I saw another intro post on here and I've been on Lemmy for a while but haven't really posted much yet so I figured I'd give this a shot.

First off - names & such: Y'all can call me Claire (she/they).

I alternate between calling myself genderfluid or transfemme. I think genderfluid more closely describes how I feel because I do still have "guy days" and don't totally hate my agab or want to be 100% fem 100% of the time. But transfemme is useful sometimes because I'm pretty femme-leaning and want stuff like hrt that "vanilla" trans women want. Plus, when I'm in lgbt spaces I usually prefer to identify femme because I get enough male-gendered validition in my day-to-day life. 😅

All that being said I don't really "fit" a lot of the transfemme stereotypes all that well. I'm extroverted, outdoorsy, not a furry, not a comp sci major, and I was like 29-30ish when I started "figuring out" my gender, it's not something I just always knew. I don't have very many lgbt friends in real life (not for lack of trying lol), and when I do get lucky enough to be in lgbt spaces I often don't feel like I fit in well with the other trans/gender-y folks.

I've been active in lgbt spaces for a long time. I first came out as bi at 15, and also at around the same age I was into doing makeup (mostly eyeliner) and nails. Though at the time I didn't really see it as being relevant to my gender and just considered myself to be an emo guy lol. I actually used to tell people when they asked why I did it (early 2000's, folks were a lot more homophobic and judgy back then) that it helped me pull goth girls. Which wasn't entirely a lie, some girls I dated WERE into that, but also I did it for me because I liked it.

My wife and me actually met and started dating when I was 16 and on kinda the tail end of my "just a cis emo guy who likes eyeliner" phase, and for most of my teens and early 20's I didn't have a lot of interest in dressing or presenting femme. I had other stuff going on, I guess. We got married when I was 26 and within the first year or so of us being married after my sex drive basically went comatose for a while, I was exposed via reddit to the asexual community and figured out that I'm on the ace spectrum (specifically, I'm a "gray ace", basically meaning, sometimes I feel sexual attraction, but most of the time I don't). But I'm very kinky and sex-positive and most of what I do enjoy doing in bed is more kink-play type stuff than "vanilla" sex.

As far as how I got to where I am now gender-wise. I think there's always been "something" there that I kind of felt a pull towards, but being genderfluid and not "vanilla" trans, there's also been long periods of my life where I was perfectly happy fully embracing my agab and didn't really think about gender stuff that deeply.

As early as like middle school ish I started to have an interest in cross-dressing, though at the time I didn't know a lot about sex stuff just in general and primarily thought of it as a kink, something I did in private for gratification. I didn't have any interest in like, dressing femme and going out to socialize with people that way for a long time.

When my wife and me were navigating the early days of my coming out as ace (she's pan with a high libido and I do genuinely like sex/kink but just find it hard to get aroused), I kind of "re-discovered" my interest in cross-dressing, again as purely/primarily a kink thing, and not as an identity thing. Our first year of being married I was cross-dressing alone every once in a while, and maybe once or twice (pleasantly) surprised my wife wearing femme lingerie for bedroom stuff. But even though I was fine being pretty open about all my other kinks and interests, it took me until like 3 ish years later to actually say "hey, this is something I'm interested in, and I want to start exploring it more". Like, she had literally already seen (and had sex with) me in femme undergarments and I was like, "but what if she's not into it and rejects me?"

After I did finally tell her my feelings and started working on being less shy about dressing femme around her, it took like, another year, maybe even closer to two, before I thought of wearing femme stuff or presenting femme as anything other than just a kink I was into, something that I did during bedroom time activities with my wife and pretty much nowhere else. I think the catalyst was I wore a top of my wife's without asking her first, she saw the top and was upset with me because (as far as I had said up to that point) crossdressing was a kink thing for me and to her it seemed like I was basically using her clothes to satisfy my kink without getting her consent first, which she understandably didn't approve of.

I felt pretty shitty and upset afterwards, and after reflecting on why, I finally for the first time ever, thought that maybe femme stuff was more than just a kink and that my gender identity might be something other than cis. Which after I came to my wife and told her that, and started to look into genderfluid and "try it out" as a label, she was accepting & supportive and since then has only gotten more accepting and supportive over time.

So far the extent of my gender "stuff" is just limited to dressing femme in/around the house and I've only dressed full femme outside the house a few times. But I own about as many femme clothes as guy clothes and am actively working on getting more comfortable dressing & presenting femme out in public. Haven't started HRT yet, but I have been actively wanting to since 2024-ish. Up until april of this year we were living with some relatives who definitely wouldn't have been chill with it, and since then I've had a couple health things going on that have delayed me starting. But fingers crossed, sometime in the next few months, I should be able to.

Even though I'm genderfluid and not "vanilla" trans I still do plan to do the "full fem" HRT routine and eventually have a fem body (possibly including surgery, but idk yet). I have a few reasons, but one of the primary ones is that I feel more comfortable dressing femme in public if I feel like I pass, and I feel like I'd pass better if my body was fem. But even if I'm stacked like Venus of Willendorf, I'm still gonna have my "guy days" and keep indentifying as genderfluid, lol.

As far as non-gender stuff goes. Hobbies. I have a lot of them (though not a lot of time for doing them nowadays). Mainly they break up into either outdoorsy (fishing, camping, hiking) or creative (music, painting, cooking). I love stuff that either gets me outside exploring nature or gets my brain engaged in some creative process. Job-wise I'm an engineer working in the power industry, and have previously worked as a CNC machinist doing aerospace stuff. I was super into Mythbusters growing up back when it was still newly airing and I used to always really admire the people who "knew how stuff worked". And also, I think engineering and math is like the closest thing to wizard magic that actually exists. And in a way, it's kind of one of the oldest "jobs" there is. Like going back to pre-pre-history, every group of humans would've had at least one guy whose main role in the group was "knows how to make stuff." And the history behind really old technologies and how they developed over time is really cool. Y'all go look at this youtube channel, North 02. He has a lot of cool-ass videos about ancient technology and ancient humans.

But yeah, that's pretty much me. If y'all wanna ask questions or chat, feel free!