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A lot of alone time to reflect on their identity

Hello and welcome to Pseuds’ Corner. Our guest today is a self-obsessed young person who would like to explain to us how special xir is.

Carla Hernando, 26, never quite felt like they fit into a particular gender. Then, when Covid-19 took hold in March 2020, they got a lot of alone time to reflect on their identity. The journey continued during Pride Month that June, when Hernando found both an article and a documentary on non-binary gender identities, by Time Out Barcelona, further opening their mind to possibilities beyond the gender binary of ‘woman’ or ‘man’.

I hope they also read up on non-human identities, to open their mind to possibilities beyond the human-chimpanzee binary.

“[Spain] is way behind in terms of gender,” believes the Barcelona-based Hernando, who uses both they/them and she/her pronouns. “I did not know what non-binary meant. I just had felt completely different my entire life.” But the more education they got about the range of possibilities outside the gender binary of ‘woman’ or ‘man’, the more they felt they related. 

It’s so exciting that Hernando uses both. I wonder how the BBC knew when to use “they/them” and when to use “she/her.” Maybe they (the BBC, that is) asked them (Hernando, that is) each time? That must have taken a lot of asking, if so.

That experience was the gateway to another discovery: the term ‘gender fluid’. Hernando felt it was an even more apt descriptor for their gender identity. 

“One day I wake up and feel more feminine, and maybe I want to wear a crop top and put earrings on. And then there’s times in which I’m like, I need my [chest] binder [to minimise the appearance of my breasts], because I’m not feeling it,” they say. The lived experience of gender fluidity – wearing a binder one day and more feminine outfit the next – is what ultimately helped Hernando discover that the term applied to them. 

Deep. Deep deep deep stuff. Profound. Life-altering. Trippy.

Gender fluidity has grown even more visible as celebrities such as Miley CyrusRuby Rose and Cara Delevingne embrace it in the public eye. The term is hard to pin down precisely, since it describes such a vast array of people and experiences, say experts.

“Experts”? Who and what might they be?

Come on. The term “is hard to pin down precisely” because it’s such bullshit and also because it’s so obvious. It’s NOT REMARKABLE that people feel like wearing one kind of clothes one day and a different kind another day. It’s not remarkable and it’s most certainly not A Sign of a mysterious exciting complicated new understanding of female and male.

There are of course many more paragraphs of this piffle, which I’m not going to read because what I’ve seen so far makes clear how stupid it all is.

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