Okay. I guess I'm officially a dinosaur now. *here, I'll prove it, oy*
rbentley, when I was in my twenties, *see? dinosaur, oy!* we had a word for what you call "stem." It was "lesbian."
It's still a pretty good word. There are no restrictions on what clothes a lesbian can wear, or what energy a lesbian can express... which yanno, is the whole point of being a lesbian: being free to be exactly who a person is, even if that changes from day to day.
I get the idea from your post that you chose "stem" not because you like it, not because it fully explains you, but just because other people around you use it. So when you say there are too many labels and that they confuse you, well, why not drop the confusing one?
You don't have to accept what other people choose as labels, and then somehow force yourself to fit into one. Choose one that makes sense to you, that resonates with you--or choose to be label-free, if you prefer--but this gender walk is your own personal journey and that means YOU get to choose how you identify. That's not for your friends to say, yanno?
Thank you for the apology about some of your earlier statements. I think quite often people don't realize that the way people around them usually talk might be racist or sexist. Understanding our society's built in racism and sexism is part of that gender walk, btw--in my opinion, a person cannot truly understand who they are and what that means without also understanding how society shapes us all, and what forces work both for and against a person's ability to express their gender completely.
I'm sorry that your family is insisting that you're only going through a phase. I'm sure my family thought the same about me. Eventually they had to give in and accept that anything which lasts a lifetime cannot be "just a phase."
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