# in the queer dressing room ## thoughts about identity and labels #### 3 jun 2024 > [!warning] > Talk of suicidal ideation. It's Pride once again. It's been ten years since I called myself bisexual for the first time and...I don't know. A year since I felt brave enough to tell my partner that I'm genderfluid. I've never really felt like I "belonged" when it comes to Pride or the queer community. I was in my 20s when I realised that I was interested in romantic or sexual relationships with people of the same gender as me. I was in my 30s before I began to question that gender and untangle the deep sense of "not-girl" that I felt for long stretches of time. I was not a kid who knew, deep in their core, that they were gay or trans; that isn't my story, and I can't and won't pretend it is. I knew I was *different*, but that difference came from another source. (Surprise, it's neurodivergence!) I've used a handful of labels for myself as a result, some even quite recently. I've tried them on in much the same way one tries on clothing--a shirt here, a bra there--and the experience is, honestly, not all that different from the experience of trying on actual clothes with this fat body. Which is to say, nothing actually fits. Sure, something might look kind of nice, feel kind of comfortable, but the moment I have to actually look at myself in a mirror, I can see all the problems, all the little ways in which things just aren't quite right. They're not a perfect match. And sure, they don't have to be perfect. I don't have to have a perfect split of gender attraction to call myself bisexual and I don't have to have a perfectly time-blocked sense of gender to call myself genderfluid. I don't need to pencil down the days where I feel agender or demifemme or female. I don't need to want to be male to call myself trans (though I actually don't use that one at all). But I think I have spent so many years of my life looking at myself in mirrors and thinking about just how ill-at-ease I look, how much I don't seem to fit in anything I wear--internally or externally--that I just want to be able to finally pin something to myself that actually feels like me, unequivocally. Something that isn't just a compromise between who I am and what I am expected to be. I want to find a word to describe that, actually, I can be and am attracted to lots of different people with lots of different genders. I want a word to explain that some days I feel completely disconnected from any gender at all. I want some way to say "this is me" without feeling like the words I'm using are ill-fitting and, therefore, all a farce. Because deep down that's what it is. I feel like a fraud, a fake, like the reason they don't fit is because they aren't supposed to. Clothing isn't meant to fit bodies like mine, because society-at-large would rather we don't exist. The labels can't fit a person like me because the person I imagine myself to be is a person that is, really, only imaginary. An illusion. It's been ten years since I first called myself bisexual. A year since I called myself genderfluid. But it's been twenty years since I first asked God to take my life and then disavowed him when he did not listen. I have not wanted to exist for far longer than I have considered how I do exist. But I am still here, and the way I feel is not imaginary. I still want to kiss lots of different people, still have days where I feel very clearly genderless. Somehow, saying it like that feels like a better fit than using a single word. Not as pithy, sure, but when you have a body like mine, you learn to treasure the things that do fit. #ramblings #queer