On gender and identity

I have been reading other people’s writing about gender and identity for years. Absorbing it quietly from a distance, but recently I read an essay by someone I respect that described their own relationship with gender with a kind of comfortable clarity I found myself envying. Not the conclusions they reached, which are different from mine, but the confidence of having conclusions at all.

I am writing this because I think I owe it to myself to try.

Most people who know me do not know this about me. That is a deliberate choice, and it is also a kind of exhaustion. Carrying something quietly for long enough becomes its own habit. You learn to route around the places where it might show. You learn to absorb the casual comments that people make without thinking, the ones that assume things about you that are not quite true, and to let them pass without correction because correction requires explanation and explanation requires a version of yourself you are not ready to produce yet.

Someone close to me made a comment recently about my gender clinic appointment. They were not being cruel and I do not think they understood how much weight the appointment carries for me, or how much weight the comment landed with. They probably moved on from the moment before I had finished processing it. I am still processing it.

This is what it is like to be mostly invisible about something that is not actually small.

I identify as non-binary.

That sentence is easier to write than to say. I have written it here, in this space that is mine, where I can take the time to explain what I mean rather than watching someone’s face rearrange itself around a word they were not expecting.

Non-binary means, simply, that I do not fit neatly inside either of the two boxes that gender is usually divided into. Not a denial of gender, not an absence of it, but something that exists outside the binary architecture that most people navigate without ever questioning it. I am not a man, not in the way the word assumes. I am not a woman either, though some days I am closer to that end of things than others.

What I am is somewhere in between, or perhaps somewhere else entirely. I am still working out the precise geography. The gender clinic appointment is part of that work.

I did not arrive here quickly.

There is a particular kind of retrospective clarity that comes when you finally have words for something. You look back across years and notice all the moments you deflected or compartmentalised or told yourself you were just being dramatic. The feelings were always there. What changed was having a framework that made them legible.

I spent a long time telling myself that everyone felt like this. That the discomfort was ordinary. That there was nothing specific here, just a general low-level dissatisfaction with the body that most people experience and most people learn to live with. Maybe I was just anxious. Maybe I was just tired.

I was not just tired.

I have a daughter. She is small and new and completely indifferent to my gender in the way that only very young children can be. She needs warmth and presence and consistency. She does not care what I am called or how I am read by the world outside our house. She just needs me here.

She is, unexpectedly, part of why I am writing this now. Because her arrival changed something in me about deferral. I spent years assuming I would figure this out later, when circumstances were different, when the moment was right. She made me understand that later is a direction, not a destination. The moment is always going to be inconvenient.

I am not publicly out. I am out to very few people, and the experience of being out to those people has been mixed, which is probably part of why the circle has stayed small. The people who have responded well have been important to me. The people who have not have left a mark that takes longer to process than I would like.

I am not interested in converting anyone to a particular view of gender. I am not interested in winning arguments. I am interested in being able to exist in my own life without managing everyone else’s comfort about how I exist.

That is a modest ambition and its taking longer than I expected.

Beeps, whose essay prompted this one, concludes that they do not care about gender: that the body is a vessel, the mind is what matters, and neither male nor female has particular claim on them. I find that position genuinely admirable and genuinely different from mine.

I do care. I care in a way that has cost me something over the years. The caring is not distress about the category itself, it is distress about the gap between how I understand myself and how I am understood by the world. That gap is the thing I am trying to close, slowly, in the ways available to me.

The gender clinic is one of those ways.

I do not know yet what it will produce. I am trying to hold that uncertainty without letting it become another form of deferral. Whatever comes from it, I will have shown up and asked, which is more than I was able to do for a long time.

This is a first public statement. It is incomplete because I am incomplete. I expect I will write about this again as things develop, probably with more clarity than I have right now.

For now: I am non-binary, I am mostly hidden, and I am trying.

That is where I am.