How did you know you were non-binary?
So, this is such a good question, such a hard question.
My experience of thinking about my gender identity and coming to a place where I am non-binary is very similar to bisexuality for me.
I didn’t think that I could be queer when I was young because I really liked boys.
But I also like really liked gay boys.
I felt like I belonged with gay boys and had a lot of gay boys growing up who I made out with, where I was like their one exception that like we could do stuff because I didn’t count as like a regular girl.
But I really liked boys, so I couldn’t be queer and then I realized I also like girls and people of other genders and I was like, okay, so I’m bisexual.
But is that really queer?
Am I really that queer?
I still to this day sometimes worry if I’m queer enough or not because I date a lot of people who are cismen.
So, there’s kind of this experience of I am experiencing a lot of different kinds of attraction but I feel like I’m somehow like a stolen valor thing to claim a label of queerness because I’m not queer enough and I don’t fit enough.
For my gender, there was a decent period of time especially right after I got out of the army and before I started identifying as non-binary where I was like, oh, these people are so amazing who are non-binary.
I totally don’t 100 percent agree with my gender but I’m not non-binary like them.
They’re super valid.
I would be a liar and as I looked back over my life, I saw a lot of ways in which I have always kind of struggled with the gender that I was told I was.
That I’ve gone through periods of like overperforming gender to try to fit in even though I didn’t align with what I really wanted for myself and how amazing it was when I was in the army to be able to just put on my uniform and talk like a guy and write emails like a guy.
Then at night be able to like put on a dress and makeup and be like a woman and be able to do both and live in both of those worlds and not have judgment for either of them and not have people telling me I wasn’t womanly enough because I didn’t wear makeup with my uniform and not have people tell me that I was being too femme or too much of a girl for having a night’s out that I wanted to look really pretty and femme.
I think that even going back when I was younger, there were a lot of ways that I wanted to play with the boys but in a dress.
I wanted to play football in a dress.
There were a lot of these ways that I wanted to have both of them at the same time in a way that didn’t feel accessible to be.
I wanted to be able to have all of these pieces of myself be present but kept getting the message over and over and over that like that wasn’t okay and that I was failing at womaness and so starting to like read more and more about gender and think more about gender and how my gender worked.
I went through that same phase of “I’m not non-binary enough. I would be like stealing from other people if I said that I was. I would just be doing it for attention. What if I’m just trying to escape patriarchy by identifying out of being a woman?”
Pro tip, anyone who thinks that that is a real thing, it is not.
People still treat you like a woman even if you say that you’re not over and over again.
So, you don’t actually get to opt out of patriarchy.
You just get patriarchy plus transphobia at the same time.
It’s great.
So, I think that for me, like knowing I’m non-binary, it’s kind of a messy and amorphous thing.
I think it’s – a lot of the stories that we get about people’s gender journeys are about this very like clear-cut “I had always known I was X and I always wanted to be X and now I get to be that,” and that’s not my experience of it.
My experience is very much the opposite which is that the more that I learn and think about gender, the more that I explore the concept of gender and all of the genders that we have, the less any of it makes any sense to me and the more I want all of it.
So, I think for me, coming to terms and recognizing my own nonbinary identity was a lot about seeing the ways in which I’ve wanted all of the gender forever and just didn’t really have an option for that until I was able to find this term of nonbinary and really identify with it.
I still question if I’m really non-binary or if I’m just making shit up.
I will say at my current job, for a variety of reasons, I’m very like incognito. I wear like a wig to work and I use she, her pronouns and everybody treats me as a ciswoman and it’s such a thing.
I’ve chosen it.
It’s the thing that I have chosen for myself.
Nobody forced it on me.
It’s something that I’m doing for my own safety to keep myself separate from my work self and from having people be able to find me, but it also just grates on me every time.
Like one of the girls, ladies.
Oh yeah, she, and just like it hurts.
It fucking hurts and I think that that’s one of those things that helps me kind of like reinforce for myself that my identity is valid even if it doesn’t look the way everybody else’s does.
I think that a big misconception of non-binary people is that they all look androgenous all the time and the thing about our definition of androgyny in this culture is that it requires thinness, so it’s inaccessible to a lot of people and it also requires a certain degree of masculinization, which is very strange.
So yeah, I mean I think I still struggle with what non-binary is for me and what my gender looks like and feels like and what is aligned for me, what feels right on any given day.
But for me it was a lot of like not feeling like I fit in any of the boxes.
I never wanted to be the person who did makeup every day and did hair every day.
I’m just never freaking one of that and I never wanted to be the person who had to use the right amount of exclamation points in the email or the text message so that people don’t think I’m being a bitch.
I didn’t want to have to use the right emojis and like all of this other stuff about navigating the world as a woman, which has never really fucking fit for me.
But I also don’t want to be like completely a dude and so that means I get both, I guess.
Por qué no los dos?
Why not both?
So that’s my experience of being non-binary.
