Non-Binary Visibility Looks Like This
I still don't understand my gender, but I know it doesn't fit into a binary
Hello friends, it’s been a minute. I’m breaking my accidental newsletter hiatus for Non-Binary Visibility Day to talk a little bit about what that means to me.
The short of it is—I have absolutely no idea.
The older I get the less I understand about gender and sexuality and life and being a person. I’m not a person who has it all figured out in any area of my life, let alone gender. It’s a little scary to talk about gender but I think everyone feels that way on some level, because it means we’re questioning norms.
I recently shared with my friends, family, and community that I’ve transitioned from using she/her and they/them pronouns into using just they/them.
It felt like a big leap to ask for this from people, especially people outside my immediate circle of mostly queer folks and allies. But it felt correct.
I wore my they/them pin to work at a restaurant shift recently and I felt hella nervous. One person commented on it, asking if I’m “a they/them.”
“Wow, people are gonna think we’re so progressive here now! I’ll do my best but no promises.” I found myself quickly backsliding into being okay with being misgendered so as not to make it more difficult for everyone around me.
Two customers commented on my pin that shift, and it reminded me of the importance of not making myself small for the comfort of others. Of being visibly non-binary. It’s a process, I’m still working on it.
None of this is to say that you have to use they/them pronouns to be non-binary. You can be exactly whatever you want to be, what feels most authentically YOU. But genderfluidity is not just about using the right pronouns.
It’s not about being some ephemeral “third gender” and it’s not somewhere in the middle of an arbitrary, socially-constructed scale of man-to-woman.
I first used the word non-binary to describe myself in 2019. I’d joined a Facebook group that was basically just people posting thirst traps and looking for compliments. It was wholesome AF and a great boost to the self-esteem.
I shared a photo that I’d taken of myself the year before following a boudoir photoshoot with the lovely humans at Scandaleuse Photography. I was feeling inspired by our shoot in the Humber River, and I firmly believe that experience sparked everything I’ve done in the last four years. It had been several years since I took many photos of myself at all, let alone nudes—oh how far we’ve come!
I shared the photo in the group and for the first time in my life, someone asked me for my pronouns.
“It’s giving hot non-binary energy,” they commented. “What pronouns do you use?”
I felt a rush when I read it. Like a layer of skin melted away and exposed a raw, tender inner space that was growing closer to the surface.
It was the first place I ever introduced myself as they/them, to a group of strangers on the internet from around the world. I felt safe knowing that no one I knew would see it and that I could be whoever I wanted to be in this space.
It percolated for a while, the confidence and truth that slowly grew louder under the surface with that secret Facebook group admission.
Meeting queer folks at a time when I really needed to meet queer folks helped me peel back the layers a little further.
To say I understand my gender identity would be a lie.
What I do understand is the idea of binary genders is a social and cultural construct created to force people into categories determined by the presence or absence of certain physical characteristics.
Our society assigns gender to everything from colours to clothing to washrooms to medicine to toys to relationship roles and personality traits and just about anything else you can think of.
I’m non-binary in the same way I’m non-monogamous in the same way I’m queer the same way I’m a switch the same way I’m bisexual— arbitrary norms and categorical boxes don’t apply to me. Even the caveat “non” in front of some of those words implies deviation from a norm, an exploration of something less socially accepted. I fought it for a long time, trying to live up to some cisheteronormative expectation of “womanhood” that was shoved down my throat by the world around me.
My gender is a feeling, an essence, an experience. It’s playing with fashion and power dynamics and roles in society and expectations and flipping them upside down and all around and making you question what you know.
When I was a kid I used to wish I had a penis as well as my vulva and vagina. I learned all about bodies from children’s books my parents got for us and I didn’t understand why we could only have just one. It wasn’t until later in my childhood I ever heard the concept of intersex and I can remember hearing stories of parents having to choose which binary genitals to assign to their intersex infants. I didn’t understand why anyone would want to choose — if you have some variation of both, I saw that as something to aspire to.
None of this is to say that genitals = gender. That’s simply not true. But children are a product of their environment. No one is born with insecurities about their body or feelings of shame around them being different—they’re a result of people around us and societal teachings. Adults imprint their own beliefs and ideas onto them and perpetuate cycles and generations of dismissing anything that is different or “other.”
It’s up to us to change that by being visible.
Non-binary folks don’t owe you androgyny or different pronouns or anything else. We want to exist as themselves in a world that says we can’t.
To me being non-binary or genderfluid means not conforming to societal expectations of gender.
It means being femme or masc or androgynous when it feels good.
It means fucking the system that tells you to do one thing and doing another.
Gender diverse people are special. And under attack for daring to be themselves.
The world needs their light now more than ever.
This is what non-binary visibility looks like.