Transcription
I am pansexual and agender.
Pansexual is when you’re sexually attracted to people based more on their personality than their genders, or physical appearance. Agender is, I don’t really subscribe to male or female, or any of the other variants.
I worked out that I was not straight when I was fairly young, when I was thirteen or fourteen and I thought there were a lot of women in movies and stuff who I found very attractive and I would quite like to cuddle them (Back when that was the extreme of my sexual fantasies!)
Then, as I got older, and people started to assume I wasn’t straight, because I was quite open about it visually. I thought ‘Oh yeah, maybe I’m not’ and I started exploring it and started kissing my friends and feeling about and seeing what’s OK and what isn’t.
I started to realise that I wasn’t really tied into any one body-type. A lot of my friends had a specific type of person, which is totally fine. They’d be like, ‘I only find really thin people attractive’ or ‘I find curvy people attractive’. I don’t seem to have a preference, other than they’re nice and that’s not a view that I see as better or worse or anything else, it’s just that’s how my brain works sexually.
I can find people attractive on first glance, but if they seem off in any way personality wise, my brain will just shut that down. ‘You don’t like that person anymore.’, ‘Oh, what a waste of a good body!’
So quite early on, I found out I was pansexual. I’ve always been stereotyped quite a lot. Being raised as a woman, I’ve been told I should be some sort of way by society. I should care a lot about what boys think and all of that stuff and I did a lot, for many years. I took a step back a few years ago, towards the end of uni. I had a girlfriend who was trans and while I was with her I thought ‘Maybe I don’t fit being a woman. Seeing as woman doesn’t equal vagina anymore. What ties me to being this?’
I thought, ‘That’s silly, you’re not having massive dysphoria. You don’t care about this stuff as much as she does, because she’s transitioning from male to female, so that’s a huge deal and stop trying to make this about you and so I shut that down for a while.
After we broke up, I started rethinking it. ‘I still feel this way and this isn’t me turning someone else’s issues into mine.’ So I played around with the idea of gender fluid for a little bit, which is when you identify as male, female or other in varying degrees on different days. Then I realised that the things that made me identify as one or the other, were inherently really sexist. ‘I feel really confident and feisty today, so I guess I’m a man today’, ‘I feel soft and delicate today and like wearing dresses, so I guess I’m a woman’.
Then I realised there are men who wear dresses and are soft and effeminate and there are women who are feisty, this means nothing. So I can’t think of anything that ties me to any of the genders. So that’s why I don’t think I belong in one of them.
I did a lot of exploring and questioning stuff and then about two years ago, I worked out I was agender.
It’s been an exciting, interesting road.
I found myself a lot more confident with my body since then, because I’m much happier now.
Once I realised I was agender, I was ‘Oh, I don’t have to look like a woman or a man or anything. I don’t have to bind to feel OK. I don’t have to shave my legs to feel OK. I can just whatever I feel like is the right way to be and it took a lot of years to get that in my head.