On this national coming out day thinking about how you’re forced to constantly come out when you’re genderqueer.
On how sometimes it’s not safe, and you have to let yourself be misgendered even when makes your skin crawl.
Every gendered term making you feel uncomfortable.

Those small little words; “she”, “girls”, “ladies and gentlemen” making you feel so small and too big at the same time.
Like you’re a puzzle piece that don’t fit. The world is chafing against your skin, against your very being. You’re chafing against the world.

Then there’s the moments when those who know you misgender you. Those that you’ve told, who still slip up and use the wrong pronoun.
Sometimes those moments can hurt even more.
You realise that perhaps they’ll never truly see you for who you are.

Earlier I happened upon a tweet about transphobia and it reminded me of the instances when I’ve been called mentally ill or unnatural for being trans. How some people would rather I didn’t exist.

To some degree I’m proud of being “unnatural”. To force people to question their notion of what is normal and natural.
But that doesn’t mean those things don’t hurt to read. That it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of the restrictive world we live in, and how it erases my existence.

So tonight, on this coming out day, I’m thinking about how I’ll never stop coming out.
About how, while I love that I am genderqueer and that I queer gender, it’s also fucking exhausting to constantly strain against the system. To always have to push back. Never comfortable.