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Maia’s sense that e might be asexual intensifies even further as e dates for the first time yet still finds emself unfulfilled by romance and sex. As Maia gets involved in fandom communities and begins writing a great deal of fanfic, e discovers that e’s unable to write about kissing from the vantage of personal experience. Phoebe helps em set up a dating app profile, and Maia, a bit to eir own surprise, meets someone e’s interested in for more than just research purposes. They date for a couple months and become physically intimate, but Maia finds that sex is not as gratifying as e had hoped and ends up breaking up with eir new partner in order to explore the questions e still has around eir gender and sexuality. Turned on by the notion or fantasy of physical intimacy, though much less by the experience of it, Maia again stops short of fully declaring emself asexual. On the other hand, e revels in the freedom of not having to marry, have children, or even date anyone. Maia’s attractions find more of an outlet in writing, particularly in fanfic, than they seem to find in lived experience.

Alongside these explorations of eir sexuality, Maia also makes significant strides toward fully identifying as nonbinary. These strides are in large part the result of the increasing visibility of nonbinary people in society. Social media sites begin to offer more gender and pronoun options. Maia takes a class taught by nonbinary author Melanie Gillman and becomes better acquainted with using they/them pronouns. E begins coming out to friends as not being cisgender and has a conversation with eir mom about feeling genderqueer. Maia’s mom, while well-meaning, is somewhat unsure how to understand this and wants to ensure Maia doesn’t harbor negative feelings about eir body or a negative self-image. Maia reassures her that e’s generally happy with eir body, just not with the gendered parts of it, and wishes e could magically switch between genders. In a conversation with Phoebe’s boyfriend, who is a trans man, Maia states that e identifies as nonbinary because “I want people to be confused about my gender at all times.” Maia, then, has moved away from feeling like not a girl toward feeling, more specifically, nonbinary or genderqueer. This movement is facilitated in large part by the increasing availability of gender-nonconforming language in society at large.

Despite this arrival at a nonbinary identity, one that Maia is increasingly able to articulate and describe to others, the memoir continues to emphasize the pitfalls of language when it comes to the complex interplay of identity and society. In a pivotal moment for Maia’s self-understanding, e reconnects with author and zinemaker Jaina Bee at a New Year’s Eve party. They bond over identifying as nonbinary, but Maia tells Jaina that the typical nonbinary pronouns they/them/their have never fully resonated for em. Hearing this, Jaina introduces Maia to the Spivak pronouns (e/em/eir), which Jaina also uses. Maia is immediately captivated but confesses that e doesn’t want to inconvenience people by asking them to use new pronouns. Jaina asks if Maia would rather carry the constant discomfort of being misgendered. Maia sees the merit in this rhetorical question but continues to struggle with asking others to use eir new pronouns. Even though Maia’s inward feelings have coalesced around a nonbinary identity, e still has to make efforts to reconcile this inner identity with the external realities of social and cultural relationships. 
 
Still, as Maia moves away from thinking of emself as, simply, not a girl to thinking of emself as nonbinary or genderqueer, e is able to meaningfully update eir earlier metaphor about gender as a scale. Rather than balancing out contrasting traits by counterweighing masculine against feminine, Maia conceives of gender as something more like a landscape—a wild forest where multiple elements can coalesce and thrive in harmony. This is an important revisioning, because it demonstrates that Maia now has a stronger understanding of what e is rather than what e isn’t. Maia has come to embrace a variety of differently gendered traits and characteristics rather than swapping one binary set for the other. This new self-understanding seems to support what Maia had earlier told eir mother about eir body: that e doesn’t have a negative self-image and only wants to be perceived on the outside how e feels on the inside. And because Maia doesn’t feel like a boy on the inside, it matters that eir new conception of gender no longer places the brunt of its weight on maleness or masculinity. Instead, Maia is increasingly bringing both sides of the binary into conversation.

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