My Nonbinary Coming Out Story

I posted this first on Facebook today, sent it to a few family members, and now I’m putting it here.

So. Okay. Am I really going to do this on social media? Yeah, WTF. I am. Here’s my #nonbinary coming out story, as far as I can understand it to date.

My sense of being disconnected from “being a girl” dates all the way back to early childhood, but I never wanted to “be a boy” either. I just wanted to be me–whatever that was–but as I was assigned female at birth, I tried in many ways to do the best I could with what I was given. But in my imagination I was usually Captain Nemo, Sir Lancelot, or Doctor Doolittle. The most femme I got was “Pirate Queen.” And I did like to draw princesses with huge treasure chests of jewels. My Madame Alexander doll was a “mechanical genius” and inventor–so not your ordinary female doll persona.

Puberty was weird. For a couple of years I wore a woolen peacoat year round in Southern CA, to prevent being harrassed about my breasts. (That shit was non-stop.) I was sexually active in my early teens, thanks to an 18-year old boyfriend, but I do remember really kind of checking out most of the time during sex, even though I did like the attention and physical affection. It was kind of like floating above or outside my body. There were traumatic moments later on, not with him, but with others. I think being on the edge of some kind of neurodiversity also added to the dissociation. At least I grew up in the 60s so that my lack of understanding about how to do girl world was masked by being a freewheeling “hippie chick.” It was okay to break rules, rebel.

But I kept being drawn to the so-called “androgynous” fashions and rock stars of the time, and beings who showed up in science fiction stories, like the Spacers in Samuel Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah.” I remember a Richard Brautigan novel where a young girl is freaked out by her developing, voluptuous body but ends up dealing with it by becoming a stripper. And (during my teens) there was the relationship with a boy who was prettier than I was but in other ways I couldn’t tell us apart. He wore my clothes sometimes but I didn’t wear his… There were all kinds of little sign posts along the way that told me I was not completely comfortable in my gender assignment, but there was nothing I could do or change about these very deep feelings.

Fast forward through the relationships which positioned me as female in various ways, through the weird metallic feelings of pregnancy hormones, the challenges (and rewards) of childrearing, and the utter chaos of the menopause. I have a friend and colleague who coined the term “reluctantly gendered” a few years ago and that term struck home for me as a first dim “hey…what if I’m also…?” But I kept those thoughts secret and I kept them safe, kind of like the One Ring that Frodo has to schlep around until he throws it into the volcano. At the time I was in a relationship with someone who would often say, “I’m a boy and you’re a girl” and I’d always recoil inside, having a thought like “well, not actually” though I’d outwardly agree. Like what else was I gonna do? And, deeper still, “who am us anyway?” (A Firesign Theater quote).

It’s hard to move sometimes from the known to the unknown.

I credit a lot of things and people and influences for helping me along: my patron deity, genderqueer Norse Loki; trans, nonbinary, and questioning people I know; internet resources and books; and so on. And writing my Ornamental Hermits novels has allowed me to experience the genders of my characters, humans and Elves, in imaginary ways.

But perhaps the state of not being “partnered” for the last four years and the solitude of this pandemic time has been as important as anything else. Without the demands of gendered performances, I have come to know myself, though without an imagined shape or form to “transition” into. I only know that I’d cheerfully part with my secondary sex characteristics if I could, and perhaps even with some primary ones as well, and have no desire to acquire any others.

I like long hair, makeup, and cleanshaven faces on most people — including myself — so perhaps I’ll always appear “femme.” Or not. I have no idea. I don’t know where I’m going but now at last I know what I am not.
There: consider that “assigned female” thing tossed into the nearest volcano. (There’s one across the lake from me!)

(Pronouns ze/zir but she/her can be tolerable, sometimes.)