“For years, professionalism has been my enemy, because it requires that my gender identity is constantly and unrepentantly erased.” 

Featured Voices guest writer Jacob Tobia seeks gender empowerment in the professional world. When being visibly gender nonconforming raises more than eyebrows on the street, how can someone stay true to their identity in the workplace?

Why I’m Genderqueer, Professional and Unafraid

I looked myself up and down in the full-length mirror. Blouse tucked in? Check. Pearl earrings on? Check. Lipstick flawless? Check. After a few minutes of primping, posing and deep breathing, I was off to my first day at a new job.

When I start a new job, I struggle with all of the typical trepidations and hesitations. Will my coworkers like me? Will I fit in with the office culture? Am I formatting this report the right way?

But one question loomed above all others as I started my job last week: what should I wear to work?

In many ways, it’s a concern everyone faces. On the first day, everyone wants to get their outfit just right. The morning before a new job, most of us spend an extra ten, twenty or thirty minutes making sure that our hair is properly coiffed, our deodorant is both effective and unobtrusive and our outfit is on point.

But for transgender and gender nonconforming people like myself, the question of what to wear to work becomes an exhausting question of identity and of survival. For us, the question changes from “how do I present my best self at work?” to “can I present my best self at work?”

As an undergraduate at Duke, I spent four years learning to love and appreciate myself as a gender nonconforming person. Going into college, I thought that my desire to dress androgynously and adopt a feminine gender expression was shameful; and for the first few months of college, I hid it from others and from myself. But after years of work unearthing internalized oppression and masculine shame, I finally learned to keep my head high as I stomped by the frat boys in my five-inch heels. I made a name for myself at Duke, and by the end of four years I wore pencil skirts and pant-suits to meetings with the Board of Trustees. During undergrad, I became fully empowered and comfortable in my gender.

Or so I thought.

Jacob Tobia, professional genderqueer (photo credit Camille Breslin)

Now, as a recent graduate confronted with entering the workforce, I find myself having to contend with a much bigger obstacle than frat boys. I have to contend with professionalism.

Professionalism is a funny term, because it masquerades as neutral despite being loaded with immense oppression. As a concept, professionalism is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, imperialist and so much more – and yet people act like professionalism is non-political. Bosses across the country constantly tell their employees to ‘act professionally’ without a second thought. Wear a garment that represents your non-Western culture to work? Your boss may tell you it’s unprofessional. Wear your hair in braids or dreadlocks instead of straightened? That’s probably unprofessional too. Wear shoes that are slightly scuffed because you can’t yet afford new ones? People may not think you’re being professional either.

For years, professionalism has been my enemy, because it requires that my gender identity is constantly and unrepentantly erased. In the workplace, the gender binary can be absolute, unfaltering and infallible. If you dare to step out of line, you risk being mistreated by coworkers, losing promotions or even losing your job. And if you are discriminated against for being transgender or genderqueer, you may not even have access to legal recourse, because in many states it is still perfectly legal to discriminate against gender non-conforming employees.

So, the first morning before work, as I put on my pants, blouse, heels and pearls, self-doubt came roaring back. Would I still have the respect of my boss if I showed up in heels? Would I be treated as a professional if I wore earrings? Would I be taken seriously wearing lipstick? Would my colleagues respect me for who I am?

As I walked to work, these doubts kept creeping up over and over in my mind. I thought back to all of the times that people had told me to “tone it down for work.” I thought back to conversations with my father, where he told me to put away the “flamboyant shit” if I wanted to be respected. I thought back to former internship supervisors who told me that I would not be respected around the office if I chose to express my gender identity. I thought back to the countless memories from childhood of being mocked for being a ‘sissy.’

I thought back to all of this, took a deep breath and walked through the front door of my new office, heels click-clacking on the concrete floor.

Jacob Tobia, professional genderqueer (photo credit Camille Breslin)

As transgender, genderqueer and gender nonconforming people, we deserve better. We deserve to have our work ethic and intellect respected regardless of how we choose to express our gender identities. We deserve to be able to wear clothing and behave in ways that affirm our gender. We deserve to be treated fairly in the workplace.

While people may try to discriminate against me and tell me that I’m dressing “inappropriately” for work, I will hold on to my gender identity and sense of self. In the workplace, I will stick up for those who, like me, find that their gender does not match a prefabricated box. I will wear my heels, pearls and skirts to work until, hopefully, the world can learn to respect people like me.

So to all of the discriminatory employers out there, you better watch out, because I am genderqueer, professional and unafraid.

(Reposted with permission from the Huffington Post)

About Jacob Tobia

Jacob is a leading voice for genderqueer, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming folks, ensuring that everyone is able to live their truth and feel their cute.

In 2014, Jacob made their debut on the national stage when they were interviewed by Laverne Cox as part of MTV’s The T Word, and in 2015, Jacob was profiled by MTV in an hour-long episode of True Life: I’m Genderqueer. A Point Foundation Scholar, Harry S. Truman Scholar, and recipient of the Campus Pride National Voice and Action Award, Jacob has captivated audiences at college campuses, national conferences, and corporate events across the country with their message of gender empowerment and social change. Their writing and advocacy have been featured on MSNBC, MTV, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Jezebel, among others.

Originally from Raleigh, North Carolina, Jacob currently lives in Brooklyn and has worn high heels in the White House twice.

Featured Voices: You

Get more bang for a buck. Let gender nonconformity shine through patreon.com/neutrois.

“Knowing all the terminology and medical facts does not a perfect transition make.” In this Featured Voices, Max walks us through the ups and downs of questioning gender identity: internal doubts, navigating hesitant doctors, imperfect options for hormones, and finding peace.

What To Expect When You’re Questioning

When I first started to admit that maybe – just maybe – I wasn’t actually a man, I had graduated from university and was still trying to put my post-grad life together. Between working a new job and preparing for grad school applications, my tolerance for uncertainty was low. I needed to find all the answers so I could get on with my transition, whatever that was going to look like, in the least disruptive way possible, armed with as much information as possible.

So, naturally, I obsessed. I spent every lunch hour listening to podcasts and video blogs, or reading forum posts and medical white papers. I came home to it, I wrote about it, and I dreamed about it.

I’m an analyst: I work with data all day and I’m used to dealing strategically with uncertainty. I like to think I’m proficient at drawing conclusions from limited information.

But dude, was I out of my wheelhouse.

Knowing all the terminology and medical facts does not a perfect transition make. I had no practice in being genuinely myself. Like, at all. Maybe this is something that a lot of trans folks can relate to, especially those who were pressured to perform masculinity by well-intentioned families. But I was finding that, rather than being liberating, transitioning socially was really, really uncomfortable.

I was subject to intense bouts of shame and doubt just discussing it with my therapist, and thinking about coming out to my housemates – who had all lived with me for years – made me completely shut down. I had spent so many years very carefully editing my behavior around others, trying to avoid drawing attention to myself. What I was trying to do now went against the grain of every instinct that had kept me alive since puberty, and it was really hard work.

Despite how much every inch of progress cost me, I was impatient. I felt the clock ticking, I kept looking for signs of increasingly masculine features in my face and my body. I worried about what not going on hormones would mean. Did it mean that I wasn’t actually trans? Was I just some weird cis dude who was trying to fix the wrong thing in their life? I had heard the word ‘transtrender’ enough times to be familiar with that narrative, and to know that it was most certainly directed at people like me: People who hadn’t really known their whole lives, who were afraid of committing to medical transition. And I was terrified that growing breasts would make me even more dysphoric. Something about the idea of growing breasts filled me with dread. Even so, HRT had some kind of allure for me. I wanted it, despite my fears that it wouldn’t be right for me.

Eventually, I decided that I needed to at least explore blockers and estrogen. So I made my appointment at Planned Parenthood, by a doctor that my therapist had assured me was extremely welcoming of folks who skewed non-binary. I didn’t have to lie, they said. I could be honest, they said.

It was a pretty awful appointment. My nail polish was chipped, I hadn’t shaved my face in days, I was still in my work clothes. I felt caught between not appearing “trans enough” to be taken seriously and feeling too ashamed to present as anything but a dude in public. I sat in the waiting room for 30 minutes avoiding eye contact. When I finally got in to speak to the doctor, one of the things she asked me was if there was anything I was worried about.

I decided to be honest. I told her that I wasn’t so sure about growing breasts.

I regretted it as soon as it left my mouth. Sure enough, she told me that she wasn’t sure if I was experiencing dysphoria. She thought I was experiencing body dysmorphia, and recommended I speak to my therapist about it. I asked her if I could get the lab work done anyways, just in case. She said yes, and I shelled out a couple hundred dollars and they took a few vials of blood. I got a phone call telling me the results came back fine, but I never went back in.

Since then, I’ve had a lot of time to think and explore. I’m no longer uncomfortable with my gender or my gender expression. I feel more at ease with my expression than I have ever felt in my life (getting that pesky beard shot off with lasers certainly helped). That doesn’t mean that some days I don’t feel the weight of self-doubt; there are times I want to rethink everything from the ground up. But I don’t worry that not being on hormones makes me fake, and day by day, I feel more confident in asserting my right to be gendered properly in my own house and in my workplace.

Honestly, I still think about starting hormones. Some days, they’re the thing I want most in the world, and other days I defiantly declare that hormones wouldn’t make me trans any more than my anatomy makes me a man. But I know that for some reason they’re in my future, whenever I’m ready for them.

There’s no rush.

About Max

Max is a fledgling transfeminine data geek and caffeine enthusiast living in sunny Santa Cruz, California. They adore the redwood forests and sandy beaches around their home and have a peculiar love of mismatched clothing.

The Valentines Day Special of Adorableness <3

About Micah

Micah runs the blog, workshops, articles, and everything else in between. Contribute $1/month – only $12/year – and support these great authors by supporting the gears that feature them!

Last month I released the results of my Readership Survey, a deep dive into the stuff my readers are made of. Among the questions I asked, the responses to two of these elucidate the most pressing needs of non-binary individuals looking for answers.

What are your most burning questions about gender and/or transition?

What’s not out there: What articles, information, or resources would you like someone to create?

There are many ways to make an impact. A majority of topics fall outside the scope of what I can cover, or I feel wholly unqualified to take on, yet nonetheless are extremely important to address.

This is why I created Featured Voices, a new series where I invite guest writers to publish their experiences around a monthly theme. This allows me to highlight the non-binary topics that you feel are missing.

Moreover, I’m using my platform to boost yours. Add your link to Community page and let somebody find your blog / vlog / comics / ramblings.

I present this list as a challenge to the rest of you. If your experience touches upon anything mentioned below, think about how YOU can add a positive contribution.

On My Blog

In the catacombs of my blog, you can dig the archives to read about:

• top surgery, regardless of identity
• testosterone, and its various options
• hysterectomy
• disclosure / coming out
• backtracking on a previous decision (like being adamant about never going on testosterone, then going on testosterone).
• bathrooms
• dealing with unaccepting parents
• post-surgical depression

Of course, coverage on any of these is not exhaustive, nor will it ever be. But I’ve feel I’ve written enough such that, when people email me, the answers are almost always somewhere inside my blog.

Lack of Representation

People like us have certainly existed, yet the problem is we can’t find their stories, either because they kept it secret, kept it private, or it was lost to time. That’s why I encourage you to start your own blog, pitch an article, post something on social media. It can be anonymous! It can be short-lived. But it will exist out there for someone to find. And the larger the target becomes, the easier it is to find.

I started my own blog five years ago (equivalent to 500 trans years) precisely because I couldn’t find anyone telling my story. At the time, I was female-identified and all I wanted was top surgery. It was highly anonymous (I didn’t post pictures of my face until a year later), and I had no agenda other than to document my process so others like me would find it and know they weren’t the only ones.

So I encourage you – nay, implore you – to put yourself out there. Everybody has a story worth telling. You will make a difference, I promise.

Community

In contrast to LGB or even trans people, the population of non-binary individuals remains small, at least from our view. The best we can aspire to is online community, which is often our only window into this world. Don’t discard it: connections formed online can be powerful.

For physical communion, other than traveling once a year to one of the large transgender conferences (held mostly in the US coasts), what are the options? Consider starting a support group in your region. It could be virtual, where you meet by Skype once a month. The important part is having a chance to talk face-to-face about local issues that affect your trans life. Also, don’t be shy about joining LGB or Trans groups in your area. I’ve forged meaningful with other queer folks because we do ultimately share similar experiences.

You might also find caring allies in unlikely places where you simply enjoy spending time, like a climbing club, a comic book meetup, or a crochet circle. Finding people who care about you as a person can often be more valuable and provide more emotional relief than random folks who happen to share a common attribute.

And no, we don’t have a secret lair… that I’m telling you about.

MAAB Non-Binary Transition, Social and Medical

A lot of people have wished for a blog similar to mine from the AMAB perspective – if you know of any, please add it on the Community page.

Portrait of Jacob Tobia

My research on transition has led me to search for and understand non-binary MAAB transition paths. I’ve corresponded with many folks with whom I’ve exchanged resources and discussed possible options. There’s a half-written draft in my folder just waiting to be finished. It’s coming! Soon! ish!

However, my knowledge on this topic, and more importantly, my personal experience, will always be limited. For example, the aforementioned post in preparation will only cover medical transition. I believe that, while anything I put out there is better than nothing, it certainly won’t satiate the gap in resources necessary for this community and their allies.

On that note, this month I’m publishing MAAB non-binary writers as part of the new Featured Voices series. There’s still time for you to submit your story!

Coming Out At Work (as Non-Binary)

I’ve blogged about my experiences at work. However, I feel my personal circumstances led me to “cop out” on this issue. I never actually transitioned on the job because I kept changing jobs every year, each jump coinciding with major shifts in my identity. It’s perhaps also not addressed frequently in the blogging space because non-binary bloggers tend to be quite young (the average age of my readers is 25, and 40% are students).

In the meantime, I recommend Janitorqueer, where Kameron has been updating us on the gradual coming out process at work.

Older Non-Binary People (40+)

With an average age of 25, I feel like I’ll be aged out of my own readership audience pretty soon.

Call it the millennial trend of over-sharing, or the like-attracts-like snowballing of resources, but it’s clear older non-binary people just aren’t documenting their own stories online as much as their younger counterparts. Luckily, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting “older” (more experienced) non-binary people at conferences, via listserves, or through local groups. Shout out here to Kyle, Jay, and Jamie.

Other than mere representation, these were some of your specific questions:

• how our gender identities evolve/reveal themselves over time
• navigating your children: coming out, understanding your identity
• transitioning with long-time partners
• servicing the needs of the elderly: more exposure to hospitals, service care, elder communities

Partners

Once again reminding you of that average age statistic, younger folk are less likely to be in a long term relationship by their mid-twenties. The dating issues they’re dealing with are also probably different from someone well past their twenties.

However, it’s not only visibility of relationships with non-binary people that is lacking; it’s the partner’s perspective that is a rare commodity. For example, I wish we could Queer Rock Love could marry itself and have babies, but alas, Paige is only one person with only one amazing non-binary partner.

You also wish there were more stories on:

• how to start a family post-transition
• successful couples (me! me! <<raises hand enthusiastically>>)
• straight couples who are now perceived as gay
• being gay and trans
• the journey of cis (non-queer) partners
• trans and pregnant

Parents of Non-Binary Teens

At the request of the conference director, I presented a Non-Binary Youth workshop at Gender Odyssey for the first time last year.

It’s increasingly common for kids to come out at 16, 14, or even 12. While there has been a huge uptick in resources, information, and support available for parents of young trans children, it’s usually geared towards binary-identifying ones. Even when providers acknowledge diverse identities, the nature of the solutions surrounding coming out, social transition, school, athletics, protective laws, medical transition, may often exclude non-binary kids. While many concepts overlap, it can still be difficult for parents of non-binary children to connect with other parents when their issues, needs, or paths look so different.

This topic remains widely underserved, with open questions like:

• how do I understand my child’s identity?
• what does a successful socially transition look like?
• how can I support a fluid identity? what if they keep changing their mind?
• should I let my kid take hormones / have top surgery?
• how do I talk to my kid about sex?
• how do we deal with siblings or extended family?
• where can I connect with other parents?

Conversely from teens, a major issue they are running into is how to get their parents on board. Where do they even start explaining this to them?

Costs Associated with Transition

This came up so, so, so many times in the survey. As a population we are simply less likely to have stable financial means given the social vulnerability and stigma around our visible identity, not to mention intersecting issues of race or disability or class or mental health that exponentially compound the obstacles.

Specific resources you feel are needed:

• Actual costs of transition
• Paying for transition: financing, saving, fundraising options
• Using health insurance: procedure, requirements, actual costs
• No insurance
• Non-transition medical costs – primary and secondary healthcare
• DIY transition
• Housing / Jobs

No Physical Transition

To me, transition simply means taking steps towards becoming more comfortable in your gender. An act as as simple as getting a haircut can be transformative for self esteem and identity. However, both trans and cis people can become obsessed with medical aspects of transition.

There are many trans people, binary or non-binary, who do not undergo a physical transition, because:

• They have no desire for it
• Not possible due to lack of financial or social resources, disability, or country of residence
• Long wait periods preclude them from continuing; especially true in countries with nationalized healthcare, or for minors

I’m still surprised when people equate “transition” with surgery, and you’re right at being surprised that I don’t see this coming in the first place. What’s absolutely clear is the need for surfacing this topic with greater frequency in mainstream and trans communities alike.

Alternative Presentations

The diversity in non-binary genders is paralleled by our diversity in visible presentations of our genders.

Things you’d like to talk about more:

• Looking gender-normative (either as assigned gender or “opposite” gender)
• Expected non-binary presentations: masculine AFAB / feminine AMAB
• Non-normative presentations: non-masculine AFAB / non-feminine AMAB
  • Femme without being female / Masculine without being male
• Not presenting androgynously
• Don’t identify as trans, yet have dysphoria and/or seek medical transition
  • Micah’s comment: not sure if the reader meant “don’t identify as binary trans man/woman” or simply as trans in general. Even when people’s experiences align with or “fit” a concept, using a label or identifying as trans is still a personal choice. Regardless, this speaks to the experience of not fitting in with the primary non-binary or trans narrative.

Is Non-Binary a Sustainable Identity?

I estimate that 100% of non-binary people have wondered about this, and perhaps continue to wonder about this indefinitely. A lot of the posts around my personal journey speak to this question, as I myself attempt to discover whether this is possible.

Many assumptions lie beneath this question, primarily the fear of being forced to choose between living as your assigned gender or transitioning completely into the “opposite” binary gender. Other fears that are left unanswered:

• Introducing / explaining non-binary gender to people who are not familiar with it
• Coping long term with continually coming out
• How do I compromise between what I want for myself and how I want other people to see me?
• How do I accept that most people will never see me as nonbinary?
• Existential stuff.

Authenticity

If we follow the trail of the question above, we’ll bump into the broader issue of authenticity, feeling like we are being our “true” selves, and figuring out what our “true” selves even are when faced with a world that fails to acknowledge our existence. I wrote about this exact concept twice: “Finding Yourself” and “Be Yourself.”

“Am I making this up?” is the most frequently asked question. Survey responses that echoed this:

• How do you know you are non-binary? / How can you be sure?
• Genderless / the experience of not having a gender
• Validity of my gender
  • Self-affirmation
  • Self-esteem
• Regret of past or future choices
• Mourning the loss of past self while embracing a new identity
• Dysphoria and Depression
  •  and intersection with mental illness

Politics and Policies

Trans rights usually refers to binary-trans rights. Given our rigid gender system, the way certain laws or policies apply to trans men or trans women can end up with no room for dealing with non-binary genders, or best a gray area. While we can dream of genderless spaces and respect for all genders, we are confronted with reality, as we live our lives IRL.

Among the fights we cannot forgo are:

• How non-binary genders fit into the legal landscape and rights of trans people
• Social or legal recognition for non-binary people
• Political discourse on gender, feminism, equality
  • Not another binary: cis vs trans
  • History of gender
• Intersections of gender identity with: sexuality, race, class, culture, disability, mental health
  • POC-specific resources
• Funding for research and studies of non-binary experiences

International: Living Outside of the US

I assume that the amount of information about non-binary genders in other languages is very little compared to what is available in English. Furthermore, most of the resources generated center around US experiences: the culture, political system, healthcare, and history. Plenty of comprehensive local resources also exist in Canada, Australia, and UK, where 20% my readers live.

For those living in other countries, you need access to:

• Localized Resources
• Access to physical transition
  • Local providers trained in trans health
  • Inclusive healthcare policies
  • Insurance coverage
  • Inclusive of non-binary identities
• Advocacy and policy
  • Legal protections, non-discrimination policies
• Cultural acceptance
• Language barrier: non-English resources

I’ve met a handful of international advocates from Mexico, Brazil, Netherlands, China, Poland, India, Costa Rica, who are amazing at mobilizing their local community – raise your hand if you’re here!

Conclusion

Contrary to tradition, I will leave you not with an answer, but with a question, the same questions we started with:

What articles, information, or resources would you like someone to create?

And one last question: How can YOU make an impact?

Help Micah Create Non-Binary Resources

Support the time, energy, passion, knowledge, and chutzpah that go into creating more resources centered around non-binary needs: patreon.com/neutrois.

For this month’s Featured Voices I interviewed fluffy to talk about their experience with lower surgery as a male-assigned agender person.

Male-Assigned Medical Transition

How would you describe your gender?

Agender/neutrois, trending slightly feminine.

How long have you been unraveling gender? 

Even when I was very young and didn’t really understand gender per se, I figured I’d grow up to be not-a-man. In high school was when I started to feel a huge disconnect between my body and my self. Of course, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, when transsexuality was (even more than now) just a mean-spirited punchline in trashy comedy shows, which of course led to internalized self-loathing and a constant fear of expressing myself.

fluffy: real-life me sitting next to avatar-me

You’ve been through primarily a medical transition as a non-binary person. Can you briefly talk about hormones: what are you taking, how much, for how long? And what changes have you seen?

I’ve been taking a fairly low dose of estrogen for quite some time – on and off starting in 2004, and full-time since 2011. The primary effects have been the growth of breast tissue and a general redistribution of body fat. Recently I went up to 4mg/day of estradiol, but that caused my blood chemistry to go out of whack and so now I’m back to 2mg/day.

For a few months in 2011 I was also taking spironolactone (a diuretic, which is used off-label as an androgen antagonist) although the primary effect of that caused me to get dangerously dehydrated and constipated.

Talk to us about lower surgery. Which surgery did you have and why did you seek it out?

I had a bilateral orchiectomy – a removal of the testes – two years ago.

I was tired of the constant nagging feeling caused by testosterone. My time on spironolactone had proven to me that not having testosterone in my system would make me feel quite a lot better, and not being able to take it left me with this constant dismal feeling of inner conflict. Pretty much classic dysphoria.

How long did it take from the moment you decided to pursue surgery until you finally got it?

Many, many years. I started to want it in college (late 90s), and the feelings only intensified over time. I always felt very timid about actually pushing forward on it, though, and I never really got the courage until I was living in San Francisco a few years ago.

What were some of the biggest obstacles you encountered during the process?

The research for the actual procedure was pretty straightforward. Finding a doctor, however, was not.While San Francisco has a reputation for being queer-friendly, it’s somewhat overstated and really only there for white cisgender homosexuals. In particular, I found that doctors have issues with DMAB-based gender stuff; practitioners want to really cover all their bases and adhere strictly to often-outdated standards of care. In particular, the surgeons I talked to there refused to do anything to me without me being on androgen blockers for a whole year to make sure I was really, really sure. And of course, I couldn’t actually tolerate any androgen blockers.

When I moved back to Seattle, however, it became really simple and straightforward. Washington state doctors embrace the informed-consent model, WPATH standards had been updated [2011], and Seattle is a very trans-friendly place. My employer at the time even had healthcare coverage for transgender care, so I didn’t even have to pay very much for it! (Although I would have happily paid out-of-pocket if I had to.)

What options or other types of medical transition were or are you considering, and why?

I’ve always been considering full genital nullification, as the hormones aren’t the entirety of my dysphoria; I also feel like having a penis is completely wrong for me. I am still considering it, although finding practitioners who will do it is difficult, and the surgery is known to have several complications as well. Another possibility is to simply get a “standard” MTF surgery and simply not bother to dilate, but that seems like a pretty big step to take as well.

Also, I still present as male at work, which means still using the men’s restroom, which in turn means having a lack of stalls – being able to pee standing up is often an unfortunate necessity (not to mention it’s also rather convenient).

I’m often considering some level of facial feminization surgery, in order to be read as less masculine, although that’s a major undertaking. I’d also like to find a good vocal coach to sound less masculine when I speak; I’d consider a procedure to modify my voice if there were one which wouldn’t destroy my singing voice.

How do you feel about your surgery now, two years later?

I wish I had done it much, much earlier. One of the problems with testosterone is that a lifetime of exposure to it makes it very difficult to overcome its rather permanent effects. My voice and facial structure are very distinctly masculine. I had also done laser hair removal for several years – an expensive and painful procedure – and this would not have been necessary if I’d never been subjected to this.

The only dissatisfaction I have with the procedure I received is that I still have an empty scrotum, which is a specific source of dysphoria for me. I could have had it removed at the time of the surgery but if I had done that it would make MTF surgery much more difficult and I wanted to keep my options open.

How has this impacted your life?

Everyone who knows me well thinks I’m far happier and better-adjusted since the surgery. Even the people who don’t know about it. My therapist said, “You no longer always look like you were hit by a truck.” Even my mom (who I haven’t told about the surgery) has noticed a marked improvement in my mood and outlook since then.

It also has helped quite a lot with my frustration. I’ve always identified as asexual, but of course testosterone is the primary driver of a sex drive – and while mine was weak, it was present enough and had no outlet.

On the other hand, now I’m a bit more sensitive to jokes and everyday expressions regarding male gonads. I’ve started to realize just how much American society equates virility with… well, everything implied by virility. This is especially bad working in a STEM field, where everyone who is male-presenting is also assumed to be heterosexual and cisgender, although my current coworkers are generally better about this than most places I’ve worked. I might even feel comfortable enough to come out at some point!

On that note, the main reason I haven’t yet come out at work or transitioned or anything is that I’ve had a hell of a time trying to find a name that works well for me. I mean, all my friends know me as “fluffy” but that’s not a particularly suitable name for professional life.

How has this impacted your gender – your own identity, how you express it, how you feel about pursuing transition in other ways?

There’s an odd sociological aspect where it’s relatively easy for DFAB people to be nonbinary presenting, but for DMAB folks you basically have to go all-or-nothing. I happen to like my ostensibly-unisex mode of dress – jeans/slacks, a t-shirt, and a plaid overshirt (my therapist calls this the “PNW lesbian” look) – and I don’t really see the point in trying to look more feminine. I’m also not one to stick out or draw attention to myself; if I could just wave a magic wand and have everyone refer to me with gender-neutral pronouns and honorifics I’d be happy. It’s not something I want to fight for. I don’t want to be an activist, I just want to be me.

Also, among the non-binary folks I know, most are DFAB, and don’t have any specific desire to make a big deal about gender, but they are in situations where they don’t need to, either. People just accept them for who they are, in general. One of them actually does do low-dose testosterone and is far happier that way.

Of the DMAB non-binary folks I know, most of them are either stuck in a similar rut to me, or decided it was easier to transition to female instead of trying to be in the middle. Even my therapist in San Francisco, who was a trans man and worked a lot with non-binary people, found it very surprising to have a DMAB non-binary client; he’d only seen it in FTMs and other transmasculine people.

There’s something a bit sad about how society sees masculinization as an upgrade and feminization as a downgrade; the former is something that’s okay to play with, the latter is something that has to be all-or-nothing and gets incredibly politicized (of course, none of these are true). I’ve even been attacked by highly-political transwomen for somehow “cheapening” their struggles!

There’s a strange belief that non-binary people don’t feel dysphoria, and that dysphoria is the be-all end-all in a trans identity, and that a non-binary identity is just “playing with” gender and not taking things seriously. It’s also a bit frustrating how there seems to be a non-binary “uniform” in terms of how they are expected to dress and present themselves and even what haircut to have. Sometimes my mom even sends me links to articles entitled “This is what non-binary looks like” and asks me when I’m going to dye my hair.

Did you ever know of or meet anyone who had a similar procedure?

Not that I know of. However, I do know several others who would like to undergo it. And, of course, I do know several MTF transsexuals who have said they really identify as neutrois but found MTF to be a path of less resistance.

Can you recommend other sites or resources for people who are interested in this option?

While nonbinary resources in general seem to focus on the DFAB experience (probably because of the same sociological issues I mentioned above), there are still some useful things. There is an amount of useful surgery-related information at eunuch.org (although I would take much of it with a grain of salt, as that site primarily focuses on fetish fiction), and AVEN (asexuality.org) has some resources as well. Susan’s Place (susans.org) has plenty of trans resources in general, including nonbinary, as does the Ingersoll Gender Center (ingersollcenter.org) which is here in Seattle (about a block from my house, actually). Mytranshealth.com is currently under construction but will have a lot of information for non-binary people, especially where to find helpful therapists, and a good therapist can also help you to find surgery resources.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

It is okay to talk about these things with adults, and it is okay to try to be yourself.

Don’t put your career and your family politics ahead of what you really need.

You will spend far more time regretting what you didn’t do than worrying that what you did do was the wrong choice.

Also, Seattle is awesome and you should totally live there (btw, don’t sell that Apple and Amazon stock.)

What advice would you give a non-binary person just starting out in their gender process?

Everyone’s journey is different.

What is right for one person is not necessarily going to be right for you. And that’s okay. As a society we’re just starting to remember that everyone is different, and self-expression is vitally important. It’s also okay to change your mind about things as you figure things out.

This stuff’s complicated, but it can also be really simple.

About fluffy

As a software engineer, artist, and musician, the person known as “fluffy” has a natural tendency to blur lines; gender is just one of them.

Greetings, Awesomeness

Get a badge of awesomeness and warm feels for supporting Featured Voices at patreon.com/neutrois.

Is there a “right” way to do femininity? Amidst the pushback from within the trans community, Brianna forges forward in teasing apart the many facets of gender.

Doing Femininity Right

With these confused (and probably confusing) stream of words I came out to my spouse.

In school it was a common joke to say that I was a ‘lesbian trapped in a man’s body.’ I loved feeling like it secretly was true, but I didn’t really feel ‘trapped’ in anybody else’s body…

I really don’t know what I feel right now. I feel like I’m a female to male transsexual who got lucky being born male but figured out the transition went too far and needs to pull back. Or maybe I really am a butch girl trapped in a guy’s body, I just don’t know.

I had spent the previous year or so doing research in fits and spurts as I allowed myself to think about myself. Finally, I came to the realization that I truly needed to explore gender to see what I’d find. I didn’t want to be one of those people I had read about who comes out to their spouse with an ultimatum of transition. My wife is the most important person in my life and I trust her with my life; if anybody has the right to have input into my self discovery it would be her! If I trust her enough to decide when to pull the plug if I’m in a hospital, refusing to include her in this part of my life seemed wrong somehow. Of course, we ran into problems right away when I couldn’t tell her what I wanted to be called because none of the labels felt right to me.

Dealing with labels has been one of the most difficult parts of my transition. I’ve been fully “out to myself” for almost two years now, but the more I learn, the harder it becomes.

During my first year of gender exploration, I had to fight to figure out what I really felt about myself instead of what others expected to see on me. So much of the conversation around transgender identity focuses around physical features or social cues.

“Have you worn a gaff?”
“How many dresses do you own?”
“I’ll go shopping with you if you want.”
“You need to pitch your voice higher and sway your hips more.”
“You don’t want to look like a man in a dress.”

In the middle of all of that noise, how can somebody tear apart and discover if there’s a difference between their gender identity and gender expression?

I’m not looking at transition so that I can wear pretty dresses and makeup. I could wear pretty dresses regardless of my gender identity. Like Eddie Izzard says, “These aren’t women’s clothes, they’re my clothes. I’m the one that bought them.” I still haven’t purchased any “female” clothes. I didn’t go into my mother’s closet to wear her clothes when I was little. I have yet to learn daily makeup techniques. All of that has caused a few problems with people, especially other transgender people, when they hear that I’m considering transition. After mentioning that I don’t really have much in the way of body dysphoria, a few people have questioned whether I should be allowed access to their transgender areas until I’m “serious” about it.

Eddie Izzard on wearing dresses: “No, I wear dresses. They’re not ‘women’s dresses.’ They’re my dresses. I buy them”

I wasn’t prepared for my body to be policed even before I started transition.

When I present to people as a man, I’m complimented just because my tie matches my belt and shoes. I’m finding that’s not the case for women. I want to scream when somebody tells me that I have to keep my hair long because women have long hair. It makes me feel unimportant when I share a picture of my swollen and bruised finger after a kitchen accident that required 5 stitches and the first thing somebody says is “Wow, short nails. You should grow them longer.”

I guess I feel like I must somehow be doing femininity right for somebody to comment on my appearance before commenting about issues right in front of them.

* Not an actual picture of Brianna, but equally cool

But I’m excited about the future. I don’t know if or when I’m going to transition medically, what it will end up looking like when I’m done figuring all of this out, or if my spouse will accept me as anything other than the cisgender man we both thought that she married. I easily get frozen by fears of what could happen, yet I’m learning to calm down and take things day by day.

As all of these things swirl around while I try to figure out this whole “gender thing” the dictionary definition of transition has been helpful to me.

Transition, n. “The process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another:”

After all, isn’t that just the definition of a life?

About Brianna

Brianna lives in southern Minnesota and passes her time worrying about what will go wrong next. Brianna’s pronouns are she/”Just use my name instead of a pronoun”/”that wanker over there”. Brianna is literally the coolest person in the room right now. I’m serious, just look around.

Ok, real bio this time. ;)

Brianna is a Minnesota girl who is definitely meant for the city. She loves quirky humour, spelling words the British way, and people who wear their confidence like most people wear their underwear – namely all the time, every day. This post brought to you by way too many podcasts to list, Hugo’s “99 Problems” Pandora station, and the number 7. 

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K has gone through several transitions throughout her life: from boy to genderless to woman. At least, that’s what it looks like from the outside; K’s inner identity is still a mystery, even to her. After four decades of struggles, K is finally happy.

The Outs and Ins of Binary

As a child, I assumed that everybody was, like me, intrinsically genderless; that everybody just casually functioned within the confines of their gender for no better reason than that was the gender they got randomly assigned to.

Apparently others could do that easily, so I should too. Moreover, I figured there must be a kind of silent convention that one was not meant to not talk about it. Why? “Because” — the universal shut-down answer given to children questioning adults about tough topics. Like everyone else, I could see there were enough subjects that children were not allowed to know the complete truth about, so what was one more?

It made a kind of sense to me at the time. It sounds like an implausible conspiracy theory in retrospect, but what did I know? I followed what I thought was expected of me and allowed myself to be cast as a boy. Clearly I held myself to this standard rather too well. I probably shouldn’t have. Oh well. Or maybe I couldn’t have done much about it anyway: times were different in the ‘80s.

When adolescence came around, gender started to actually matter. I needed a new coping strategy. I don’t really know how, but I just convinced my mind to censor my own thoughts, to shield myself utterly from the topic of my gender. I couldn’t even think about it.

It took fifteen years for the mental dam to break. Panicking, I learned about myself all over again. After that, I wanted desperately to come out, but I was thoroughly insecure and timid and ashamed because I didn’t think that being genderless would qualify as trans, afraid and perplexed about how I should explain it to others. I was transfixed, unable to take any action at all. I didn’t manage to work up the conviction to tell another living soul for four more years. Even after that I still moved slowly, imperceptibly.

Over the course of three or four more years, through my mid 30s, I began to come out. First I shared with my very best friends, then to a trickle of people (including family), then more and more as it got easier to tell, including select coworkers and acquaintances. My closest friends and family got the detailed discussion of what genderless meant for me and how I came to know myself. Perhaps a dozen or two more got a shorter version. Anyone else would probably have guessed that I was trans, but assumed I was on my way to female. During the same time period, I transitioned my appearance, which mainly consisted of facial hair removal, (head) hair transplant, avoiding all clothing (like formalwear) that is highly gender-specific either way, and selecting clothing that is approximately feminine, but never categorically so. I also stopped using gendered washrooms.

Always the worst part, the part that I dreaded, was the moment of change itself. Whether it was a new style of clothes I had never dared to wear before, or a conversation in which I revealed the truth to my parents, or a request to call me by a new name, I absolutely hated drawing attention to myself and the changes I was making. Even though I knew the change would make my situation indescribably better, I desperately wanted to find an inconspicuous way to get there. In all these cases, I would have given anything to avoid or skip the event by using magic if I could, moving straight past the discomfort into the new normal as if the old version had never existed. I had to be coaxed and prodded by helpful friends into making these scary changes, one by one.

On the medical side of things, those same friends helped me to make appointments I couldn’t work up the courage to make on my own. I was seeking nullification surgery: complete removal of the genitals without constructing anything else as replacement (just the minimum to enable normal urination).

I was granted a consultation at the local hospital’s gender clinic. After evaluation, I was invited to sit down to hear what they thought of my case. A whole panel of collaborating doctors and therapists were already in the room when I walked in.  They could not have made the setting more intimidating if they’d tried; I was like a defendant in a court of law invited to come hear the verdict.

But worse than that was the pronouncement. The senior doctor callously declared that my request was completely ridiculous, non-sensical, that I could not possibly actually be genderless. I walked out of there devastated. It’s a very, very good thing I had friends to support me. I still can’t believe how that doctor can have been so insensitive and reckless. But that’s in the past, and it gets vastly better after this.

Since the gender clinic that failed me was prominently part of the national public care care system in Canada, I was pretty sure that system as a whole would be a closed door to me. Well, good riddance: I really wasn’t looking forward to arguing with their bureaucrats to get them to pay for a surgery they never heard of that’s not on their approved list while they pay for other people’s binary transgender surgeries automatically. So I went international. It would mean I would have to pay for the surgery myself.

My most helpful friend did research and found a surgeon for me in the US who was willing to give me what I wanted. This doctor placed stronger-than-normal requirements on one of the necessary letters of recommendation, insisting that it be from a WPATH-listed psychiatrist who practiced in the doctor’s own country. This was an onerous requirement that would require me to travel internationally over and over again to get my recommendation, but after the devastating experience with the doctor at home I was willing to agree to just about anything.

Meanwhile, I must say that the social aspect of my transition was proceeding very well indeed. I received nothing but respect, support, curiosity, and love from my all of family, all of my friends, and those coworkers I was close enough to share this with. I am very fortunate to have had such positive experiences.

But there was still something bothering me. While I got all those beautiful reactions from my loved ones, it often felt like complete understanding and complete acceptance were elusive. I truly appreciated everybody’s efforts and enthusiasm, but fully comprehending and internalizing what it meant for me to be without gender was just out of reach for them.

On a more pragmatic note, I was facing many uphill battles, feeling completely daunted by them. Could I have proper public washroom facilities? Could my gender be accurately indicated in (or omitted from) my passport? Could I get people to consistently designate me with the they/them which they struggled to do? Could I avoid gendered formal forms of address? Would I ever wear a swimsuit again? Could I ever blend into a typical crowd? How could I continue properly speaking French (which requires that all adjectives agree on gender)? These things wore me down. I believe strongly in getting those problems fixed for the benefit of the entire non-binary trans community, but I’m not an activist, I never wanted to rock any boats. I need to leave those tasks to stronger fighters (whom I am happy to stand behind in the shadows).

The culmination of this uneasiness is that I changed my gender from none to female. I suspect this change was building up over the course of many months, but when it finally happened it was shockingly sudden: around 8pm on a particular Wednesday evening. And that was that.

I didn’t have to worry about non-binary integration problems any more. And I was already unfailingly passing as a woman in public anyway, even though that hadn’t been my intention.

I wasted no time in sharing the news with friends and family. In many cases, the reaction was palpable huge relief. Finally this was a gender they could understand intuitively and without reservation. I admit that I felt relief in turn, though it’s impossible to say how much of that was caused by my simplified integration and how much by making my loved ones more comfortable.

Previously perplexing situations became obviously correct overnight. For example, one of my friends asked me on the spot to be a bridesmaid at her wedding, a suggestion that would have been very upsetting to me just weeks before.

The unexpected switch occurred less than three weeks before my scheduled surgery, the year I turned 39. The surgery was changed at the last minute from nullification to feminizing vaginoplasty. And that was that, again. Ironically, I could have had that surgery in my own country under the national health care coverage.

Did I really “jump” between genders on that day, or was I always a binary woman and just didn’t know it? Perhaps I am still actually genderless and chose an easy way out, one that works well enough in practice yet betrays my true gender. Who cares? I used to feel the need to analyze and justify my gender, especially to myself. Now it just doesn’t matter anymore. Years later, I’m happier than I ever thought it possible to be, and that’s so much more than enough.

Some years on from this, I moved to the UK to start a new job. Nobody in the whole country knows I’m trans. That’s a novel experience, and also completely normal at the same time. Being trans is not a part of my daily life. And I’m happy to live that way right now.

I know that there are those who hold all kinds of non-binary genders, more genuinely that I turned out to do in the end. This world still needs help to understand and respect and include. I know because I was there: I will never forget the years I spent struggling with non-binary gender. It was difficult, but precious. I hope I can help in a small way, from the shadows. But for me, the story is mostly over.

About K

K works in IT and enjoys travel, hiking, mountains, and forests but especially traveling to forests and mountains without tech gadgets (icky work stuff).

Lift Up More Stories

K has been privately a huge supporter of me and this blog for several years. Now, she felt compelled to share her story publicly. Please help me in thanking K and all the others who have been encouraged to speak out so the rest of the world may listen.

Most people subconsciously and automatically sort people into two genders. But what happens when a machine is tasked to this? Alyx explores the the human side of artificial intelligence technology, and what it could mean for transgender people.

Through the AI Eye

Mirror, mirror, on the website, what gender do you sight?

There’s dozens of facial recognition websites where you upload your pic and it guesses your gender and age. This is Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine vision: how the machine on the other end of the website tries to see who you are.

Sometimes I look in this digital mirror before I go outside, to either reaffirm my current trans DMAB gender presentation, or out of curiosity to see how far machines have come in understanding queer faces.

Most of these mirrors are not perfect. Their AI vision is blurry to the granularities of facial features because they’ve only been fed a small range of faces to train on, rarely queer people. For example, some only train on celebrity and stock photos, where gender binaries are at extremes, like howhot.io. Others, like how-old.net train on a larger, diverse corpus which give more granular, lucid face results.

Most people subconsciously and automatically sort people into two genders. When I go outside I want people to sort me into a gender closer to how I identify, since it makes my life easier (a little towards F but near the middle-ish [on a 2D plane]). I feel better when I upload my selfies to “How Old” and trust it the most. I still can’t get “How Hot” to sort me in the right gender bucket for my desired presentation.

Alyx: Through the AI Eye

AI facial recognition is here to stay, and will only become more ubiquitous. We have to make sure all types of queer people are represented by this sorting technology as AI becomes more ubiquitous and influential. This could become a safety issue in the future if a robot misgenders a trans person publicly because of the way light and shadow casts of their face (one metric used by AI to understand gender).

I wish someone would build a more affirming AI eye. One that trains on binary extremes but also on all the options in the middle, so a graph (4D time-based-genderfluid-cube) could accurately represent my identity and when I upload my face pic the machine spits out a gender tesseract.

About Alyx

Alyx Baldwin is the co-founder, CTO of Kip and an award-winning designer / technologist in NYC. They love networks, artificial intelligence and cats.

Humans, Not Robots

Contrary to popular belief, Micah is not a robot. All of these pages are lovingly hand-crafted by one tiny little human. Send some love by donating a cup of coffee a month: patreon.com/neutrois.

Micah doesn’t ask people for money online. Micah is smart.

Genderfluid: a gender which varies over time. A gender fluid person may at any time identify as male, female, or any other gender, or some combination of identities.

Genderfluid

I didn’t always know I was trans, but I always knew I was weird. I certainly didn’t fit in with the other guys from grade school onward. All I knew for sure was that I was more emotional, more sensitive, than the boys and then young men around me.

In my second long-term relationship, during my twenties, my girlfriend’s other boyfriends asked her more than once if I was gay. But I wasn’t attracted to them; in fact, I didn’t trust men in general and certainly didn’t feel safe opening up to them.

From everything I had heard, being trans meant a rather specific set of things, mostly involving surgery, hormones, and other mysteries. And I knew for sure that I wasn’t trans, because I didn’t want to be a female all the time, just some of the time. By the time I was in my mid-thirties, I absolutely despised the gender binary, but didn’t have a clue that there might be more to it than a disgust with the way that society trained and enforced gender norms.

I suspect the first inkling of my difference was a bit of gender play in the bedroom. The first time I tried it, I freaked out after a few sessions and locked it all away (physically and mentally) for several years. The second time I tried gender play with a trusted friend, however, I had a moment of realization: this wasn’t just bedroom play.

My friend encouraged me to start looking for community and information. This was where the Internet absolutely proved its worth, because I found the word “genderfluid” during my research, and it clicked in the way that nothing else had.

Meanwhile, I’d gone back to college in 2010 for a BA in Communication. I took my classes, got to know other people working on that major, and absolutely wanted to hide this part of myself from them, because I knew what happened to trans people. After all, Gwen Araujo had been killed in 2002 and she was local to me.

But in 2011, I couldn’t keep hiding this from myself anymore. I first came out to myself when I found that word on the Internet. Over the next several months, I came out to a couple of trusted friends, with generally positive results. By the time Fall quarter had started, I was very slowly, very awkwardly coming to grips with my gender. I mourned all the time I’d “wasted” before I came out, incredibly conscious that at 38, I was much older than other genderfluid people who were coming out at the same time.

That was also the quarter I took a conflict management class in my department. Our professor assigned us a project: to define and analyze a personal conflict, and then to propose a means of dealing with it and then critique that potential solution. I asked if I could do an internal conflict, and she provisionally agreed, as long as I could define my conflict as a conflict according to textbooks we were using.

When I came back next class, she told me that she wanted me to do this – my conflict about my gender, between my enculturated self and my genderfluid self – for my project. And I did, including presenting to the class as part of the project. The first presentation was easy. I just kept everything in the third person, the way I was supposed to. When the time came for my second presentation, I went back and forth on whether I should out myself to the class. I finally decided in favor, and when I did, I had several students come up during the break to tell me how brave I was for coming out like that.

I’ve been incredibly lucky, I know that. I live in a very liberal area in a liberal state, and the worst thing that has happened to me has been catcalling while I was in female mode. My friends have all been very supportive.

But even with all that, I still have days where I struggle with my identity. I’ll never look as good as the thin, waif-ish genderfluid people who seem to be able to pull off male and female modes with impunity. I probably won’t ever be able to take hormones, and surgery is right out, because my gender shifts are strong enough that I don’t want to risk changing my body in ways I can’t easily fix. And I still have to navigate a world where, if I go out in female mode, I’m seen as something of a freak.

But I can’t not do this. It took me years to figure out my gender identity, I’m not going to give it up just because it’s difficult.

My name is Dee, I’m genderfluid, and I’m 43.

genderfluid

About Dee

Dee Shull got their MA in Communication; they did their thesis on how non-binary people communicate their identity on the Internet in spaces they control. They’ve also presented on their gender identity to a variety of audiences, because they believe that visibility is critical for acceptance.

Visible Voices

Featured Voices is building up momentum.  With your generous help, we can make non-binary voices even more visible.

Everyone’s gender is different, and that’s great. But what do you transition to, when everybody is following a different path? For Indi, the lack of examples has meant becoming vis own inspiration to follow. 

Drawing Inspiration

The non-binary community does a great job of being inclusive and supportive for all comers. Questioning folks are told there’s no wrong way to express their gender, everyone’s gender is different, everyone’s path is different. This is all true, and this is all valuable, but it can also be pretty overwhelming. In my own years-long gender journey, I’ve looked and looked, trying to find some clear, well-trodden path to follow, and all I see are a bunch of people going off in their own directions. And none of them look like me.

One thing that’s been clear to me as I’ve tried to work out my identity (gender and otherwise) is the value of examples and inspiration. It wasn’t until I started meeting queer people in college that I conceived of the notion that I might be queer myself. It wasn’t until I read about non-binary characters in science fiction and fantasy (thank you, Greg Egan) that I started to realize that I wasn’t male or female. It wasn’t until I saw trans narratives in media that I recognized the vague wrongness that had always been with me for the dysphoria that it was. In each case, the inspiration caused a profound change in me, re-contextualizing things that I’d done my best to not think about, and giving me at least the beginning of a new way to see myself.

With this new knowledge came the desire – and the need – to express it somewhere other than just in my head. I saw examples of people addressing their dysphoria by transitioning, but the specifics of the examples were all wrong. I searched far and wide for others who felt they weren’t male or female. I found a few, though not as many as there are now; this was years before the recent explosion in non-binary visibility. The inclusiveness was still there, but the examples weren’t. Others had success mixing masculine and feminine signifiers, but I knew I wanted as little as possible of either, and saw no evidence of anyone else trying that. Worse, when it came to non-binary transition, all I could find were stories of people struggling through restrictive systems with little success. In short, real-life inspiration was pretty hard to find. 

I felt stuck, for years. The possibility of transition remained theoretical, expressed online in rambling journal posts and fantasy role-play. Slowly though, circumstances changed. They changed in the world, with standards of care improving and non-binary narratives diversifying. But they also changed inside me. The tension grew, the need to do something, anything. At the same time, all my hypothetical and virtual experimentation was laying groundwork. Online, I could look however I wanted, state whatever gender I wanted (I tended to avoid places that made me choose one from a list), and figure out what to emphasize about myself that didn’t touch on binary gender at all. I loved bright color, I loved body decoration, I loved animal motifs. I was starting to become my own example, my own inspiration.

“Me, if I really had things my way” Artwork by NowAndLater.

Finally, everything came together, and I took the leap. Once again, external inspirations and examples helped immensely, as trans friends came out and started transition, and the growth of non-binary resources started to include concrete experiences that I could relate to, at least a bit. At this point, the logistics of the physical transition were the easy part; not only had I been reading and obsessing about transition options for years, but also the policies of medical providers had finally progressed to the point that I could actually use them. They weren’t perfect, but just knowing I could do something inspired me try to see just how much I could do.

Expression was, of course, still the hard part. It’s hard to find a piece of clothing that doesn’t have some presumed gender assigned to it; just look at how stores are laid out. People of all genders can wear jeans and t-shirts without raising an eyebrow, but in our male-default culture such an outfit doesn’t do much to offset other male signifiers (height, build) that are more difficult to control.

Thanks to my years of hypothesizing, I at least had a place to start from. I began to treat the whole thing like a series of experiments. Would wearing female-cut pants and shirts change anything? How about adding more colorful accessories? How would I feel about wearing a skirt? How about a skirt plus a binder? Dyed hair? Improbable club-wear as daily dress? Results started to come in, and it worked much like it had online: what felt best was turning up the volume on things that didn’t touch directly on gender at all. And above all, it felt wonderful to be doing something other than trying to slip by unnoticed in jeans and baggy t-shirts.

Experiments

It was fun, but it was also a balancing act. At first, I cringed at being called “he” and “sir”, while welcoming the occasional “she” and “ma’am” as signs that my expression changes were having some sort of effect. However, when the latter became the most common forms of address, I started to feel very uncomfortable with them as well. I tweaked the experiments (more binder? less skirt?) and kept going. Eventually, I realized I’d stopped desperately searching for external examples and inspiration. My own ideas had become enough.

I still wish there were more folks like me out there. I love that everyone’s gender is different, but there’s something special and validating about finding someone who seems to have dealt with very similar challenges and came to very similar results. In becoming my own example I’ve learned a lot about myself, and put together a gender that is truly mine. I hope that process, at least, can serve as an inspiration to others.

About Indi

Indi Latrani is a glowy synthetic animal hybrid who lives on the internet. Morgan Nichols is an AMAB neutrois design geek who lives in the depths of Cascadia. The boundary between them is so easily crossed as to barely exist. Their pronouns are ve/ver/vis.

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What is it like being the partner of a transitioning person? Yasi walks us through 5 ways to be a Superhero Supporter.

5 Ways To Be A Superhero Supporter

What is it like being the partner of a transitioning person?

I’d like to think it’s a lot like being Peggy Carter while watching the love of your life being injected with Super-Soldier Serum and transformed from a boy into a man. The only difference, I think, is that Peggy Carter only had to endure Steve’s physical pain and misery for a mere three minutes of screen time. Real life doesn’t let you off of the hook that easily.

Also, let’s face it, I am no Peggy Carter.

Am I implying being trans is like being a superhero? Think about it. Most trans people I know, my partner included, have at least two identities: There’s the identity for people they aren’t out with (maybe at work, with certain family), then their secret identity, which they entrust to their partners, families, and friends.

The reason that makes superheroes relatable as characters is this duality, this inherent conflict. So here it is, my very own origin story – except that it’s not even really about me. It is about us – about me, Yasi, and Jay, my partner.

Let’s rewind to last year, around March. Jay and I had just moved in after four years of being together. Jay had already started thinking about top surgery and the many different obstacles one has to overcome before the actual surgery itself. I had heard and read many horror tales of unsupportive partners, and I honestly didn’t want to disappoint Jay. But I was also scared, and this was completely new territory for me.

Naturally, I thought to myself, “What would Peggy Carter do?” The answer was quite simple. She would be the best, most badass partner to Steve and help him through his transition. Duh, Yasi. Determined, I donned some metaphorical armor and willed myself to be the superhero my partner needed as we both charged into this battle of transitioning together.

Here’s the thing about being supportive: It’s hard work. It isn’t a one-off sort of deal. It requires attention to detail and care. I wish I could say this to my last-year self. Being supportive is a work in progress, but it’s a little like training to be a hero. It eventually gets easier, and one can get better at it, but there is no point in time where one stops learning.

A lot of my advice here about being supportive is really common sense, yet coming from another person sometimes helps put things into perspective. Of utmost importance is, always, communication and respect of identity.

Yasi’s Advice to Being a Superhero Supporter

1. You Are Not Alone.

Jay and I had been talking about top surgery for years, so the reality of it didn’t really hit me until we moved in together and set a date for surgery.

Surgery is, understandably, a scary topic. More than anything, I doubted my own ability to physically and emotionally take care of Jay after the surgery. I felt a little stuck. Somehow, I had worked myself into a corner that all of this was not a legitimate reaction, that I wasn’t allowed to feel what I felt. Like any formidable superhero, I thought I should keep my feelings from my partner in order to protect them.

Take it from my experience: this does not work. This lack of communication gave my partner the worst kinds of ideas – that I didn’t want them to transition in the first place, that I didn’t fully support their gender identity.

My inner Peggy Carter sort of hit me upside the proverbial head. “Stop being so proud! Go talk to Jay,” she said.

It was really difficult, but I did it, and Jay came up with a solution. They asked me if I’d like to have their sister and her husband in town to help me with the aftercare. The feeling of lonely helplessness magically lifted. I had help? Well, that made things better!

One of the things about superheroes that gets on my last nerves is their lone-wolf act. It drives me up the walls, because they have friends and family members they can confide in, seek advice from. But noooo… they have to suffer alone. What makes us inherently human is our social nature. We are not alone.

So here’s the moral of this story. Communication in a relationship is the best way not to feel alone.

2. Own Your Feelings, But Don’t Let Them Define You.

Another annoying thing superheroes do? They ignore their own feelings instead of trusting them. Most of them feel guilty for even having feelings.

After a year of distance, it’s a lot easier to look back and realize that I didn’t talk to Jay because I was feeling guilty for being scared. I wanted to be stronger, better, the perfect partner. I was letting fear and guilt rule me.

But my feelings do not define who I am as a person. Just because I was scared about my partner’s surgery doesn’t mean that I am a coward. I was scared because I love my partner. I didn’t want anything to happen to them, anything to go wrong. I was scared of losing them.

Jay had thought about top surgery for more than a decade before deciding to do it. They had obsessed over this topic and all of the choices that come along with it for a lot longer than I had.

I didn’t want to hurt Jay with my feelings, but I learned Jay’s feelings and mine are separate. What I am responsible for is sharing with my partner my emotional state so that we can have trust in our relationship.

Emotions are there, but they do not control you. Forming concrete phrases like, “I’m scared” or “I’m  upset” helps legitimize feelings. The next step is actually doing something about it.

3. Battle Ignorance With Research.

What does a superhero do before going after their nemesis? Try to find the villain’s weakness in order to defeat them.

The supervillain here is ignorance. The real reason I was so upset about surgery was because I didn’t know enough about how to prepare for it.

Above all, I had no idea how to support someone emotionally after surgery. So I asked Jay for some blog posts about post-surgery care. I ended up asking Mark from TransTalk what kind of support he was expecting from his caretakers.

I hadn’t thought of going to trans/SOFFA support at our local LGBT Center until  Jay suggested it. It really does help to be around people who are fighting the same villains. The doctors, surgeons, and nurses were very good resources for physical care. I ended up with a lot of pamphlets and written instructions.  

Research put me at ease because I formed a coherent, concrete plan for supporting my partner. Remember: You are not alone. Acknowledge your feelings. Research.

4. Support Comes In Many Different Ways and Forms.

Supporting Jay after the surgery had its ups and downs. I was very nervous the first day, especially after driving back from the hospital. Although Jay was on a load of painkillers, I was afraid of opening up stitches if I drove on a pothole. I found out very quickly that Jay couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, couldn’t even go to the bathroom without help. They were trusting me to do all of it.

After the first day it all became a routine. I also had lots of help from our friends, as well as Jay’s sister and brother-in-law.

The emotional stuff was rough for me. Jay began to doubt whether surgery was the right step. Reassurance and constant communication became the key to surviving post-surgery depression.  I noticed many emotional problems lost their edge when Jay was actually comfortable. During Jay’s recovery I spent a lot of time reading out loud, or we ended up watching some of our favorite TV shows together. To cheer Jay up, I even wrote little stories.

Being a hero isn’t always about putting on a mask and fighting bad guys, it’s about being there for others. Support comes in many different ways. Sometimes it comes in the form of listening or reassurance. Other times, it comes in the form of distraction.

5. Take Care of Yourself First.

A superhero’s powers are nothing if they perish in battle. To be there for someone you have to be there, first.

The mental strain and responsibility of taking care of a recovering person can be overwhelming. I wasn’t eating, drinking, or taking caring of myself properly, especially after Jay’s family went back home. I wanted to keep Jay up in good spirits, but I didn’t want to tell them I was struggling.

I was fortunate to have a support network to serve as a distraction for me during the long hours of surgery. A good friend of mine brought us sweets and even offered to watch after Jay while I was at work. Building a support network is, I would argue, imperative in being a caretaker. My support network helped me deal with the stickiness of my emotions, and I’m very grateful for that.

Come Talk To Me!

My partner had top surgery, and we both survived! I am, by no means, an expert in top surgery or its aftercare; these are just my experiences. I am here to support other superhero supporters who may need a little extra help.

About Yasi

Yasi is a writer by night and a software engineer by day. She is currently working on a collaborative novel with her partner Jay. She enjoys reading, running, and everything to do with superheroes. Follow Yasi on Twitter.

My gender is awesome

Support Your Superhero

Add a little boost to our superpowers. Help Micah keep the Featured Voices series going by contributing here or sharing this post.

Full of compassion, love, and many many questions, Libby shares 5 realizations she learned on her journey to understanding her agender child.

5 Realizations From Loving My Agender Child

Even before my children were born, I chose names that could be used for either gender. Aidan, born with a female body, was very “girly” as a young child. As early as 2 years old, we were arguing over clothing choices – Aidan wanted to wear dresses, I wanted them to wear pants. I realized I was the one who hated to wear dresses, and learned to embrace this traditionally “femme” aspect of my firstborn.

As Aidan grew into elementary school age, they discovered the practicality of pants over dresses (you can hang upside down on a jungle gym at school without anyone commenting on your underwear!). The pants and tops chosen were traditionally feminine pastels, butterflies, and flowers.

During the middle school and high school years, Aidan traded in the pastels for blue jeans and cargo pants from the “boys” section of the store. They chose more neutral colored tops from the “girls” section – we still had butterflies and flowers, they were just more “artsy.” Aidan didn’t see any value in underarm and leg shaving until 8th grade graduation. They were required to “dress up” and Aidan chose to borrow one of my few dresses. I can only guess that they were mocked for their hairy legs, because they started shaving after that day. I had mixed emotions at this point – I was immensely sad to think that my child had been the subject of mockery, so I was relieved that they took the step necessary (begin shaving legs and underarms) to avoid future mockery.

College brought a few changes. Aidan cut their hair in a short, easy to maintain style. They stopped shaving their legs and underarms, despite my continued purchasing of razors. I was always uneasy whenever we went somewhere and they were dressed in shorts and tank-tops. I did not want to be present if somebody decided to mock my child for their choices.

Aidan often commented on the fact that I shouldn’t ever expect grandchildren from them, therefore it came as no surprise when they came out as asexual. By the time they formally announced it, I had already guessed it. I was aware of the sexuality spectrum, as I have personally meandered across it over time. I was aware of the transgender community, but I still considered people as either male or female. In my mind, Aidan was a young woman, a feminist who regularly questioned and defied social norms.

In February 2015, Aidan initiated a cryptic e-mail exchange about a Mom and her daughters, that ended with “haha what a weird twist ending right.”

I didn’t fully grasp what Aidan was saying. My response at the time was a simple smiley face, because I wanted them to know I loved them:

Aidan responded shortly after with this:

clarification:
i am not:
– a girl
– daughter
– miss
– she

i am:
– agender
– your oldest kid
– they

also:
– dad knows
– you can tell jenna [my wife]
– people in general are allowed to know but i don’t want a big announcement about it on facebook or anything (using they is fine but if i want a post saying ‘hey everyone aidan is genderqueer’ i would make it myself)

?

After reading this clarification, I shamelessly lied about understanding the term “agender” although I did not lie about my love for Aidan and my intention to be mindful of their wishes.

I promptly Googled the term “agender” but found very little helpful information. I still had a binary mindset when it came to gender: you were either a male or a female. Eventually I stumbled upon a Psychology Today article pointing me to a few meager sources, one of them being this blog. I contacted Micah, who gave me a list of resources, and offered a few words that stuck with me:

Let me reassure you that there are plenty of non-binary trans adults living life the way they want to. It’s a process that takes time, and perhaps even more when it’s not you going through it all. Patience and understanding are perhaps the greatest gifts of support you can give.

As it turned out, I ended up not sending Micah any questions. Aidan is a very private person, but they were open to answering a lot of my questions over time.

• Do you think you’ll do hormone therapy? “Yes, but not yet.” 
• What about surgery? (My thought bubble: please say no!) “No, probably not. Not a big fan of doctors/hospitals.”
• Can I use the pronoun ey since they feels grammatically awkward. “Ok.” (I soon apologized for this one and began using they/them/their as those are the phrases Aidan prefers.)
• How is your dad handling this? (Dad is progressive, but he goes to a church that has very conservative views on gender roles.) “He’s good, he loves me just the same.” Whew!
• How do you want me to handle pronouns when I am in conversation with others, extended family and friends who ask after you? I don’t want to “out” you without your consent. “Use your judgment, mom. If you feel like it’s someone who will understand, that’s fine; if not, just use the feminine pronouns they are used to hearing.”

***

Through this journey with my oldest child, the five most important things I realized are:

1. It’s a Spectrum

Gender and sexuality are spectrums, very few people fall at either extreme. Aidan showed me the Gender Unicorn, which I found very helpful.

2. One Size Does Not Fit All

Yes, please do research in order to educate yourself. Expect it to be an ongoing journey of discovery, just like any other relationship you are in. Because in the end, it is your relationship with your non-binary child / significant other / friend that will matter most when it comes to “getting them.” Find out if they would like to talk about their experience as a non-binary individual. Make sure it is a dialogue, not a monologue. Make sure your tone of voice is kind, respectful, compassionate, inquisitive.

3. Love Them

Really love them. Your non-binary child / significant other / friend wants more than anything to know that you love them. Even if you don’t “get it” at all, you can compassionately, lovingly journey with them. Not despite who they are, but because of who they are in your life.

If your religious beliefs get in the way – I cannot state it enough – this is about your relationship with your loved one. If you communicate unconditional love, respect, patience, and compassion (which are the tenets of every religion I can think of), you will find that you will most likely receive them in return. People get hurt, defensive, and angry when they feel misunderstood, judged, and unloved. If your exchanges become heated, ask to take a break – not to shut the dialogue down, but to make space for each of you to compassionately consider things from the other’s point of view.

4. Patience and Compassion

Communicate with love, respect, patience, and compassion. Think about how you would want to be treated if you had to reveal something about yourself that could be painfully misunderstood by those closest to you. Coming out is not an easy process; there is so much vulnerability.

Be patient. There might be some things they can’t articulate yet, as (just like everybody on this earth) they are probably still working on their own self-understanding.

Treat yourself with compassion and understanding, too. If the coming out process is unfamiliar territory for you, it will take time for you to adjust.

5. Work On Yourself and Society

I am so proud of the young adult Aidan is, but before you think I’ve got it all together, please know I am still a work in progress, too. One year later, I still occasionally have to correct my pronoun usage. My biggest stumbling block has been when Aidan has been mocked for the way they appear. My gut-level response is to blame Aidan for it: “If only you could try a little harder to fit in with societal norms.” These are thoughts I keep to myself; I know they are just plain wrong, and would be hurtful if spoken aloud.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Aidan. There is a lot wrong with our society, and the only way to change society starts with me working to change my own societal expectations.

*Names have been changed for privacy.

About Aidan’s Mom

Libby is the proud mother of 2 young adults, Aidan and Ash. She lives in Virginia with her wife, Jenna, and their 3 cats. Libby makes half-hearted attempts to garden, keep a tidy home, and learn how to play the guitar. When she is not busy at work or in the home, she really prefers to be curled up in a comfy chair with a good book.

Create Compassionate Resources

You can help other parents find resources for their non-binary children. Contribute to the efforts behind the blog, including over a thousand hand-crafted personal responses to emails like Libby’s.

What happens when an introverted feminist academic tosses off her big black nerd glasses and succumbs to a brutal crush on a hard-rockin’ Texas boygirl? Paige Schilt’s memoir introduces her to Southern belles, singing sperm donors, gay evangelicals, and tattooed sub-cultural kinfolk.

Previously published on Mutha Magazine, this essay is an excerpt from Queer Rock Love: A Family Memoir. Buy it here! Or from your local indie bookstore!

[Micah definitely recommends buying this book, because 1) it’s not a coming out narrative, it’s about adult queers building a family; 2) it’s funny and cute and adorable, but also real and gritty and honest about dealing with life’s ups and downs; 3) it’s wonderfully written. See for yourself!]

Welcome Moms and Dads! …And, Uh, Partners

Pregnancy made me feel really frugal. I vowed to wear only second-hand maternity clothes, I hoarded hand-me-down onesies, and I opted for the cheapest birthing class I could find.

On the evening of the first meeting, Katy and I parked in one of the hospital surface lots and wandered around until we found the education annex. I was beginning to move like a pregnant woman, and Katy held my arm protectively as we walked down the stairs to a vinyl-tiled basement corridor. In the doorway to the training room, a pasty social worker named Pat was checking off names on a clipboard.

“I’m Paige Schilt,” I said. “And this is my wife, Katy.”

Pat’s eyes traveled from me to Katy and back again.

“Oh, uh-hum, okay.” She laughed a nervous, high-pitched laugh. I had the feeling that we’d overloaded her circuits, and I felt annoyed that her social work training hadn’t prepared her to make queer families feel more welcome. At the same time, I was aware that we weren’t exactly a typical lesbian couple. If she had been reading Katy as a man, I might have startled her when I used the word “wife.”

These kinds of interactions happened all the time. Heck, I hadn’t been able to decipher the complex puzzle of Katy’s gender when I first saw her performing with Raunchy Reckless and the Amazons. Now that we were together, I could never predict when a stranger would read her as male and when they would read her as female. Katy was usually content to play along with whatever pronouns people assigned her. The one thing she didn’t like was when people changed their appraisal in the middle of an interaction. She wanted to protect them from embarrassment, and she also wanted to avoid the anger that sometimes came with it.

Inside the classroom, we found two seats in the circle. On our right were two Latinas—a twenty-something pregnant woman and an older companion. I hoped that they would turn out to be dykes, but they didn’t give us the knowing lesbian look. To our left was a young middle-class straight couple of a sort you see around Austin quite a bit. The woman was wearing hand-beaded earrings, and the man looked like maybe he’d been in a band in college before he became an accountant. He gave Katy a curt, dudely nod. This ought to be interesting, I thought.

“Welcome Moms and Dads!” Pat had taken her place near the white board at the front of the room. She looked at us and the two women to our right. “…And, uh, partners.” Geez, I thought, I know they might not get a lot of queers, but surely they see a lot of pregnant women without a dad in the picture. I sized up the rest of the room to see if anyone else was rolling their eyes. Near the door was a white woman in expensive-looking running tights and running shoes. She looked like the kind of person who would start doing sit-ups in the delivery room, and her husband’s hair was coiffed like Texas governor Rick Perry. Definitely Republicans.

At the other side of the circle were two young white couples who seemed to know each other. Something about their behavior—men slouched low in their seats, women giggling over Pat’s introduction—made me think that they were attending the class under duress. The women were drinking Sprites and sharing a bag of Funyuns from the vending machine in the hallway. Mrs. Running Tights looked like she was going to spontaneously combust from all the self-righteous energy that she was directing their way.

Pat asked everyone to introduce themselves and explain what they hoped to get out of the class. The women mostly talked about how many months along they were, how they’d been feeling, and whether they were having a boy or a girl. The men said reluctant things like “I’m just here to support her.” Most of them looked embarrassed already, and we hadn’t even begun to talk about vaginal canals.

When it was my turn, I told the group my name and then proceeded to speak in the first person plural.

“We just found out that we’re having a boy. Our due date is May 12,” I said, gesturing to include Katy. “It feels really soon, and I’m just hoping to learn more about what to expect in the delivery process.” Then, to take some of the pressure off Katy, I decided to introduce her too.

“This is my wife, Katy,” I said quickly, smiling and scanning the class.

I couldn’t tell how our classmates received this piece of information, but Katy handled the occasion like a pro.

“I’m really looking forward to this class,” she said. “Because it’s hard, you know, not being the one who’s carrying the baby. I want to be as involved as I can, and sometimes it’s scary, thinking that she’ll be in pain and I won’t know how to help.” Compared to the other partners, Katy was positively verbose, and I had to smile, because I knew that the professional therapist part of her just couldn’t resist this opportunity for a little psychoeducation. She was trying to model to the other dudes how to express feelings and still be manly.

***

On the second week of birthing class, Pat dutifully broached the topic of circumcision. She gingerly laid out some of the arguments for and against the removal of the foreskin, all the while looking absolutely terrified that someone might express an actual opinion. In the end, she advised us to speak with our OB-GYN about any concerns.

When Katy and I got in the car after class, I was fairly confident that we’d be on the same page, but I wanted to test the waters.

“I can’t believe that anyone would cut a newborn baby!”

“Well,” Katy said, keeping her eyes on the road, “I can see why some people might do it, you know, just so their kid won’t get teased in gym class.”

“Times are changing,” I said. “More and more parents are deciding not to circumcise. It won’t even be a big deal anymore.” My sister had dated an anti-circumcision activist in college, and I was basing my argument on a sample of one straight guy, but I hoped I was right.

“Yeah, maybe,” Katy replied. I could tell she wasn’t quite ready to grant my point. “It’s just that I want my son to look like…” she trailed off.

“You want your son’s penis to look like your imagined penis?”

“Yeah, kinda,” she said sheepishly.

We were at an impasse, but I wasn’t ready to give up. For New Year’s, we went to visit our gayest friends, Martin and Richard. We were hanging out in their baroquely appointed living room when I happened to let slip that we hadn’t yet agreed about circumcision.

“Oh my God, no!” said Richard.

Both friends were adamant that no gay man in his right mind would want to lose the pleasure potential of his foreskin, a.k.a. nature’s masturbation sleeve.

“But,” Katy objected, “don’t uncircumcised penises look funny, like shriveled carrots?”

I had to shake my head. As a trans-masculine person, Katy was generally much more of a connoisseur of the male physique than I was. But, as a gold star lesbian, her actual experience with unclothed penises was rather limited.

“Honey, it doesn’t look any different when it’s hard,” Martin said.

“It doesn’t?” she marveled. I could tell she was starting to come around.

“And if he feels strongly about it, he can always get circumcised later. But he can’t get that shit back if you cut it off.”

“Let him make the choice,” Richard concluded. “He’ll thank you for it later.”

Schilt-Koonce family photo courtesy of Lisa Rawlinson

About Paige Schilt

Paige is married to Katy Koonce, frontman for the band Butch County. They live in Austin, Texas, with their son. Paige blogs at queerrocklove.com, and has written a book of the same title. 

About Featured Voices

Featured Voices is a new series on NN centered on amplifying non-binary visibility. By voluntary submission or (slightly coerced) invitation, guest authors are encouraged to dig deep and publish a story around a monthly theme. Support the trans community by supporting the efforts behind FV.

When your child comes out at 14 as “agender” what do you do? Eli’s Mom has always been loving and supportive, no matter what. However, that doesn’t mean the family’s journey has been straightforward. A loving mom shares with us the process she’s been through (and is still going through) in parenting an agender teen. 

Growing Up Agender

For 14 years we thought, that like my two other daughters, Eli was a girl. But life has a way of throwing curve balls, doesn’t it?

I’ve always been so proud of my kids, and as a young child Eli was absolutely gorgeous with their blonde ringlets, blue eyes, and easy smile. They were good at sports, outgoing, steady as a rock, and hugely intelligent. Despite an occasional temper flare-up, they were very upbeat and laughed easily.  All our relatives and friends were completely drawn to Eli; they were just easy to be around.

In eighth grade, Eli’s friend Julie was hospitalized for depression and suicidal thoughts. Eli explained that Julie was now going by the name Leigh and using the pronoun they instead of she.

After Leigh came home from the hospital, I asked their mom if Leigh was androgynous. I literally did not have the terminology to ask the right question because I’d never heard of anything like this! Truthfully (and cisgenderly), all I could envision was Saturday Night Live’s “Androgynous Pat” character. Leigh’s mom told me that their gender identity is called non-binary, and explained what that was.  I wasn’t put off by the revelation, just a bit confused. We do live in a liberal town, so my contemporaries’ reaction was twofold.  First there was the skepticism; “Is that really a thing?” And when my husband and I assured them it was, “Boy, that makes me feel old!”

By this point Eli had declared themselves to be asexual, which I found somewhat perplexing. I argued with Eli that at age 14, since they had no sexual experience, how could they be asexual? Throughout middle school Eli had done several school projects, each time choosing LGBT topics. They’d joined their middle school’s Gay/Straight Alliance and learned so many terms I had never heard of.  So I figured they were most likely gay; being gay seemed so much easier.

Just a Tomboy

Joining the GSA and writing reports on gay rights weren’t the only ways in which Eli didn’t present as a typical (or stereotypical) little girl.  Over the years I had gotten a total kick out of their tomboy persona. After all, I had two other girly girls, and Eli’s non-traditional interests and personality were quite refreshing.  

I always thought Eli was just a tomboy because they always seemed so Girl Power!; never “I’m Not A Girl. With an amazing degree of confidence and from a very young age, they had always challenged gender stereotypes to anyone who would listen. My husband and I couldn’t have been prouder. We envisioned them growing up to be a pioneering feminist who would one day change the world in a better way for all women.  

Eli’s genderqueer friend Leigh continued to have a very challenging time, with incidents of self-harm and an eating disorder. Leigh pulled Eli into many situations that were worrisome and inappropriate. Eli was, thankfully, wonderful about letting us know what was going on.

My husband and I were never under the illusion that Eli’s struggling friend had any choice in their identity or could control their own mental illness. We felt that if we cut off the friendship completely, Eli would accuse us of rejecting Leigh for these aspects of her life, and we emphatically did not want to send any negative messages about LGBT identity or mental health to our child.  We also didn’t want Eli to feel punished for having alerted us whenever they felt Leigh was in danger.

But our primary goal was to protect Eli’s mental health. We spent a lot of time trying to discourage Eli from allowing themselves to become Leigh’s personal therapist.  Eventually, however, when Leigh backhandedly suggested that Eli harm themselves, we deemed the friendship too unhealthy to continue. Eli felt the loss of Leigh’s tumultuous friendship acutely, and I would better understand why in a short time.

About six weeks later, when Eli and I were alone in the house, Eli told me that they were agender. I was so glad they felt comfortable telling me, and asked how they knew. Eli said they had always felt that something was wrong, but they didn’t have a name for it until they came across the term non-binary in their GSA meetings. They explained that they didn’t want to waste another minute of their life being someone they weren’t. Eli was truly brave.  

Still My Child

My initial and primary reaction to them coming out was a simple one: “They’re still Eli—that hasn’t changed. And they’re still here.” I had just witnessed close hand the absolute and total devastation of two couples who had lost their children to suicide, and I knew I had so many things in my life to be grateful for, including my great relationship with my fantastic kid.   

Truthfully, I initially thought it might have been Leigh’s influence on Eli that made them believe they were agender. Leigh could be a very compelling, influential kid who had led their friends through middle school with dramatic episode after dramatic episode. And what were the odds of both of these friends being agender when, until six months ago, I never knew such a thing existed?

As I continued to prod, Eli assured me they knew they were not a masculine lesbian, although they weren’t able to fully explain how they knew. They described their dysphoria to me, and it was unbelievably hard to hear about their pain. Hearing your child doesn’t like something about themselves is never easy, but when it’s about the very body they were born into… it broke my heart.

The next day we went out to lunch with my husband and Eli came out to him as well. It wasn’t a perfect conversation, but my husband and I both feel the same way, which is that we love Eli, and only want them to be exactly who they are, and no one else. Still, it was clear that we had a lot of catching up to do in terms of educating ourselves about what this meant for Eli and for us.

The next few weeks were a bit rocky for my husband and me. We watched a documentary about transgender children and the difficult decision their families have to make regarding hormones at a young age. We spoke to a psychologist once and practically ran fleeing from his office when he suggested Eli start puberty blockers. It was too much too soon. Eli had just told us about being agender the week before! There had been no time to process the revelation.

Learning Curve

As the weeks went along, I took time to mull things over. Earlier in the spring I had read a magazine article about a woman whose brother was FTM transgender. Some of the things she described about her brother pre-transition rang true to me.  For example, the transgender man’s sister talked about how he always wanted to run around without his shirt when he was a little girl.  That was my Eli, too. I still search my memory for examples of when I might have unknowingly discouraged Eli’s true identity.

Reading this article was the first time I had considered that Eli might be transgender.  I mentioned this idea to my sisters and my best friends when they visited.  “No, no, that’s sooo unlikely,” they said. My hunch had turned out to be right.

Eli’s non-binary gender identity was still somewhat confusing for me because it wasn’t something Eli had been talking about from the time they were a young child.  Stories of binary transgender transitions at a young age, such as Ryland and the Whittington family, made more sense to me.  Eli’s identity had become clear after puberty, and it wasn’t that I didn’t believe them, it was just that I couldn’t immediately tell if this new identity was permanent. But Eli has been crystal clear and expressive in the last nine months about the fact that they are not a girl. Articles about transgender people like youtuber Gigi Gorgeous who had a post-puberty clarification of their identity helped me understand that path better. Now I can see that this is who Eli always was.

Another mystifying aspect of Eli’s coming out for me has been: if they aren’t a boy, why do they want to look like one? Eli feels that the male body is more gender neutral. I’ve taken to the internet to research the topic online, and have thankfully found multiple bloggers who are genderqueer, but present and live as male.  At least it has helped me to see that Eli is not alone in this outlook.  

In the fall Eli asked us to call them by the pronoun they/them, and came out to the rest of the family. Our relatives have been supportive, although the older ones are unable to switch to the pronoun “they.” I have been working on the pronoun switch myself for nine months now, and yet 60% of the time what rolls off my tongue is an amalgam of “she/they.” This kind of change (pronoun and plurality) doesn’t happen overnight, and actually requires laying down new synapse paths in the brain. It’s a constant struggle for all of us, but most in our family understand how important it is not to misgender Eli, so we keep trying.

Processing the Future

These days, when Eli talks to me about surgery, testosterone, and changing their name, I am careful not to react too much. I really want them to feel 100% supported.  My husband has expressed his negative feelings about Eli making any changes while still a teenager.  I feel the same way, but for the most part keep my mouth shut in the hopes that Eli will keep talking, which I believe is essential for their emotional wellbeing. Once, Eli and I discussed my uneasiness with surgery. Eli asked if I would understand their desires better if they were binary transgender. While I would probably understand it better, I wouldn’t feel easier about it. What Eli can’t understand is my parental point of view: they are my baby, and therefore, in my eyes, they are already perfect as they are.

Eli, self portrait

As for the future, we’ll be with Eli every step of the way as they transition and grow. I’m constantly on the edge with worry and a fear of the unknown. I never slept very well, and I basically don’t sleep at all now.

In some ways I’d like to fast forward through the part where Eli has surgery, hormones, and a name change because despite the fact that I support them, I’m dreading the difficult process of further mourning the loss of the daughter that (at least in my own reality) I had.

Yet seeing Eli struggle with insecurity, dysphoria, and isolation also ensures that I will, without a doubt, experience fundamental relief when Eli is on the other side of their transition and finally feels comfortable in their own skin for the first time in their life. And when that happens, we will still have our beloved child Eli; just a happier version. Nothing else about this journey is as important as loving them and seeing them through it.  

*Names have been changed for privacy.

About A Loving Mom

The writer is a Mom first and foremost, and feels that most other aspects of her life are tiny in comparison to this job.  But if you feel you must know something else: before she was a parent she received a masters in writing that she’s been too distracted to do anything with.  She juggles her hectic suburban parenting life with work in an elementary school library, and occasionally finds time for a little sewing hobby on the side. This is her first blog post.

Help Agender Kids

Help other non-binary teens come out to their parents, and help parents understand their kids’ gender. Your small contribution will go a long way in creating more resources and sharing more stories like these.

“What does it mean for her – for my wife – to be in love with someone who blurs the lines of gender?” In honor of my 30th birthday, I’m sharing a personal piece about the history of my relationship with the most significant person in my world.

Featured Voices SOFFAs continues next week.

Husband and Wife

Legally, we are husband and wife. For her, wife is an accurate descriptor, though she says it makes her sound older than how she feels inside. This is someone who wears Snoopy t-shirts and Mickey Mouse shoes to work, who’d rather call herself a girl than a woman. For me, on the other hand, neither husband nor wife are quite a fit, and not just because of the shared sentiments around my own youthful spirit. Rather, because I don’t identify as a man, nor as a woman.

Had we been able to get legally married a few years ago, we would’ve been wife and wife. When I first asked what the T in LGBT meant, someone explained it as “wanting to be a man.” Growing up, I thought everyone hated being female, not just me. But I dismissed being transgender; as clear as I didn’t want to be a woman, I didn’t want to be a man either. Later I discovered that transgender encompasses an entire spectrum of people, including people like me, who feel an uncomfortable mismatch with their birth gender, but don’t necessarily see themselves as the “opposite” gender. Fast-forward five years, two surgeries, a legal name change, a legal gender change, and lots of botched coming outs later, and I’ve happily carved out an in-between space that brings me happiness.

Transgender people are appearing with increasing regularity in the media, with stories focused mainly on their transition. More progressive coverage now highlights well-rounded aspects, such as trans people’s groundbreaking artistic or even athletics careers. But what about those people behind the scenes, the ones who love us? And, what does it mean for her – for my wife – to be in love with someone who blurs the lines of gender?

Today, my wife will wear an old blouse of mine and we’ll joke that it belonged to her “ex” girlfriend. Most folks around her don’t get the reference; they only know me as her husband. Yet it’s still common for restaurant hostesses and taxi drivers to greet us “Hello, ladies.” In airplanes we’re frequently confused for a cute pair of adolescent siblings.

As I count down the last remaining days of my 20s, I celebrate that she’s seen me through almost the entire decade, which is just over a third of my whole life, and certainly the majority of my adulthood. We are that couple: adorable, attached at the hip, inseparable, can’t-breathe-without-one-another. We’re the ones that order two waters, one entree, no dessert. We sleep on a queen-sized bed, but would be equally comfortable on a twin. We eat next to each other, not facing each other. We like the same TV shows, dislike the same foods, have the same friends, sometimes even wear matching clothes (totally by accident, I picked my outfit first). We are the relationship our friends aspire to have. We speak in first person plural. “Is it weird that I missed you?” she’ll ask, after having been apart at work for a mere ten hours. Together, we comprise one human unit.

I wonder, were we always this stuck to each other, or did the glue slowly seep into the ever-shrinking divide between us? Others ponder a question they deem more compelling: who is she attracted to, exactly?

When we met, she had a short history of serial long-term monogamy with a few guys. She claimed to be straight, only because she had never questioned it before. Yet while she wasn’t too tied down to the label, she rejected me the morning after our first night together on the grounds that she had been curious to try “chocolate milk” but she really preferred “strawberry.” Meaning, she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of dating a girl. Because back then, that’s what I was. I simply replied that I was lactose intolerant.

I had a two year advantage over her in questioning sexuality and its labels, especially my own, having conclusively discarded them all as meaningless to my personal identity. In turn, barely a month passed after that fateful night before she was very quickly forced to break from the ingrained framework of heteronormativity. Amidst her confusion, I issued her an ultimatum over the phone: she couldn’t go around kissing guys then profess her love for me in the same evening. Thus, we officially began dating.

At first, she said she was only into me, definitely not into girls in general. Whatever; I wasn’t devoted to defining her sexuality, only to expanding her horizons insofar as those included me. She fell in love with my quick wits and quirky humor, my utmost loyalty, my vulnerable honesty. I vocally denied being in love, though her endless compassion (withstanding even statements such as those) drew me in more deeply each day. If she were a writer, it would read:  <3❤❤. I know this because our house is littered with fluorescent post-its, sneakily hidden behind the bathroom mirror, the bottom of the cereal bowl, the inside of my underwear drawer, dripping with sweet affirmations.

Gradually the realization came that she might be into girls after all. Taking a break from late night studying, she reveled in watching queer movies, and especially dove into all the lesbian-themed books I was bringing home. But we really hated being called lesbians. We certainly felt out of place in straight society, but were we only welcomed by our LGB peers because we were seen as a “gay” couple? Both of us experienced the same awkward inner conflict in queer spaces; something didn’t quite sit well.

It’s cute to say we finished each other’s sentences, but it’s empowering to know she understood me at my core. She saw past my name, my clothes, my body, even before either of us could put a name to it. Transitioning into my androgynous self has only made me more “me,” she proudly claims.

Perhaps my unusual gender, despite not having completely surfaced yet, was the catalyst to her enlightened conclusions. I was a girl, but something about me… wasn’t. So claiming to be gay or bisexual made no sense to her. Just like no label seems to describe what my gender is – only what my gender isn’t – no label seems to describe her sexuality. Queer, the closest word, stands for not quite straight, not quite gay; strange, other. Her ultimate preference would be to remain label-less.

Eventually, she admitted gender makes no difference to her; she is equally attracted or un-attracted to people regardless of gender. With one exception: me. She is completely smitten with me, beyond anything she could ever imagine with anyone else. “Seven years down,” she wrote on our anniversary card once, “seventy to go.”

About Micah

Nine years after declaring their relationship “official” Micah still refuses to admit he is in love. His wife knows the truth and loves him regardless. Both originally from Mexico City, this compact 2-human unit lives in minimalist-style colorfully decorated apartment in the right ventricle of the heart of the Mission district in San Francisco CA. Their greatest wish is to adopt a scruffy dog that is as cute as he is well-behaved. If the dog survives, only then will they consider a tiny human.

For the Love of Gender

Micah is the tiny typer behind Neutrois Nonsense (this blog) and its series Featured Voices. If you’ve been enjoying the stories and resources here, please consider donating any desirable quantity in solidarity with embracing all genders.

Through previous romantic relationships, AJ learns to be seen in their gender. But sometimes what it means to be a good or a bad partner isn’t so binary.

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Reflections

As a 12-year-old at the science center with my family, I heard two boys about my age say, “Who does she think she is, a boy?” I was in the midst of my tween-years of awkward gender signal mixing; I believe that particular day I was wearing a full set of Korean-war era fatigues, Converse All-Stars, giant earrings and fire-engine red nails (hopefully no pictures exist). Dubious fashion choices aside, their perception was something that made me ask myself, even as I roiled with shame, “wait, am I trying to be a boy?”  

Several difficult years later, when I had almost given up on figuring out an answer to that question, I had a transformative relationship with a woman who was in theater. She had experienced the whole spectrum of gendered costuming, from corset-training her waist for a period role to full on drag. When we talked about wearing suits, she said, “When I do it, it’s dress-up. When you do it, it’s just you.” I was sort of thunderstruck by her observation, which in retrospect seems kind of, um… obvious. But at the time? The feeling of not only being seen but recognized, was amazing, undiscovered country, and I suddenly wanted to live there, all the time. And like Schrodinger’s cat, my gender identity morphed: just because someone was looking at it, not with derision, but with respect. And ok, hopefully a little lust.

Her gift to my life was that recognition, and the example she set of being amazingly, unashamedly, herself. At a time when gentle androgyny was de rigeur for young lesbians, she made garish pants out of curtains like Maria Von Trapp and wore work boots when she needed them and gold lame and glossy red lipstick when she damn well felt like it. It felt like we were making art just by stepping out into the world as a couple. Could I explain then how we were not butch-femme? Nope. Can’t truly explain it now, except to say that my take on masculinity is more James Bond than James Dean, so the word “butch” has never felt quite right for me. 

Cary, your cravat. Perfect for those of us who are too short for ties.

Not long after, I met someone that seemed to actually be like me. He was queer, charming, and incredibly smart. Gender-wise… we didn’t have so many words to choose from then, but when I got rid of my girly earrings, he adopted most of them. He painted his toenails, kept his beautiful curls long, and walked tall, which still leaves me in awe of his personal fortitude. We didn’t have to discuss the in-between, we both lived it. He swiped his younger brother’s jacket for me, I bought lipstick for him.  He held my hand like we were playing Red Rover, ready to resist all comers. I felt unassailable, like I was part of something, for the very first time.

Coming to understand myself as part of the in-between genders has been, for me, what medical doctors call a “diagnosis of exclusion”: more feminine than that person, more masculine than that one, a kind of complicated triangulation from the examples around me, in my family, my small communities in the midwest, and in my occasional visits to The Big City. I owe not my gender identity, but my understanding of that identity, in large part to friends and lovers, family and strangers.

Those two early relationships, though brief, taught me that it was possible for other people to see me. Like the reflector behind the flashlight bulb, they made my light stronger and more focused.

It’s been a long, strange trip from my original assignment as female to where I am now, and for a lot of it, I’ve had company in the form of my current romantic partner. At least, I call him my partner; he doesn’t like that term, because it “sounds like a corporate entity, not an intimate relationship”.  We have been good-naturedly bickering about what our relationship should be called for more than 15 years.  

He doesn’t know that I don’t consider myself female. 

“Wait, did I take a wrong turn?”

As a matter of principle, he has never believed that gender is more like a scatter chart than a salt-and-pepper shaker set. He thinks that’s newfangled nonsense, and name- and pronoun-changing (except in the case of binary trans folks) are just a hobby for the privileged with nothing left to rebel against. But philosophically, he’s pretty tolerant; he just figures there are a huge variety of acceptable ways to be a man or a woman. 

At this point, it would be tempting to demonize him as an unsupportive partner. Bad SO, no cookie! But then there’s what he doesn’t do.

He doesn’t see me only in relation to a mythical female-shaped space around me. I am not constantly existing in comparison to some idealized, impossible female presence, one who’s feminine, malleable, smart (but not too smart), and sexy (but chaste). And probably taller than I am.  

He does not care, even more than I don’t care, whether I hit the high points of conformation to femininity. He doesn’t care how long my hair is, anywhere on my body. He doesn’t care if I wear jewelry or don’t. When I bound my chest with Ace bandages because I didn’t know any better, he Did. Not. Care. Now, when I bind, or don’t, he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care if I wear a suit instead of a dress, or rather, he does care: that I feel comfortable in what I wear, and stop obsessing about it so we can have a good time.

When I showed up for the first formal event we ever attended together in a tie and a too-big velvet blazer, probably looking like an underage Christina Ricci trying to channel Vincent Price, he didn’t bat an eye. His sole feedback on my unorthodox fashion choices over the years has been to point out that if you wear a black suit with a white shirt, you look like a waiter. Good point, sweetie.

It apparently doesn’t affect his own self-image to be seen with someone who’s “less” of a woman, which is so, so rare in a man. And he does appreciate who I am. He loves that I’m low maintenance, practical, and forthright, which others have characterized as frumpy, unimaginative, and tactless. My experience with him is less about being understood and more about being free to expand in whatever direction feels right.

So do I feel perfectly seen in my most intimate relationship? No. Do I still value many things about that relationship? Absolutely. We’ve both invested much of our lives in it. Our families consider us a unit. Our wills name each other. The sheer inertia of the status quo is incredible, especially when the issues are so distressingly intangible. A label. A pronoun. A promise never to refer to my body in certain ways. 

A lot of the stories about partners (and even friends) to trans people are as polarized as the older trans narrative.  A good partner is unwaveringly supportive and never has bad days.  A bad partner is always mean and abusive. A good partner stays. A bad one leaves. I think just like our genders, most of our relationships are much more complicated than that.

I don’t know if we’ll ever discuss my identity, or if we should. I am not sure whether having a label for something that’s moderately obvious would make a difference – I trained him years ago not to call me a “girl” – but I’m thinking about it more and more, now that I’m starting to understand it better myself. Ultimately, I suspect that whether I’m in or out to him won’t be any more binary than the rest of me.

About AJ

Let Gender Be Seen

Transition can suddenly envelop you in a whirlwind of choices. Yet as Cameron soon realized, those decisions weren’t only about him – his family, friends, co-workers, were all transitioning along with him.

We Aren’t The Only Ones Transitioning

When we come to terms with our gender identities and find that they do not align with outside expectations, we are faced with a lot of choices.

It’s natural to get caught up in those choices and focus on how we feel and what we want to make happen for ourselves  Our decisions around how we address gender and transition will fundamentally change our lives, the way we inhabit our bodies, and the way the rest of the world interacts with us. However, as someone who went through this process in the midst of a long term relationship involving children, exclusively focusing on ourselves and our needs isn’t necessarily the best plan if we hope to move forward through our transition with our relationships and families intact.

“Not only am I and the kids also in transition with you, you’ve taken your time getting ready for this. You’re well into your process and I’ve just started. It’s not fair to expect me figure all of this out faster than you did.”

It should have been obvious to me that I wasn’t the only one going through transition, but it wasn’t until my wife sat me down and said the words that I had my ‘Oh, duh!’ moment. I remember being stunned, feeling chagrined that I had been too self-centered to see the truth for myself. We were all transitioning. My wife, my kids, the other people I was involved with, my co-workers, the rest of my family, and on and on. Depending on their relationship to me, the people in my life had different challenges to face in coming to terms with my transition. And those challenges were different than the ones I faced, but not any less important.

The eldest of my kids was about 10 when I started moving from butch and female-identified to genderqueer butch-identified. My wife and I had always spoken out against gendered assumptions about haircuts, toys, activities and colors, so it wasn’t a big leap to start talking about gender in more depth. My daughter got the hang of genderqueerness pretty quickly, and didn’t have as many questions about it as I would have expected. The most challenging questions came from my wife and were about truths that were totally self evident to me, but really hard to describe and express in ways she could understand.

For example, how did I know, for real, that I wasn’t a woman OR a man?  How could I know that? What did that feel like? I was stumped and a bit defensive. How dare she question that I know who and what I am?  On the other hand, I’m a writer, words are my thing; and yet, I couldn’t come up with a succinct sentence or two to explain how I knew this really important thing about myself. The only thing I could think of to say were ‘I just know!’ and ‘How do you know you’re female?’  I’m still searching for the right combination of words to describe how I can know such a thing.

During a very vulnerable conversation one night, she admitted that one of her big issues about my transition was the fear of losing her queer visibility. At the time, I hadn’t started taking testosterone yet and still passed as a butch dyke. We’d been together about 21 years at that point and were very visible in our community as a lesbian couple. I remember that conversation being very difficult for both of us. I knew she was right, that the further I went towards masculinity , the more we’d be seen as a straight couple. I had my own issues with losing queer visibility, but my need to pursue some medical respite from my gender dysphoria drove me forward. She wanted me to be happy and healthy in my body and my life, but also requested  space and respect for her grieving process.

Yes, grief is part of transition. It might come as the result of losing the love and support of family and friends, or perhaps the community we have come to rely on and feel at home in. I didn’t lose anyone important to me, and for that I am forever grateful. However, like my wife, I have had my moments of grief around losing my queer visibility. Where I used to be recognizable almost everywhere as a queer of some kind – butch, dyke, lesbian, gay man – I am now mostly unnoticed. Not only do I look straight, as time goes on and T continues to work its miracles on my body, I don’t look particularly trans unless I’m nude. This invisibility is something I’m not particularly thrilled about. I liked being obviously queer, I liked that look of recognition I’d get from across the room if I glanced over and saw another queer person. I liked being a burr in the mental sides of people who get uncomfortable around nonconformity. And now I look like just another straight, white cis dude. This was not a side-effect of transition that either my wife or I wanted.

My wife and I have gotten through the difficult early conversations and those initial months of transition. I feel that our relationship is stronger as a result. My daughters – now 6 and 16 – are growing up in the midst of my transition and watching their parents work through it together. They’re also learning from my wife how to be an ally while working through your own difficulties and fears. That’s a very valuable lesson.

The people in our lives who love us are going to do their best to support us. It won’t always be easy, and mistakes will be made, all the way around. Even people who are committed to being our allies will mess up. Our loved ones may use our old names, our family members may stumble over what words to use in describing how we relate to them.

Everyone is going through transition and everyone’s transition is different. There’s a lot to learn, and a lot of assumptions and societal expectations to break down and re-examine. The people who love and support us will work through all of that because we matter to them. If we can be open to the process others are going through along with our own, that compassion and empathy can help us and help them. By recognizing that my loved ones and allies were going through transitions of their own, I was able to step up and be an ally to each of them. And that has helped me be more patient and loving with myself as well.

About Cameron

Cameron Kyle Combs is a trans genderqueer writer, parent and geek.  Cam is active in his community as a facilitator for Pizza Klatch, a group providing support and advocacy for LGBTQ+ youth and their allies in high schools.  Along with parenting and community involvement, he contributes to the greater conversation about gender, parenting and relationships on his blog.  Cam loves dark beer, dark chocolate and cool, mossy barefoot walks.

Join the Family

Join this colorful non-binary family by becoming a Gender Warrior through Patreon. And you don’t even have to pick Micah up from daycare.

What’s going on in the heads of two people in a relationship? Each person holds an entire world of thoughts. A queer/genderqueer couple shares both of their perspectives.

In Dialogue

I’ll admit, I was nervous. I tried very hard to enter into new relationships with hope and cautious optimism: the person who was straight, so incredibly straight, and could accept my queerness only if it was appropriately mediated for their gaze and for their benefit; the person who, when with me, experienced homophobic abuse and perhaps realised that being with me would mean that they would no longer be read as straight; the person who, I suspect, went through my desk drawers, found my medication and finished things shortly afterwards.

I wrote a piece about it. I perform it sometimes, when I am feeling confrontational and frustrated and tired:

I will always be too awkward and difficult. I will become your transgressive experience, residing in stories that begin “I once dated someone who…” and you will fill in the blanks: who was brown, who was genderqueer, who was queer. This will make you seem like an open-minded and generous lover, willing to consort with such a weird, awkward body.

Interesting enough to flirt with, perhaps sleep with – but ultimately, I, with my dysphoria and sometimes achingly bad mental health, am a hard person to love.

After all, we are told that no one will ever love you if you can’t love yourself. We read countless times that trans people’s partners are tremendously inspiring for bringing themselves to touch us. We read it in dating profiles (no blacks, no rice, no spice). We get it at gay bars, these supposed havens for lesbian and gay community where we cannot use the toilet or get asked if we speak English or get aggressively and creepily hit on to be someone’s transgressive experience for the night.

Eventually, I got to the point where I was comfortable with myself and comfortable living as someone whose gender and race appeared ambiguous to others and whose gender lacked a convenient label, comfortable living in the spaces and in-betweens. There’s a lot about myself and my physicality that I learned to accept, even enjoy. I wasn’t sure if anyone else would want to embrace my messy, complicated whole but I knew I was not longer prepared to deny crucial aspects of myself in order to fit into someone else’s ideas of an acceptable partner.

And then I met someone for whom this wasn’t an issue. I held my breath for months, years, waiting for it all to become too much for her. I am still holding my breath, still tensed for the inevitable heartache that has not come. Perhaps I can cautiously hope it will never come.

***

For me, the bigger issue had to do with entering another long-distance relationship, not my partner’s gender identity or lack thereof. I’ve never felt it was my job to be the queer police or the gender police. It seems so stupid to stop being attracted to someone based on their body parts.

It’s been explained, very patiently, to me that this is not how other people see the world.

That’s not to say that being in a relationship with my partner is always easy. For example, the hardest part for me is dealing with my partners’ pronouns and getting everyone else to do it too. I try my best, but several of my friends are non-native speakers of English who struggle with the idea of singular “they” applied to an individual rather than “he” or “she”. It’s tough, and even I mess up more often than I would like.

They look great when binding (and when not binding too – but they don’t like to acknowledge this. The bits of flesh hanging off a body aren’t the only thing that makes someone attractive). They especially look amazing in their button-down shirts. But after 5 years of ongoing binding, their binder hurts them. We talk about it like a sausage casing: it keeps their bits in, but it’s not really ideal. Binding means my partner is really reluctant do anything that requires wearing a binder more than they have to. Luckily they have a flexible working arrangement, which lets them work at home most of the time. They don’t wear their binder at home, but it means that when I’m around all the tasks like grocery shopping and answering the door for the postman and running errands fall to me. I wonder what they do when I’m not around. Fun date days to a museum or an all-day or all-afternoon event at the weekend are often out of the question, as it means one more day of wearing a binder. I don’t complain though – as many cis women know, bras are awful enough; imagine having to wrap yourself in a sausage casing to feel like yourself every day!

It’s tough to hear about the trials and tribulations of the gender clinic. Here in the UK the gender clinic is covered by the NHS; in my home country, this is inconceivable. Even though the kind of coverage the NHS gender clinics offer is apparently very inconsistent, with lots of moving, flaming hoops to jump through, it is still taken out of taxpayer money. At home, there are fewer hoops to jump through but any surgery contributing to body modification costs big bucks out of your own pocket. That can be hard to reconcile. We argue about the merits, difficulties and indignities of these different systems a lot. All healthcare should be accessible and it’s terrible that the road to a legal non-binary identity is so complex, but at least in the UK medical treatment free. This isn’t much comfort to my partner who endures appointment after appointment of disbelief and reluctance to act.

***

I worry a lot about my partner: that by choosing to love me, she has chosen difficulty. She has chosen awkward pronouns, chosen tricky explanations, chosen to allow my identity as a genderqueer person to shape hers as a queer woman, chosen a life that will come with footnotes and caveats. I have to trust that she makes this choice freely and willingly and lovingly, and trust that she can and will say no.

For my part, every day I take a leap of faith that this person is okay with our relationship, okay with me, okay with dealing with things she wouldn’t have to deal with if she had a cis partner.

***

But despite all the things I’ve said above, being with my partner is great. We have our own little queer universe together, full of our own inside jokes. They are non-judgemental of my gender identity as a cis woman, And they’re enormously handsome and cute and attractive every day, regardless of the bits of skin attached to them. (Oh, and they have a great butt.)

About the Authors

The authors are a queer cis woman and a queer non-white genderqueer person both living in the UK.

Support SOFFAs

Become a partner for all non-binary people and their families seeking resources by supporting Micah on Patreon.

Now a seasoned gender veteran, Julie looks back on her son’s fascination with the female historic personages aboard the Titanic.

The Titanic

When my son Harry was in second grade, I used to joke that I was sure in another life he’d been a passenger on the Titanic. That was in 1997, and his near obsession lasted more than two years. He just couldn’t get enough of the people and the story of the doomed luxury liner.

His love of all things Titanic began with the non-stop promotion of the James Cameron movie, released that year at Christmastime. Between then and the fall of 2000, when I took Harry and his friend Nik to see the touring Titanic exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, my son read every book our local Milwaukee public library offered on the subject. He studied the passenger list, the deck plans, and the facts. He knew a ton of Titanic trivia. And he drew full-figure portraits of the two most notable women on board: Molly Brown and Madeleine Astor. Maybe he had been one of them, I thought.

Something my now-24-year-old son said at dinner one summer night in 2014 got me thinking about his childhood interest in the ladies Astor and Brown. I wondered if I had completely misunderstood his focus on the women of the Titanic.

We were out with his boyfriend and our pre-cocktail topic was Orange is the New Black. Harry’s boyfriend had just finished an OITNB and Scandal marathon.

“Have you watched Scandal, Mom?” Harry asked. “I think you’d really like it.”

“I’ve seen a couple of episodes,” I replied, “but I forget when it’s on. And I don’t like watching movies or TV on my computer.”

Then to shift the subject from my old-school viewing habits, I remarked on the 12 Emmy nominations snapped up by OITNB. “Maybe it’s going to be the new Breaking Bad and win best of everything for the next four years.”

Harry and his boyfriend had never watched Breaking Bad. I admitted I hadn’t either. I just wasn’t into a show about a meth dealer, no matter how good it was.

“I never watched it because there are no lead female characters,” Harry said. “I mean, why watch a show when there’s no one to relate to.”

And then it dawned on me. The handsome, bearded young man sitting next to me at the restaurant didn’t just idolize female characters, he related to them. He identified with them. And I don’t think I’d made that overly obvious connection until that night. That’s when I remembered Harry’s fascination with Titanic actress Kathy Bates. But it wasn’t Kathy Bates at all. My nine-year-old had identified with her portrayal of Titanic heroine Molly Brown.

He’d told me that when he was a toddler. Not in so many words, and without mentioning Molly Brown, of course, Harry was only two when he told me that “inside” his head he was a girl. But I didn’t know much in 1992. I was a mother with limited experience and few informational resources. The internet was no help, because there was no internet. Sex and gender meant the same thing to me, and both referred to the two boxes on my passport application. I sometimes felt confused by my son in those days.

Even if Harry as a toddler and growing boy couldn’t articulate with the terms and language of gender identity and expression that exist today, he knew instinctively that in his head was where his true identity resided. While he was happy being a boy, he felt more girl than boy on the inside.

I’m hopeful every child is allowed to acknowledge his or her inner self, regardless of when it happens or how long it takes. And I like to think now of gender identity itself as a head-of-the-fleet luxury liner, one that deserves to be launched in celebration and revered by all.

About Julie

Julie Tarney is a board member for the It Gets Better Project, blogs for Huffington Post’s Queer Voices, and volunteers for the PFLAG NYC Safe Schools Program. Her blog and forthcoming memoir, My Son Wears Heels, are about her experiences raising a gender-creative child of the ‘90s and what she learned from them along the way about gender identity, gender expression, and self-acceptance.

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Prologue

This worked so well last time – we gained SIX new St Patrons of the Nonsense: Ugochi, Kell, Ryden, tannith, Michael, and Mel – that I’m once again reminding you of a simple way to show your support for Featured Voices and amplifying non-binary stories. To quote myself,

Tell all your friends it only takes a dollar to join the most colorful revolution! Or if you’re like me and have no friends, then you can talk to your stuffed animals and pretend they’re listening to you too.

My stuffed children are lazy. My real children will obviously make their bed without prompting.

April: SOFFAs

SOFFA = Significant Others, Friends, Family, Allies. 

From personal friends to fellow bloggers to random strangers who sought fame and fortune by submitting a post to this humble blog, all the stories were overflowing with emotion.

Featured among the many voices were superstar partners supporting their loved one through surgery or illness, two loving mothers trying to make sense of their teenagers coming out as agender, and one seasoned mom looking back on her kid’s burgeoning genderqueerness. We also wrote about ourselves: understanding the questions our family and friends have during our transition, questioning what it means to be a good partner vs a bad partner, questioning our own self-worth in the eyes of a lover, and questioning what it means to love us.

• 5 Ways to Be a Superhero Supporter, by Yasi
• Loving My Agender Child, by Libby
• Welcome Moms and Dads! …And, Uh, Partners, by Paige Schilt
• Growing Up Agender, by A Loving Mom
• Husband and Wife, by Micah (Yours Truly)
• Reflecting Gender, by AJ
• We Aren’t the Only Ones Transitioning, by Cameron
• In Dialogue, by K&H, queer couple
• You Have a Gender Too, by Leah
• Titanic, by Julie Tarney

You’re my person

Seriously, if you did not shed a tear with at least one of these, your heart is colder than mine.

So thank you to my personal friends, fellow bloggers, and random strangers. Thank you for believing that by sharing a very intimate piece of yourself, you can touch the lives of many others who are – like us, like me, like you – simple mortals trying to make sense of the wonders of gender.

May & June: Out at Work / School

Will they use my new name? 
Will they use my pronouns?
Will others even understand what I mean by non-binary gender? 

Coming out at work or at school is perhaps one of the scariest steps one can take (so scary, in fact, that I never ended up doing it). And it’s also a process that is distinctly different for those of us with a queer gender than our binary trans peers.

For the next month-and-a-half, we’ll be hard at work following the coming out of many professional non-binary people. They are experts at being themselves, though for many it has taken years, sometimes decades, to finally build up the courage to be candid with their colleagues, supervisors, peers, or teachers. Still others have felt empowered by the choice to not tell anyone about their future (or their history) with a different gender.

If you have a story to tell – I’m sure you do, I can hear you typing already! – submit your idea or draft or poem or video or comic strip or expressionist dance to me via email: micah AT neutrois.me.

July: Role Models

Non-binary genders have yet to experience “transgender tipping point” of visibility in mainstream media that plain ol’ transgender people seem to be gaining. In spite of this, we continue to craft our own version of gender, of transition, of purpose. I started this blog precisely because I couldn’t find anyone out there who was like me.

So, who has inspired you to become YOU? Was it a flamboyant artist? A gender-bending celebrity? A revered friend? A blogger, or a book? For example, this theme was inspired by commenter reikelian.

You have a full 6 weeks to ponder this question and get back to me.

Inspired to be Awesome

Beck spent their undergraduate years immersed in a welcoming transgender community. When Beck became a graduate student at the same university, they were suddenly back in the closet. Thanks to the support of peers and professors, Beck has taken steps to be out at work as a non-binary graduate student in a plant biology lab.

What I Really Prefer

People often tell you that during your four years in college you will learn as much about yourself, if not more, as you will learn about the subject matter for which you are attaining a degree.

Unlike my suburban, just-outside-of-Boston high school, my new college had and still has a very active and affirming queer community. I found myself regularly attending meetings of the LGBTQA+ student group because after all, I finally had a safe space to be my big gay gender-non-conforming self.  The first part of every one of those meetings consisted of us going around in a circle stating four things: our preferred name, preferred pronouns, answer to a random question of the week (Pterodactyl or Brontosaurus, and why?), and of course, what underwear we were wearing. Regardless of everyone’s underwear (or lack thereof), we were all there together as a support system for each other. I made some of my most meaningful friendships by being a part of this group, as well as through a local transgender-focused conference.

It was at one of those meetings where I first realized that gender was an actual thing people talked about, explored, questioned, and were tormented by.  That set off my own genderquest, searching for myself in my spare time between classes and long nights at the library.

During the summer between my first and second year (after a Tegan and Sara concert no less) someone from that queer club asked me what name and pronoun I really preferred. This time, my response to this question became a defining moment in my gender journey.  “Well, I really like using they/them pronouns. But I’m not really sure what name I prefer… do you have any ideas?” We brainstormed and came up with Beck – not only was it gender-neutral, my new namesake was also a Grammy-award winning musician. Except that, beyond the space of those Monday night meetings, I was still Rebecca.

Fortunately, in my university students can change their preferred name and pronouns on the registrar so that (most) school-related documents reflect those preferences. Despite this system, most of my professors ignored those preferences and glazed over their rosters when it came time to take attendance at the beginning of each semester so that I, and other trans identified students, were essentially “outed” in front of the whole class. I just remember hearing my “name” being called aloud and cringing at the sound of it. The professor’s mouth would open, and as much as I hoped they would see my preferred name in parentheses next to my legal one, they would utter those three, heart-wrenching syllables “Reeee-beccc-aaaaa.” I basically wanted to run to the nearest gender-neutral bathroom and cry. Every semester. Every class.

That is until one professor, one whom I least-expected to be gender-aware, sent me an email asking me about my gender identity and what pronouns he should be using. I was in disbelief. This older, straight, scientifically-minded man was asking ME what my pronoun situation was. And so I told him, and only him. It felt good. It felt safe knowing that the chair of my department was on my team and would go to bat for me should he need to.

He wasn’t the only professor in the department that was curious about my gender. As an undergrad, I started doing research in a plant development lab, so I would hang out a lot in the plant biology department’s building. A year later a friend relayed to me that another professor asked her graduate student, “There’s this … person … working in Professor X’s lab … are they a boy or a girl?” The student, who had never even met me, was dumbfounded. “I think she’s a girl?” As if knowing I was one or the other would let that professor sleep at night.

Turns out the grad student (we’re good friends now) was half-right. I was still using she/her pronouns among scientists; I had made the decision to not bother with the whole pronoun thing in this sphere of my life.

Beck in the Lab #distractinglysexy

Years later, I am now a graduate student in that same department. Not having my pronouns recognized here took a toll on my mental health. My experience as a queer and gender non-conforming graduate student was very different from my undergrad experience. There’s no student club just for graduate students. The only identity most professors care about is your identity as a scientist, which takes priority over all other aspects of yourself. So my identity became Beck the Master’s student working on the evolution and development of flowering plants, Beck the graduate Teaching Assistant, Beck the labmate, Beck the classmate. I had lost who I was for the benefit of my career. I thought I’d figure it out someday. I thought that maybe when I began to medically transition, then I’d be able to tell my colleagues that I was transgender.

It wasn’t until my third year as a graduate student that I came across the word “non-binary.” A weight was lifted off of my chest – I finally found a place to call home. During my undergrad, I had identified as genderqueer. But for some reason, that label didn’t sit well with me; it didn’t feel quite right. To me, it seemed to have this connotation that I would never physically transition, that genderqueer was just a stepping stone. I was under the impression that taking testosterone or having top surgery meant I was a man, which I knew I was not, so I did not pursue those options. Imagine my delight when I started reading (on this blog!) about non-binary transition. I immediately started taking steps towards becoming my authentic self, the first of which was believing in myself.

I took small steps in coming out at work as non-binary only a few months ago.  I decided to tell my close graduate student friends that I was non-binary, and to use they/them pronouns when talking about me. Their support gave me the courage to then tell my advisor, and I’ve gradually been able to tell a few more people whom I trust. What a relief!

People still mess up with the pronouns here and there, but just having them know lets me be my authentic self in the context of my career. Telling my advisor was a huge step; somehow, disclosing to someone that isn’t exactly my peer made my identity feel more valid.

Going forward in my career – wherever that may take me – I now have the courage to stand up for myself and who I am, along with continuing to explore my gender in both a very personal and public way. For example, my trans pride flag is the first thing people see when they pass by my desk, standing out in front of my botany textbooks.

Sometimes I refer back to the email conversation with that first inquisitive professor, since I find his response most gratifying:

“Beck,

I am possessed of a rich history of friendships with diverse people, which means I am familiar and comfortable with the terrain, and particularly eager to forward societal progress in this area.   I stand to learn more from you, because you are clearly much nearer the center of the transitions underway.   

Thanks for giving me your particular preferences.  People tend to pay attention to what I say. They will follow suit, so getting it right is important to me.”

That’s coming from a 68-year old tenured professor, which fills me with hope.

About Beck

Beck is a graduate student studying plant biology and lives in Vermont with their partner Liz and their two cats Harvey Milk-Moustache and Ru Small. When not being a stressed-out graduate student, Beck can be found crouching to photograph flowers on a forest floor near you.

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