kind of a sequel to this: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/51020389/
i construct these things in a jokey manner, but the reality is that this crap has been eating away at my mind slowly for most of my life LOL.
i've been An Openly Masculine-Identifying Person for about half my life now, but never quite felt 100% comfortable with insisting that i am Male. don't misunderstand - i am. it's just that, it's also different than what you would usually assume from that. because, like all things, gender is a set of social expectations and not *just* individual identity, for me the discomfort comes from what people assume about how i intend to perform masculinity after declaring that i am male. because i'm not about to do any of that shit, but how do i make that known?
very easy solution (THAT TOOK ME 14 YEARS TO FIGURE OUT): make it clear through some signifier that you do not adhere to binary, "expected" masculinity in some manner. so, non-binary man.
gender-non-conforming man also works, but it is actually a little more complex than that for me. the maleness for me *is* non-binary at its core, not just performatively. so y'know. there's layers. it's a mixture of many things compounding one another. it can be confusing and difficult, but it is what it is.

the thing that made it confusing was that i couldn't figure out why i did and didn't feel nonbinary at the same time. oddly, the agender part *isn't* what *feels* nonbinary, and THAT was what i was having trouble with. agender, to me, feels like a complete and total disconnect from gender. it does not feel like something that exists, but which is altered, which is what my nonbinary-maleness feels like. so i kept thinking to myself, "well of course i *feel* NB, i'm agender... but why isn't that knowledge placating me? what's wrong? isn't my maleness just standard, socially-agreed-upon binary maleness? surely it is?"

in hindsight, that is kinda funny to me.