Authenticity is transparency

Over the years I came to the conclusion that authenticity is synonymous with transparency. In other words, who you are should be a known commodity. This can be scary but the alternative is to damage your psychology through the paralysis of fear. 

Thus an identity is established through ultimately claiming your space with unapologetic confidence. You tell people who you are and they must accept it because this is something so fundamental to your nature that it cannot be changed. 

This is where your own self-examination comes and you decide whether you have lived with suppressed identity issues as opposed to someone who enjoys playing with gender (which there is of course nothing wrong with). 

Here the mind can trick us because we have invested so much time developing a personal narrative which may not be correct. We either make much more of the situation or conversely underplay it and suffer in silence. The latter is the more harmful of the two. 

It has taken me many years to arrive at an understanding of my identity because my life started out with so many variables which were antagonistic to who I was. The eldest in a very religious household born during an era where gender rules were strictly enforced. 

Your situation may be different but the core question remains always the same as does the work to answer it. 

Who are you?