I don't identify as genderfluid myself. It's one more in a long list of terms that technically might apply, depending on how they're interpreted, but which would be misleading because of how they're more generally used.
If there's a widely shared notion of what "genderfluid" means, a cartoon caricature sort of simplification, it's the person who has "girl days" and "boy days", a person who oscillates between the two conventional genders at some oscillation-frequency. Like alternating current, or the progression of night and day, first one and then the other and repeat.
There really are people whose gender fluidity matches that description pretty closely. (And there is nothing wrong with society having a simplified cartoon caricature understanding of something complex, and certainly nothing wrong with individuals fitting the stereotype). A double handful of people in my online genderqueer Facebook groups have written specifically about their experiences on days when they were feeling femme or conversations they had with their mom on one of their masc days, and I recall one person saying they would realize who what gender they were each day when they stepped to their closet and looked at the girl clothes on the left and the boy clothes on the right side and felt which side called to them.
But there are also a lot of people whose identity as genderfluid has to do with squirming out of the confinement of any rigid gender identity because of its limitations. If you visualize the whole range of possible human experience and human behavior and personality and character attributes, a lot of what gender is about is a litany of shouldn'ts. Constraints. Boys don't cry. A lady wouldn't sit with her knees apart. A man ought not to let his fear show. Girls don't, boys don't, shouldn't shouldn't shouldn't. Many a genderfluid person attains escape from that by not feeling confined to any specific gender, and therefore not subject to those barriers.
That raises the question that my agender and neutrois associates might raise: "Then why have a gender at all, fluid or otherwise? If they're all about constraints, wouldn't it be more freeing to bail out on the whole gender thing entirely?"
But gender isn't solely about constraints. For any given gender, we have role models, heroes, social icons who have demonstrated a capability or attained something, and these can be powerful to draw upon. Gender can be about strengths, about what a person of a given gender can do, sometimes things that seem to step beyond the limitations of what we think a generic person is able to do. Or a way of being in the world, a set of characteristics that are most easily comprehended by referencing their widely-shared popularization as associated with a specific kind of person of a specific gender. A genderfluid person may embrace these libraries of potentials and strengths and other admirable traits, with all their previously-expressed nuances, as elements of a gender that they participate in.
Perhaps a neutral genderless notion of a person should not be scoured of these images and portrayals, but if our myths and stories and the portrayals of characters in books and films are embedded in a gendered world (as indeed they tend almost invariably to be), trying to evoke them without evoking the gender with which they are most associated can be like trying to think about how rose petals feel without conjuring up memories of how roses look and smell. It's just easier when you include the associated experiences.
A lot of people say that their gender fluidity is less like a binary either/or condition that flips from girl to boy and more like the progression of seasons. They may have times in their lives when they feel strongly anchored in one gender and other times when they are rather prominently rooted in another, but they may also have a lot of time spent neither strongly this nor that but with elements of both, or neither, or some of this and some of that intertwined.
The poles of a genderfluid person's variances may not be the two conventional ones of woman versus man. Some genderfluid people say that they vary between femme and agender; some explain that their fluidity ranges from demigirl to tomboy. There is a sense in which any given gender terms carries with it an assortment of positive and negative attributes, woven together to create an overall feeling or taste. A person exploring their gender identity may be observed to be trying on several of these in turn, trying to see which notion resonates with them best and feels like the most accurate description. (The various gender qroups I'm in are always well-populated with posts from people posing such questions as "Do you think I am nonbinary, or am I more demiboy?" and then describing what they like or don't like about the "fit" of each term). A genderfluid person is sometimes a person who decides that instead of needing to finally select the perfect term and stick with it, they can treat gender identities like items in their wardrobe, and populate their gender wardrobe with gender identities that look nice on them and fit pretty well and which they feel comfortable in. We have more than one outfit in our clothes closet, why not more than one gender? And why not more than two, for that matter. Not all genderfluid people have only two components that they vary between. There can be more.
I myself don't oscillate, really. Oscillating back and forth between two (or more) specified gender expressions or identities is not a specific requirement for being genderfluid, but it's what the term "genderfluid" brings to mind for most people who know the term at all, and that's the main reason I don't identify as genderfluid.
I haven't been immutably rooted in a single lifelong gender identity for myself, either, though. When I look back, what I see in my life is a long single curve that appears to have landed at a final stable destination. When I was a young kid, around 7 or 8, I saw myself as being a person who was like the girls were. I was in the inverse situation of a tomboy — I was male and unapologetically so, but very much out to show the girls that I deserved their respect as an equal, measured on their terms. And didn't want to be associated with or thought of as one of the boys. Then, in junior high and high school, as a consequence of being sexually attracted to girls, I slowly shifted towards a boy gender identity: the countercultural mellow hippie male, a variant type of male identity that didn't seem so horrible and foreign but which was also associated with sexuality and sexual liberation, especially with a form of sexuality that wasn't as laden with conquest and exploitation and was, itself, more mellow and loving. And then, in early adulthood, my path of my gender identity curved back again as I found the "countercultural guy" ultimately not a very good fit for me and came to realize that in an important sense I was still who I had been as a young kid, essentially one of the girls and proud of it.
I identify as genderqueer, and as a gender invert.
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