In awe of the honesty, celebration of the author’s individual A-HA with this topic whilst making clear statements of respect/compassion for the multitude of NB & trans identities out there. My god, as the gay male body loving/straight feminine spirit vice-versa version to this author’s more masculine spirit in a gay woman’s body story - This Is Incredibly Refreshing to read. I was nodding along with so much shared here.

I respect any individuals choice of identity however, I have noticed a bit of a holier-than-thou air to some folks adopting alternative identities out in the real world and I have also questioned “Why adopt a separation They instead of, say, a more inclusive We/Us” pronoun?

We are living in a time where many are awakening to the pitfalls and brainwashing political two-sided-only focused media perspectives have done to attempt to herd us into a: “if you don’t adopt this leftist progressive agenda then you Must Be in that Right Wing agenda”… and this writing celebrates Our Uniqueness and Divine Spark of individuality. Community is important.

This section really rang my inner YES bells:

Once I fully divorced myself from left-wing identitarianism, my non-binary identity looked like a flimsy cope for the suffering of being human. Whatever poetry or magic I thought I’d found in it now looked nauseatingly empty and disconnected from reality.

I see my traipse through non-binary identity in retrospect as a sad, embarrassing fetishization of my own disarray in a last-ditch effort to find stability in an alienated world. The world is bleak. It always has been, but right now it has a particular strain of surreal, disjointed bleakness that has lent itself to obsessive self-fixation in a scrambled search for security in words that perfectly capture some essence of ourselves. One avenue for this is in gender, something so individual yet so compulsorily social; it’s private enough to suit an alienated world, but public enough to solicit connection and mirroring even from strangers.

In the last few stanzas of my coming out poem, it is clear what challenges I am trying to solve with my new identity:

it is gray space where I am. soul out of body looking in mirrors whose reflection is always just slightly beyond recognition.

soul hanging quietly above the scene of a now young adult dressed in coral and royal blue garb, the image of the 21st century secretary.

I am 12th house fire, and these words these clothes these bones this flesh cannot express the infinity of what I am. not this time around, not ever.

they/them thank you

With this identity, I am trying to find a linguistic way to affirm and embody a fundamental experience of disembodiment; I am trying to embrace and normalize a fundamentally pathological experience of dissociation. I am trying to find power and meaning in the alienation I feel from my bullshit job as an admin assistant, and the suffocating presentation and expectations I felt were foisted upon me by this position. I am, somewhat narcissistically, declaring special status for fighting the universal battle of human nature: we are all consciousness bound up by the constraints of an animal body, constantly in a battle between our impulses and our ideals. We are virtually all restrained in our self-expression by social expectations and barriers to resources or opportunity. This is what it is to be alive and human, tragic as it is. Pronouns could not reflect this nor alleviate the pain of it. It was a vacant, hubristic dead end.

//

I do not believe by any means that everyone who is non-binary is engaging in a flimsy cope. Being non-binary is legitimate and often materially significant, and discrimination on the basis of gender is abhorrent and must be eradicated. I do not see non-binary identity as something inherently pathological and therefore worthy of violence (I also don’t see pathology as worthy of violence anyway, rather of boundaries and support). I don’t think gender needs to be compulsorily restricted by or reflective of biological sex. I guess what I’m saying is ~non-binary people are valid~ and I mean it.

My story is my story and I’m not editing it for anyone.

Great job, Molly, sharing your truth - real and uncensored. So Essential for the times we live in to hold the banner of Liberty Democracy and Independent Autonomy intact.