“My use of their is socially motivated…: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the motion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I’m doing and why.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Early on in my life, I learned that it was a terrible thing to be mistaken for the opposite gender. But I often was, as a shaggy-haired kid with thick glasses and a science fiction paperback stuffed in my back pocket—and I found that my mother cared about it much more than I did.
When I played Dungeons and Dragons as a young adult, I was usually the only female in the group. No matter what character I ran, the other players persisted in treating my character as the person to be protected, even when I was running the biggest bad-ass in the group. And socially I was presumed to be the peacemaker of the group, the advisor, the confidante—even when I didn’t want to be.
It’s fitting that I realized I was nonbinary at a 2019 science fiction convention. In that revelatory space, I was finally able to articulate something I’d been fumbling my way towards, and say it to others: I’m nonbinary. Moving outside of femininity is how I manage to be myself. Being nonbinary lets me evade much of that internal programming, and braces me to resist other parts of it.
The universe is nonbinary, too, but we keep trying to impose a binary nature on it. I believe that the binary that’s done more harm than any of the others is Us versus Them. It’s a seductive binary, because being “one of us” is a human instinct. We want to fit in; we want to be accepted; we want to be part of the crowd and not the outsider.
But everyone is us, whether we or they like it or not. We’re all inhabitants of the same planet, and so we must figure out how to get along. The stranger you do not know is not an enemy but a potential friend, and certainly a comrade on this small lifeboat, surrounded by sharks whose primary characteristic is not their gender but their hunger.
The universe is a complete entity and I am a reflection of its entirety—not just parts. To be nonbinary is to say “I’m choosing my own path. I know it will be rocky from time to time, but there are things to experience along the way. There are flowers. And there are companions. There are all of you.”
Prayer
Thank you, universe, for all the complexity around me, and for manifesting me as part of that complexity. Help me perceive and appreciate it in the people around me.