Episode seven of the Some Gender Going On podcast: I’ll Always be Misgendered. You can play it or download it here:

My seventh episode, and my angriest episode. An emotion that is valid and doesn’t automatically lead to hurting people. An emotion that isn’t exclusively masculine.

Notes

SGGO 7: I’ll Always be Misgendered

This episode’s going to be a bit angrier that a lot of the previous ones.
Because I’m angry
And because I’m learning that being angry is valid
That I’m not not hurting anyone just by feeling this emotion and talking about it
And it doesn’t make me male to feel this way.
It’s just being myself, feeling emotions authentically.

So why am I angry?

I’ll always be misgendered
Strangers will never see the true me
Because I’m nonbinary
Because they can’t imagine the true me.
So fuck those ignorant blind little peat bogs.

I took HRT because I like the effects
Not to get strangers to see who I really am
Because most people are incapable of seeing who I truly am
Because they don’t have a niche in their brain called non-binary
They will automatically put me in the niches labeled ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and then maybe dig their image out of those chasms if they are experienced in doing so. Maybe. But mostly, that imagine stays in the pits.

It’s impossible to pass when you’re non-binary. The concept doesn’t even apply. Which is good, maybe, it’s a bullshit concept. But it’s more than that. It’s hard to even have a reasonable frequency of affirming interactions. The best I can hope for is gender neutral or “si- uh ma’- uhm, right”, or maybe a they if someone’s feeling spicy and decides to read a pronoun pin.

People call me miss and I just don’t realize who they’re talking to. At an airport in Poland, it took me forever to realize. The security guard at the metal detector was just calling at me and calling at me. “Miss, can you come through? Miss? Excuse me, miss?”

I thought at the time that maybe I liked it and I was just unused to it, that I would grow to like it. That it would be easier if that’s how I felt, what felt validating to me. If it was validating for trans women, surely it’d be validating for me. Surely the same things apply to me and them, right? Surely It would be easier if I was more binary, a trans woman with an extra label of nonbinary stuck on.

Fuck easier. Fuck normal. Fuck predictable. Fuck making sense.

After the trip, back in Urbana, on a bus, I was the last person on the bus, and the driver want sure if I wanted to get off where we were or at the next stop. “miss, do you want to get off here? Miss? Excuse me, miss?” I thought he was talking to someone outside the bus, I couldn’t imagine he was talking to me. I only figured out who he was talking to when he waved at me, not after three “excuse me, miss?”

It doesn’t feel like me. It’s not me. I’m not a miss.

After the bus ride I went home and cried, harder than I’ve cried for a long time. The system only wants me to be a man or a woman. I can break myself out of the system but I can’t break them out of the system. There’s too many of them. They’ll always be there, always surrounding me, whatever I do. Forever.

Being called sir felt temporary, escapable. Being called miss and still feeling totally unseen, invalidated? That means it’s forever.

It wasn’t just the bus I was crying over.

I adopted the shortening Izzy because the vast majority of people just couldn’t comprehend a nonbinary Isaac. Isaac was a he, that’s all they’ll ever say.

But they can’t comprehend a nonbinary Izzy either. Because they can’t comprehend nonbinariness. It’s not in their conception of the world, yet. So Izzy is just a more femme spin, and femme means woman to them. Bullshit.

I was sad about being asked to leave a men’s bathroom in Amsterdam. I’m pretty sure it was by a man who looked at me and thought “she belongs in the women’s bathroom”. And I talked about it in a trans support group and they suggested I use the women’s room from now on.

I’m not a woman. I shouldn’t be forced I’ve way or another based on whims of strangers and their bullshit misinformed first impressions. If society doesn’t have the decency to provide a bathroom for people like me then they can damn will shut up and let me go wherever I feel at that moment.

Fuck society’s bullshit, their blinded inability to imagine a more interesting world, the gendering built into the terms of address, public accommodations, interactions with strangers. Fuck it all. I want to break it, burn it, shred it to rubble.

Strict binary, gender essentialism, cisnormativity, none of these express how awfully vile and oppressive and permanent and immovable and hateful and enraging the whole garbage fire is. Needs a term I can spit in dismissal, like “the straights”, “the cis”, etc. Not just people with a normative identity, but who perpetuate that identity, keep enforcing it. The bins. Helps remind us of the trash fire that birthed the bins and their mindset. The binary’s thugs, goons, enforcers.

So no. I’m not minimizing myself. I’m not going to what’s normal, or palatable, or helps the bins get it closer correct. I’m not going to feel bad any more for ignore the bins when they misgender me with sir or miss or anything. I’m going to use whatever bathroom I feel like and dare the fucking bins to challenge me. I don’t fucking care. I’m not going to check how frilly my skirt is before I pick where to go. I don’t care about making them uncomfortable. I’m done making myself miserable to avoid the slightest discomfort for the bins.

There’s a line from a song a like, Binary by The Spook School:
So make them uncomfortable
and challenge their ideals
‘cause their antiquated notions
are blinding what is real

And I’m not going to quake in fear out of danger of violence, physical or legal or social. That’s the bins trying to keep us in line by the vague threat of potential violence, and I don’t negotiate with terrorists. Sure, it’s due to privilege that I even have the option to say fuck minimizing myself for some meager safety from the bins. No shade on anyone who picks safety. But I have the option and I’m going to take it, and fuck the bin world.

No more staying quiet when I get he’d. I’ve been out for over five years. No more hiding.

And I’m not taking advice from the bins on these topics any more. People might think they’re trying to be helpful but they don’t understand me, and misguided advice is worse than none because I might follow it.

So fuck them all, burn it all to the ground, I’m done hiding, done minimizing myself, done being “safe”, done automatically avoiding conflict. I write my own story, I find my people, we build our world. A world worth living in. Not this bullshit garbage heap infected and festering through our minds, worms and maggots and hopeless despair at the possibility of anything new and worthwhile and full of light and joy.

I’m going to live in the world I want. I don’t care that the bins aren’t living in my world. I don’t want them in my world anyways. But you’re welcome to join me.