The mental patch on my vision, today, is increasing.

Facebook sent me two emails, five hours apart, automatic emails to tell me how much stuff I was missing out on because I haven’t logged in for two days, painfully neglecting the notion that I haven’t logged in because I can’t, because they’ve suspended my account until I give them information I’m not going to give them.

Every time I pull up the page, I get a message informing me that they will use the name on my identification, whether I want to use it or not, if it’s provided, and informing me that they’d like people to go by the name they use in everyday life.

What they’re neglecting is that the name on my identification is not the name I go by in every day life.

Another person I know, a woman who used to work for facebook, was handed the same notice I was given while she was out at pride, all for suggesting that the real name policy is unfair to trans people. In a week, she has to give them identification.

But I feel horribly like I’m left out the “trans” bracket, because the dysphoria around my body, while it exists, comes and goes like the tide and leaves me pretty sure any hormonal or surgical transition isn’t going to do much for me. I am trans merely in the fact that I do not identify with my sex.

I feel like I exist in a bracket that people refuse to see or acknowledge. My gender doesn’t exist. I can’t have it on my passport, or any ID. I’m still fighting for people to use the right pronouns when referring to me, correcting people at each slip of the mind. When someone does use it, I feel ridiculously grateful and happy, and wonder if my similarly they-preferring genderqueer friends feel the same. Why should I feel so happy when someone else acknowledges what I know to be true?

And these days I struggle to get out my flat just for basic necessities. I don’t know why. I do know, however, that when I forced myself out more often my mental health and energy levels took a rapid decline. What I was using to combat the rapidly rising levels of isolation was facebook, which at least allowed me to share a little in my friends activities.

Now even that has been removed from me.

I feel like my whole existence is in question.

[Edit: Going to add – the woman I know wrote an article on medium about the Real Name Policy and has started #LogOffForPride to protest this policy – from what I understand, facebook sponsors pride events and still has this policy that is being continuously used against trans people]