Atypical Transgender Late Bloomer

I have within the last ten days come to recognize that Something's Going On With Me. It's been there for a while. Now I have the "world enough and time" to ponder and pursue it. I've been growing my hair for a year now. Buzzcuts on both sides, the top grown out. It's an undercut. It's a bisexual bob that still needs to grow out. But I'm growing long hair after a lifetime of military haircuts. I'm wearing earrings. I had a mani-pedi in last fall. I wore nail polish for a few weeks last summer. I've worn a kilt in public a few times. My nipples have become sensitive to eroticism over the last few years. I've nurtured an interest in transgender women online in my circle of people, and then enlarged it to their circles of people. The notion of queering the gender norm is appealing to me. I like the way silky clothes feel on me. I want to feel pretty. I want to try out Femininity. I've been trying out eyeliner. So, even though I...

I've been asked (by a friend) to explain myself categorically, that is: to label myself, to submit myself to the mainstream's categories, for the ease of people trying to decide about me, to judge me, to evaluate me. It's an interesting 'ask'. I'm a misfit. I don't easily categorize, and I don't fit into categories at all for people who are Serious about labelling. I don't start off intending to frustrate a system of categories, I have no activist intent, I'm just unable to align with their structures and remain Myself. So 'misfit' is a tag that Others might apply to me. 'Eclectic' is another; it seems positive, kicky, rather non-judgemental. I guess 'strange' works. But I think the word that fits me is queer , both in its outdated usage and also in its recent usage. Back in the Day, 'queer' meant strange, peculiar, or non-functional. You could be a queer bird if, for instance, you registered to vote ...

Heard a tremendous NPR 8-minute interview with LuLu Miller , author of Why Fish Don't Exist , about how false or unhelpful categorizations and naming structures lead us into faulty mental frameworks that persist in our perceptions, feelings, and thinking; often these faulty frameworks serve us poorly. She said, imagine there's a lecture hall and the professor displays a slide showing a salmon, a lungfish, and a cow. The prof asks, Which two belong together? Which one does not belong? Most of the audience will say, the two fish belong together; the cow does not belong. And that seems to make sense. Two fish and a cow? Pretty easy to sort out . On examination, the facile answer falls short. A lungfish has lungs and an epiglottis, just like the cow. The cow's heart and the lungfish's heart are very similar. In fact, the cow and the lungfish have much more in common than the lungfish and the salmon. Turns out that grouping them by "which ones are fish" ...