Our Youth View reporter M updates you on what is happening in her life at 19. Attending college, making friends, getting a girlfriend and then breaking up. Just typical type news from an agender youth who used to be into polyamory but now feels they have grown out of it.
In a very short time our agender Youth View correspondent M will be off to college. How do they look forward to the beginning of a new phase in their life? With eagerness and some trepidation. The dark cloud over the college experience is the dreaded possibility of the possible uttering of their deadname by college professors who don’t know any better. All of M’s admission info is in their old name and M would rather that remained a secret. Get all of M’s thoughts on the coming, possible, crisis in today’s post.
Today our Youth View contributor M writes about how their dysphoria has changed during the past few years. The word dysphoria means an extreme discomfort or a feeling of unease. It has manifested differently for M over the years. For example when M was 14 their Adams Apple and chest caused deep feeling of discomfort for them. Now they sometimes feel the dysphoria centered on the chest but because, due to hormones, their chest is getting more feminine. Read all about M’s dysphoria in today’s Youth View.
Our agender Youth Correspondent tackles the subject of dating while trans and queer. M prefers they/them as pronouns and that one fact makes it hard to connect with anyone for romance. Once M stepped outside the binary they found barriers. For example an online dating site that lets you pick your gender from a long list but then you have to chose how you want to be labeled in search results and you can only be a boy or a girls. Step into Dating While Trans and see what M ran into.
Do you recall a time when no one except the fringe members of society had piercings and tattoos? Remember when “punks” listened to punk rock music and wore mohawk hair styles, and put safety pins everywhere? Even through their noses. Now it’s 2018 and depending where you live you are likely to see a lot more body art and piercing. While people still gasp at shocking modifications like large holes in cheeks and screw-in horns, for the most part no one notices the pierced lip, pierced nose or eyebrow. Today M, our youth correspondent, talks about writing. What M hopes for is a day when LGBTQ people are not noticed anymore than a tongue piercing or two earrings on a dude. A day when all the young LGBTQ writers grow up and write about LGBTQ issues and desires.
For some people making friends is easy. They just fall into place in their lives and are often friends for life. For others, such as transgender or agender people, things may not be so simple. Our agender contributor M didn’t have any friends till they were in third grade. Now they are getting better at making friends but there are still problems to overcome. Give M’s blog post a read and see what being different forces them to deal with.
Our 17-year-old agender contributor is making work for us. The graphics department will have to update “Seventeen” to “Eighteen” on their column’s graphic since M is having a birthday on March 13. Happy Birthday M! Their post today talks about the way it feels to grow older. (These kids today.) But seriously, you will want to know what’s been going on in M’s life and that’s what they talk about in today’s post.
When things are going badly there is so much to say about how you’re being affected and how you feel. When things are all moving along smoothly there doesn’t seem to be that much to talk about. Just, “Hey, I’m okay. All is well.” That was the dilemma of our agender youth correspondent M when they were trying to come up with a topic for today’s post. So they decided to go ahead and write about how everything is okay.
M inhabits a zone somewhere between genders. They identify as “agender” which means they don’t get along well with the binary gender world we live in. While for male crossdressers having a big gender divide is fun since they can dress like the that opposite gender, for M there is no opposite. So people M meets will assign a gender to M and use whichever pronoun they believe is appropriate. M writes about the difficulty of fitting in.
Life is, for some, a constant reevaluation of self. For others it is a set-in-stone path that leads straight from birth to death. Our contributor M is one of those evaluating types. They had been identifying as “gender queer” or “gender fluid” and accepting feminine or masculine pronouns. After coming to an epiphany about themselves M has realized they are “agender.” What does that mean? Is it another step on their journey or have they reached a final position in their relationship to gender? In a world that demands that people pick a gender and start playing will an agender identity work? Read on and see how M came to identify as agender and what it means to them.
