For a while, my about said this: "I'm aromantic, asexual, genderqueer and butch, and those things are all messy and connected for me. One day I'll write an essay about it." Here's my attempt at writing that essay.

I've used a lot of words for my gender over the years: cis girl, demigirl, nonbinary, graygender, genderflux, transgender, agender, butch, genderqueer, cis woman. My metaphors have ranged from "watered down soda" to "my gender is a renewable energy source and we have reached Peak Girl". Weirdly enough, though, how I feel about my gender - what I want for and from myself - hasn't really changed at all.

Since I was a little girl - because regardless of what gender I've been at any stage in my life since, I was once a little girl - I've wanted the following when I grew up: to be understood as a woman who didn't want to get married, to be understood as a woman who didn't want to have children, and yet to be understood as someone who had little to no internal connection to the word "woman". As a teenager and young adult, things shifted, but they've since settled to include: to not be seen as sexually attractive, to been seen as more masculine or androgynous than feminine, to be almost plain and boring in my appearance, to be understood as someone who doesn't personally care for romance or sex or want anything to do with them, to be referred to by a gender neutral name and at least sometimes with gender neutral pronouns.

Some of those traits are hard to square with each other. Even when I most fiercely identified as nonbinary, when being called a woman sat wrong in my stomach and being called ma'am made me nauseous, I still couldn't shake the feeling that when I got a hysterectomy, I wanted the gender I was affirming to be understood as something closer to a woman than not. I have never wanted my rejection of being a mother or a wife to be seen as a rejection of being a woman. When I was rejecting being a woman, that was a separate story altogether.

Lately, I've been making earnest strides to live my life in ways that not only are consistent with these desires, but that make them clearer to other people. I live with my transmasc lesbian butch platonic(? shrimp colors) partner, I'm out to my parents and my extended family as aroace, I have they/them pronouns on my Canvas and introduce myself with them when I organize. I use Darwin as my name almost everywhere. I've stopped buying women's clothes, I got the hysterectomy I've always wanted, I grew my hair out long and wear it in a ponytail inspired partly by my favorite male character of all time. I organize around abortion and do my best to push against the framing of it as a women's issue whenever it comes up.

And what I'm finding is, perhaps ironically, this makes me more comfortable with the idea of being understood as a woman than ever before. The people around me aren't understanding me as a woman with all the stereotypes and gender roles that comes with; they're understanding me as Darwin, a woman. And I'm totally okay with that. I'm even happy with it.

I think there's a lot of gender feelings that could be described many different ways. I wouldn't be surprised if my long list of labels has only scratched the surface of what I could use for myself. In the context of the US's current political climate, I feel like I'm a lot closer to a cis woman than a trans or nonbinary person, although there's a ton of overlap in experiences and gender is obviously more complex and internal than that. For my own complex gender situation, I've been settling into the words butch and genderqueer, because I think they capture how I've felt - or at least, what I've wanted - at every stage of my journey.

So, hi. My name's Darwin, pronouns they/them or she/her. I'm an aromantic, asexual genderqueer butch cis woman. It's a bit of a mouthful, but you made it this far in the post, and it feels good to say it all at once.