Your story is so beautifully written-
I think the answers to your questions lie just outside the feelings you describe. I am your age, and I am also a late bloomer, though it really couldn’t have been any other way. It is only now that our society has come to be able to say so many truths of gender. We are able to breathe.
Gender is not a thing. It is a relationship stance and styling. For example, we choose to assert and welcome another’s acceptance of our assertion. We will listen, so another may talk. We will nurture, or do emotional labor, so another can focus on physical labor, including killing others. We will be the pursuer so another can be the pursued, or we will choose to be the gracious prize at the end of the pursuit.
How do we choose? We learn the rules for reward and punishment. Gender is in the eye of the beholder. We think of gender as our identity, but that identity is our presentation plan for relationship with another person, perhaps even an unspecified other. We can prefer a gender style, but for our approach to gender to be successful that person needs to see us in the way we want to be seen and treated. What we want to express needs to be accepted and valued, or we are marooned and isolated.
The binary gender construct that permeates every society restricts our choices of gender,and enforces this thoroughly. The logical foundation of this action is that there are two sexes, whose reproductive anatomies are complimentary. That it makes sense to arrange the world to capitalize on and reinforce both primary and secondary sex characteristics, set of rules for every detail of life, outer and inner. Of course, those with social and economic power also found it convenient for managing access to their privileges.
The binary construct is part ideology, part mythology, and part a way of ensuring that certain social requirements could not be challenged. Only a few years ago, if someone had to enter combat in war, it was going to be male, and any and every male could be chosen to walk that plank, on pain of losing his most important asset- his status as a ‘man’. If someone had to take care of infants, or the weak or elderly, it will be the female in the room. She cannot refuse.
Gradually the realization is dawning that females actually have the same kinds of desires as males, for career, for risk, for power, for ownership, and for respectful listening. It is much less obvious that males have the same kinds of desires as females. But it is true.
Today a female is allowed to be cannon fodder, and males can be nurses. A woman can go from being a gorgeous girl to a man-like creature. She is less valued in society, but that is the ordinary fate of females, despite all the celebration of idealized beauty. A male can be openly gay, and it doesn’t seem like he is straying out of bounds. But we are still uncertain and suspicious when males seem to be giving up their privilege and status.
As hinted in the quote with which you opened your story, gender is the life we lead, and also the life we wish we were leading. Gender is not a thing, it is our choice of style, made from available options, where our success depends on others.
