Ellie Nixon is a 20-year-old pansexual queer person currently navigating her relationship with gender. She spoke about her gender journey and how she has learned to be comfortable with herself.

Ellie Nixon: Gender is a strange, difficult subject for me. I’m not sure I’m very far along with it yet. I know that I like to dress and behave in a very broad spectrum.

I don’t currently identify with they/them pronouns, but when people address me with those pronouns, it makes me happy because they don’t know or because that’s just how they speak. It makes me feel good not to fit into that box.

I sometimes think I confuse the people in my life who are less queer-educated.

Laugh

Through my behavior and dress – even the way I speak – I may speak in a more feminine way and use, one might assume, more feminine terminology on some days than on others.

And I don’t really know what causes me to have different feelings on different days or in different situations, but it definitely fluctuates between them.

I feel most affirmed in my gender when I have, I think, had a relatively large amount of time to get ready and formulate a look.

Fashion has become much more important to me in the last two years than I realized. Being able to wear something that is a mix of masculine and feminine and just not worry about the rules and follow them has given me a lot of confidence and security about myself and my gender identity – even if I don’t know exactly what that is.

I think I’ve gotten to a point where I’m comfortable with not knowing my gender identity or just being comfortable with where I fit in – whether that’s anywhere on the spectrum – just by growing up, going out and experiencing new things and slowly trying to care less and less about what other people think of me.

I think that moving out and living alone helped me a lot.

When I walk around a dorm or an apartment complex and see so many different people, whether they’re proud of their appearance or not, I feel like I’m asking myself, “This is the situation I’m in and who I am. And a lot of it I can’t change.”

And a lot of the reason I have this mentality is because I’ve been recovering from an eating disorder for five years, and the main thing I’ve had to learn is to not care about my body or the way others see it.

And realizing that everyone else only cares about themselves. They’re too busy to care what I look like or what I do in my free time, or at least I hope so.

And I think it’s really just about the feeling of: I’m going to be myself, and it doesn’t matter what other people think of me, you know, they can be there for me or they can leave for me.

It was just instilled in me sometime after I moved out of my parent’s house.

And when I go back to my parents, I feel the same as them, you know, I feel like they want to see me but they don’t see me that much, they miss me and they take me for who I am. Because that’s who I am and I’m tired of hiding it.