I was recently asked (not for the first or last time), what does nonbinary mean as a gender? There isn’t a one size fits all answer.
I can tell you nonbinary (also non-binary, enby and NB) isn’t about genitals, which should define nobody unless that’s what they want, but personally I’d hate to be defined by my sex organs. Wouldn’t you? Like all genders, non-binary resides in the spirit and mind, not the body. The gender sense for a nonbinary person is of not fitting into the male/female binary.
Although nonbinary comes under trans for some, for others it doesn’t. For me, it’s a different experience to the struggles my trans friends and clients have with gender dysphoria. There are commonalities but there are also differences. I heard only today of the term gender euphoria as opposed to dysphoria and can totally connect with that, having clear memory of the joy that came with learning there was a term, a label, for what I’d felt my whole life. Some people don’t like labels, yet we all live with many, not least of those being the word human. I am glad to be me.
In being able to embrace nonbinary as a perfect-fit description for how I feel and think, my identity became clearer to me and I was able to communicate it to others. I was empowered, energised. A measure of self-confidence was received into myself. I became less often depressed. The lifelong sense of being alien, isolated, something else unlike others… All that went away. A process began there and then of re-evaluating my entire life, forgiving myself for things in the past and forgiving others for not knowing. It’s not a given, but had they known they might have behaved better towards me in many situations that led to painful memories.
I can speak only for myself, of course, when it comes to how I see myself. I do sometimes refer to gender-variance, which covers all of us outside the cisgendered binary to some degree. I don’t have incongruence between my sense of self and physical being. but have experienced it when dealing with the expectations of others that I had to behave as a boy, and later man, were expected to behave in society. How dull (specifically in relation to me, no one else) and ‘not me’ that was.
There are expectations within the gay community, too – the labels of top, bottom, fem, masc. I’ve always felt a need to be free of that male/female thing, which is, to me, rigid and prescriptive. My whole life, I didn’t have words to describe what was going on within me, not until a shift in language came into public discourse in recent years and awareness grew (as did hateful, oppressive activism against all those who challenge gender orthodoxy).
As a teenager I was drawn to role models who subverted expectations on gender as well as sexuality. Annie Lennox, Boy George, Marc Almond and more. I thought, for a time, that I should have been born a woman, because of my interests and feelings and an innate sense I had that the man label didn’t sit right with me. No label did. There was gay, given my attraction to those of the same sex. But that was never the whole story. I knew there was more to me than that.
Never once, though, did I want to be or feel myself to be a female. I didn’t want to be defined as a man or a woman. I didn’t connect with either in any way I could call invested. I was very much a floating voter – or more accurately, a centrist, I suppose. I wanted to be me, simple as. This is not androgyny, though. That’s something else. You might be androgynous but that doesn’t mean you’re nonbinary and nonbinary people don’t have to appear androgynous.
I know my parenting drive feels more motherly than fatherly to me, which is precisely what I think people are seeing when they say I’ll be a great dad. I’m not going to be one, that’s my choice. I have plenty of rescue animals to care for. I help young people all the time in my work as a counsellor. We corral people into these obligations, responsibilities, behavioural boxes and social conventions using labels and immense, enduring pressure, thus ensuring a man can’t be a mother, can’t act in a motherly way.
Why the hell not? I could be a mother and father, as and when the qualities arbitrarily assigned to those labels are called for. Ask any single parent if they are specific to the task in hand – loving their child, doing what needs to be done – or directed by the opinions of others as to what they would or shouldn’t do based on their assigned gender.
Almost every human characteristic is genderised unnecessarily. These notions of protective fathers and nurturing mothers are great as far as they go – but what if you want to be nurturing and protective? Are we to think men are somehow more capable of protection, less capable of nurturing, with the reverse being said about women? Tosh. We all have access to the same emotional toolkit. It isn’t gendered. It is gender orthodoxy that has many believing they don’t have access to the entire toolkit. It is oppression and it is a lie.
The essence of nonbinary for me is that I’ll be who I am, what I am. I am not my external appearance. I am not my shoe size. I am not my subculture. I am not going to be what anyone else wants. I am definitely not having every aspect of my life ultimately defined by my sex. My sex is not my gender. My sex is a biological fact but gender is not. People are remarkably invested in sex and gender, of course, often conflating the two (wrongly). I’m more interested in who people are, what they are doing, how they’re feeling.
I was aware of how political an act it was going to be to stand up and declare myself nonbinary. I had no problem with my birth names other than they were gendered, applicable only to boys. The names I have now can be assigned to anyone of any gender (yes, Xander is predominantly male in usage but far from exclusively so). I like my chosen names and feel they suit me better. I don’t care what others think as long as my friends and chosen family are supportive, which they are.
I’m no stranger to bigotry and people who don’t want to live and let live, having come out as gay in the intensely homophobic late 1980s. I see that bile directed in the 21st Century against the trans community. Then as now, for all of us: my life, my body, my mind, my gender. What does it have to do with anyone else? We all have power and personal agency to fight for a better, more inclusive world. I have to believe we will get there, eventually. I am too aware that there are people who don’t share this goal.
Am I fully where I want to be? No. Not yet. We are all works in progress, after all. I can rock a skirt – i love skirts, so practical, so expressive – hey, I’ve got good legs – but that’s in areas I feel safe, such as on Canal Street in Manchester, which is where what’s known as the Gay Village is located (it’s there for all the LGBTQ+ community, though). I’d like to live in a country where we can all wear what we want and be safe from fear in doing so. I’m pretty sure there isn’t such a country yet, but that word ‘yet’ is where I place my hope for the future.
For now, if you want to be an ally to nonbinary people and seek to understand and support us better, Stonewall has some excellent information for you. If I’m your therapist, ever, or a friend, you can be assured that I live and work in a fully gender-variant and trans-inclusive way. I’m informed on the issues, the politics, the arguments. My focus is on helping without prejudice or judgement. That’s it. That’s my guarantee, whoever you are.
xph therapy offers integrative counselling, which means working with multiple therapy types, including CBT, psychotherapeutic and person-centred to develop a therapeutic pathway just for you, whatever outcome you’re hoping to achieve. Get in touch in a variety of ways. See the contact page for more info.