As An Enby in a Violently Gendered Society:

When I was a kid I was always fascinated by dress-up. It was fun to put on boy's clothing and pretend to be a boy. When I was younger, it was just assumed by everyone I'd grow up to be a "tomboy". I never thought we needed these terms at all. As a kid, one doesn't really understand the ripple effects that gender has on society. I was disadvantaged from birth by being born female in a patriarchy. Gender meant nothing more, when I was a kid, than how you were born. How you were born, that's how you were meant to stay.

It wasn't until high school that I really began to wonder about what gender meant. Was it really only about what was between my legs? My parents, raising me, were strictly heteronormative, cisnormative: boys played in dirt and liked blue, girls played with dolls and wore pink. The argument of colour belonging to gender, in itself, never made any sense to me. All of society has to be gendered: why? To make the privileged feel better? Or to further oppress those that have grown up invisible?

As a teenager, there was really no one to talk to about the things I was feeling. Maybe I was just a tomboy, but that didn't feel like enough. I'd spent hours wondering what it would be like to be a man, I'd say things like "If I were a man, I could date this pretty girl". Those were normal things to wonder, right? Doesn't everyone think about what life would be like as the opposite sex? It seemed like just curiosity, at the time, nothing more to it. I was a girl. I would always be a girl.

Until college. Finally, finally, I had people to speak to who understand. My friend group in college was mostly queer, witchy people who loved art and gay rights. I'd been in denial my entire youth, growing up in a family who took no questions, who blamed gender confusion on media and adolescence. You'll grow out of it. It would have been nice to have had some sort of guidance, because I mean, that is the job of a parent, is it not? Some days, girl felt wrong. Some days, boy felt foreign. So then what would I label myself as? Why do we all have to be labelled as something?

I chopped my hair off for the first time when I was twenty three, just to see what it would feel like. I remember a switch flipping inside my head when I looked in the mirror, a switch I didn't even know about before then. My father, a rather close-minded man, saw my short new haircut and asked what I had done to myself, why I would cut off all my beautiful, long, blonde hair. I'd always had long hair. After a while, it became obligatory, something I did for them, and not for me.

Cutting my hair was the first step in a long process of self-discovery. I began to branch out, label my style as masculine rather than tomboy. My parents would question, and questioning made me anxious, so I'd stand in the comfort of my room, dressed in a button-up shirt and a pair of men's jeans, and I'd watch my reflection become someone I recognized. At the age of twenty-four I came out to my closest friends as a transgender man: stuck between the binaries of man and woman, as if nothing existed beyond them. I changed my name, kept my hair short, called myself boy. But after a few months, even that felt wrong.

The truth is, there's so much more to life than gender. I'm used to being asked about it by strangers. Are you a man or woman, as if it matters. As if I can't be anything else. My child, who stopped conforming to gender at the age of three, is scared of being bullied. I'm used to being bullied on their behalf, by strangers who think they know better, who think their bigotry stems from superiority and not ignorance. None of it matters. Gender is a construct, pushed on the vulnerable to make the fragile feel comforted. Gender is nothing more than a made-up word to shove people into boxes. People don't belong in boxes.

Most days, I can live peacefully without attention or demands. I am not a woman, and I'm not a man. My worth is not determined by my sex, and sex does not equate to gender. People are people, and people are valuable.