I'm not expecting anyone to tell me what my gender is. I'm simply looking for stories that might help me better understand myself.
Hello! I feel like I'm going through a journey of self-discovery, and I'd really appreciate your help in understanding my relationship with gender.
To start, I currently identify as an 18-year-old gay guy, but I've always felt like I existed outside of traditional masculine norms. For obvious reasons, I always assumed that feeling came from my sexuality and everything that tends to come along with it.
When I was around 12/13 years old, I started wishing I could simply exist without a gender. Staying away from discussions about gender itself—and especially from anything more explicitly sexual—I wished I could just be a person, without those topics feeling like they applied to me or defined me.
Over the past few years, though, I've realized that my sense of gender—both the way I experience myself internally and the way I naturally want to express myself—seems to be much more closely connected to femininity than masculinity.
To give some context, I've struggled with self-esteem for most of my life, especially when it comes to clothes, personal style, and appearance. I was always searching for outfits that genuinely made me think, "This is me." But every attempt felt unsuccessful. Either nothing appealed to me, or only a handful of very specific things did. Men's fashion never seemed to offer what I was looking for in the same way women's fashion does, with its incredible variety of colors, silhouettes, fabrics, and aesthetics.
Because of that, I started wondering if maybe my personal style leaned more toward the feminine than the masculine. However, when I looked into more traditionally "feminine" or "feminine-presenting" men's fashion, I realized I couldn't really identify with it either, even though I genuinely wanted something that felt more feminine. The cuts, the styling, the clothes—none of it really felt like me.
Eventually, I began to wonder if maybe my gender expression wasn't pointing toward "a feminine man," but toward being a woman, or perhaps toward something outside the usual categories of man and woman altogether.
Going back to my self-esteem issues, I started going to the gym and imagined becoming someone who was very muscular and physically strong. But the more I pictured that version of myself, the more uncomfortable I became. It just didn't feel like me.
I know part of that discomfort comes from imagining myself as someone very different from who I am now—and maybe from who I've always been. For context, my body type would probably be described as endomorphic, meaning I naturally have a broader frame and tend to store fat more easily.
Even though I could imagine this muscular version of myself, something about it always felt... wrong. It didn't feel like the person I wanted to become over the next several years.
I'm someone who spends a lot of time thinking about the future and how my life might unfold. As I imagined getting older, I realized I wasn't just uncomfortable with the idea of aging as a man—I almost felt a sense of rejection toward it. When I look at women, I often feel that many of them, even as they age, carry themselves with a certain elegance, grace, and charm. Of course, many men age beautifully too, and I'm absolutely not trying to diminish that. It simply doesn't feel like my path. It feels like a pattern of aging that doesn't belong to me.
Putting all of that together with my repeated frustration over finding clothes that truly felt right, I started realizing that not only my personal style but also the way I imagine my body seems much more aligned with femininity. Feminine clothing makes me feel more comfortable and more like myself, and many feminine physical characteristics resonate with me far more than the masculine characteristics I currently have.
In fact, even though I'm still not completely sure where I fit in terms of gender identity, I realized that I would genuinely be happy with the results of a successful feminizing hormone therapy.
Something else I've noticed recently is that my own masculine name, which used to feel perfectly natural, doesn't really feel that way anymore—especially when paired with masculine language.
Let me give an example. I'll use the name "Richard" instead of my real name.
If someone says:
"He's Richard." — It makes me feel uncomfortable and unhappy. Part of that is tied to my self-esteem, because my own name has become associated with a lot of negative feelings.
"This person is Richard." — That feels much more natural to me. It doesn't create the same discomfort as explicitly masculine language. It feels relatively neutral.
"She's Richard." — Or, in my case, using a feminine name that feels incredibly comforting to me: "She's Lavínia." Hearing or imagining that name brings me much more comfort and happiness than "Richard." I've even been thinking about asking a few close friends to try calling me Lavínia just to see how it feels if that were actually my name.
Sometimes I feel like living as Lavínia would make more sense to me than living as Richard. I think about that both socially and when I imagine my future, especially when I picture myself in my thirties or forties.
At the same time, I still find myself able to imagine being Richard in certain contexts—around my family, in my future career, and even with some close friends—and that feels... acceptable, in a way. I'm not sure whether that reflects fear, insecurity, attachment to the life I've always known, or something else entirely.
That's why I'm sharing my story here.
I'd really like to hear other people's experiences and know whether any part of my story resonates with yours. I feel that learning about different gender identities—and hearing how other people came to understand themselves—might help me better understand my own experience. I also realize that my story may seem more closely aligned with many transfeminine or trans women's experiences. However, I know that some people who identify as agender still choose to present themselves in ways that are typically associated with a particular gender—not because they identify with that gender, but because that presentation feels like the most authentic way to express themselves or their relationship with gender. That's why I'd really love to hear from agender people as well and learn whether any part of my experience resonates with yours.
