A helpful framing when I’ve discussed this with other people is to consider rejection of gender as exerting a form of editorial control over your own existence and self-concept. Social pressure made you one way, but the conscious negation of that social control results in something different. If the result of this process maps to an existing current in the gendered order of things, that is not a reinforcement of the correctness of that order; instead, it is evidence that it is illusory. The annihilation of gender is the process of escaping a story put upon you by the world in favor of one you create for yourself.