I believe passionately in the arbitrariness of gender norms. I just can’t get behind the idea that having certain chromosomes or body parts or hormones means that we are to behave in some specific, societally coded way. According to Xiao (2022), “[h]uman beings are duck testable”, and there’s no denying that I completely fail the duck test: I look, and walk, and talk exactly like a woman. In my childhood, my mom dressed me in Laura Ashley dresses, stockings, and Mary Janes that I hated; I rebelled as a teenager wearing my boyfriend’s jeans and tiny tank tops; in my 20s I mostly dressed as one might expect for a young woman who’d lived a year in Paris and hadn’t yet caught onto the American penchant for leaving the house in pajamas; and in my 30s, I stretched the postpartum excuse out for years and lived in leggings and flowery tunics. Though I succeeded in portraying “woman” outwardly, inwardly I never felt like I possessed the necessary qualities to be a woman in real life. My internal narrative has always been decidedly unfeminine, and when I try to give it voice, it turns into a guy named Bob.
After coming out during the pandemic, I tried “looking non-binary” for a while. I did this in direct response to a boss telling me that my upcoming name change was going to confuse people if I continued to present as femme. Although she meant it in concern, I became very excited about this idea that I could confuse people about my gender. After all, one of my main goals in asserting my non-binary identity was to challenge the notion of binary gender and its associated norms. So I proceeded with the name change, put my shiny new pronouns in my email signature, shaved part of my head, felt gender euphoria in a way I hadn’t ever thought to imagine, and wore boxy clothes from Target’s men’s department; yet absolutely no-one was confused. All my coworkers - except the well-meaning boss, credit where credit’s due - continued to gender me female without any hesitation. Clearly, I wasn’t trying hard enough. I started wearing minimizing sports bras to flatten my breasts, when I had spent all my previous years trying to amplify their meagre size.
With the exception of the gender-affirming haircut, the harder I tried to appear androgynous, the less I recognized myself in the mirror, and for the first time in my life I started to experience something akin to embodied gender dysphoria - a lack of concordance in how I felt in my body and how I felt about my gender. Since my gender identity has never been tied to the shape of my body, the boxier I dressed, the further away I got from being comfortable in my own skin. And to what end? It clearly wasn’t helping anyone perceive me as non-binary. “Here is the crux of the nonbinary tragedy: We need to perform to be recognized, that performance might not be how we want to be recognized in the first place, and even then, the performance doesn’t always work to generate recognition,” (Xiao, 2022).
These days, I’m back to looking like a woman. More specifically, to most people I look like a middle-aged woman who is lazy about her appearance. I’ve let my gender-affirming haircut grow out into a nondescript style of intermediate length, and I wear a combination of mismatched clothing from before, during, and after my androgynous phase. I appear just like a woman, but when I look in the mirror, what I see is a defeated enby. In trying to look androgynous, I had fallen into the trap of once again defining myself by the very gender norms that I was trying to disrupt.
Because I don’t plan on altering my body, it’s likely that I’ll always continue to be read as a woman by almost everyone despite my internal convictions and attempts at explaining my gender identity to others. I have now freed myself from my own unyielding definitions of womanhood - and with this came innumerable benefits, not least of all the will to live. But I no longer expect the same grace from others. I’ve worked for years to decondition myself from categorizing everyone I meet as man or woman, and I still need years more of practice; I know it’s hardly something most cis people will take on.
And yet, some do. Dear allies, if you have truly done the work to decondition yourselves out of cisheteronormativity for a queer person in your life, I know that this takes love and sincere commitment. I can only speak for myself, but I see your work, and I don’t take it for granted. And for those of you who are just getting started, I see you, too, and welcome you with open arms.
References
Xiao, C. (2022, October 5). Nonbinary People Don’t Want to Owe Androgyny, But We Do It to Survive. The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/10/5/xiao-nonbinary-androgyny/
Yes. And this. And all of the parts. And everything.
I rarely tell this story but... Mid transition (which is essentially my whole life now) I went to the bowling alley with my wife and kids. Asked the counter person for shoes, size 7. They handed me mens shoes, then immediately apologized and said "I'm so sorry, I don't know if you meant men's or women's" and I FELL IN LOVE WITH THAT MOMENT.
Did they get me? Did they just give me whatever was closest? Did I fool nobody? I don't care. It still felt right.
Thank you 🙏🏻