Atypical Transgender Late Bloomer

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 But I think the word that fits me is queer , both in its outdated usage and also in its recent usage.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" ...