I’m much newer to this, I socially transitioned around 2 years ago and medically transitioned around one and a half years ago.

It’s OK to refer to stereotypes, I tend to think it helps us communicate even if there can be a social injustice that comes from generalizing.

I also feel like I would just want to be a cis woman and so 100% female sounds very good to me, but my sense is also that I’m definitely not a guy. I certainly learned to live as one, and identify as one even, but I always felt a bit out of place as a man. When I was in middle school for example, I would have low grades in gym class because I refused to change in the boy’s locker room. When I would go swimming I often would wear a t-shirt because it just felt wrong. I didn’t like sports or athletic activities, and while some stereotypical boy interests and activities overlapped with mine, I found myself forming a strong preference for female friends by the time I was in the 5th grade (around 10 years old), and that became quite an extreme preference for me.

Nonetheless, I can feel some affinity with men - ironically, my dysphoria made me fit a certain kind of stoic male stereotype well. I think Imogen Binnie captures this well in Nevada - the sort of crust punk stoic who doesn’t take good care of themselves and so on. Outside of the trans context, I identified with the ascetic life of the Cormac McCarthy’s protagonist in The Passenger, rotting away sleeping in a hay bed in an exposed windmill or roughing out a winter in an unheated house in Idaho … I tend to think now that this was more about my own depression, dissociation, and general mental issues than about my gender - but I certainly identified with a certain subgenre of masculinity that emphasizes the virtue of suffering and not feeling anything.

I think for me what helped me realize I wasn’t non-binary or bigender was by interacting with other non-binary and bigender people - I met someone online who felt like their beard was a part of who they were, they loved their beard and shaving it was a huge mistake for them, but they were transfem and medically transitioning - so they a gender expression that includes breasts and jewelry but also a beard, and that feels natural and good for them. I find it hard to relate to that, my beard was good in many ways - it was nice to feel the air around me blowing (it was like an extra sense of sorts), and it covered my face and made me feel less social anxiety that way. It was also a perfect mask, it allowed me to finally fit in as a man after so many years of being perceived as too feminine and gay, or even just younger than I was. It gave me social acceptance of sorts.

But the beard was also sickening, even when I was pretransition and unaware I saw a picture of myself with a beard and I felt truly nauseated - it’s like seeing myself did psychic damage or something, I didn’t just hate myself it was disturbing to me that I could look that way. I just didn’t realize it was a gender issue - and since I’ve transitioned, what I see in the mirror feels better, and I feel more comfortable taking photos of myself than ever (I basically never took photos of myself and was upset if anyone else tried to - now I take photos of myself all the time and even feel good about some of them, something that had never once happened before).

My partner is someone who identifies as bigender, and for them they feel a great deal of openness and acceptance of gender traits, they say they would be happy in a male body as well as a female body, and they wear both male and female clothes. They have a particular gender expression that is both femme and butch that is hard to describe accurately - muscled and strong, but with long feminine hair and so on. The muscles on my body make me feel nauseous, I hate my calves for how developed they are, and I can’t relate to their preferences.

Now, those are just two ways of being non-binary / bigender, and it seems like everyone can be pretty different, which is why I like talking about it and learning, because I have so much to learn from people’s self concepts and the way they think about and use their labels.

I tend to think there is probably some super complex biology that makes me inherently a mix of gendered traits both biologically and otherwise, so it wouldn’t be surprising to me if I were technically non-binary, but I am not sure I really fit that label well and I don’t use it. What seems true is that I should have been born a cis woman, and I’m now doing what I can to compensate for the male body I have so I can integrate and live socially as a woman and feel more comfortable in my own skin. So far everything feminizing has felt great, and I haven’t had much trouble giving up being a man - there is nothing I miss or felt attached to that was difficult to lose. Being a man was essentially all bad, and being a woman seems all good for me.

Anyway - I would love to hear more of your experiences, or if you have any advice in all your years of experience, it would really be helpful 😅