…for all of my other nonbinary peoples, there seems to be one truly unifying thread of reality. The intense difficulty of coming out, staying out, and being able to be who you are inside.
As gender is a social construct, I don’t believe someone is born with an ‘innate gender identity’. However, we might try to figure out where we feel like we ‘belong’ the most and who we can relate to. Combining this with the struggles we’ve endured and which aspects we identify with, will result in some sort of feeling, that some might interpret or see as 'gender identity’. Naturally, this is influenced by multiple factors.Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me that people come up with things such as 'absorbgender’, in an attempt to describe their feelings towards the concept of gender. But I don’t think that coming up with more words to describe our personal relation to this social construct will help on the long term, as this results in only more boxes. And exactly those (restrictive) boxes are what made us feel out of place in the first place. What if we’d get rid of the boxes? What if we’d address the restrictions we feel/felt, instead?
There’s a small mistake in the article related to the demographics of the study – It was two-thirds transgender girls and one-third transgender boys, not the other way around. It doesn’t make a difference from an analysis perspective – there was no statistical difference between groups – but I think it’s at least worth mentioning for accuracy.
Otherwise, I think the article is a great recap, and I have no complaints about the methodology in the paper! You can find the full paper for free, published through the American Academy of Pediatrics:
