“I stared at the screen in shock while parts of my lived experience, like multi-coloured Tetris blocks, began to slot together into a pleasing fusion”
BY ALANNA REID, IMAGE BY CANVA
One morning, five years ago, I logged into my company’s intranet and, as casually as a dry weekly update, appeared a personal blog from a colleague – introducing themselves as “non-binary”.
This was the first time I’d ever heard this term.
Were you living under a rock? You would be right to ask.
To some degree, yes. I’d spent (wasted?) my teens and 20s struggling through life as an evangelical Christian, nurturing an excellent vintage of internalised homophobia. Thankfully, a long chain of events eventually set that life ablaze and my 30th birthday marked my first year of freedom as an openly gay woman.
Or so I thought, until I came across that blog.
Non-binary, I would come to understand, is a gender categorisation that lands somewhere between, and beyond, male and female. It takes many different forms, ranging from rejecting the gender options all together, to inhibiting aspects of the “masculine” and “feminine” within your human spirit simultaneously.
I stared at the screen in shock while parts of my lived experience, like multi-coloured Tetris blocks, began to slot together into a pleasing fusion. All those feelings, since the days of my childhood preference for short hair, to that dysregulating “itch” I’d experience in front of the mirror as an adult, were just blocks in the puzzle that needed flipping, recalibrating into a better fit.
And so, for the next year, I entered one of the richest, affirming periods of my life. Against the backdrop of a very corporate profession, I met a whole group of non-binary colleagues, went to specialist training to understand the breadth and depth of the transgender community and watched as the company led by example by using preferred pronouns in emails.
This would not last.
One year later, scrolling through the news one Saturday morning, I come across a torrid of accusation against prominent LGBTQIA charity Stonewall. Falling deeper into the social media generated flurry of information, I could only see that the organisation had committed the unforgivable sin of affirming and standing beside the transgender community.
As I reflect on this moment, I see it as the start of a chain, pulling back the supportive, affirming culture I was briefly nurtured in, to reveal something far more suspicious, fearful and divisive; markers of a culture now experienced by the transgender community on a daily basis.
Conversations from that moment only got harder. Individuals that I regarded as progressive, inspiring, even allies in my journey from Christianity to “queerdom” looked at me suspiciously as I asked for certain gendered everyday vernacular to be rephrased. The silence became particularly curious. I had started my journey in a song celebration and visibility, now things seemed to be sliding into static.
I felt caught in a giant nationwide gaslighting attempt. Was this non-binary thing even real? I paused for a moment, clutching my newfound identity to me, like a traveller at their start of their journey, uncertain if I really wanted to board this particular train at all.
But, thank god for story tellers and activists holding their space across the spectrum of the creative arts. Voices like Mae Martin and Akwaeke Emezi were bold in their visibility, confidently speaking the phrase “non-binary” in the public sphere and thereby fuelling the confidence within me to continue.
Five years later to the month when it first crossed my mind, I know firmly in my soul that I am a non-binary human. Yet, from where I stand, it feels scarier to live openly compared to five years ago. Certainly, gone are the affirming blogs on the intranet home page.
I can only hope, as the 2024 general election ushers in momentous change across the UK, that our new leaders are brave enough to open space for the transgender community and dare to understand that gender affirmation can save lives. I hope both the cis and trans communities can hold space between us; space for conversation, for kindness and to explore the fears that sit at the heart of the deterioration of tolerance we’ve seen in Britain over the past five years.
And it’s my hope that you might read this article and reflect, in the happenstance of your day like I did five years ago, on the face behind the headline and that our uniqueness, our pride and our joy is one worth celebrating after all.
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