About my identity

Explaining the various identity labels I use, why I use them, and how I came to realize that they fit me.

If you read my bio, you’ll see that “I am a queer, sex favorable greysexual, grey biromantic, biaesthetic, transfeminine non-binary person. Pronouns are she/they.” You may be asking yourself why I use these labels and how I came to realize that they fit me. And believe me, it has taken me literally me my whole life thus far to know myself well enough to use all of these labels. What I am aiming to do with this post is to go through each label and explain what it means to me (after all, it might mean slightly different to someone else!), how I came to use it, and why I use it.

DISCLAIMER: I am not the ultimate authority on the meaning of the universal meaning of these terms. As I said above, other people may use the terms differently than I do. I am the ultimate authority on what the terms mean *TO ME*. So, don’t use what someone else says to invalidate what I am saying or vice versa.

TRANSFEMININE NON-BINARY

I like to start with this because everything other label I use flows from my gender identity as a transfeminine non-binary person. This is not to say it is the most important part (I think they’re all equally important), rather it is saying that being non-binary affects how I view other terms which are generally gendered. I’ll explain more specifics later.

What this means is that I am non-binary (neither male nor female) but that I feel more female than male, and I was assigned male at birth (hence transfeminine). I use she/her/hers or they/them/theirs pronouns. My preference is for people to switch back and forth between the pronouns every time they use them (e.g. “This is Mychel. She has a Substack, and they also host two podcasts. I have known her for 10 years.”), but I realize that this is hard for people to do, so as long as you use one or the other, I am happy.

Growing up, I never felt masculine. My voice was much higher than most boys my age and it didn’t drop until I was in college (more on that in a sec). I didn’t develop much body hair or other secondary sexual characteristics when I was in high school. In my sophomore year of college, I was diagnosed with extremely low testosterone (about 10-15% of “normal”) and was placed on testosterone gel, then patches, and finally shots. For me, who was perceived as a cis guy, and was desperate (at that point) to be more “manly” (I was at a very conservative college and was religiously and politically quite conservative), so I grabbed the opportunity when I had the chance. That is something I regret greatly now because I now have body hair all over (except the top of my head) and the hair and shaving give me the closest thing I get to dysphoria. But at the time, I welcomed my voice dropping enough to not be confused for my mom over the phone and the ability to shave once a week.

After college, once I had exited the very conservative spaces I was in and had accepted that I was gay (more on that linguistic change later), I found myself becoming slightly more sure of myself and more willing to question some things. In 2012, I was working at a speech pathologist’s office and was talking with a friend about Unique coming out on Glee. At the time, I knew nothing about being transgender and was completely confused about how a guy could be a girl. My friend explained to me how gender is who we actually are even if that is not how the world perceives us. This gave me the insight I needed to understand and accept what it means to be transgender. In Catholic theology, there is a concept called “transubstantiation” which means that the bread and wine we use for Communion become the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ. But, people argue, why don’t they taste, look, or smell like flesh and blood? The reason is based off of the Aristotelian concepts of “accident” and “substance”. For anything, “accident” refers to how something is perceived or how it appears to the senses. The “substance” is what something truly is. I trust you can see where this is going. For a trans person the “accident” is their gender assigned at birth. The “substance” is the gender they truly are. Once I had that framework in place, the rest was easy to understand. Hence, I have Aquinas to thank for my understanding what transgender meant. I am sure he is probably spinning in his grave at the thought. :-)

A couple of years later (2015, I think), I first heard the term “genderqueer” and it was like something that had been missing was slotted into place and I was made more whole. I knew that the idea was the right idea for me. I eventually settled on the term “non-binary” mainly because it felt like a better fit and because “genderqueer” has certain political overtones that I am not entirely sure I inhabit. So, I switched my pronouns from he/him/his to they/them/theirs. A couple of years later, as I was learning more, I realized that I using female pronouns also felt right and when I sat with that, I also realized that I do feel more female than male, so I added “transfeminine”. And I once again shifted my pronouns to accommodate my newest discovery. That is when I switched to she/they pronouns. After talking with my sister-in-law, who had had my niece by that time (one other niece and twin nephews were yet to come), she asked what title I wanted to use. I immediately nixed “uncle” and “aunt” since they are gendered. After looking around, I found a page on Tumblr (that I can’t find a link to right now) and discovered the word “Unty”, a mix of “Uncle” and “Auntie”. I liked it, so now I am “Unty Mychel” to my four niblings.

Finally, in 2019, I decided that I wanted to change my name from a name that was very much a male name to a more gender-neutral name. I wanted to keep the “M” at the beginning of my name and decided that I wanted to honor my dad (Michael) for how well he handled my coming out. In January 2019, I asked a couple of friends to start referring to me as “Mychel” (pronounced me-SHELL, it is from the French name for “Michael”, I just changed the spelling). I liked how the name felt, so I went to the state courthouse closest to my house and applied for a legal name change. It was granted on July 30, 2019.

QUEER

As I said above, my other labels flow from my non-binary identity. When I first came out in 2002, I used the term “bisexual” mainly because I was still very conservative and needed to use it to ease my way into eventually acknowledging I was gay.

For the record, bisexual people do exist. Not all bi people are really gay or lesbian. Bisexuality is a real thing. For me, at that point in time, it was a transitional label, but that in no way, shape, or form invalidates the label for people who are actually bi.

Growing up, I had always known I was interested in guys. I loved looking at guys as they were getting changed and, in the summer, I would sometimes just sit and stare at shirtless guys in the pool or playing games outside. I would also go to department stores and look at the guys on the underwear packages. Yes, I was deeply, deeply closeted. In college, I realized that these feelings weren’t going anywhere even though I desperately wanted them to. I was mired in a toxic stew of Traditional Catholicism, misogyny, racism, and homophobia. I eventually got out of it, but by then the damage had been done. It took me a few more years to accept that I was gay and then several more years of growth to get to the point where I could accept it and not fight with myself. I was still Catholic, so I had internal fighting going on between what I believed and who I was. Who I was was slowly winning out, but it was quite the process. And that process wasn’t helped by the fact that I was taught at 2 Catholic parochial schools from 2005-2010.

In 2010, after leaving my second school, I also left the Catholic Church and religion entirely. I came back to religion (as I discussed in my welcome entry) in 2015 and through a friend found out about the Queer Theology podcast. Brian and Fr. Shay helped me reappreciate God and religion and they also helped me realize that “queer” was a better fit for me. At first, it was because I felt uncomfortable using the word “gay” given my recently discovered non-binary label. I know there are non-binary people who use gendered terms like “gay” or “lesbian”, but I am most empathetically NOT one of those people. “Queer” felt more comfortable for me and it helped emphasize my non-binary-ness. Later, I came to realize that I could use the term “bisexual” (as an actual descriptor, not as a placeholder). The reason I don’t use bisexual is best explained using an extended quote from I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver (page 178):

Like who you are as a person and who you’re attracted to are two totally different things. It’s hard to explain not being confident in your own body. it just feels wrong, but only you really seem to know how and why it feels that way…

Because I’m still attracted to more masculine-presenting people, but non-binary-ness isn’t something you can tell outright, so the boy at the coffee shop who I think is cute could actually be non-binary.

But I’m still attracted to him. And besides, I don’t have exactly have a gender, and being gay implies being interested in the same gender.

Like I said, it’s complicated…

I think of myself as bisexual. I’m interested in guys and more masculine-presenting people. But then there are people who argue that bisexuality is only two genders, and that those two genders have to be men and women. I’ve heard that argument too many times now, so I’ve learned just to keep it to myself. “For simplicity, I just say that I’m queer and I have a type.” And definitely a lot easier than explaining that I identify as bisexual. And less gatekeeping involved too.

That pretty much explains how my attractions work and why I use the word “queer”. I’ve seen it as part of the bi+ spectrum for a while now, I just haven’t used the term “bisexual”.

SEX FAVORABLE GREYSEXUAL, GREY BIROMANTIC, BIAESTHETIC

Yes, this is three terms, but they are all interconnected in such a way that I cannot talk about one without talking about the other two. All three describe different types of attraction that I have been able to tease out. This teasing out started in May after I saw The Idea of You with Nicholas Galitizine and Anne Hathaway. For as long as I can remember, if I found someone attractive and I saw someone else kissing them, I’d get a little jealous and wish it was me doing that. I am really attracted to Nicholas, so I got the response I expected when Anne was kissing him. What I didn’t expect was to have similar feelings when Nicholas was kissing her. That pulled me up real short and, after talking with friends, I realized that I was biromantic. In other words, I felt romantic feelings for people I wasn’t sexually attracted to (in this case Anne Hathaway).

Then, in October, I was reading Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen for Asexuality Awareness Week and I started seriously resonating with stuff in the book. I was astonished because I had never thought of myself as asexual. I like sex and I have experienced sexual attraction before. So, I decided to, once again, tease out what was going on. After reading the rest of the book (as well as The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality by Julie Sondra Decker), I realized that 95% of the attractions I felt were attractions based on aesthetics (how someone looks) and not based on wanting to have sex with them or anything sexual. Most of the rest of the attractions (~4%) were romantic in nature (i.e. I wanted to kiss, cuddle, or other non-sexual intimate acts) and the rest (~1%) were sexual attraction. I can honestly think of 6 people (all guys) who I have been sexually attracted to in my whole life. The rest have been based on aesthetics and there hasn’t been sexual attraction.

This doesn’t mean that I haven’t had sex because I have. I’ve had sex with many guys, none of whom I was dating. I like sex, but if I don’t have sex, I can live without it. It’s like having a good meal. It satiates me, but it doesn’t mean much more than that. One of the guys I am sexually attracted to I have actually had sex with and I can say, in all honesty, that it is some of the most memorable and best sex I have ever had. Not sure if the attraction played into that, but there it is. This paragraph is why I use the word “sex favorable”. I like sex and enjoy having it. I am not repulsed by nor indifferent to sex. “Sex favorable” describes my relationship to sex in general.

“Greysexual” means that I rarely (see above) experience sexual attraction. For a long time, I mistook aesthetic attraction for sexual attraction because I had never had a reason to think about them separately. Once I realized that there were in fact differences, I was able to figure out them out in relatively short order. “Grey biromantic” means that I experience romantic feelings for multiple genders and that I experience this romantic attraction rarely. “Biaesthetic” means that I experience aesthetic attraction to multiple genders. As I said above, this type of attraction is, by far, the most common type of attraction for me personally.

Looking at these three types of attraction, I realized that they are almost a progression for me. I hate to use a “levels” analogy, but I think it will make it the most understandable. Aesthetic attraction is the “lowest” level and the easiest for me to feel. Romantic attraction is the “second” level and everyone who I am romantically attracted to I am also aesthetically attracted to. Sexual attraction is the “highest” level and everyone I am sexually attracted to I am aesthetically and romantically attracted to. I am NOT trying to say that one is better or more pure or any of that nonsense. I just can’t think of a better analogy to explain things.

To explain my attractions in other terms, I find many, many people of all different genders to be physically attractive. Men, women, non-binary people, agender people, etc. Some of these people I am also attracted to romantically. Not just men or non-binary people who are more masculine, but also women. Of this group, I am also sexually attracted to a select few. The people I am sexually attracted to are (up to this point anyway) all males although I think I could also be attracted to non-binary people (particularly more masculine ones or those who were assigned male at birth) and maybe trans women as well. Cis women are always a possibility, but I don’t see it happening.

I’ve written quite a bit here and I hope that it makes sense to you. Feel free to reach out with any (non-intrusive) questions or if you want clarification on any point. Thanks for reading and please feel free to share this with people.