There aren’t a lot of articles out there on assigned male at birth (AMAB) nonbinary folks. There are more out there now than ever before, but they’re still few and far between. There are even fewer speaking out with passing privilege, those of us who are still seen by the world as men but know in our hearts that word is wrong. We move through this world, mostly invisibly, dancing through this world as if we have a mask on.

When I first started questioning whether I was nonbinary, I read a lot. I devoured authors like Kate Bornstein and Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon and Leslie Feinberg and Danez Smith and countless Tumblrs and blogs. I was assured that gender expression is not connected to gender identity, that who I am on the inside is not dependent on how people perceive me on the outside, that my inner truth was more important than their outer judgments. And I believed them and started coming out to the world.

I have low body dysphoria, though it’s set off by specific things (I really hate how ultra-masculine I feel in a necktie), so I’ve never felt the need to physically transition to feel more at home with my physical self. In addition, though I now see gender expression as a playground, discovering new things about myself like how I love nail polish and that I like how I feel navigating the world in tight jeans, I’m still misgendered on a daily basis.

The word I decided most matches my experience is agender. I don’t understand gender at all. To me, a shirt is a shirt and what matters most is how I look and feel in it.

I decided that my image of myself didn’t need to match my mirror image, that what was more important was that I was comfortable with myself.

What I find is that I am a conundrum to the world, a category smasher, because, when I come out to someone as agender, it immediately throws both their assumptions of who I am and what it means to be a man into crisis.

It usually also leads to the litany of microaggressions. Do I ever intend to get surgery or take hormones? What genitals do I have? Why do I wear nail polish? Why do I care so much about people using gender neutral pronouns for me? At times, these microaggressions become macroaggressions, with people calling me a faker, accusing me of being a special snowflake and doing it all for the attention, and getting defensive about using my pronouns, even when they are clearly present in my email signature and on my name badge and in the bio line of my articles. Worse, I’ve been told by a former parishioner that I’m not suitable for ministry because of my gender expression and had people flat out leave the congregation because they could not imagine me as their minister.

In other words, it feels like people are asking why it is so important that I not be invisible, that I be allowed to go to the dance without the mirror image on.

Many times these questions are raised in good faith, with the person genuinely not understanding why they are inappropriate, and I try to educate them. Other times, they are people who are being quite malicious, tearing me down to prove a point or to reinforce cissexism. In all cases, it makes me feel like who I am is not good enough to move through the world.

Yes, there’s a lot of hate and prejudice and misunderstanding out there, but the implicit message I’m given every day is that it is my job to either dress in a way that makes my gender easily identifiable or else to argue why others should put in the effort to deprogram their minds of the cissexist and binarist assumptions they were taught since birth.

So it gets exhausting, day after day after day justifying my existence to a world that would be happy if I’d just sit back and quit trying to make it work so hard to figure me out. There are times I think that it would have been easier to just stay in the closet and let people believe I’m just a queer man who enjoys some traditionally feminine things along the way.

But there’s something empowering the times people are able to see me for who I am. I am serving a congregation now in east Alabama who have been wonderful in seeing me for who I am. In fact, they will often come up to me and apologize for misgendering me, and I’ll realize that I’ve become so numb to hearing the wrong pronouns that I didn’t even notice. They’re not perfect; none of us are. But they are trying and doing their damndest and, when I am with them, I feel affirmed in who I am, that, yes, this agender minister can be who they are and still be damned good at what I do.

And there’s my partner, for whom there’s never even been a question that I am valid in my gender identity and expression. When he looks at me, I feel seen, and I feel free to let my guard down. I don’t need to justify myself, at least in that moment.

For me, in these moments, I’m no longer wearing my mirror image, but free to move through the world, seen for who I am. They are rare moments in our current culture. When they happen, though, they mean everything to me.