I saw some documentary about a gay couple trying to have a baby, and all my mom and grandma would do is speak negatively about the couple. They'd also tell me to not be gay and warn me that they'd have me "talk to pastor" if they found out that I was gay.

And while I never really thought that I liked women (okay I kind of did, but that was before I knew the difference between romantic and platonic attraction), I did start to question my gender. When I was really little, I thought more in the sense of being a boy and thinking that the doctors mislabeled me as a girl. As I got older, it was more "I'm not sure that I have a gender really. If anything, I'm gender neutral." But then I convinced myself that I was just a gender non-confirming girl, and left it alone for the longest.

Becoming an adult. . .

As adulthood approached, I began to seriously question my sexuality. This led me down the journey to realizing that I was ace. The word agender came up a lot because the two often get confused. I dismissed it for a long time, but then, I reevaluated my behaviors and realized that agender might fit me. I identified as agender for a while, but one night I had a panic attack because I didn't think agender fit me anymore. To ease my anxiety, I read a short story about asexual/gender neutral mermaids. That's when I realized that I felt more comfortable describing myself as gender neutral. But I still like using the agender pride flag. So now I officially label myself as agender/gender neutral. I don't feel comfortable calling myself agender unless I specify that I mean it in the gender neutral sense oppose to the genderless sense.

My pride. . .

There's a lot that I do to acknowledge my pride. I own several pins: two agender pins (one with the word "agender" on it and one without), and several they/them pins. As of Saturday, I also own a miniature agender pride flag. I also have my queer friends call me Dale and use they/them pronouns so that I can find out whether or not I like them. I've been doing this since March, and I think I'm going to stick with it. When I go off to college, I'll get a large agender pride flag for my room. But until then, my miniature collection will have to do.