Nonstop Flight to Nonbinary City

When my dad first made the awkward attempt to ask me as a teen if I was gay, I wished the conversation was that simple. I had no difficulty coming to terms with being bisexual, but I struggled with my gender even then, and would continue struggling for another decade.

Being female and struggling with gender often gets swept into a tidy “tomboy” box and put back in the closet. Even then, with most recognizing the term universally as an inherently “girl” experience, boys are not afforded a similar catchall term by which to address any non-masculine leanings they might harbor. But this does beg the question: If these gender roles are so innate, as many would have us believe, why do so many buck them in the first place?

My own story is messy and inconvenient. I lived four years as a trans guy. This meant a haircut, chest binder, men’s clothes, lowering my voice and changing my gait. Being in Texas, concealing being trans was absolutely necessary to keep safe, so I made sure I was read as male, even if that meant being seen as five or six years younger than I actually was. This wasn’t the path I ultimately chose, and since I was underage, I didn’t make any permanent changes to my body.

Still, I went by “Scottie” and found freedom in the space I carved out. It still felt off. “Boy” encompassed a lot of me that “girl” didn’t make room for, but both of them felt slightly right and slightly wrong. I confessed my uncertainty to my then-partner, who was nonbinary. They said I sounded like them—a gender that was both, neither, in between. Internally, I felt they were right, yet I totally rejected the idea. It just didn’t seem like a real option. This was, frankly, a dick thing to say to your nonbinary partner.

My doubt about my gender grew, though, and in college, I did a 180, reusing my legal name and she/her pronouns. The desire to admit I was nonbinary remained strong, but I bailed. Guilt and fear kept me silent as I jumped into womanhood, even as I felt silently jealous of every openly nonbinary person I encountered.

Eventually I made my way into the sex industry in the form of strip clubs, where I experienced a world of hyper-femininity that paralleled the hyper-masculinity I’d previously lived in as Scottie. In less than a decade’s span, I had experienced being called homophobic male slurs and whorephobic female ones; I wore both masks, saw both sides of the scramble for cis people to validate their own genders—which they, of course, do, too. A society with only two extreme options for gender roles lacks flexibility. Even those vocally against trans identities can turn on a dime to decry the dangers of strict, rigid gender expectations, and many pride themselves on not falling into the fray—particularly women who are quick to condemn other women for clinging too steadfastly to femininity. Ironic that any freedom to shirk stereotypes should come with barriers for others. For those people, it seems, gender non-conformity comes with precise limits.

One can be proud of “not being like other girls” but that is usually as far as it goes. Even with non-conformity being seen almost like a badge of honor amongst women, prevailing rhetoric all but tells us the mold is biologically innate. That biological inflexibility dictates certain products are made for those with a vagina and not a penis; that biology somehow created pronouns; that biology is responsible for making girls wear heels and makeup. These are arbitrary social constructions we’ve been led to believe are somehow immutable—determined only by social agreement.

When I finally came out as nonbinary this year, I found myself. There is room for all of me, and I feel gender kinship with nonbinary people, regardless of their biology. I can be the me I have always waited to be.

Any time I read essays about how trans people are the fall of civilization, I wonder how we would view gender if the pressure was fully off, if we could only erase the myth of perfect, cis, ontologically opposite genders and leave the blueprint open. If nonbinary and trans identities were more widely validated, maybe it would give cis people the freedom to define their own relationships to their genders—to expand what woman means, what man means.

It would be prudent to give people back the dignity of choice. Even cis people must feel the exhaustion of adhering to unwritten societal roles, or the depression of falling short of some mythical ideal. Women could feel feminine and whole with their real selves; men masculine and whole with theirs. But then, it’s harder to sell face serum and dick pills if peoples’ goals become to self-actualize.

We could make gender opt-in. I am here because I want to be. What would it feel like, rather than battle to feel man enough or woman enough, to say these words:

I am a woman, because it is self-evident that I am.

I am a man, because it is self-evident that I am.

And for me, I am not, because it is self-evident that I am not.

Stephanie Scottie Thompson is a nonbinary artist and writer who defected to Santa Fe from Texas in 2013, and almost graduated from Santa Fe University of Art & Design.