Myths of Non-Binary Visibility

The most amusing thing about my non-binary journey, to me, is that I delayed my coming out to myself. When I was twenty and in the middle of Covid and primarily alone at home, I discovered I was asexual. During the rollercoaster of navigating it, with limited community support in my physical presence, I had started to figure out that I might be trans. When I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror long enough, I would start to feel the familiar discomfort about my chest. This sinking feeling that it didn’t belong to me. It didn’t feel like me. And when it bubbled over, I used to feel this rage. Like I wanted to rip my breasts off my chest and not have them anymore. I guess at least a part of me had figured out what the implication of these feelings were. But I was twenty and depressed and in the middle of figuring out one queer crisis, so I told myself I would deal with a second queer identity later. So, I delayed my trans awakening to myself, mostly by telling myself that it was a ‘future me’ problem.

Well, future me turned twenty-one, and I eventually had to confront the feeling that my body didn’t belong to me. While I had believed that one queer rollercoaster would prepare me for the second, this, in fact, turned out to be a myth. Coming to terms with being non-binary and recognising what it meant for me was a spiral of its own. In exploring what it meant for me to reimagine my relationship with my body as a non-binary person, I realised that the Herculean challenge of this spiral was feeling ‘visible enough’ to be considered ‘non-binary’ enough. 

I am a feminine-presenting non-binary person. I was Assigned Female at Birth (AFAB). The best way I have learnt to explain my non-binary identity is to say, “Some days I wake up and feel like I am a woman and feminine; and other days I wake up, and my gender is just… no. Nothing.” To be honest, this is an extremely reductionist version of what it feels like in the fluidity of my mind. However, this is the best I know to offer when people ask me, “What does it mean that you are she and they?” This is the only explanation that has the fewest follow-up questions. Over time, as I went from absolutely hating my body for not feeling like mine, to learning to embrace it as a form of expression for what being ‘me’ meant, I arrived at quite a conventional feminine form of expression. For the better part, the way I dress daily, and the way I keep my hair, is very conventionally feminine. I am very aware that if someone were to pass me by on the road, they wouldn’t think twice about me being a ‘woman.’ This is where the visibility problem takes place. 

The knowledge that a stranger would not consider me ‘non-binary’ and would assume I am a woman has always put me in a very specific position of dilemma. On one hand, I recognise the privilege this presentation gives me in a country that is actively creating laws against trans rights. On the other hand, it makes me feel like I need to constantly justify my place within the trans community. I have fought hard with myself to navigate my relationship with my body, the hate I have had towards it for not feeling like mine, to sculpt a relationship with it that feels like me. Just me. No justification required. However, there has always been this unsaid pressure to perform androgyny. To showcase myself as being trans enough to hold visible space within the community. To shrink myself through a series of justifications to prove the validity of my identity. It would be fair to say that my reductionist explanation of what it means for me to be non-binary comes from this shrinking. I feel this burden of responsibility to prove my identity in both queer and non-queer spaces. It is the response to the pressure of telling cisgender folks that my femininity does not oppose my non-binary identity; and to tell trans folks that my lack of androgyny does not oppose my non-binary identity either. It is between a rock and a hard place, and the sliver of gap between both is where I tried to build my visibility. 

I have spent a better part of my trans journey resisting through the joy of expression. I know the burden that it has been to look in the mirror and feel like my body and I are separate entities. I know the gender envy I have battled off watching smaller breasted non-binary folks wear oversized t-shirts and have their smaller chests disappear from view, while I have bought oversized t-shirts that hang over my breasts like mountains and valleys and felt suffocated in myself. The journey from that suffocation, the suffocation that exists in the sliver of the gap between the rock and the hard place, to being able to breathe freely in my clothing expression, that has been my resistance of queer joy. The journey from feeling separated from my body while looking in the mirror, to feeling like I am seeing me, just me. No justification of a gender. Just me. 

For the longest time in my journey to understand and make peace with my non-binary identity and its expression, I convinced myself that the only thing that mattered was how I saw myself. If I celebrated myself and my self-expression, in all its non-binary pride, to me in the mirror, then that was all I needed. However, this also turned out to be a myth. While it deeply mattered, without any doubt, how I saw myself, visibility in a community consists of both how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. The burden to justify and make myself visible ‘enough’ as a non-binary person never completely left. Though even I couldn’t answer what defined ‘enough.’ It was simply an arbitrary threshold that existed in some unsaid burden. 

I think I shrunk myself so small within my non-binary identity that at some point I was simultaneously openly out and completely in the closet at the same time. I said I was non-binary out loud while shrinking myself into corners because I simply wasn’t sure how I could possibly be perceived. I didn’t know what being perceived as a non-binary person from the outside felt like, and I wasn’t sure how to ask to be perceived as one without feeling like I was occupying space where I shouldn’t.

At twenty-three, I got into my first relationship as an openly queer person. It was a dramatic turn of events for me, as I had not dated in four years while I had figured out multiple parts of my identity. I didn’t know what I was and wasn’t allowed to expect in a relationship. For all my talk about self-advocacy and empowerment as a non-binary asexual person that existed in the mirror, I didn’t know how any of it translated in real life. All I knew was that I was in love with a boy who knew I was asexual and non-binary and loved me all the same, with all parts of me, and never made me feel like he loved me ‘despite’ those aspects of me. To me, that was all I could ask for. I didn’t know asking for anything more was an option. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to ask for. That was till, one night when we were sitting in his room and talking, and my boyfriend of two days turned to me and asked,

“Hey, now that we are dating, should I tell people that you are my girlfriend or that you are my partner?”

At twenty-three, after three years of kind of knowing I was non-binary, and two years of navigating what it meant for me to actually be non-binary, I sat and stared at him, stunned. Because as I watched the face of a man who was waiting with careful curiosity and genuine care for me to answer, I was hit with the realization that this is an ask I was allowed to make. That for someone to love me and hold space for me in all my parts, meant acknowledging all of them fully. That loving all my parts meant loving all of them, queer identity and all, equally loudly. When the words, “I would really like to be called your partner,” left my lips, I realised what I hadn’t given myself access to in all my time of accepting myself in the mirror. 

It had never once occurred to me to give myself agency. 

Having someone who loved me, offer me choice in how I wanted to be addressed, and genuinely waited for the answer with sincerity, released something in me I didn’t know I was holding back. It shifted how I had been perceiving myself. It made me perceive myself with agency. 

In every step of my trans journey, from when I delayed my coming out to myself, till the moment right before I was asked how I wanted to be addressed, I had been occupying space with permission from others. It hadn’t been loud and explicit, but it was always permission. I first denied myself the permission to navigate being non-binary. Then I spent years denying myself the right to be perceived as I am, with no justification. Even as an uncloseted non-binary person, I kept walking into spaces armed with justifications. Every time I looked in the mirror, I told myself, “I accept myself for who I am. Unfortunately, others may not, and that’s okay.” But it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t okay that I felt the need to justify my existence as a non-binary person to both the queer and non-queer community. My reductionist explanations of my identity were ways in which I was handing my narrative to others so that they didn’t feel uncomfortable; my discomfort and lack of agency be damned. 

Being asked about what I would like to be addressed as in a romantic relationship didn’t just matter to the dynamic of the relationship. It flipped a switch for me. It made me realise that I didn’t need permission to be perceived. I could demand how I wanted to be perceived through the agency that I held. Agency, I didn’t realise I was allowed to have. It changed how I looked at myself in the mirror. It changed the narrative I was telling myself. It gave me the chance to realize that I didn’t need to remain stuck between the rock and the hard place with a sliver of visibility for everyone else’s comfort. I was allowed to escape the sliver and carve out my own space. 

I always believed that the things that would liberate me from my shame of being perceived as a non-binary person would be a big dramatic moment. Life changing advice that would change everything I thought I knew. That turned out to be a myth too. What changed it was being offered the chance to take back my agency by someone who told me they loved me with all my parts and then showed me in action what that love meant.