Rewilding my Gender | I am Nonbinary Day Musings

January tenth is I am Nonbinary Day (not to be confused with International Nonbinary People’s Day), and instead of the usual information blog post (maybe next year!), I thought I would share a personal essay about my gender journey and what being nonbinary is for me.

My relationship with my own gender changed and evolved as I grew, like it does for most people, I think. As a little one, I did not really understand gender. I was often left to my own devices, free to roam the woods and lakeshore surrounding my mother’s home, and the Christmas tree farm that shrouded the log cabin my father lived in.

There was no gender between the rows of pines, or on the shore next to the lapping waves. One might think that gender was present under the front porch, in the crawl space, where my brother and I played family, digging in the dirt. I was the mother and he was the father, but I wasn’t female. Like every other aspect of my wild play; I simply was.

But then as I got older the boys vs girls mentality climbed like Virginia creeper over my life and my outlook was only what I could see between the five-fingered leaves. One day at the park, another girl and I were desperate to join the boys in building their fort, rather than help the girls with theirs. The two of us were judged by the male cohort, and it came down to our clothes. The other girl insisted that she was dressed the way she was, in a pastel tee shirt with little flowers embroidered on the neckline, due to her mother’s influence. Without thinking I echoed her sentiments until I looked down and realized I was wearing my brother’s cast-offs; a gecko rappelling down a cliffside. I changed my tune immediately, insisting I liked my shirt, which I did.

In the end, I was chosen to be a part of the boys’ group, and the other hopeful kid presumably went and played with the girls.

In middle school, I attempted to manicure the thicket of my identity (as well as my unruly hair) into the pleasant suburban lawns I was presented with more and more by the other tweens and teens around me. One of the best examples of my autistic approach to copying the other girls blossoming around me was when I took the time to track what clothes my classmates were wearing, to try and figure out what clothing would catapult me into popularity.

Some katydid larvae do this as well, not the chart tracking their classmates’ fashion choices, but instead, pretending to be other, more dangerous insects, or plants, to ensure their survival to adulthood. They are more successful, I fear, as my mimicry was never all that successful, and despite the attempts of my then best friend, I remained awkward, frizzy, and queer (in the sense of being strange, I didn’t even consider my sexuality for another almost decade). I oscillated between being proud of my ‘not-like-other-girls’ status, and desperately yearning to be just like them. I was incredibly alone in a lot of ways; a little girl lost in the woods.

During high school, I started to truly embrace my otherness, in some small, more broadly-acceptable ways. I wore long skirts before they were trendy (Was that just my school? I still don’t understand trends). I embraced my interests and taste in music, even if it pigeon-holed me as the ‘horse girl’. I still didn’t understand why I was different, but I was starting to accept it.

Being nonbinary isn’t synonymous with androgyny, but I remember the moment when I learned about the term and ultimately started my journey toward understanding my gender identity. I was eighteen and in an AP Psychology class my senior year of high school, where the word was part of a vocabulary list.

My immediate thought was that androgyny was superior to both masculine and feminine, and that was what I wanted to be. I might have even said something to that effect to my teacher, commenting ‘Why wouldn’t anyone take the best parts of being female and male and be even better?

Looking back, my understanding of my gender and sense of self at this time was heavily coated with an algae bloom of misogyny, killing off any sense of pride in my femininity lurking underneath. Rehabilitating that mental habitat took almost another ten years, and starting to take testosterone.

So what is my gender now? My first instinct is to say it is an old-growth forest untouched and full of mysterious depths. But that is not entirely true. The idea of entirely untouched forests is a fantasy. Since humans have settled into stationary life, they have cultivated the land they have lived on. The Indigenous people who have cared for (and still do) the land I now live on did so with foresight to the future, and with their own survival in mind.

But the colonization and conquest of this land and the peoples distorted or destroyed everything to fit the desires of the colonizers and conquerors, and that includes our very perception of the concept of gender, including my own. So rather than some pristine, never-been-touched, fantastical forest that never really existed, I think my gender is rather a reclaimed environment. A lawn allowed to become what is natural for the environment, or a space lovingly rewilded, with native plants, saplings, and sprouts pushing back the invasive plants, and the white-supremacist beliefs that have been planted in my mind since birth.

Someday I would like my gender to be a deep dark forest, where wild things roam, a space where future generations go on the type of quests talked about in folktales to find themselves. But for now, I uproot the English Ivy, and poison the Tree of Heaven, not just in my own backyard, but in my perception of myself. I have plans to unlawn my yard this spring, as well as work towards understanding my gender and embodying my identity outside of the expectations of someone born into a body that looks like mine, as well as what is considered acceptable for an AFAB nonbinary person. I work towards the future I want to see both inside and out.