Davi, 20, Oakland CA

Davi, 20, Oakland CA

When I finally figured out my true gender, I was around 17 years old. Inside, I always felt different but didn’t know why. When I was in elementary and middle school, I felt that I didn’t belong with my peers (at the time I only thought that there was boy and girl). I felt I could not relate and I felt that I didn’t really want to be around people because it was too hard to connect --- after trying with so much effort I was tired of trying. Something that added to my level of not understanding myself, I have a Central Auditory Processing Disorder, Having this challenge has made it harder as a young child. It’s hard enough, to understand who we are without extra challenges. 

Before I came out with my true gender, I came out as a lesbian to my parents a few years before. I came out as a lesbian because I have always been in an open family, but I only knew about gay and lesbian, so that is what I came out as. This label still didn’t seem to fit me, so I  verbally expressed my true gender to my mom first when I was 17. As a child, I grew up expressing that I didn’t want to lean towards one gender, but I didn’t know it. My mom says she could tell that there was something different in the way I expressed myself than the other kids around me. 

When I first came out as transgender, I came out as gender-neutral because I didn’t know what I felt, but I knew I felt different inside. I just thought it would easier until I figured the rest out. After I came out, I did a lot of exploring, meaning I identified more male. Then I realized that didn’t fit right, so I went back to identifying as gender-neutral. I have been identifying as gender-neutral ever since. 

Many people around me have been supportive, they want me to be me and to be happy. I have had a few people who have been unsupportive, but that came a lot from not understanding or lack of knowledge, so I tried to help teach them, and sometimes they started to support me. Then other times they have remained unsupportive. When this has happened I have done my best to rub it off and not think too much about it. 

I have faced the challenge of being illegally terminated from one of my jobs due to my gender identity. The people I worked with felt uncomfortable with me as a person, so they just fired me so they didn’t need to be around their uncomfort of me. 

A few things I want people to know about me is that I am an athlete in many different sports, such as gymnastics, skiing, swimming, biking, tennis, and more. Another thing I want people to know about me is that I am from Switzerland and speak a variety of languages. Some of my hopes and dreams are to become a surgeon or something in the health or science field. I have always wanted to be a doctor and have always been interested in human anatomy and physiology. 

In my experience being gender-neutral, means that I feel very much in the middle and don’t always belong, but also I feel that I am always pushing the gender binary boxes out of the way to not let anything define me and that feels amazing. It is not always easy to be gender-neutral because we live in a binary world and I can feel invisible. I try to be loud and proud, so people know I am here and gender-neutral folk exist. 

I feel that we are stuck in a binary world because have been for thousands of years. I don’t think that gender-neutral folk can be accepted by the majority of people in this world until there is complete gender equality amongst the gender binary. I know this sounds horrible and I hate how it sounds, but many people in this world only know the gender binary and that is what the gender inequalities are based on. Women in some cases can still be underpaid due to being a woman and they used to not be able to go to school, vote, drive, but were stay-at-home moms and that is what they did.