With "nonbinary" being so hot here today, I'm reposting something I put on DropTheT a while ago. It may not provide any new insight, but I just don't want it to be another story lost in the Purge.

Please view this image before reading: https://imgur.com/a/TNSPGST. It's an old tweet of mine, and my finding it was the entire reason I wrote this.

I was a tomboy growing up. My mom would dress me up in her handmade dresses each Sunday for church, but I couldn’t wait to get home, tear it off, and play outside. I had ADD/ADHD which caused me to be rowdy and disruptive and generally bad at holding my tongue, resulting in me getting in trouble quite often. I had more male friends than female friends. (Girls never seemed to like me much, for some reason, and I got along with boys better.) I always asked for the “boy toy” when eating at fast food restaurants. If my dad was outside doing yardwork, I was right there with him. T-shirts and shorts or jeans were always my go-to. I never saw anything wrong with any of this because my parents just let me be a kid. I never felt wrong.

Fast forward to high school. I figured out I was homosexual early on. Once I put a name to my feelings, everything clicked and I felt so much better. Unfortunately, I also had depression, so where’s a sad band kid in the early 2010s to turn but to Tumblr? That was where I first learned about “nonbinary gender.”

I had never had issues with my gender. I realized I was different from other girls, but I didn’t care. I had never cared... until I joined Tumblr. I didn’t search for gender-related stuff; it just came up on my dashboard one day. Curious, I did some digging into "nonbinary." I found blog after blog saying that if you are female and don’t act or “feel” like a woman, you might be nonbinary (this was before “trans” became widely used). Through that, I became hyper-aware of every single unfeminine thing about me. I felt extremely insecure — felt wrong — and like I needed to use this term to help me understand what was going on. I learned about gender-neutral pronouns, started using they/them, and told my friends all about the new me. They were confused, but they didn’t know any better than I did, so they just went along with it.

Contrary to popular belief, calling myself nonbinary did not make me feel better. In fact, it made me feel terrible about myself. It served only to make me more confused and depressed. “Nonbinary” was a parasite — it had wormed its way in and sucked the life out of me. But I couldn’t just cut it out. It had gotten to me in such a way that losing it would only make things worse. Without it, I was terrified I would lose all sense of identity, so I held on for dear life.

I was now too different from my peers, and I felt more isolated than ever. I didn’t want to be special. I wanted to be like everyone else, but I didn’t know how. Almost every day I thought about killing myself, but thank God I never tried.

Time passed, and it got a little easier. I distracted myself with YouTube, video games, and TV. I got so into one TV show in particular — Supergirl — that I made a stan twitter account for it (hence Kara in the profile pic). I found a great group of girls who were either homosexual or bisexual, and we were all very close. (I understand that many stan communities are notoriously toxic, but this one was an exception. Everyone was very encouraging and positive.)

During my time there, I kept seeing one word used over and over again — lesbian. Up until then, my only experiences with it were porn, jokes on TV, and that time my sister said of one of her college roommates, “She has decided that she’s a lesbian.” It just wasn’t a word I saw very often, and when I did, it was used negatively. On twitter, however, I saw it every day in casual or uplifting contexts and tasteful jokes. I began to use it when talking about the show or other users. Eventually, I started using it to refer to myself, and it just felt right.

This tweet, this wonderful fucking tweet that I am so glad I made, shows me finally accepting my being a woman after years of thinking I wasn’t and making myself miserable. Calling myself a lesbian was a huge step for me in accepting myself as I am, not how other people say I should be. I realized that despite my lack of feminine characteristics and tendencies, I was still a homosexual woman, and lesbian was the perfect descriptor. I let go of my insecurities, ditched “nonbinary,” reclaimed she/her, and finally felt normal and, I daresay, happy. I just let myself be me without worrying if I fit into some box. Lesbian did that for me. Lesbian set me free.

Rant time! Fuck “nonbinary” and the downright sexist logic behind it. Fuck the blogs that listed every nuance to expression and behavior under its definition and then claimed “you don’t have to use this label if you don’t feel like it! <3” (News flash! That’s manipulative as hell!) This ideology fucked me up for so long and made me think that I couldn’t just be a tomboy and homosexual. No, I had to be this special “nonbinary gender” because I didn’t fit into their neat little pink and blue boxes that they made me believe mattered. I had never needed a term to define myself, but gender-special Tumblr took advantage of my vulnerability, got in my head, made me doubt myself, and inducted me into the gender cult. Fuck that.

I am so grateful for “lesbian” and for the people who exposed me to this word to help me find myself again. It's such a special word to me, and I will cherish it forever.