JT Leon writes about being a non-binary artist, songwriting and finding hope
IMAGE BY DOTTY MCCORMACK (INSTAGRAM: @SHOT.BY.DOT_)
Songwriters are always on double duty. We create empathetic spaces for our listeners, as the soundtrack to individual lives in myriad ways. All the while, the songs we write become a journal of our own lives, leaving shards of our very timeline etched into sound.
With the release of new music on the horizon for me, it wasn’t surprising then to take on a reflective angle, consider past and present. Everything was expected… until it wasn’t. I started to notice a pattern I hadn’t before: that my songs have naturally become an archive of my gender identity journey across time, and it brought me back.
I was just 13 when I was outed in school. At my 2009 all-boys Christian high school, my bisexuality quickly became a point of revulsion, curiosity and rumour in equal measure. This was an environment where queer kids were considered weird, sinful and had a proverbial target on their heads.
It was that oppressive atmosphere that led me to write the first versions of Closure (later released in 2022) and Make Believe (releasing on 24 July 2025), both born from a desperate plea for change.
By 15, I had found some community in the local LGBTQIA+ scene and had started collaborating with several other queer musicians, most notably Richard Stottman (cyntrix), who would later co-create Make Believe with me. These new friendships were top-of-mind when I wrote Make Believe’s chorus, summoned from the feelings of my first Pride protests, new creative freedoms, and the slow-burning, knowing connection I began to have with my trans friends’ stories.
By 2017, I was all but saying the words aloud. “Man” or “woman” had never really worked for me. Only through writing Closet Case, a song confronting the harm of conversion therapy, did my own gender identity once again come into unavoidable focus. At 20, I had a still-open wound from my school-age outing. I wanted an opportunity to express my queerness on my own terms. So the next steps became clear. Through Closet Case, I would come out as non-binary in the very lyrics I wrote, reclaiming my story: “Three for a girl, and four for a boy / Five for a non-binary like me / Did you wanna play the game of happy families?”
Soon to emerge, my EP Sounds You Never Heard Pt. 2 continues Pt. 1’s aim of bringing new life to more previously unreleased or unavailable songs, including a revamped Closet Case and Make Believe (the EP’s lead single). I was 15 when I first wrote Make Believe, and now, at 28, the lyrics resonate even more with what’s going on in the world right now. The current pushbacks on LGBTQIA+ rights, the broader emboldening of fascist horrors, and the ever-present climate breakdown all underscore the anxiety here, an anxiety that could lead us to total inaction, if we let it.
And through all the self-reflection, the impact of community healing and the reclaimed agency to stand here today as a proud non-binary artist, therein lies the message I want to now convey the most. That hope is a radical force, and we must believe in the potential for collective change that is not just eventual, but that starts now.
To pre-save Make Believe, find their socials and more, go to solo.to/iamjtleon.
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