Q&A: ” can’t find a word that completely describes myself. Perhaps you can help.”

anonymous said:

Despite reading lexicons, I can’t find a word that completely describes myself. Perhaps you can help. Description of my person: AFAB, I love and I’m happy with my female body, don’t want a male body; crossdressing, men’s clothes, very feminine underwear, make-up, long hair, love my androgynous face. Psychologically sometimes really feel like I’m a man, sometimes quite like a girl, rarely completely like a girl.

…this may make me come across as an ass, but i feel obligated to point out that you’re not going to find any one word that encompasses what just took you 46 words to convey. in fact, i’m sure that even those 46 words are only scratching at the surface of who you are as a person.

…and i know that all i’ve just done is state the obvious. bear with me.

for many people, when it comes to finding words to describe oneself with, one may find a word that fits perfectly. one may find a word that fits awkwardly. one may find a word that fits well at times, but doesn’t fit at all other times. regardless of how the word fits, more often than not it’s the case that any given word only fits one piece of the bigger picture that is who one is, even just in terms of gender. some people utilize multiple ‘specialized’ words to try and fill in as much of that bigger picture as possible using as few words as possible. others are more than happy to use but a few words and leave their picture more abstract, preferring to fill in details as they deem necessary or relevant on a person-by-person, relationship-by-relationship basis.

looking at the description that you gave me, no single word comes to mind. rather, it sounds like you’ve just described (at least) three different aspects of yourself: feelings about your body, how you like to present or express yourself (some refer to this as gender expression) and how you see yourself in relation to society’s concept of gender (gender identity).

it’s my personal opinion that how you feel about your body in and of itself says nothing about your gender. your gender expression, just like everyone else’s, is something that is unique to you. as such, you may not find a single word that describes it, although i did notice that you used the words ‘crossdressing’ and ‘androgynous’, so it seems like you already utilize some words, at least. have you tried combining them or looking into related terms? when it comes to gender identity, it sounds like you experience fluidity involving at least two genders. genderfluid, bigender come to mind, but there are lots of other words that could also be relevant. please bear in mind that neither of these words necessarily involve being any specific gender all or even part of the time; there is an open-endedness to them that some find helpful / useful / accurate / advantageous / comfortable.

in the end, my advice is to find words (regardless of how many) that you like and that feel right to you and combine them into your own unique cocktail of an identity; one that is as unique as you, even if that means that only you know the recipe for it. that’s much better than trying to fit so much of yourself into a single word, imho.