Like, I’m AMAB but don’t really identify with whatever “being a man” is supposed to mean in this society

I feel you on this one. Maybe it’s because so many of the ways of “being a man” in American society are super toxic or just feel kinda gross to me. Maybe it’s because my usual instinct is to not draw attention to myself, and a lot of masculine gender performance is about being big, loud, scary, and ignorant. Maybe it’s because I resent how capitalism has made products like shampoo or waffles into gendered varieties where you have to buy the product that’s “For Men” that has fighter jets and grizzly bears on the packaging (although those waffles with the bears on the box are kinda good, ngl).

More of my thoughts here from a similar thread.

This post could have been written by me word for word three years ago. I now identify as agender, and prefer they/them pronouns.

I just never cared at all about gender. I don’t really have a conception of gender, I never really learned it growing up beyond “girls wear dresses and boys wear pants” which always seemed silly to me.

I’ve never acted according to my understanding of gender, I’ve just acted how I’ve wanted to. Someones gender has no impression on me, including my own. I don’t present in certain ways or do things to look masculine or feminine or androgynous, I just want to present and act as I want to. I’ve never wondered if I’m too masculine or feminine or not masculine or feminine enough. It just has no significance to me.

I thought I might be non-binary for a while, but I found that the label of agender is more comfortable for me. You might agree with everything I’ve written and prefer to call yourself non-binary rather than agender, and that’s perfectly fine. You also might prefer to not label yourself at all.

Consider if you would be happier calling yourself non-binary, or agender, or genderqueer, or anything at all. Don’t feel the need to arrive at a concrete label that you have to stick with and commit to if you don’t want to.

Also if you want to ask anything else, please do

I think we might be quite similar maybe? I don’t think about my identity much it’s more a desire to not align with societies definition and expectations of masculinity. The more “masculine” i am the more miserable i feel but in general I’d rather just be perceived as me. My appearance preferences boil down to whatever is convenient and comfortable, my behaviours and characteristics are just what i like doing and beyond that all i really want is for people to stop measuring me against their fucked criteria and deciding I’m amoral because i don’t conform to whatever stupid ideas they have come up with.

As someone who took time to figure out they were non-binary (agender), it wasn’t really my pronouns that bothered me, but that certain of my features made me look to much of a certain sex. I thought that if I fulfilled whatever archetype of that sex, I would be happy, whether it leaned more masculine or feminine. But I wasn’t. It was being seen as that sex that bothered me in the first place. The biological implications terrified me, not because they themselves were terrifying, but because that wasn’t what I was supposed to be. The voice, genitalia and secondary sex features, these features weren’t supposed to be on me. I didn’t want any of this.

The features you describe as disphoria seem to be social disphoria. In a sense, you understand that they see you as man, so it makes it even more uncomfortable.

Gender is a fuck, one of which I do not give.

Being agender is a possibility.

When my egg started to crack, I also considered myself to be somewhere on the enby spectrum because “being a man” felt completely wrong.

I don’t remember exactly what my thought process was but I clearly remember that I didn’t really force myself or lost sleep over it and instead just put it in the background and moved on with my life.

Over time I noticed that my felings were starting to develop more and more, even though I didn’t really put any hard thought into it, and 6 months later I finally felt ready to do the big soul searchy thing and discovered that I was just a woman that didn’t really care about gender.

So my advise would be to not be so hard on yourself and instead just ride the wave. If it turns out you’re not an enby then so what? Who gives a shit? I thought I was an enby for half a year and I was wrong. Do I regret it? Fuck no! Without this phase I wouldn’t stand where I am right now.

And for the whole imposter thingy: That’s trans as fuck. Every trans person has those feelings at some point in their life (myself included). But what I say to that is that as long as you listen to your heart and try to be true to yourself, you cannot be an imposter. You might be wrong about your gender, you might misinterpret your feelings, but you’re not an imposter.

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.