AMAB enby here.

Aesthetically I have always wanted to be androgynous. The main problem with that for me is that I’m Jewish and I’m not willing to go through the effort of managing all my body hair (and tbh weight) to get the look. So just by default I’m fairly masc presenting except I have long hair so I get called “ma’am” sometimes if someone doesn’t clock the beard first.

Like you I have no idea what “being a man” is. I have constantly heard that and it hasn’t made any emotional connection inside me. Ironically according to my masc friends based on my hobbies and way of living I’m one of the most masc presenting people they know. I work on my house, chop/heat with wood, build things with my hands, etc. Most of my masc friends come to me for advice on fixing their homes, computers, etc. People always ask me for tools. My FIL (who I am never actively coming out to) in law thinks we have one of those man-to-man connections. My hands are usually rough, and I have a hard time “taking care of myself” in the stereotypical way that’s culturally expected from GSMs. At the same time, I started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race with season 1 before my wife (white cis woman AKA the target audience) even knew what it was. My artistic, cultural, and aesthetic hobbies and consumption trend very much into the avante garde art gay/femme world. I love sad girl books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I have no issues with cross dressing, wearing gendered colors, etc. I share clothes with my wife as we are roughly the same size and shoe size. I also have no concept of what “being a woman” is. To me genders are just constellations of signs and signifiers. They’re shapes humans make in the night sky of our activities. I can see those shapes, but I can’t feel them. I don’t feel bad about it, you shouldn’t either. Charli XCX has synesthesia so she feels sound as color. That fact that I can’t doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy music, and doesn’t mean I’m “missing” something.

Like you I am also autistic, and let me tell you that it doesn’t matter one bit. There are plenty of autistic men that identify as men (I work in the software space so I see a ton of them). However many autistic people are also gender diverse more than NTs, but just because you have autism doesn’t mean you’re cursed with non-binary or agender.

To use a common trans metaphor, sometimes I am in the Eva, sometimes I’m not in the Eva, and the Eva doesn’t have to be me if I don’t want it to. I don’t have to “be the same person” to everyone. I think that’s often something that’s been hard for me as an autistic person to understand because I am one of the autistic people where things need to have a uniform flattened context. My relationship with my FIL is never going to be the same as my relationship with my masc best friend, because my FIL cannot properly contextualize who I actually am, and that’s fine. He doesn’t need to. He can barely contextualize himself let alone his immediate family.

so it feels like coming out to myself hasn’t really changed much of anything, and that’s giving me imposter syndrome type intrusive thoughts when I think about telling other people I’m non-binary.

I often struggle with this as well. Enby’s are like #2 on the list of most annoying types of GSMs right behind bisexuals. However my feelings about it are that I do not care. In fact I would rather not have people know because I’m okay with being treated on average as a man than risk being treated differently for being nonbinary. I usually take any and all pronouns but I typically prefer they/them but I’m not really picky about it.

I think a lot of specifically gay culture has lead to this idea that every GSM has to be celebrated, brave, proud, out, and in front of people’s face. I think culturally that it’s a bit of an overreaction and the attempt to carry stonewall culture into the world where gay is a leading cultural current instead of an underground counter current is actually harmful to GSMs who comprise smaller slices of the population than homosexuals. It leads us to think that we have to perform in a certain way but it leads to this imposter syndrome because for normal people our “type” is relatively unknown and doesn’t have a grand historical narrative of oppression.

My advice is that you should simply ignore all the broader cultural mores and exist how you want to. You don’t have to develop a complex and boutique gender identity like agender/gender neutral/gender apathy. You don’t have to tell everyone you’re nonbinary. You don’t have to have strangers call you they/them if you don’t want to. You don’t owe people your gender. It can be something that is only well known among your friends and you are still valid for choosing to live that way. You are valid and you can just exist.