Byronic Mess

When I was younger, I thought everyone felt the way I felt. Like their skin was too tight for the vastness of their soul. I’ve always felt like I was far-reaching, endless. It wasn’t until I actually examined my gender that I realised that wasn’t a universal feeling. Most people feel strictly male, or strictly female, some combination of the two or nothing at all, whereas I felt like I was made of galaxies and stars. I felt like a black hole, absorbing gender and crushing it to stardust. I felt masculine, in a way, but as if I was someone that had been male a long time ago. My body felt limiting, as if it was holding me in and one day I would come bursting out of it like a supernova. I didn’t feel like a god, I felt infinite, undying, like the universe.

When I was just coming out, I decided to focus on the fact I felt male at all, not on the fact that I felt like a man that had been left in the void of space for too long ad had ended up consumed by it. It was easier to present as masculine — cut my hair, buy a binder — but it didn’t stop the dysphoria completely. It helped, that’s for sure. It made the dysphoria something I could live with rather than something all encompassing, but it couldn’t banish it completely. It was all too human, and I’ve never felt like that. I feel like a concept more than a person, and that’s something that will never go away, or be achieved by my mortal vessel.

Gender is complex, and it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time looking into. I wanted to know if there were other people out there who felt about their gender in the same way I did. I wanted to know I wasn’t alone, I guess. I stumbled across Tumblr blogs dedicated to neopronouns and xenogenders and finally felt like I’d found people who would understand. Whenever a cisgendered person asks me my gender, I say I’m a man, and I’m mostly right. With other trans people, I can open up a bit more, use some more specific labels like transmasc nonbinary. But with these people, I could be wholly honest about my gender in a way I never have been before. It was like striking gold, like catching lightning in a bottle. I felt seen and understood for the first time in my life, and it was glorious.

With a bit of searching I found a label that fit me perfectly: gendervoid. I was the void of space trapped into one body. It felt freeing to know this term already existed, because that meant there were others like me. There was at least one person out there who felt the same as me, and it suddenly made me feel a lot less lonely. For so long I had been convinced that I was strange and unnatural, that maybe I just looked too hard at my gender and found something I wasn’t supposed to, that I was supposed to just ignore this piece of me to be accepted. I still find it hard to talk about my gender with people outside of the internet, because I’m scared they won’t understand, but at least I know that there’s a place I can go to be understood completely, without having to lose my little uniquities.