B*tch, I don’t owe you androgyny.

by Taylor Neal

To all my beautiful She/Theys out there, this one is for you.

I started noticing feelings of resonance toward they/them pronouns in myself just over a year ago, after I had moved across the country from Montreal to Vancouver and felt like I could, for lack of a better term, reinvent myself and re-evaluate my relationship to identity for the first time in years.

It’s funny, how moving allows you to meet yourself again like that. When you live in one place for an extended period of time, though there is always room for growth and expansion if you prioritize it, it’s harder to break free of certain identities within a community that has assigned labels to you and known you in this way for years. Humans are creatures of habit, and change is commonly difficult for us to accept, so when we start to play around with our identities and our ways of interacting with the world, though we should be able to expect our communities to offer us the space to explore our place in this world at our liberty, often we come up against resistance and confusion when we move through personal change.

During the intensity of the first major wave of COVID-19 lockdowns in the spring and summer of 2020, when we were all stuck inside, scared, with little to focus on outside of ourselves, many of us seemed to find ourselves in deep states of reflection. We turned inward, in the privacy and safety of our own homes, and from here came a lot of change for many folks in various areas of our lives. Without being forced to undergo the often messy, stages of transformation out in the questioning public eye, we could really hear ourselves for the first time without the influence of outside pressures and standards, and from this came a wave of liberation that showed up prominently in the realm of sexuality. Particularly, queer sexuality.

Of course, this is not to say that we didn’t exist before, and this is not to ignore the privilege that comes with the experience of opting out of public visibility during difficult transitional times. This is merely an account of a shared experience discussed amongst the queer community over the past couple of years as the world has continued to fluctuate. The isolation of the lockdown world allowed folks the chance to re-evaluate who they really are, at their core, how they really feel and what they identify with, and hold this up against who they’ve been told they are, how they’ve been told to feel and with what they’ve been told to identify. Interestingly, though not surprisingly, there seemed to be a large population of folks during this time that found themselves confronted with gender identity and their relationship to it.

I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, so I will speak for myself when I say that the removal from society and ability to remove any and all societal expectations from myself as a cis woman allowed me to realize that I had a hard time identifying with all of the things that caused the world to look at me as a woman. The term woman, more and more, started to represent something that felt so far from who I was during those months of isolation, where for the first time I was able to exist unapologetically as my most raw, stripped-down, organic self. I started recognizing feelings of limitation and claustrophobia arise from “woman”, like this term didn’t even begin to define my human experience or scratch the surface of how I felt in my skin.

This term “woman” was only capable of representing half of me.

The thing with identity, is that it allows us to determine our place in the world. It is a crutch to lean on, how we can show up with purpose and how we relate to the world around us as we navigate all of the twists and turns. It is our sense of center and grounded-ness, our sense of home, when everything around us feels out of our control. We cling to identities for safety and belonging, so when we start to notice that something about how we are presenting ourselves suddenly starts to feel uncomfortable, wrong or dishonest, like a lie or incomplete sentence, it is difficult to fully recognize and integrate right away. It takes time. It takes deep, messy, sticky, difficult self-examination and work, and often it is extremely unclear and non-linear and confusing for quite a while.

These moments of noticing within myself, these feelings of discomfort toward who I was telling the world that I am, slowly trickled into my consciousness one “she/her” at a time. Over several months, as I got to know a new city and find my place within it, I slowly started to hear the faint whispers of my heart getting a little bit louder, trying to show me why falling back into old patters and limiting myself with a binary gender identity was feeling like I was walking around in shoes that were 2 sizes too small, cramming my body into structures that caused me immense discomfort, but from the outside looked perfectly acceptable and unassuming to the public. During this transformational time, there were a couple instances in which someone would refer to me using “they/them” pronouns, and I would feel an intense surge of warmth and recognition move through my body when this happened. Finally, I felt seen. I felt heard, in contrast to the complacency and shrinking that happens inside when someone refers to me by what is easiest for them to digest. I just couldn’t ignore those feelings.

It wasn’t a big, dramatic announcement or any drastic changes that marked my coming-out as non-binary. Gradually, I started replacing my pronouns in different areas of my life and mentioning my feelings to my close friends, and as I did this I started to notice both the sense of liberation that comes with claiming an identity that aligns with your truth, as well as an intense degree of imposter syndrome. I started to realize that I felt like an outsider in the non-binary community, simply because of how I looked. I felt wrong in claiming this title because I didn’t immediately change much about my appearance in order to fit society’s idea of what a non-binary person might look like. I didn’t jump straight toward more androgyny or shave my head immediately upon changing my pronouns on my work name-tag. I felt non-binary because I was me, exactly the way I am, and as long as I lived in my truth, my identity felt to me, valid. However, as though navigating a new chapter in one’s gender evolution isn’t confusing and nuanced enough, just when I felt I had finally released all of my imposter syndrome surrounding my queerness, those feelings would find their way right back into my chest each time I was told I am a woman because I look like one.

As a relatively femme-presenting gender-fluid person, the concept of what “non-binary” looks like is utterly exhausting. While there are many of us who feel most comfortable with androgyny, the non-binary community is a vast, expansive, fluid spectrum of individuals identifying with all sorts of different language, terminology and representations, and we don’t owe anyone an explanation of why we choose the language we choose in order to try and translate how we feel in our bodies into words, as if that’s ever even really possible. Some of us can be very cis-passing, some of us are very much not, and not all of us have vulvas! Non-binary identity, also, is not a “girl’s thing” or a trend, it doesn’t come with a set of rules or guidelines, and it should definitely not come at the regulation of gatekeepers. It is a matter of living in one’s truth, bravely, unapologetically. It is a matter of digging deep inside yourself to see what’s really there, and then claiming this as your place in the world. Asserting yourself, often to be met with the stubbornness of a world that wants to put you in an easily-identifiable, labeled, two-sizes-too-small box, but continuing to speak your truth regardless. It is being mis-gendered over and over and maybe not having the energy to correct it every single time, but knowing that you are valid in you truth regardless of how the world sees you and finding strength in that, and then gravitating towards those that do see you and honour you and don’t ask for your credentials when you are given the chance to self-identify.

I wasn’t ready, and I’m still not ready, to fully let go of “she/her” pronouns. They have been how I have identified and existed in the world for my entire life, and while they have caused me pain and dysmorphia, they’re also comfy and familiar, and they feel just as much a part of me as they always have. This has been the difference though, recognizing that this is only part of me, and now, recognizing and honouring myself for all that I am – a gender-fluid human who’s self-expression cannot be summed up by restrictive language which claims that by being one thing I am inherently not the other. I am Both/And. My appearance on any given day does not even begin to represent the inner-workings of my boundless, flowing, infinite gender expression, which is a constantly evolving, day-by-day journey, and that is okay.

We do not owe anyone an explanation, I do not owe you my CV to prove that I exist. I don’t need to change a thing about myself in order to step fully into my truth and be comfortable there.

Bitch, I don’t owe you androgyny.