As you can imagine, this can cover a lot of vastly different experiences. Non-binary means someone who doesn’t identify exclusively or wholly as a man or a woman. That’s where I’m coming from- how do I see myself now? There are two terms I’m using a lot in this article that have been really important in understanding my identity: non-binary and gender nonconforming. I’ve known that I wasn’t attracted to men for a quite a while now, and realised that the times when I thought I was or even put myself in romantic or sexual situations with men were me actually just trying to fulfil an elusive ~something,~ namely feeling desired and through that affirmed and validated, or alternatively mistaking the tension I felt around some men as chemistry or attraction, when in reality I was just uncomfortable. The whole ‘working out that hey I’m am a lesbian’ thing is a fairly big realisation for anyone to come to, and for a lot of people who know me it may seem like a sudden shift, but it is an understanding of myself that I have been coming to for a long time. The labels I have sought comfort and a sense of ownership in have changed as I have grown and worked out different things about myself.įor five or so years I identified as a vaguely bisexual transmasculine non-binary person, and have since come to the realisation that I am a non-binary lesbian, which may not seem like the biggest shift (after all, I’m still non-binary), but has been an important, joyous and at times harrowing journey for me personally. The terms I have used to communicate my identity have changed as I have. That change isn’t a bad thing or a step backwards, it’s just part of learning and understanding the world. Sometimes this sort of contemplation ends up reaffirming the ideas and understanding that we’ve held up until that point, and sometimes it means finding ideas and language that resonate more.
It’s kind of the way it goes for a lot of queer people I know let people know where you’re at, go off and figure some other stuff out about yourself, fill people in, rinse, repeat. In the past year or so I’ve been reflecting on how I think about my queer identity and connection to gender and sexuality. I came out as non-binary in 2015 and have taken steps to socially transition since then - changing my name and the pronouns people use to refer to me - and in last May, started testosterone. It was truly like letting go of a breath I didn’t know I was holding to find the trans community, first online then in person, and learn that it didn’t have to be that hard.
No one told me that was allowed! But as hard as I tried I was never very good at ‘girl’ the more wrong it felt, the more wrong I thought I was. As a kid, I always felt somewhat of an estrangement from girlhood - I understood the idea of it and that people recognised me as a girl but I didn’t have a personal connection to ‘girlhood’ beyond that - but like a lot of trans people, the idea that I could ‘stray’ from the gender I was assigned honestly never occurred to me throughout childhood. Gender has been a bit of a journey for me, I think it’s fair to say. And it’s been a bit of an identity crisis-filled genderweird whirlwind. This is new! Well, this isn’t new, but me knowing about it is new. Hey! I’m Arlo and I’m a non-binary lesbian.
This article is part of our Non-Binary Week content!