Why the MOGAI and tucute community is harmful to preteens/teens.
Young people questioning their gender, please listen.
I normally hate putting political or personal posts on my blog, but I’ve seen way too many adolescents calling themselves trans when they aren’t or going by MOGAI labels and I wouldn’t want them to end up like me.
From a very early age, I’d always felt strange seeing myself in the mirror. I never felt ugly, but I just knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what being a “girl” meant. I didn’t know there was anything else I could be. I always felt so disconnected from my reflection and I could never figure out why. I spent so many days looking at my face and relentlessly crying over these feelings I couldn’t express. I pushed it down as much as I could and told myself I was just sensitive.
Later, around 11 years old, I discovered the tumblr LGBT community and felt so at home. I knew I liked both boys and girls, and though I hadn’t questioned my gender yet, I was still comforted knowing that other people had the same feelings I did. Shortly after that, I discovered MOGAI labels.
I read up on terms such as agender, genderfluid, demiboy/demigirl, etc. and I instantly connected with them. I was clueless at the time and I hadn’t done any previous gender questioning before, so upon finding out that I could be something other than female, I was ecstatic. I began identifying as bigender simply because being nonbinary was an escape from the gender roles that had previously suffocated me, but I still liked wearing feminine things on occasion, so instead of just saying that I was a normal person who sometimes liked wearing pink, I thought, “I must be a girl AND an enby!” I thought that the clothes I wore dictated my gender while I still preached that clothes didn’t have gender. It was a vicious cycle.
After attempting to come out to my stepmother, she told me that I could wear androgynous clothes without labeling myself and I cried into her shoulder for hours because I knew she was right. I had panicked for so long about coming out to her and never once stopped to question, “Does this actually make sense?” I quickly figured out that I wasn’t actually bigender, but I instead went by that label just because I thought it was “cool” and that “gender was a feeling”. I was already confused by my developing depression and anxiety and then I had been mislead by the hundreds of labels the MOGAI community made up. It took me a long time to recover from that and to start finding myself again.
Flash forward to a couple years later when my depression is at its worst. Each day was a struggle. I didn’t want to live anymore. I couldn’t see myself living past 18. On top of that, I kept having these strange, recurring thoughts telling me that I wasn’t a girl. Giving me this weird uneasiness when I looked in the mirror. One day, the feeling got so horrible that upon seeing my body in the mirror, I began dry heaving just because I felt so incredibly uncomfortable. However, I told myself that I was faking it all. I knew I wasn’t bigender, but I didn’t know that I still had dysphoria. I didn’t know who I was; I couldn’t have been female, but I didn’t want to go by all the fake labels I’d seen before. I had completely lost my sense of identity. I didn’t have a place to express these feelings. I knew that what I felt wasn’t normal, but I didn’t know where the feelings were coming from. Although these feelings were extremely burdening, I kept telling myself they weren’t real, they were all made up. These were the most difficult years of my life and they made me wish I’d never been in the MOGAI/tucute community. Had I not seen all the labels and genders they’ve made, I wouldn’t have been so lost. If I had just thought to myself, “Maybe I’m just a boy,” even a little bit earlier, I could’ve prevented all this from happening. Unfortunately, that’s not how it played out.
Fast forward to today. I’m soon going to be a junior in high school and I’m exactly a week away from coming out to my parents as a trans male. I’ve gotten professional help from a therapist and I’ve had a proper safe space to talk about my dysphoria and acknowledge that it is in fact real. I consider myself to be a transmedicalist/truscum and I’m so much happier with myself now that I’m going by the right label. However, even with my life turning around in such a positive way, I still sometimes have recurring thoughts telling me that my experience isn’t real. Had it not been for my impressionable preteen self joining the tucute/MOGAI community, I wouldn’t be asking myself all this. I wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not my gender is “just a feeling”. The aftermath of being in that community affects me to this day and I’m sharing my story for other younger, impressionable people on this hellsite to realize what that community does before it harms them in the way it harmed me.
Please, don’t try so hard to label yourselves; if you’re cis, that’s okay! If you’re trans, that’s okay! Those labels don’t define you. Being trans doesn’t make you cool and it certainly isn’t a fun experience. Don’t force yourself to be anything you’re not, let yourself be a kid and don’t try to figure out your identity too fast. If you’ve read this far, I sincerely thank you for listening. (And thanks for coming to my TEDtalk.)
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