Say Hello to Your Newest He/They
I live in Bushwick and have way too many tote bags *not* to claim non-binary identity.
One night, when I was nine years old, sitting on the couch with my parents watching our usual TV line-up (the news, followed by Jeopardy!, followed by Wheel of Fortune), I mustered the courage to ask something that I had been mulling over ever since starting the fourth grade just a few days earlier: “What if I’m not really a boy?”
My mom, sitting on the opposite end of the couch, looked up at me, cocked her head to the side, and paused before replying, “What do you mean?”
Besides starting at a new school—the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades were considered intermediate in our school district—my classmates and I were also told that we would be changing for PE. Gone were the days of us taking gym in the clothes we had worn to school. Starting that year, we would be required to bring a change of clothes—our grades depended on it.
I was mortified. Changing in front of other boys made me dread PE. While every other boy in the locker room seemed fine—comfortable, even!—with seeing each other almost naked, I tried to make myself as small as possible. While they teased and prodded each other, muffling their laughter in between being told to settle down by one of the PE teachers in an adjacent office, I sequestered myself to the farthest corner possible. I changed at a speed that rivaled NASCAR’s fastest pit crew; the feeling of being exposed for longer than a few seconds made every cell in my body feel like it was trying to scramble for an exit as if thrown by centrifugal force.
At the time, I didn’t know why I felt this way, only that it felt wrong—I felt wrong.
I didn’t know how to answer my mom. I guess I was hoping for some miracle, as though my question would prompt my mom to re-evaluate my gender and come to the conclusion that I’m not a boy. Boom, gender identity crisis averted. But, since that didn’t happen, I dropped the conversation out of fear of entering territory I was not yet ready for, and because I just didn’t have the proper language at my disposal. I guess I decided that I was stuck being a boy.
***
My relationship with gender remained, for the most part, complicated. Even after I graduated from high school and came out as queer, I still didn’t know how to internalize my gender. Gender variance was all around me, especially as I became an active participant in New York City nightlife; it was something to be played with, explored beyond what has been institutionally inscribed. Contradictions, at least what would be deemed contradictory by the world outside our community—wearing a gown and sporting a mustache, for example—were encouraged; bonus points if you could get passersby in traditional office garb to raise their eyebrows at you.
By the time I had many trans, gender non-conforming, and other friends who were deeply devoted to their inner selves and who lived openly in support of their inner dialogues, I was still figuring out my own. I started by embracing androgyny, experimenting with gender presentation, and allowing myself the space to define my style. But those were all outward expressions, and, while they hushed the white noise that had become my internal uncertainty about my gender, it was only temporary, a placeholder for the path of self-reflection on which I had yet to embark.
I knew for certain that I wasn’t trans. But I was also uncomfortable with calling myself a man. (I still wince at being called “sir” or “bro.”) I embraced my feminine traits, but also liked to present as a boy sometimes. Was I genderqueer? What is genderqueer???? I was a little bit of this, but not a little bit of that. I liked this. I didn’t like that. All of this, but without this one thing. Confused? I WAS, TOO, BABE!
The one thing I did know, for certain, was that there were gender-affirming options out there. Besides medically transitioning, which, again, was not what I needed to affirm my gender, although I am happy that those options exist for those who do—not want, need, and there is research correlating reduced psychological distress and suicidal ideation with gender-affirming surgeries, all of which should be free because healthcare should be free, BUT I DIGRESS (for now)—there were things I could do that would help me reconcile the inside with the outside. But I only had one piece of the puzzle.
As much as these visible presentations of self helped me understand myself better—and helped me broadcast to the world that any nomenclature related to me and my gender was, at the very least, buffering—there was still a disconnect between the internal and the external. And it wouldn’t be for another few years that I would finally start to achieve a sense of totality that would validate the person I was—and to become.
***
My partner came out as non-binary in 2020. I watched as they began to rediscover themself, witnessed as the way they moved through the world changed. It wasn’t just their pronouns that changed; it was as if their very being permeated a different current, like static energy filling the air before a thunderstorm.
I watched them reframe the way they saw and thought about the world according to their newly achieved sense of self, revisited what they liked, what they didn’t. They started to dive deeper into gender theory, my apartment at the time accruing more texts written by various writers and thinkers in addition to the Judith Butler and bell hooks that already occupied my shelves—texts that I, too, started to read and revisit alongside them.
I watched them give themself the permission to experiment, from the way that they would talk about themself to the clothes that they chose to adorn themself with. They started to play around with make-up, their face aglow every time a new palette would come in the mail. Their face became their canvas, a reinterpretation of their physical features not accessible to them before this most-recent actualization of themself. It’s like their identity became a game of Choose Your Own Adventure, but in a way that was fun and exciting, and less of a burden, overwhelmed by the world's grossly archaic need to define, categorize, and limit out of an instilled fear of otherness stemming from Western cisheteropatriarchal values since time immemorial. (Sorry, but we gotta go there—and often!)
I watched them as they relearned themself.
A year later, I would turn thirty. I love being in my thirties. I highly recommend it. I’ve never been more confident in my life, have never been more comfortable in my skin. I know my purpose. I’ve acknowledged my talent, and, more importantly, have spoken it out loud, something I deemed an abomination to vocalize in reference to myself merely a few years ago. I’m not as insecure as I used to be—all the benefits you’ve heard anyone who’s ever turned thirty extol.
And yet...
While, in many ways, I was deeply rooted in myself, having established a strong foundation from which to live my life, I still felt the need to unearth something. That something felt like a flower that was trying to poke its head out from the ground, but the ground was still frozen. Now, I had the power to thaw the ground, so that the flower—the version of me I was hoping to become—could finally bloom.
***
I started by changing my pronouns to he/they on Instagram. No announcement, nothing formal beyond a quick screenshot to my Instagram stories like, “new pronoun just dropped,” and that’s it. But even doing something as simple as that opened up something within me. Immediately, I felt like there was created in me the space I had been looking for—a space I needed—ever since I can remember. I felt something within me shift.
A few weeks later, when my Twitter account would get hacked by NFT scammers, I texted a friend with whom I share hundreds of mutuals to ask if she could please tweet that I had gotten hacked, and to please report my account as such. She kindly obliged my request, and, when I saw her tweet, I saw that she had used they/them pronouns when referring to me. At first, I almost didn’t even notice. Then I noticed that I almost didn’t notice. It felt natural to me, almost like they/them has always been something that has applied to me.
It was at that moment that I felt like I finally found the right key to unlocking the door that had—up until then—remained closed to me. It was like I was finally scratching the itch I hadn't been able to scratch. The piece of furniture that you had to take and flip the other way to successfully assemble. Shall I go on? “We get it,” I can hear you saying.
There is a power in our pronouns, and anyone who thinks otherwise is, at best, uninformed, and, at worst, close-minded and unwilling to engage with anything outside of their very limited worldview. For me, he/they allows me the space to put all the things I am—or think I am—side-by-side. They can co-exist. It allows me to explore manhood within the context of queerness, to move away from normative masculinity associated with power, greed, excess, and violence. It’s a way for me to honor complexity, inviting me to lean into it as opposed to resisting it.
Most of all, it has, finally, allowed me to internalize my gender in a way that makes me feel like I can explore it without losing sight of myself. It has given me the opportunity to relearn myself, a process that no one—regardless of identity markers—should shy away from. If you have the chance to grow—to flourish in ways that will not just enrich your life, enrich you, but also those around you—why not take it?
Credits
Cover art by: James Jeffers
Editorial assistant: Jesse Adele
You can follow my other unhinged missives by following me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. My debut memoir, Born to Be Public, is out now.