When I first started reading the book “Redefining Realness” by Janet Mock, I think on some level I expected that this novel that would validate a lot of feelings I had. However, it was actually something very small within the book that really struck me.
“Redefining Realness” is a memoir, but it’s charmingly objective and smart, loaded with as much thoughtfulness as it is with earnestness. In one part of the book Janet talks about being “seen.” But she doesn’t mean just in the physical sense. She means that to “see” someone, is to understand them, to recognise them on a deep psychic, neuro level that creates a bond of recognition and trust between two people. And although I had known that I was trans for some time, reading those lines that Mock wrote about meeting her best friend and knowing that this friend recognised those parts deep within her, were some of the last building blocks of that realisation. Only Janet’s story is just one transgender narrative. For me, my experiences with gender are equally as complex. I do not identify explicitly solely as a “woman.” At least, not at this point in my life. My experience departs from the western narrative that we often follow about manhood and womanhood. Gender identity is complex, and diverse, and is often shifting. In fact, I’m non-binary – a term used to describe someone who does not fit within either the realms of man or woman.
How the blurriness of gender informed my childhood
Ever since I was very young I’ve always felt like I was “different” to the boys around me. And yet for the life of me I didn’t have the resources or the language to express why this uncertainty existed. I understood quite deeply that the way they felt comfortable around each other was not the same way that I felt when I was around them. I knew that there was something within me that separated myself from them – it was a sense of sociality, but also of emotional recognition. I never accepted the models of boyhood that were often pushed upon me, because in my mind I didn’t really think I was a boy – so the way I responded to socialisation was radically different a lot of the people I knew. These things are hard to explain, because the truth is colonised societies don’t have models of experience or language that occupy grey areas and dust out all the uncertainties. It’s not useful for the heteropatriarchy to provide those options. It was always so hard to explain, and I definitely felt that to question that simply wasn’t an option. I never had the tools to do so. I felt ashamed that my favourite movies were cartoons like Thumbelina and The Swan Princess (which I now realise are worth being ashamed about, but only because they were so badly written and formulaic.) I often envisioned myself as the princesses in those movies, in the way that I imagine other girls did too. I thought their desires to find true love, to be recognised by a prince, was profoundly noble and most of all, completely understandable. On another level, I also loved how they presented themselves and how they responded to things, how comfortable they felt following their gut instincts. I admired their personhood. I recognised what society coded as “femininity” to be the things that often made those characters admirable.
I based a lot of my personality and livelihood upon the women in my life, as well as men and women who blurred lines of gender, because I thought that represented me more than the men did. And I think that’s what informed my personality growing up. My very best friends were often girls or boys that also felt the same things that I did. Clinical psychology tells us that the act of “seeing” someone, is more than just a concept in Janet Mock’s book. People with similar cognitive process, and even people who have had similar life experiences or traumas, can subconsciously recognise the same things in other people. You may know a few people who you immediately connected to or related to without even knowing why. The concept is marvellous in its strangeness. It’s one of the most fascinating parts of human psychology, in my opinion, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was adapted as a survival instinct.
As I grew up and entered my teenage years, I entered into a profound sense of discomfort with my body – something I have come to understand is, well, very common. I suppose the difference with me was that reactions to my body and voice changing felt profoundly crippling to me in a way that I didn’t see other people experiencing. It didn’t feel that the voice that developed was really “my” voice. I began depersonalising and feeling distant from myself in a way that’s hard to describe unless you’ve ever experienced it before. To many trans people, they may describe this phenomenon as “gender dysphoria.” Gender Dysphoria is loosely understood as a feeling of disassociation from your selfhood or body because you may not feel like your assigned gender is what you really are. This manifests differently for everyone – but for me, hearing my voice change from a high pitched tone to a deep bass sent me into an early existential crisis. I noticed the hair that was growing on my body and didn’t understand why it was doing it – it was if my brain was expecting one thing, and my body was doing the total opposite.
How non-binary identities separate themselves from the spectrum
To go into why the identity “non-binary” exists would be to go into a whole history of gender, and I have no intention of doing that. Non-binary is a term that, instead of focusing on shifting from one side of the scale to the other, focuses on breaking out of that mould altogether. Non-binary is a constant question mark, a continual challenge of gender in itself. And it’s a very valid experience and millions of people identify with that experience. To challenge one’s assigned gender identity is radical in a society obsessed with only two options. For me, I feel like I might as well find solace in that murky space and acknowledge that.
I can tell you that both sex and gender are not as one sided as you would believe. The way we define these things goes beyond everything we are taught to internalise since birth – we all have chromosomal differences, different secondary sex definitions, and there are so many people with genitals that go against what we expect of binary sexes. But gender is not sex, and sex is not gender. Non-binary people may choose to take hormones or have surgery to achieve their desired form, some may focus on social transitioning and put more emphasis on pronouns, some may change their name, or focus on a combination of all of the above. I know non-binary/transfeminine people who cultivate their gender expression as something less focused on surgery and hormones than something that happens in a more ephemeral manner.
Why it’s not just as simple as identifying as a trans woman
Some people might be confused that I do not identify as a trans woman – although there have been many times when I’ve been mistaken for one, or just been read as a woman/masculine woman. I feel like this isn’t a space for me to occupy while I still fit within a more murky gendered area. I feel like there isn’t the same life threatening urge to pass specifically as a woman within me that many of my friends experience. I’m happy to just be myself within whatever context. Also, the parts of me that others interpret as “masc” aren’t inauthentic parts of my personality. I still feel that my life has more complexity than what that label offers me, although that is definitely a part of me. Whether that’s the way I dress myself, the things I like and relate to, or the feelings I have about my body and internal processes and universes, those are still things that are valid. However, I’ve probably experienced the exact same things and felt the exact same things that trans women or more distinctly trans femme people have. It’s just that those things manifested in different ways from that point onward, and that I’ve found different ways for those ideas to be experienced tangibly within my life.
Of course, it just so happens that being in that psychological space doesn’t actually happen that often. I also don’t feel a life-crushing need to present in a femme way, to define myself in that context 100% of the time or to be seen in that light, although to be honest, these things change completely from day to day. That isn’t the integral focus of my gender identity, though it’s certainly a big part of it. Many of my interests are categorised by society as “femme” and are thus assigned less value. Femininity is seen in many modes of feminism to be inherently repressive, but “femininity” has also existed outside of capitalist patriarchy in different cultures in ways that have been seen as powerful, spiritually respectable and valid on their own terms. I often feel that on different days I am in a different emotional space, and sometimes I feel like I occupy a different sort of space within my brain. These things are hard to explain to anyone who has never felt them, at least when it specifically comes to gender identity. As of yet, there has not been many links to what causes someone to be transgender, though it is hypothesised that it comes from a specific gene.
We do not have to agree upon the “origins” of that sense of self to agree that it is ethically obligatory to support and recognise sexed and gendered modes of being that are crucial to a person’s well-being.” – Judith Butler
In that context, I suppose what separates different trans people is how they respond to their dysphoria, or just general unease with their gender assignment at birth, and how they move on from that point. There are no rules to being trans, and a medicalised “dysphoria” should not be seen as the key to being an “authentic” trans person.
When I talk to my friends who are non-binary, I relate to their stories. I empathise with the way they felt growing up, with the way they move through their day-to-day life now, and with their feelings in general. There’s only so much I can describe, because I do feel like a lot of these feelings are ephemeral, but it’s a label that fits me and accurately describes my internal worlds. I feel like calling myself non-binary was a way to opt out of the trap of maleness. It was a way to distance myself from those concepts, and in addition to that, those social spaces, and feel proud of my complexities. To some people, they may call this gender-fluidity, or being genderqueer. Those terms carry different connotations and histories and those labels have different roles that work for some people which are often categorised by a time and place, or association to a certain culture or sub-culture, but for me, the label of “non-binary” is just one I use to recognise my many personalities, and how those worlds often manifest on the outside. And those things are absolutely valid.
People who fit outside of the gender spectrum have existed forever. In our anglicised, European language, we gender almost everything with masculine and feminine adjectives and pronouns, but other languages are very different. Some languages use gender neutral pronouns to address all individuals. In addition, our understanding of “male and female” is one that is firmly rooted in colonisation. There are many non-European cultures that have existed happily alongside individuals in their community that see themselves outside of this binary. And there’s documentation of people like this going back hundreds, if not thousands of years.
When people see me, they may not immediately read me as trans. But it often even depends on the day. I would say 20% of people see me as a boy, 70% see me as something in between, and 10% read me as a girl with a mullet. But those things only tell half the story of gender identity – they don’t tell of my experiences, of how I’ve internalised mixed messages about women and men, that I’ve felt a profound disconnection from my world without images of myself to look to, to relate to. And those things are just as powerful than the way the outside world might treat me. I would say that my personal perception of myself, my emotional state, are more indicative of how I’m going to act on any given day, and I think many people would relate to that.
Non-binary is an excellent descriptor for me because it accurately describes the sum of my life experiences within the world of gender. It recognises my past, present and my future. It acknowledges the pain I’ve felt from a colonised, Australian view of gender and how that has impacted me throughout my life. It recognises the blurriness of my experience and it allows me to sit inside those uncomfortable questions, not necessarily looking for answers. And my identity is still real.
Be a better ally
We have a responsibility to disengage somewhat from the idea of assuming someone’s gender based purely on their physical appearance. Sometimes it doesn’t give a full scope of their life, their experiences, and how they’ve responded to the world around them. There are many practical ways to being a good ally. It may be using neutral pronouns as much as possible before you know somebody, by realising that there is a huge population of people who have not experienced socialisation in the way it’s currently understood, and that dissociation and gender dysphoria are often crippling and can lead people to suicide. It’s been proven that the ability to express one’s gender identity honestly and even medically transitioning leads to better mental health amongst trans people. By adapting to a fairer, more modern understanding of gender identity and by listening to trans/GNC/NB people when they tell their stories, we can create better spaces for people who are disenfranchised by the gender binary.
What It Means To Be Non-Binary And Why Gender Is About More Than Appearance appeared first on The Vocal.