Well, good way too early morning to you all. I woke up and could not get back to sleep. Partly because I was hungry but also because I had way too many thoughts in my head. Therefore, here we are, me with a lean cuisine cheese pizza and my laptop at 2:30 am ET. The first topic I’ve been wanting to write about is the many misnomers and misinformation out there concerning what some see as the hottest trend, binary and non-binary. I’ve recently realized after probably way too long, that I am non-binary. The first piece of misnomer or question many have, is does that mean you are trans? There are trans people who are non-binary, but no, that does not mean you are trans if you are non-binary. Biological sex and gender are two different things. So let’s start there. I was born a female and I feel very comfortable in my skin/body. I do not feel like I was born with the wrong anatomy. When it comes to gender, what it means for me is that I don’t fully relate to females or males. I’ll explain more about that in a bit. The next question many have is does that mean you want your pronouns to be they and them. There are many non-binary people who do not identify with their gender pronouns, however, I am used to and comfortable with she/her. They and them pronouns just feels foreign to me. That is just my experience and preference.
Let me explain to you a little bit about my experience and what it means to me to be non-binary. When I was growing up I never related to the things my more feminine female friends were into. The toys, clothes, and hair that I felt more comfortable with then and still today, were according to our society, more along the masculine nature. I enjoyed playing with “boy” toys, wearing “boy” clothes, and having a “boy’s” haircut. I put quotes around “boy” mainly because it is only our society that has decided to deem these things I enjoy as “boy” things. Really they are just things. Growing up this gave me the label as a tom-boy, which also didn’t fit. I think most suspected it would be something I would grow out of. I did change my appearance for a long period of time to try to fit into society but in my 30s I gave up on trying to please society and decided to do and wear what makes me most comfortable. This means that in general society doesn’t understand me. They think I am trans, I had a woman once tell me I was jealous of men because they could grow beards. WTF? Like I want hair on my fucking face, are you kidding me?? I am all about no hair. Why the fuck do you think I date women, well one of the many perks of dating women, is no hair. Myself is no exception, I love to be smooth and hair free. Again just stupid ignorance. Just because I like to wear what you see as men’s clothes and have what you see as a man’s haircut does not mean I want a beard or a dick, or to be a man. It just doesn’t.
For me non-binary again just means I don’t fully relate to either gender. I remember one time I was with a friend and I was commenting on women’s shoes and I said something like, “yeah I don’t really understand women and the shoes they wear.” She looked at me strangely and laughed and said you are a woman. Again the misunderstanding between biological sex and gender. Wikipedia defines gender as, “Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures and gender identity.”
Biologically, yes she was right, I am a woman, but the things that society aligns with the female gender, such as the shoes they wear, makeup, and doing nails, like, I don’t relate with that gender in those respects. The same applies to men. There are so many things about men that I think are gross, annoying, and stupid. Truly. So that leaves me here in the middle where I relate to some male and some female gender components. And yet often neither. This is what non-binary means to me. Relating to both and yet at the same time neither gender. I honestly like the flexability that gives me. Because I choose to live authentically in my skin, it often means I am misunderstood by society. I am often called the wrong pronoun. People often think I am using the wrong restroom. People often think I want to be a man. Anyway, I just had to get my thoughts out on this topic.
Cover Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
Shaynanigans 