Demigirl?

This post is the second in a series.

I did quite a bit of journaling through the time when I was coming to recognize my reality. I would like to share some of these entries with you as a window into what it means to come out. Please come back to read through the rest of the journey. If you haven’t read the first, you can click here to be redirected to that post, called Truth.

 

Feb. 8, 2020
2040hrs

Last week when I came across the article on being a non-binary woman, something rang out in me. The next day, doing some research into some more “obscure” LGBTQ terms, I came across “demigirl” and that also struck a chord.

“Demigirl is a gender identity describing someone who partially, but not wholly, identifies as a woman, girl or otherwise feminine, whatever their assigned gender at birth. They may or may not identify as another gender in addition to feeling partially a girl or a woman.” [from gender.wikia.org]

I went back to the article (in Teen Vogue, by Suzannah Weiss) and read, “I personally identify as a non-binary woman because, to me, this identity acknowledges both that I don’t have an innate identification with any gender and that I’ve been socialized as a woman.” This has me thinking about spending my life pleasing people and doing and being what and who I think others are expecting. I have been socialized as a woman. How much of my sense of being a woman comes from outside myself and feels like it’s part of me only because of how long it’s been around? How much more of the non-binary part of this would I feel if I could truly let go of people pleasing?

The article also mentions that another non-binary woman identifies that way because she “loves her female-coded body but doesn’t always feel it accurately represents her.” I feel some affinity for this as well. I don’t feel like I’m in the wrong physical body – I feel like lots of the stuff that comes with that body is foreign. The expectations of femininity have always felt uncomfortable.

 

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash