In honor of National Coming Out Day, I wanted to tell my story. I have a secret. Sometimes I wish I were a straight woman. It would be so much easier, less complicated, more accepted than being a Queer person. I didn’t ask to be pansexual. I didn’t ask to be nonbinary. I didn’t ask to be different. But I am. And as I’ve gotten older, it’s become more and more exhausting to airbrush myself into something socially acceptable and easily understandable by others. I still do it, to some extent, but — like wearing a bra — it’s an uncomfortable bit of social theatre that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with other people’s perceptions.
When I first came out to my parents, I was 14. I was convinced I was bisexual. And I was. They told me I was too young to know about sexuality and that this was just an exploration phase. It was, of course, but not in the way they wanted it to be. It seemed that, in my family, Queer was something that happened to other people’s families. And there was nothing wrong with that, they were good folks and all, love was love, just not in our family.
I married a man in my early twenties because I thought I couldn’t do any better and that it was expected of me to marry somebody with a dick no matter what I felt about other people. It was a disaster of a marriage, a potent mix of untreated mental health issues, unplanned pregnancy, and unmitigated poverty. When we divorced, I took my maiden name back and swore never to change it again. I did love my ex-husband, but I’d learned a hard lesson that love can’t fix crazy, poor, or incompatible. And honestly, looking back at my most emotionally intimate relationships, he was an outlier, the only man among a whole list of women and femmes.
Coming out of that experience, in my late twenties, I became more involved with Queer culture, not because I sought it out but because I was living with someone who’d made Queer culture their home for decades. I met fabulous people who were living their best lives despite their circumstances, and I was inspired by them. I longed to be as sassy as a queen or as confident as a bear. I also realized during that time that bisexual wasn’t the label for me. I was attracted to women. I was attracted to men. I was attracted to people who were wild, crazy, amazing experiences of self-expression. It didn’t seem to matter what gender people were. Sometimes that attraction switch flipped on random folx walking down the street. So I updated my label to pansexual.
But that wasn’t all. The more I looked at how I was attracted to people, the more I realized that there was something different about how I saw myself. Honestly, I felt like I couldn’t even do gender correctly. It was my masculine side that was femme and my feminine side that was butch. There were times I wanted jeans and a t-shirt and times I wanted gold lamé and sequins. The drag queen in me loved makeup. The diesel dyke in me loved motorcycles. I wished I could be Ruby Rose or Jack Monroe or Tilda Swinton.
I didn’t know the words ‘nonbinary’ or ‘genderfluid’ at that time. I just knew that there were times I’d wake up and swear I had a dick, then be sad when the sensation subsided. There were times I loved my breasts and times I hated them. I didn’t know at the time that these were signs of gender dysphoria. I wasn’t a young child adamantly insisting they were a different gender than the one they were assumed to be or a teenager actively repulsed by their body. I just had a general feeling of disappointment that I only had some of the right parts. But everybody felt that way sometimes, right? Penis envy. That’s what they called it. I just had a bad case of internalized misogyny.
Or so I thought.
My first experience with gender euphoria was when my dear friend Susan was talking to me on the phone, encouraging me to apply for some internship at a feminist radio show, and she called me ‘Mx. Thang’ and told me I was the perfect person for the job. And in my mind I was like, ‘Yes! That’s who I am!’ But it wasn’t about the job. It was about the honorific. It rang so true to me, like someone finally saw who I really was and acknowledged it. I’d heard the gender-neutral honorific before, of course, but I hadn’t considered that it might be for me. I guess I was still doing battle with the internalized notion that Queer folx existed in every family but my own and that it was a bad thing to be different.
It occurred to me then that I might not be cis. If a genderqueer honorific felt so right to me, what else might I have been overlooking or not acknowledging? I wondered if there was a place for people who weren’t cis but weren’t transitioning to the opposite gender either. Like being bisexual, stuck in the middle, neither fully gay nor fully straight in the eyes of the common observer, I felt alone in the mists of betweenness. I wasn’t cis. I wasn’t trans. I was something else. Again, this was before the word ‘nonbinary’ entered into my lexicon.
Now really, if you agree with the gender you’re assigned, you’re cis, and if you don’t, you’re trans. But to me, trans meant crossing the binary to the opposite gender, and I wasn’t doing that. I was just weird, stuck out in the middle being a human being. I was socialized a girl/woman, and I was treated as a girl/woman by others. But that wasn’t the reflection of who I was. It didn’t capture the times when I queened out and my entire aura became that of a gay man. It didn’t capture the times when I butched up and my entire aura became that of a mama-bear dyke. It certainly didn’t capture the times when I envisioned myself as Hermaphroditos come to life.
If I had the ability to wake up tomorrow in the body I wanted, I’d have small breasts and a cock as well as a pussy. I’d have short hair dyed some funky color. I’d have tattoos. I’d have less of a belly but oddly enough would still be about the size I am now. I’d wear sundresses one day and a suit and tie the next. I’d be as fabulous as the people I admire.
But I work an office job, so I have to look ‘professional’. Who decided that professional was a look and not an attitude, anyway? I’m out at work, but I haven’t deviated too far from my conventional femme presentation. I wear pants and floral prints and hanky-hem shirts. I live for the day when I can bind my chest and wear a button-up shirt and a waistcoat. But that day is not today. It probably won’t be tomorrow. Depending on how the election goes, it might not be any time soon.
But here I am. A Queer, genderqueer, nonbinary human being living as good a life as they can. I hope I can be a beacon of light to others who are struggling to find out who they really are. I’m here, I’m queer, and I’m not going back into the closet.