Nonbinary

Ha, well - that should be pretty much natural, tbh

IRL I find a lot of otherwise binary trans women use "she/they" pronouns and adopt a non-binary identity while otherwise fitting the typical arc of a binary trans woman. I notice many of them struggle with imposter syndrome and I sometimes wonder if that's part of the reason for their non-binary self-conception, or if it's a way of understanding and relating to when dysphoria doesn't match the extreme stereotype of a trans woman, e.g. if they don't have much or any bottom dysphoria, etc.

I actually avoided transitioning for many years by adopting a non-binary identity, I figured my dysphoria wasn't bad enough to justify anything like medical transition (and at the time I didn't know non-binary people were considered trans, so I thought I was "non-binary and not trans"), so I often think about how I struggled with self-awareness and identity and just assume others are going through the same thing.

Sometimes it can be hard to communicate - e.g. talking about a transfem enby, there is a huge range of what that covers ... there are basically-binary, medically-transitioned trans women who identify as non-binary, there are agender folks, people who feel like they are both male and female, and so on. It's very hard when so many people are lumped together, when I talk about "enbies" there is little that can be said is true of all or most of them (this is true of trans people generally, tbh).

I guess in my mind the paradigmatic transfem enby is Jacob Tobia, but I don't know a single person IRL who is like them. Most transfem enbies I know IRL are not that different than the binary trans women I know, the enby identity doesn't differentiate much. One transfem enby I know IRL takes a lower dose of estrogen and they are the closest transfem enby I know to not being basically like a binary trans woman. I don't know a single person IRL who uses only they/them pronouns. The one person who did use they/them for a short while was a trans man who was struggling in their transition and finally changed their pronouns to he/him.

So what it means to be non-binary is pretty open, at this point I usually just try to learn what the person themselves wants and how they understand their own gender, and then I just respect and try to see them the way they want to be seen.