Once upon a time, on a sunny September day, 2019…
“I’m non-binary!”
THE END!
By Jennifer Tyler.
Just kidding. Bit more to it than that. But I understand how, from a cisgender, heterosexual or questioning perspective, “coming out” stories can seem very instant, solid and almost intimidating. How does one discover they’re queer? Is it like the famous ‘lightbulb moment’ analogy, instant epiphany beaming out of every pore? Do you just wake up one morning and know? “Huh. I’m non-binary. Cool. Now I need to pee!” Does a friendly squirrel bound up to your door, a brightly coloured rainbow scroll tucked between their teeth, quickly joined by four squirrel friends as they all break out into a vibrant “WELCOME HOME!” squeaky song and dance number? I WISH. Maybe these examples are true for some people (if anyone had the squirrel example, CALL ME.) For me, it was a long process of leaning into uncertainty. Not knowing, not having any set answers and eventually identifying myself with the fun rhyming label: “gender pending.” And as someone prone to anxiety and obsessive intrusive thoughts, this was both an incredibly challenging and ultimately powerful journey. A journey that does not end, nor begin with the opening quotation, which was in fact said to me by my sibling when they came out to me as non-binary.
My first response to my sibling’s statement: Genuine Surprise! Didn’t see it coming! My second response was: Awesome! Excitement and elation, seeing the wonderful impact it was having on my sibling’s well-being. They had seemed noticeably more relaxed when they visited me that previous summer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where I was performing my first solo show. More joyful, grounded and content. Then suddenly, like a thunderbolt of lightning (“very very frightening”), my third response - unshared, under the surface, landing in my brain with a THUD: Fuck. That’s me. And yes I include the above quote as a fun musical reference from a beloved gender-bending icon, but the sad fact is it WAS very, very frightening. I wish I could say it wasn’t. But at that moment, my deep inner knowing was shrouded with fear and dread of how destabilising this new-found knowledge could be to my life, how much it could open me up to stigma, doubt, hostility. I swallowed those feelings and continued to focus on my sibling, celebrating the moment with them, none of those thoughts entering my mind about their journey (isn’t it strange the double standards we can set for ourselves sometimes?) But I left feeling lost at sea, turbulent waters in my gut, knowing the ship that would eventually (hopefully!) rescue me from this dread would be leading me to a very different life than the ship I’d fallen from.
The truth is that, when I track back, none of this was actually new to me. It was to my consciousness but this internal conflict had been present throughout my entire life and had long been leading me closer to the point of realisation. That Edinburgh Fringe Festival show? It originally contained a song exploring the binary understanding of gender as a limiting, damaging social construct (translated through me imagining a sneak-attack on shop-floors, destroying “men’s” and “women’s” sections in a gender-bending rebellion!) The song was cut during the rehearsal process on advice from my team, who believed it belonged in my next show which should focus on this subject in its entirety, noticing how passionately I talked about it. That September day in 2019? I had chosen to spend the afternoon leading up to seeing my sibling at the Kiss My Genders exhibition at the Southbank Centre. I had wandered around on my own, fascinated by and in awe of all of the stories and art shared. I bought a glittery rainbow lips decoration and a trans symbol badge which I pinned on my bag. A gesture I thought was as an ally, but which would later reveal itself as something deeper.
I had already come out as pansexual a few years before. The spark for this ignited when I saw Redcar (known then as Christine & the Queens) perform Tilted for the first time on The Graham Norton Show in 2016. It’s hard to put it into words, but…I just got it. It spoke to me more deeply than any musical performance I had seen before: the song style, the lyrics, the dancing, Redcar's clothes, the way he held himself. After another long, sadly fearful journey (am I gay? Am I bi? Am I straight? I DON’T KNOW AND I’M SCARED TO TELL!), I saw that Redcar described himself as pansexual, as did another musical idol of mine, Janelle Monae, and that seemed to speak to my experience. It’s interesting that pansexual resonated more than bisexual and I think that may speak to my hidden away non-binary truth, the differentiating feature being “pan” referring to attraction “regardless of gender”. It is important to note, however, that people do use both bisexual and pansexual as meaning the above definition. All of this is so deeply personal to each individual and can be so beautifully multi-faceted, so unique and ever-evolving, so not binary. People can be pansexual and cis-gendered, and bisexual and non-binary – whatever rings true to you is what you are!
I’d like to say coming out as pansexual was a hugely cathartic moment, but looking back, it did feel like something was missing. It didn’t feel like the completed queer puzzle of my existence (not that anything is ever complete!) But being anything other than a woman didn’t feel like an option until recently. I was born in 1989 and non-binary was not a word in my vocabulary until a couple of years ago, even though genders beyond the binary have been celebrated in cultures outside of narrow western colonial attitudes for centuries. Through my school days, I knew NO queer people. Which is statistically impossible and in retrospect evidentially not true, so, to rephrase, I knew no openly queer people. And the sad fact is that the one person I remember being rumoured to be gay at secondary school was made fun of, isolated, deemed “strange”. God, that breaks my heart. My best friend who went to the same school is gay and we talk often about the mental health impact of growing up in a world where queer culture was silenced, looked down upon, feared.
It was also a GIRL’S secondary school. Let’s sit on that for a hot second. I remember feeling so free at my mixed primary school. I had to wear a skirt but I wore a white open-necked shirt like the boys. The binary gender line didn’t feel as set in stone pre-puberty. I could run around and be who I wanted to be (to an extent, I was bullied at primary school but that’s a story for another essay!) My free spirit shrunk during the bullying and then shrunk even smaller entering a girl’s secondary school.
Aged 3…
Quietly, they tip-toe to their sibling’s bedroom
Whilst photos are taken downstairs
First day of school
Brand new uniform
(Uniform (noun): a particular set of clothes that has to be worn by the members of the same organisation or group of people
Uniform (adj): the same; not changing or different in any way)
They opens the drawers
There is a serenity to what they see
Years later they will claim that dressing up in their sibling’s clothes as “their new uniform” was just for attention
But there was a longing
A want for what they didn’t have A confusion as to why the clothes felt and looked so different to theirs
A comfort in wearing them
A joy A fun
A freedom
And so comes…the “tomboy” years
(An extract from the poem, ‘Gender Pending’, that I wrote during my gender pending period, April 2020)
I threw myself into drama and performing at secondary school as I always had done and tried to ignore all the expectations put upon me, all the social conventions I didn’t relate to, burying my confusion and isolation feelings deep down. The lumps growing on my chest felt violating and annoying but I just went along with it, I didn’t seem to have a choice. When I try and describe my experience of gender dysphoria, now I can see it for what it was, I gravitate towards the following analogy. Imagine an annoying fly buzzing around you that you have to keep batting away. That is getting louder and becoming more of a frequent visitor the older you get. That starts to get stuck in your hair, pulling you into activities and actions that don’t make sense to you. That starts to burrow into your brain, trying to convince you that this is how it should be. You should feel strange and uncomfortable in the gender you’ve been assigned and that’s life, now get on with it! “Ladies!” Bat away. “Girls!” Bat way. “You’re a woman now.” Bat away, bat away, bat away. “Let’s spend hours doing our make-up and hair before the school disco!” Try to copy, re-apply because you have no idea what you’re doing and try to ignore the urgent, frustrated call from your soul to “stop wasting precious time you could be using to tear up the dance floor!!” But also hearing the insecurity fly buzzing away at the same time: “Come on! You should be better at this. You’re being weird. No one is going to like you or fancy you like this. Step up to this plate that doesn’t fully represent you and just endure it.” It breaks my heart now to look back on how much of my individual free spirit as a young, pre-pubescent child was stolen through this process, how little I enjoyed secondary school discos compared to primary school discos despite dancing being my FAVOURITE thing to do.
As an adult in my 20s, I started to feel incredibly guilty at how much I was resisting femininity. I was an ardent feminist! I was outraged at the way women had and were being treated. The misogyny, the sexism, the abuse that sadly if you are assigned female at birth, you ALL experience to different degrees through your life. I adore The Guilty Feminist podcast and yet I found I was struggling to relate to a lot of the “guilty” aspects. For reference, the podcast explores “our noble goals as 21st century feminists and the hypocrisies and insecurities which undermine them”, each episode beginning with the legendary host, Deborah Frances-White, and her guest host sharing hilarious personal confessions, helping them and the audience to laugh off any harboured guilt: “I’m a feminist, but…” My difficulty in relating to a lot of these confessions wasn’t down to my being morally pure and 100% perfect at all times (I know this because I have struggled with obsessive thoughts around this subject so am highly attuned to its specific triggers.) It’s because, frankly, I’m not a woman. And that does not mean that those who are women don’t differ hugely in the way they relate to the podcast, behave or express themselves. I’m sure there are woman who may feel the same as me on this particular point. I’m sure there are people of other genders who highly relate to the “guilty” aspects! (Again, nothing is binary.) But for me personally, it felt like my deep inner knowing was starting to whisper to me again from underneath so many layers of “Just get on with it! Don’t make a fuss! Don’t be different!” that familiar, subconsciously distressing call: something doesn’t feel right. Feels alien. Confused. Unsettled within. (I feel it is worth noting here, that I now I feel at home in my gender, I am and feel able to be an even more committed, passionate feminist than ever before. Our allyship, activism and support for one another across all our intersectional identities and oppressions under the patriarchy is the power that can give us more hope for a real and more immediate equal future.)
This time, the call led to more external manifestations of my confusion. I immersed myself in books around the subject of gender - The Gender Games by Juno Dawson was revelatory for me. I would get my friends copies and brought it up in any conversation I could. I found myself inexplicably sobbing at the interval of Kinky Boots in front of my rather confused parents. The musical hadn’t yet hit its emotional beats but the gender-bending joy of so many drag queens storming the stage was so emotionally releasing for me, although I couldn’t find the words or the reasoning for it at the time. More little subtle moments like this continued to occur, leading right to the Edinburgh Fringe 2019, where I determinedly said to my producer over drinks after our final show, “My next show HAS to be about gender, sexuality and intimacy anxiety and I HAVE to call it ‘Gender Pending’!”
But I cannot stress enough, in the moment on that September day, how much the idea of me actually being non-binary felt brand new to me. There had been one slightly more conscious moment, arriving a month before in Edinburgh when my producer casually said to me one day, “Yeh keep the line as “us women” ‘coz you’re a woman right?” And I remember how abruptly and almost violently that question hit me. My chest clenched up, my whole body tensed, almost as a physical manifestation of the inner thought, that was only a quick flicker, but clearer than ever before: “No I’m not.” (A feeling that now continues on varying levels every time I’m misgendered.) But that inner thought still couldn’t quite connect up to something I felt I could voice or act upon. It was the millionth fly buzz that I batted away yet again. My people-pleasing, co-dependent tendencies and the binary world I had inhaled for my entire life meant I wasn’t ready to fully face or embrace how “different” I was from our constructed binary norms.
And so the gender pending period began, starting off incredibly stressfully, as I tried to keep my sibling’s identity, and therefore my own questioning, a secret to respect their sharing process and ended up almost combusting with non-disclosed inner turmoil anxiety (a miscommunication of needs that my sibling and I have reflected upon since, discussed and learnt to communicate better from.) That then shifted into opening up to friends and eventually family, the statement being, when adding to my sibling’s already shared story when they were ready, that “Oh by the way I am also in the process of exploring my gender identity I’m calling it gender pending because that always gets a laugh in discussing this still seemingly taboo topic and deflecting from my anxiety with humour is all I knoooooow hahahaha!!!....”
Which then led to…a really happy time. Not generally - it was the end of 2019 and as we all know, 2020 didn’t turn out quite how we all expected it to. But being gender pending was such an important, powerful period of my life. “I don’t know, and that’s OK.” Really believing and feeling those words finally brought me a sense of calm and peace that I’d never felt before. In a slow subliminal sense, it helped my other anxieties too: “Let go of control. No one knows the future. You can’t change the past. And that’s OK.” I could feel that inner knowing – now, in my strong imagination, envisaged as a very sleepy sloth who has submitted to being ignored and instead enjoyed a restful hibernating slumber - slowly waking up to find that the chains are off (now there’s chains too?! Poor sloth). The chains have disappeared, and there are no prison bars up around the sloth as they once perceived. None of it was real - internalised external stigma built this “prejudice prison” holding the sloth hostage and internally (and hopefully eventually externally) it can finally, justly, be destroyed.
But of course, the deep inner knowing sloth isn’t going to just crack on with whatever sloths do each day! They’re going to wait a while. Check that it isn’t it all trap. Also they’re TIRED. They’ve been dormant for YEARS. They’re going to go slowly. There’s no rush. They’re going to listen, first to their own heart, then to where that heart wants to take them. They’re not going to question the process, instead lean into it with compassionate curiosity. They’re going to follow queer role models on social media (using their inner sloth wisdom to utilise the gifts of social media in a healthy way.) Learn about LGBTQIA+ charities like Gendered Intelligence and Mermaids. Discuss their feelings with their queer friends and their non-queer friends, slowly, timidly, but more honestly than ever before. Even bring it up at work with trusted colleagues when they feel ready, seeing the effect all of this is having on their well-being, their confidence, their ability to engage with life in the present moment – as if I was just watching the movie of life before and now I actually get to LIVE THE MOVIE!!! (Yes I’m the sloth, the sloth is me, we get it.)
And then finally, one May afternoon in 2020, I ring up my best friend and tell her that I think I’m non-binary. This moment isn’t even binary. I do not KNOW 100%. There have been no lightbulbs, no squirrels. But something has shifted. I don’t know exactly when it happened but it has. And I’m happy and relieved and excited but I am also lying on my sofa sobbing, weighed down with emotional exhaustion, fear and anticipation. And as I talk to my friend, specifically chosen from my deep inner sloth knowledge that she will be excited, comforting and supportive, I start to feel lighter.
I think the term “trans” can almost be a bit misleading. Its use as a prefix is defined in Collins dictionary as “used to form words which indicate that someone or something moves from one group, thing, state, or place to another” but that makes it sound like someone is moving away from something when they transition, to somewhere far, distant, mysterious. But for me, the opposite is true – it feels like coming home after being somewhere else my whole life that felt far, distant and mysterious e.g. being assigned female at birth. If we didn’t have such binary structures and ideas around gender and sex, would we need the word “trans” at all? Or could we just tell the world what we are as we grow, living that ever-evolving, beautiful truth from day one?
I am now more able to lean into the non-binary-ness of everything. One of my favourite books that I discovered through my gender pending months is Life isn’t Binary: On Being Both, Beyond and In-Between by Alex Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker. It has helped my gender and sexuality discoveries enormously but also helped me approach my feelings, my thoughts and my relationships from a non-binary perspective and increased my understanding of the diversity of life experience and the intersectionality of discrimination and privilege in today’s world.
I recently changed my pronouns to “they/them” publicly on my social media pages. Something that could be perceived as an immediate sense of knowing, but, again, something that has actually come nearly 13 months into living my truth as a non-binary person, and around 10 months after thinking I may be “they/them” rather than “she/they”. And it could all change again. And that’s what I hope you take away from this essay. That it’s OK not to know. To be questioning, to be shifting, to be deeply listening to your ever-evolving inner truth and letting it lead the way. That a human life is not set in stone. The more we embrace and accept all people for who they are with equal respect and love, the more the true diversity of what it is to be a human on this earth can flourish, can connect us, delight us and educate us as we discover and celebrate each other’s unique specificities and gifts with excitement and wonder.
So take a breath. Take your time. And relax into the “not knowing” as long as it serves you.
Be, accept, and love who you are, just as you are, right in this very precious moment.
Photo of me aged 3 in my sibling’s clothes,
referred to in ‘Gender Pending’ poem extract.