Hi everyone, my name is Ashley Wylde and welcome to my channel Ashley's Wylde Life. This week on
the Gender Resources Playlist: how to deal with the doubts that come along with questioning your
own gender. The first thing I have to say about this is: understand that having doubts while
you question your gender is 100% normal. It's a typical experience of questioning any identity
that you might hold. Doubts are normal because we are conditioned literally from the womb to
be gendered in whatever way our society tells us matches our sex assignment. However old you are,
that's how many years of this gendered wiring that you've endured. These cultural ideas that we have
about gender, and about our own gender, are very very difficult to unlearn, or to rewire. So if you
experience doubt throughout the process that's because you're a human being. I know personally
for me this is a big one. I knew my own gender identity as non binary for a full calendar year
before I said it out loud to anyone I cared about. Even now, I very rarely have actual conversations
about my gender in which I identify it out loud with my family members. I felt worried that I
would lose those relationships or that they would become weaker, and it made me wonder whether my
gender was so important to discover or not. I felt like I should swallow it in order to ensure that
I could preserve the relationships that I had with those people. Now in my case I was really lucky. I
didn't lose relationships over my gender identity, but that does happen, and that in and of itself
can be enough to cause doubts. Something important you can do is learn to tell the difference
between fear of rejection, and discomfort because something feels unnatural to you. The reason that
distinction is important is because discomfort can tell you to redirect, whereas fear of rejection
will tell you: "quit. Hide it. Give up. Stop doing this. It doesn't matter." Discomfort, feeling like
something is unnatural for you, can actually be really helpful because it can give you a
redirect message towards something that might feel more authentic. And when you start to pay close
attention you might realize that you've been doing something for a long time that actually gives you
that signal of discomfort, and you might be able to say, "I don't have to keep doing this," and
that's really empowering. But if we let ourselves make decisions or change directions based on fear
of rejection, we take away our own opportunity to become our best self and all of our relationships
will suffer. If you have a relationship where you face rejection for expressing your gender,
there's a huge chance that resentment is gonna build up in that relationship and that it will
become ruined anyways. Human beings need space to be their most authentic selves,
and the more you're able to be your most authentic self, the more you'll have to give to those
relationships. Try to help the people in your life understand that the happier "you" you can be,
the better you can be to them. My last piece of advice: wait it out. Doubts are gonna come up,
it's not always going to be easy. Sometimes you'll have two options, or three, or ten, or fifty,
and you won't feel strongly about any of them, and that doubt will start to creep in. But the thing
is, gender and identity, just like everything else we learn about ourselves, becomes more clear as
we experience life. You can't know how you will behave in a situation that you've never been in,
you can't know what will be comfortable for you if you've never tried it, so just wait it
out. Give it time. Don't be in any rush. It is a hundred percent okay for you to be exactly where
you are right now. Approach yourself with as much patience and self-love as you can possibly muster.
I hope this helped you learn something about how to deal with doubts because doubts are a
huge part of questioning your gender. I'm here for you and I'm going to keep making videos so let me
know what it is that you want to hear me talk about. Thanks for watching everyone. Buh-bye!