I'm Nonbinary Trans And I'm Exhausted

It’s half way through Pride month, and I am exhausted.

I really struggle with having ‘months’ for deliberately disadvantaged aspects of human identity. Marking and remembering the Stonewall Riot, and the 2SLGBTQIA+ rights it paved the way for, is important. It is particularly important to remember that it was led by Black and Brown Trans Women. But as long as we have a month for it, it means we are still trapped in a Gregorian calendar of colonial, capitalist hell where that group is more likely to be exploited than truly celebrated.

Until every month is Black history month, Pride month, Disability month, we are still trying to change a system that operates exactly as intended, instead of building a new one. The processes of decolonisation and neuro-embodiment are year round, lifelong endeavours, that cannot be picked up and set down.

The system that permits us one month a year to be loud about our queerness, is the same one that assigned us our identities through colonial constructs that have surrounded us since we were born. We are told who were are, or indeed, who we are supposed to be. 

Our genders are decided for us, often before birth.

Our names are likely to reinforce the gender that has been assigned to us.

Our clothes, our toys, they way people speak to us, what the expect from us and of us, are all gendered.

Our sexuality is assumed to be allosexual (not asexual) and heterosexual and we are bombarded with straight love stories.

We are surrounded with stories of low melanated people and soon realise that having more melanin is ‘other’. 

We are surrounded with systems, services and amenities designed for a mindbody that works in a certain way and are told that way is ‘normal’.

And we perform.

We perform gender, sexuality, whiteness and mindbody normativity, to whatever extent we can and need to in order to survive. Those who can perform most closely to these constructs, are least likely to ever critically question whether they are a true reflection of who they are, because the system allows them the most freedom and benefits. It’s a game where everyone who can whistle gets a chocolate bar. The whistlers might question why non-whistlers don’t get a chocolate bar, but they don’t stop to ask themselves if they want to whistle, why they are being asked to whistle in the first place, or whether they might actually want to sing.  

It is a particularly tiring Pride month to be Trans. I’m not going to list the reasons why here, because it’s well documented elsewhere and I’m not going to do more emotional labour on that front right now. But let’s get one thing abundantly clear - Transness is ancient. Before European colonialism brought cis-heteronormativity to the majority of the world, our transness was woven into our cultures, traditions, roles and celebrations. Even the concept of ‘Trans’ is colonial, because it exists in reference to the construct of gender being assigned at birth based on observation of genitals, rather than a deeply personal part of you that emerges as you grow to understand yourself and your place in your community.

I have been performing ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ for so many years, I am still disentangling what belongs to me and what doesn’t. In my twenties, I really leaned into lots of colonial, femme stereotypes. I lost weight and toned up in pursuit of the most svelte yet hourglass figure I could achieve, and wore super tight dresses to show it off. All my bras were push up. I grew my hair long and wore it in soft, wavy curls falling around my face, they had a delightful bounce as I walked (often, strutted). I had a relatively senior corporate job and was earning good money, I bought myself manicures and pedicures and kept my wardrobe up to date, with an emphasis on power heels. Performing ultra femme or ultra masc in alignment with our assigned gender is quite a common thing for Trans and Nonbinary folx to do when grappling with our true identities, I have since learned.

When I first realised I was Nonbinary, I found myself wanting to appear as androgynous as possible. I shaved in an undercut, I wore a lot of dungarees, I stopped doing my nails and would only wear flat shoes. I wore heavy black boots in summer even though it was sweltering. It was an uncomfortable and confusing time, where I was in a cycle of shedding one construct only to replace it with another. I was deeply unhappy and trying to anchor my sense of self to anything I could so that it wouldn’t slip through my fingers.

Today, after several years of unlearning, decolonising and coming home to myself, I am the closest I have ever been in my adult life to who I really am. The most liberating part of having a stronger, more solid sense of my gender, is that I have largely let go of gender performance and my binary ideas of gender expression. My hair is long and I’m re-cultivating the natural curl that years of bleaching flattened out of it. It’s healthy and shiny and I’ve grown out my natural colour so that I can bathe in its dark, Indianness, for the remaining non-grey years I have left. I wear clothes that fit well and make me feel good. I wear shoes that do the same. I paint my nails bright colours because they make me happy. I wear more trousers than I ever did before. Long, high-waisted, flared trousers. I wear makeup some days, and not others. I don’t feel more masc or more femme at different times, because they don’t really mean anything to me anymore. I don’t really have the language to describe my gender fully in words yet - this is a loss that I am grieving, as I am certain my ancestors had powerful names for this experience. Nuanced, life-giving names. The closest thing I can say right now is that I am all genders, all the time. And I feel wonderfully… me.

Imagine a world where children are not bombarded with messaging about who they are supposed to be, and therefore don’t need years of unlearning, heartache, exhaustion, illness, fighting (and access to resources!) to reclaim what was taken from them.

What if we were encouraged, from day one, to nurture and get to know our true selves, in our entirety?

Who might you be today?

Who could you be tomorrow?

— AJ

Today’s Neuro-Embodiment Prompts:

Suggestions and questions to help you engage with mindbody decolonisation:

1. Are there aspects of your identity aligned with colonial constructs that you have never questioned? If so, why not? How could you safely explore that part of who you are?

2. In what ways are you performing gender? Who do these gender performances serve? What aspects of gender performance might you want to work towards letting go of?