Happy Non-Binary People's Day

Back in 2013, when I began to medically transition, being non-binary wasn't an option. To get hormones, one had to convince a primary care doctor and two mental health professionals of one's gender identity, including a psychiatrist. The only recognized identities were male and female.

So, I didn't tell the doctors I felt more like "something else" I didn't have a word for than I felt like a man. I told my friends. But my doctors were more like the guards at Buckingham Palace who will seriously mess you up if you step past the "do not cross" boundary they exist to protect.

This bias in medicine led to my coercive sterilization in 2014. In short, it all came down to my obligation to "prove" that I was "really a man" to my doctor, who was unconvinced of my sincerity.

I didn't know I was Intersex when I first walked into the doctor's office asking to transition. Surprised me as much as anyone. But it turned out my body had never made any testosterone, and this lack of hormones had been the reason for the worst puberty ever -- complete with clockwork-reliable vomiting spells, the biggest breasts in all of fourth grade (including the teachers), and severe idiopathic muscle and joint pain from age 11 onward.

All I knew, on that day I walked into the doctor's office in Seattle, was that being a woman was really not working out for me. I wasn't willing to live like that anymore. Since the only other option was to be a man, I guessed I ought to try it.

I drew the above picture in 2013 with pencil. In hindsight, it seems abundantly clear that both male and female identities felt like prison to me. My body being defined by the male/female binary left me feeling unrecognizable, faceless, and lacking the agency that should have been in my hands.

At the time, though, I was making the best I could within the limitations of the binary, colonial system in which I existed.

I lived as a man for the next five years. Boy, was that intoxicating.

There's a phrase I learned from addiction recovery folks: No amount of something that is almost-enough will ever be enough.

My voyage into masculinity became deeply toxic, and broke me, by the time I was 29. Manhood wasn't authentic for me. It was compliance. It was willful assimilation into a way of life that pre-concludes I can't exist.

So there I was, existing, and feeling like the world's biggest failure.

I couldn't be a woman. I couldn't be a man. If those were the only two options, then I couldn't even be. Could I?

After almost 3 years of homelessness, I picked myself up by the bootstraps and got a CDL to start trucking. It put a roof over my head, put a paycheck in my hand, and gave me 11 hours a day while driving to re-think my life without anyone else's influence. 

I got to listen to audiobooks, podcasts, and the sound of my own heartbeat. I got to reconsider everything I thought I knew about anything, especially gender. 

In 2019, in Arkansas, I found a doctor who was far more understanding than the one in Seattle had been. She prescribed me a low dose of estrogen. Then we gradually re-introduced testosterone until I found a dose that felt stable rather than euphoric. Turns out, I need a low dose of both. A cisnormative dose of either hormone wrecks my body like a drunk 8 year old taking the family car for a joyride.

Because I am non-binary. 

Maybe next International Non-Binary People's Day we'll talk more what it means that "non-binary" is a wildly all-encompassing term that includes every identity which is not female and not male.

There are thousands of words in Native tongues that get erased by that casual grouping; thousands of ways of being beyond the binary which the English language refuses to name.

“I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming – making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn’t need to hate. That’s why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished.”

-- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door

But for this year? Let's double down on celebrating being alive. May you always be Named and known.

Thank you for being here and for joining me on this beautiful, wild journey.

Love,
Brandyn
(they/them)