Hello, everyone! I'm Rinzler and I'm 22 years old. I'm extremely new to all of this, so I'm a little unsure about some of the proper terminology and such. So if I mix-up any words, please feel free to correct me!
Although my biological sex is female, I've known my whole life that I don't always identify as female. However, it's only been within this past year or so that I've really thought about how real these feelings are and what they really mean. Although I was very tomboyish as a child, most people would probably assume from my appearance nowadays that I'm very feminine. I have shoulder-length hair, enjoy wearing make-up, and about 90% of my wardrobe consists of skirts and dresses.
They wouldn't necessarily be wrong in assuming that I'm feminine, since I do very much enjoy my femininity. However, there's also a large part of me that at times feels very masculine and wishes more than anything that I could look as masculine as I feel at those times. Because of that, I don't feel that it's accurate to identify my gender as strictly female. Rather, I feel that I'm bi-gender or gender fluid, since I'll identify as either a man or a woman depending on who I'm with and what sort of situation I'm in.
Although I typically dress more feminine, there have been occasions where I've dressed like a man, both publicly and privately. Publicly, I cosplayed as the version of the Joker from The Dark Knight at a few conventions and for a few Halloweens. Because of the full face make-up, my height, and the clothing I wore (a make-shift chest binder plus layers of clothing helped to hide my figure and the shoulder pads in my jacket made my build seem more masculine), people would often mistake me for a guy until my voice gave me away. Even before I came to the realization that I'm bi-gender or gender fluid, I could explain away my crossplaying as it just being a costume I was wearing for fun.
It's only been in the past year or so, however, that I began privately dressing up as a man. Privately, I've put on make-up to make my face look more masculine and worn my make-shift chest binder with a baggy t-shirt in order to take pictures of myself. This all started when I made an account on a social mmo website and, on a whim, decided to claim I was a biological male. I made many online friends and, as I got closer to them, some of them wanted to know what I looked like. I knew it would come to this point eventually and had planned for such a dilemma. I made a private, password-locked album on photobucket (so that no one could find the pictures unless I linked them to it) with pictures of myself made-up and dressed as a man.
Although my make-up skills were (and still are) pretty shoddy (making me a rather unattractive looking man and not the most convincing man at that, haha) my friends seemed to believe that the pictures I sent them were of a biological male. Or at least, if they had any suspicions, they kept it to themselves and didn't treat me any differently.
Eventually, as time passed, I began to feel guilty and admitted to my friends that I was a biological female (most of them seemed shocked, although a few of them said that they suspected something all along) and made a new account where I was only female. I was determined to stick to this, although I soon began longing to be male again and made another new account where I claimed to be a biological male once again. I kept this account a secret from my other friends and tried to act more masculine on this account in various ways. No one ever got any suspicions or first thought that I was female with this side account and I was very happy. I was very happy, that is, until the social mmo I had these accounts on shut down.
I tried finding other similar sites, but couldn't find anything satisfactory and so went back to facebook and tumblr and tried to put the thoughts and desires of being a man behind me. I was able to stick to this until I came across a new social mmo just last month where I made an account claiming to be a biological male again. I haven't been on long enough for my online friends to be too curious about what I look like, but I'm already planning for when they do become too curious and want to see what I look like.
None of my family knows any of this about me and most of my friends (whether they are friends I know in person or friends I've made on the internet) are unaware of my true gender identity, as well. The only people that I've expressed these feelings to so far, aside from y'all, are my best friend of over ten years and my boyfriend of over three years. I only found this site the other night when I was searching for female to male make-up tutorials and decided to see what online forums were out there for the transgender community. I'm excited that I found this forum so that I can take part in discussions with people similar to myself in regards to non-traditional gender identity. Also, I hope that I haven't sufficiently bored out of their mind anyone who has been nice enough to read my ramblings, haha.
