It Doesn't Have to Be One or the Other

On genderfluidity, how I discovered it, and what it means to me

Happy Pride Month, y’all!

Summer isn't my season at all, but Pride is always one of my favorite times of year. Setting aside all of the corporate tomfoolery, seeing so many wonderful people come together to celebrate feeling comfortable as themselves, no matter who they are, makes me optimistic for the future at a time when reasons to be optimistic are dwindling by the month.

You may or may not know that I am part of the LGBTQ+ community. It's not exactly a secret but I'm not usually very loud about it either. The primary reason I don't typically speak up is that I haven't felt like my experience as a queer person is particularly noteworthy or exemplary. I’m pansexual, but I’ve only ever been in a relationship with a cis woman. I'm genderfluid, but I still present as traditionally male and have suffered very little overt discrimination on this basis. My story is largely not one of direct external strife, a fact for which I am eternally thankful.

But, as for most queer people, it has no shortage of internal strife, and the internal can often hurt just as much as the external. The process of figuring out who exactly I am has comprised a ton of tough conversations and more than my fair share of sleepless nights, and it's still certainly not complete.

Recently, Leah and I have been reading through Nonbinary, the 2019 anthology of essays on gender from gender-diverse authors, edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane. We're only partway through, but most of the authors we’ve read thus far have expressed some sort of wish that they’d known more people who identified outside the gender binary as they themselves were discovering who they were. Most of these authors are early Millennials or late Gen Xers, about a generation older than me. Tons more resources have become available in the past 20 or so years, but that desire for more peers still remains for some of today’s young, gender-diverse authors…well, at least one: me.

The only way to change this on a large scale is for more gender-diverse people to relate their experiences to others. And, well, I identify outside the gender binary, and I know a lot of people, some of whom statistically also identify outside the gender binary. So…why not me, right?

Today, I'm going to explain how I came to discover that I'm genderfluid and what that term means to me. We Are Going to Start a Dialogue™. If these ramblings are useful to even one person, the effort was worth it. If they aren’t, it was also worth it, as this is still a tangible record of my current thoughts that I can revisit later in my journey.

About that journey…

How did I get here?

A Boy Scared of Men

Traditionally, Rule #1 of masculinity is that you have to be the manliest man you can be, always. The worst insult a man could possibly receive is that he displays a lack of masculinity—perhaps even shades of (gasp) femininity! Resultantly, in traditional upbringings, masculinity usually correlates to popularity for adolescents assigned male at birth. In turn, the more popular, more masculine kids often bully the less popular, less masculine kids.

You are no doubt familiar with this dynamic if you’ve ever watched any boy-centric coming-of-age media. To name two of my favorites as random examples, one of The Sandlot’s most famous lines comes from Ham retorting that a player on a rival team “plays ball like a girl”, and the Geeks portion of Freaks and Geeks features Sam and friends constantly being humiliated for—in essence—not being manly enough.

Discounting the fact that I was adopted in early childhood, I was raised in an overwhelmingly traditional upbringing. Under my cis-heteronormative parents, I came of age in a relatively rich, extremely white suburb in South Dakota. As you can probably guess, I wasn’t very masculine and I was bullied a lot in my adolescence.

But there’s another motif that permeates this relationship in Freaks and Geeks (and similar media): envy. The less masculine kids are seemingly invariably shown to be envious of the more masculine kids, who almost always have something they want but cannot attain (athleticism, success with girls, etc.). This envy wasn’t a part of my adolescent experience. I never wished I was one of the cool kids; I was just scared of them. Really, I was scared of traditional masculinity in general.

And by this I don’t mean that I was scared of overblown, macho, toxic masculinity—I mean that I was afraid of pretty much everyone who outwardly displayed exclusively “masculine” traits. Some of it was the direct harassment I suffered, yes, but even when people like this were friendly toward me, I always found myself worrying that I would somehow slip up and reveal myself to be “not man enough”, causing them to turn on me or abandon me.

Be that as it may, I was still very interested in hobbies that required me to interact with men. Namely, I'm a big sports fan; discussing professional and college sports usually required interacting with the men who make up the majority of their fanbases, and playing sports absolutely required interacting with men because I was assigned male at birth and people care way too much about the genitals of the participants in youth sporting events.

In 7th grade, I signed up for cross country. I was not a runner at all, but I wanted to play sports, and the fall sport options for boys at my school were cross country, golf (no way), and football (lmao), so distance running it was. I was pretty out of shape and couldn't keep up with most of the boys on the team during warmups or on long runs, but I was technically playing sports.

Luckily, one of my friends, a girl, was also on the team. We ran at about the same speed, so we naturally started running together. We killed a lot of time on long runs cracking jokes and telling stories—at one point, she began crafting an elaborate narrative about how she'd discovered a secret alien society, keeping it up for a couple weeks before admitting it was all fake. I obviously never thought she was being serious, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if she grew up to write science fiction. It was a blast! I was getting in shape and having fun doing it—y’know, the entire point of sports—not to mention that I actually felt comfortable partaking in one of my interests even though I was really bad at it.

Of course, once the coach caught wind of this, he put a stop to it. I wondered why it mattered who I was running with as long as I was putting in the work, but my vote meant nothing. It was back to failing to keep up with the boys.

Officially, I finished in last place in every race of my 7th grade season. Spring track, in which I ran distance, was a similar story. I went back for more in the fall of 8th grade and started finishing not last some of the time, which you gotta realize was big progress for me.

In winter of 7th grade, I told my mom I wanted to play basketball, and she shot it down immediately. She thought I was too short—and, to be fair, she was right; I’m only 5’5” as an adult, so I was basically Frodo at age 12. Despite this, I again begged my mom to let me play in 8th grade. Maybe it was because I was starting to improve athletically or maybe it was because I just didn’t shut up about it, but she said yes this time. This wasn’t a scenario where I’d actually have to make the team either. In middle school, if you wanted to play, you were in. We had four teams for varying skill levels—the A, B, C, and D teams—so tryouts were solely to determine which team you were on.

I distinctly remember a classmate sensing that I was nervous at tryouts and insisting that we would both play together on the C team. I was nervous, but ability had nothing to do with it—I knew I was bad; I just didn’t care. The nerves came from feeling like a fish out of water, the old, familiar fear of masculinity coming back to haunt me again.

I was placed on the D team and the entire season was a wreck. It’s astounding how many of the details I still remember 13 years later. There was an inbounds play where I forgot which basket we were shooting at and sprinted the wrong way for a backcourt violation. There was a possession in which a teammate found me wide open at the free throw line and I just froze and passed into a turnover. Most hurtfully, once during pregame warmups, I started dancing to the music they were pumping into the gym while I was waiting for my turn in a layup line, and a teammate yelled at me to stop. I couldn’t have fun in cross country, and I couldn’t have fun in basketball either. By season’s end, I had failed to score a single point. I’m not certain, but I don’t think I even shot the ball once. I was petrified.

That was the end of my youth sports career. My mom refused to endorse my return to track in the spring. There was a lot of crying from both of us.

Letting Things Come to Me

My friend group in high school consisted almost entirely of LGBTQ+ folks, whether we realized it at the time or not. Perhaps owing to our upbringing, most of us didn’t, and there was a lot of realizing that went on as we aged into adulthood. Myself included, multiple people who believed (at least outwardly) that we were cis and straight at the time have since discovered that one or both of those descriptors is false. Even the one who was already out as gay in high school experienced another coming out, as transgender, after she left. It’s a wonder what getting out into the world can do for your self-perception.

I had long suspected that I would be able to find more confidence once I escaped the hell I saw in my hometown. And I was right, but not in the way I thought I would be.

I thought maybe men would be less scary to me if they weren’t the same men who bullied me in middle school. Surely college would be full of friendlier men who would make me feel more comfortable about my social life. And it was! Most of the men I met in undergrad were super amicable and I found myself having little trouble making friends with them.

What surprised me was that I still felt more comfortable with people who weren’t traditionally masculine, even if we had very few interests in common. That was basically the dynamic in my high school friend group, so I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me too much, but I really did think my main problem socially was that I didn’t have anyone to talk sports with outside of the internet.

Speaking of the internet, I was on it a lot. I’d say something like 75% of my socialization came online from age 14 to…the present day? At first, I mostly frequented sports communities, on IRC, Reddit, very briefly Yahoo! Answers (RIP), and—once it existed—Discord. Since its popularization, the internet has played a crucial role in hosting queer communities and arming LGBTQ+ folks with the resources to discover and feel comfortable with their identities. Through age 22 or so, I had not entered these communities because I did not perceive myself to be queer.

Then a funny thing started happening: the queer communities came to me!

Little by little, the sports communities I hung around began to be frequented by more and more out LGBTQ+ people. Sometimes they were regulars who either had a moment of self-discovery or finally felt comfortable enough to come forward publicly; sometimes they were newbies to the community who had been out and proud for years. Queer issues gradually became regular topics of conversation by happenstance, through which I got my first real experience watching intelligent discussions on the subject unfold between people close to me. In South Dakota, most of us had no experience with queerness, and throughout undergrad, the majority of my friends were still cishet, so talking specifically about queerness was rare. In these newly queer communities, I regularly saw people who knew what they were talking about helping each other, educating each other, and just generally being there for each other.

Simply being in the same community as these people allowed me to start viewing my own experiences with a much more open mind. I stopped thinking I was Just A Really Good Ally™. I went from “I’m not gay, but” to “I’m bi” in seven months flat, and I have the Discord receipts to prove it.

About a month later, I finally arrived at the discovery that I wasn’t a man and never had been.

Figuring all of this out was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. But, compared to how quickly this came to me, the process of figuring out where exactly I was on the gender spectrum was (and is) a lot more complex.

Fluidity

When I realized that I was not cis, I began using he/they pronouns, the former because I still presented as male and had no intention of changing—at least, not in the immediate future.

At pretty much the same time, I mentally flipped my sexual orientation from bisexual to pansexual. To me, the “bi” in “bisexual” implies an automatic relationship to the binary by way of association with biological sex.¹ Since I was eschewing the gender binary entirely and felt attracted to people regardless of gender identity, “pansexual” immediately seemed more correct to me.

Over the next few months, I began to recognize an all-too-common feeling—the pit in my stomach when my look did not match my identity—as gender dysphoria. I had always presented as strictly male, but I often hated the mere concept of masculinity, and many aspects of my identity, personality, and behavior seemed more traditionally feminine.

For some time, I interpreted these feelings to mean that I might be transgender. It’s a process I’ve seen unfold several times: person assigned male at birth realizes they are not a cis man, switches to he/they pronouns, and then realizes she is a trans woman and switches to she/her. Existence outside the binary is often seen as a sort of purgatory for those sorting out which of the two boxes they fit into better—the liminal space of genders.

But, for every time I looked in the mirror and saw a broken person pretending to be a man, there was another time the mirror seemed to reflect exactly who I really was, even though my presentation never changed. Sometimes the more traditionally masculine parts of me did feel good, look good, sound good.

And that’s when I understood that it didn’t have to be one or the other. More than that, it’s when I understood that nothing had to be one or the other. You may note my overuse of the qualifier “traditionally” before the terms “masculine” and “feminine”. I use those to such a great extent because I believe hardly anything—any gender, personality trait, body type, fashion choice, life event, you name it—is necessarily tied to a biological sex. The only thing that connects one to the other is tradition. I have recently swapped the order of my pronouns—from he/they to they/he—for this reason.

And this is also why I don’t feel the umbrella term “nonbinary” effectively describes my gender. All that word tells us is that I exist outside of the male/female binary; it fails to dig any deeper than that surface.² The more precise “genderfluid” suits me best: not only am I outside the binary, but my position outside the binary shifts all over the map on a regular basis. It often changes on a whim, based on factors both in and out of my control. In the words of many a Ted Lasso extra cheering on Roy Kent: it’s here, it’s there, it’s every-fuckin’-where.³

This sometimes leads to seemingly unavoidable dysphoria; I can’t always change my appearance as quickly as my identity shifts. I like my beard a lot, but during the times when I feel less traditionally masculine, it does cause a significant amount of dysphoria. But it also brings me a lot of euphoria and pride at other times, and switching between having a full beard and not having a full beard isn’t something you can just do with the snap of a finger, so I tend to keep it.

I don’t have it right now. Just last Friday, when I was trimming it, I screwed up and left an extremely obvious hole on my left cheek; it was like a window into my face. I was going back down to South Dakota to visit family later that very evening, so I couldn’t justify looking ridiculous and ended up shaving the whole thing off. Before last Friday, some of these parts of my face hadn’t seen the sun in over five years.

I’m glad this happened by accident, as I’d been wanting to trial a full shave for a while, but I’d never do it on purpose in case I hated the result—like I said, these things don’t grow back instantly. Without the beard, I still feel euphoric and dysphoric at different times when I look at my face, but the pattern is more or less the opposite of how it was with the beard. I suspected this would be the case, but it’s a relief to have the undeniable confirmation.

I’ve grown to feel more comfortable playing sports as I've discovered myself. In a development that most fiction writers would consider too on-the-nose, I currently play in two recreational softball leagues: one men’s league and one co-rec league. I feel confident enough in myself to play in the men's league without freezing up, but I still usually feel like I'm pretending to be someone I'm not. Meanwhile, in the co-rec league, I always feel like myself. I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In the near-ish future, I’d like to try out some less permanent, traditionally feminine tweaks to my presentation—wearing jewelry, trying my best to make my hair flow down instead of up, maybe even switching out some of my clothes. I feel comfortable saying that I will likely always present primarily as male, especially once this beard grows back, but I do need to figure out how to stave off the anti-masculine dysphoria.

I’m sure I’ll get there. As I said at the top, my journey is certainly not complete, but I’m confident that I can navigate whatever bumpy, winding roads lie ahead. I got this far, after all.

And the primary reason I got this far in the first place is that others spoke up. People close to me stepped up and said who they were, and the world became a better, more interesting place, both externally and inside my own mind.

This is me stepping up.

1. I know this isn't a unanimous opinion, but it is my opinion, and I'd be hard-pressed to change it. I think differing opinions are valid and have no interest in debating the matter.

2. The introduction to Nonbinary, the anthology I mentioned at the top of the essay, goes into this at length. When I read it, I felt fundamentally understood in a way I rarely do.

3. I’m actually only midway through Season 2 as of this writing. No spoilers!