Re-reading this 2.5 years later is a wonderful reminder, that, just like this piece exemplifies, I am (and, I would venture, you are!) somehow always just the same me and also always new and changing. The most notable things that have changed for me since writing this are my increasing contentedness with a range of pronouns and my decreasing contentedness with other gendered words. Questions abound, answers are elusive (or nonexistent? this is perhaps the point?). It only gets messier! Oh how I do delight in a good mess.
So. Here’s the situation.
Keywords: gender, nonbinary, coming out, personal (over)sharing, story time
I obviously have a complicated relationship with gender, and many facets of my journey have been very public. It has been a constant, endless, very frustrating negotiation between what is true and what is widely understandable. In both my personal life and my life as a public advocate and educator, describing trans experience is a perpetual and sometimes life-crushing simplification of ideas that just don’t belong in boxes. But people want boxes so fucking badly that ramming the colorful and creative mess of trans identity into restraints sometimes feels like the only way to communicate anything meaningful.
I have a strong enough sense of the public sphere — both from my own experience, and from reviewing and conducting research on how people understand gender and how they might be able to understand broader concepts of it — to know the limitations pretty well. There is progress to be made, surely, but it has to be made thoughtfully, carefully, gently, accommodatingly. I concede.
But I’m done accepting those same limitations in my personal world. For those of you who know me well, this is little surprise; for those of you who know me less well, this doesn’t matter much — so maybe it’s just entertaining a self-centered and somewhat directionless need to express. But, especially in light of so much pervasive and annihilating nonbinary-antagonism, I choose to use the platform I already have to say — I’M SUPER DUPER NONBINARY! YAY!
And I’m going to tell you a little about what that means for me, not in the “so you can understand best” way, but in the “this is actually true” way. It’s personal. It’s long. It’s still in process. And it’s a gift from me to anyone who wishes to read it, because I feel comfortable and am making an active choice, not because it is something that I or any other trans person owes to anyone. I invite you to engage it.
I grew up as a girl who was allowed to be many things. I felt like a girl, I think, though I never really felt a whole lot about it. I knew it was ridiculous that girls and boys had to line up separately outside my classroom; I knew it made me angry that boys always assumed they were better at sports than I was; I knew I was good at building things and doing math; I knew I liked clothes from the boys’ section better than the girls’; I knew it was devastating when the boys who had been my friends in 3rd grade stopped wanting girl friends by 5th. But it didn’t mean a whole lot to me in terms of who I was — probably because my family and close community gave me permission to be a sometimes “boyish” girl without major consequences. I loved my all-girls summer camp, and, later, my all-girls school. I was, in many ways, just a precocious young feminist.
Then middle school. Who even knows. I got my period, and really big boobs; I was not at all pleased about either. I had a short but intense stage of wanting to do sexy femininity perfectly. I was good at it, and it was fun, but I also sort of hated it — it felt like just a really convincing mask. I also fell in love, hard, with a girl. I was overwhelmingly unsure of how to navigate the intensity of those feelings, in part because I never quite felt like I wanted to be her girlfriend — I had an incomprehensible longing to be her boyfriend. I started to flinch every time teachers would call us “girls,” but I didn’t know why. I started refusing to wear the uniform skirt. I was angry, and sad, and scared, and so confused about why. I had so much to be happy about, but somehow everything still felt terribly wrong.
Early high school hit me like a truck. I was more and more sure that this whole girl thing was not working for me, and I was more and more sure that I either wanted to be or deserved to be dead — maybe both. I eventually emerged from the depths of my own personal hell, mostly thanks to the fierce and unwavering love of my God, my parents, and a handful of my friends. It was on my way back toward wanting to live again that I embraced trans identity. It was the only thing that made my life feel coherent, possible, worth living.
So then I was a boy, I think? I wasn’t a girl, so I figured that meant I was a boy — at the time, those seemed like the only options. And that seemed chill enough, especially since I had no boys around to complicate or make me question my new gender alignment. I rebuilt myself into a healthy and functional young adult on that foundation. And it felt good. SO good. I graduated high school as a boy, mostly.
Then college. Oh boy. No pun intended. All of a sudden, there were men everywhere. Men I was afraid of, who made me feel small and vulnerable and scared and stupid and incompetent and fake. I had no idea how to do masculinity the way they all knew how (nor did I really want to try to learn something that I found so aversive), but I also looked enough like them that the girls didn’t want me, either. I had no gender membership to speak of. I was crushed, and lost — again.
In the years since, I have found people who are not afraid of gender ambiguity — who see me first as a human, an intellectual, a dancer, a friend — not first as a gender. I have waded through so many questions I have for myself about who I am, how I want to be perceived, and why. I have found many truths. Some of them are as follows:
I believe in divine feminine and masculine energies; I think they are complementary and in many ways opposite; I think they are both beautiful and fundamentally important to the wellness of a people. I genuinely enjoy embodying BOTH. I reject the concepts of “woman”ness and “man”ness altogether, and therefore am personally interested in NEITHER. I have a body I have spent a long time learning how to love, and I am happy with ALL of my pieces: some of them more male (I love my beard and my flat chest and my deep voice and my hairy legs), some of them more female (I love my soft skin and my small hands and my vagina and my femme-pattern curves), most of them just human (I love my eyes and my lips and my muscles and my fat and my freckles). I love my first name, for its androgynous sound, feminine roots (it combines my two given names), and masculine implications. I love my middle and last names, for their tying me to both halves of the family that makes me whole. I think gendered pronouns are a linguistic and cultural disaster, but am comfortable with any pronouns used with genuine love and respect, and assume that will most often be he/him. I feel similarly about gendered words - I generally prefer things like son/ brother/ nephew/ boyfriend, as long as you realize their limitations. I want to be invited to any gendered spaces where I am welcome — I feel good in most of them. Femme spaces have defined my life so far, but I am beginning to find masc spaces that feel like home, too, and I can’t imagine being asked to choose which to leave behind. I am confident that my God loves me, and you, and all of my trans and nonbinary sibs out there, no more nor less than anyone else — and loves our genders, too. To me, embodying the types of energy I was meant to is embodying the beauty and truth of God. I am confident that I am capable of loving and being in love with a person of any gender, any body, any combination of gendered energies. I have no interest in unsolicited opinions about my hair, clothes, jewelry, makeup, vocal patterns, physical mannerisms, or any other gender presentation choices. I welcome any genuine, thoughtful, pre-researched questions asked with good intent for me and all people like me. And I thank you for caring enough about me, about gender minorities in general, or about both, to have read this entire piece.