"Are You a Boy or a Girl?"
A Journey of Self-Acceptance
Following up on Emma’s post about Practicing Pronouns, it seems like a good time to share about my gender journey.
I remember when I finally learned the word “misgendered” after a lifetime of being misgendered. Sometimes, we don’t realize we’re missing vocabulary to make sense of our experiences until a new term is discovered.
Two words I learned in middle age have changed my life: overexcitabilities and nonbinary. Overexcitabilities, along with positive disintegration, helped me realize I wasn’t broken or mentally ill. Non-binary helped me realize I wasn’t a defective woman.
I didn’t know I was nonbinary, or that an option existed outside of the male/female binary, until I first came across the word. I don’t have a clear memory of the moment, which may seem surprising since I’m such a documenter of my experiences.
Even though I don’t have a clear recall of the moment I discovered the term nonbinary, I can tell you I immediately recognized myself in the phenomenon. Much like I did when I discovered twice-exceptional, which led me to overexcitabilities and positive disintegration. The magnitude and impact of discovering these terms on my life cannot be overstated.
Being authentic in my gender expression felt like a curse when I was growing up. If there had been some nonbinary role models represented in the media when I was a kid, I think it would have been easier. Sometimes I think about the fact that my obsession with suicide began in childhood before I was eight years old. What if it had felt OK to be as different as I was in multiple ways?
One thing that’s clear for those of us who work with the gifted is that the percentage of gifted and otherwise neurodivergent people who are gender-nonconforming is higher than for more typically developing populations. Compounding types of differences lead to what can feel like a more difficult and challenging experience of reality due to social isolation and lack of mirroring.
Growing up identified as highly gifted was hard enough. Last year, one of my friends said something along the lines of, “Growing up highly gifted is being a freak show,” and that resonated.
Add the gender difference of not identifying as female despite being born in a body with female parts, and it’s even worse.
A Weird Kid
In the post I shared about autoethnography in April, I said that when I was growing up, I didn’t expect to get married in adulthood. There was no representation for me on wedding cakes. I didn’t see myself as the bride or groom, so where did I fit?
I was a weird kid in multiple ways: neurodivergent, intense, and gender-nonconforming. Most things that seemed hard for other kids came easily to me when I was young because of my intellectual ability and high self-efficacy. I was also pretty athletic and played ice hockey until there wasn’t a team for me to play on anymore. But I didn’t know how to be a girl or dress like one.
Here’s a photo of me in a hotel room at Disney World in 1983 at age 10, playing the mouth harp and wearing a hat.
Until I was in about 6th grade, I had no self-consciousness about being perceived as a tomboy. If anything, I was proud of being a tomboy and thrilled when I got to play ice hockey on the boys’ team. And yet, I didn’t feel like a boy. I didn’t feel dysphoric about the body I was in, exactly. It’s more that I found it easier to talk to the boys, and we had more common interests.
I knew throughout my childhood that I wasn’t represented adequately by either “female” or “male.” But “male” was a closer fit in the externals. I had absolutely no interest in wearing dresses or girls’ clothing from my earliest days, and by first grade, I started refusing to wear skirts and dresses. I can count the number of times I’ve worn a dress in adulthood on one hand.
However, while wearing boys’ clothes felt more comfortable, they still weren’t quite right. For one thing, they were not designed to fit the body I was in, so they were often ill-fitting. I’ve never been thin, so finding clothes that fit and are acceptable to me has always been pure torture. My life would have been so much easier if I’d been thinner and able to wear whatever I wanted. Instead, I felt doomed in adulthood when trying to find clothes for work or when I had to shop for plus-size maternity clothes.
The Hell of Gender
From the earliest times of childhood, there was misgendering. Sometimes, it was accidental, like the man at the bank saying, “Excuse me, son,” while I was in line with my mother. Even when I had longer hair, it wasn’t enough to avoid misgendering because I was probably wearing boys’ clothes.
Most of the instances when girls tried to bully me in elementary school started with, “Are you a boy or a girl?” Imagine those words wielded as weapons in the stairway or at recess.
My father had been bullied as a child. I talked on the Conversations on Gifted Trauma podcast about his childhood experience moving to Philadelphia, Mississippi, from Milford, Connecticut, in 1963. One lesson he learned was to fight back, and that was always his advice to me: hit first and ask questions later.
As mentioned already, I played on hockey teams with boys, where I had my own locker room, which could feel lonely and weird. But it was preferable to the teams with girls, where I had to figure out how to be a girl to fit in with them. I never felt as alien as the times in childhood when I was in the locker room with girls.
It was thanks to playing hockey that I learned to stand up for myself so well. But I took it too far, and I easily became aggressive. My anger was often palpable when I was young, and I had a very low tolerance for frustration.
In middle school, the attempts at bullying by other kids were worse, and I think that’s a huge part of why I became the person I was during adolescence. I was constantly on guard, defended, and ready to protect myself. I carried a knife in my pocket through most of seventh grade and found school mostly unbearable.
Throughout seventh grade, I was depressed, suicidal, and obsessed with drugs and escaping my reality.
When I started the autoethnography in 2014, I was still looking back on middle school as the time when my “mental illness” started. From my journal:
“Looking back at the beginning of middle school—one of the biggest puzzles for me has been wondering what went wrong when I started 7th grade. It never made sense. I'd been a straight-A, Lisa Simpson-like kid in terms of academics. And then it was like my brain was suddenly broken. I never looked at how the pieces fit together because I'd never considered ADHD. Or ODD. I only ever viewed that period of time knowing that I have bipolar disorder, and a mood disorder shouldn't have derailed my academic work so much. And it didn't.” (April 2014)
It’s embarrassing now to even admit that ten years ago, I could only view myself through the lens of pathology that way.
“I’d only ever viewed that period of time knowing that I have bipolar disorder.”
Even more embarrassing is that I assumed I’d had ODD—oppositional defiant disorder. It’s important to understand that I wasn’t remembering myself accurately, something I discovered during that project, which I described in Episode 56.
Now, I look back at 7th grade through different lenses than I used to have. One is the lens of gender identity. Another is trauma.
Let’s revisit the beginning of 7th grade. I’ve also talked elsewhere about the fact that I experienced a traumatic event at the beginning of that school year. I witnessed violence against my mother. Someone tried to kill her in front of me, in our home. That alone accounts for the difficulty I had at the beginning of that school year, in which I went from never having anything below an A grade to my first C.
I also had to learn how to perform the role of middle school girl, which felt much more difficult than anything academic. Clothes and makeup were the source of endless misery for me. What to wear. How to apply makeup. It didn’t take long before I gave up and reverted to wearing boys’ clothes.
But again, the problem with wearing boys’ clothes was that I didn’t feel like a boy. It seemed like there needed to be a third option, which didn’t yet exist in my world. The years I’m describing were 1985-1987. Things were very different. We didn’t have online shopping yet, or companies producing unisex clothing for nonbinary people.
At the beginning of middle school, I learned that girls in the choir could not wear pants during performances. I’d been in choir in elementary school but could not continue in middle school because I would only wear pants. This would be a problem for many years of my life. From my journal:
“I just thought about the things I was excluded from that would have helped me because of my gender issues. My nonconformity. In 7th grade, I couldn’t be in choir anymore because girls had to wear a skirt or dress at concerts. No exceptions. At the Washington Workshops seminar [in high school], the events required girls to wear a dress or skirt. I clearly remember how difficult it was to wear a skirt to one session. I knew I couldn’t keep doing it. That’s why I went home early. What a disaster that was. If I could’ve worn pants, it might have been OK. Except I was also a mess emotionally. It felt problematic so many times in my life when I had to face the dilemma of what to wear. Every special occasion for so many years. It sucked.” (April 24, 2019)
There were other traumas in middle school, too. The traumas I experienced around gender—exclusion, and bullying in particular—felt so arbitrary and unnecessary.
I didn’t date until adulthood. I liked boys, but I was too unconventional and different. There were no romantic partners for me in adolescence. It’s not something I felt particularly sad about because I was still very social and had friends. But there were moments when I felt bad about who I was and not fitting in as “normal.”
Since clothes were such a problem for me, it was wonderful to go to an all-girls school for the first part of high school. Even though the uniform was a jumper, it wasn’t like wearing a dress. And I always wore shorts underneath. I loved wearing a uniform because it took all of the shame and struggle out of clothes.
When I got kicked out of that school abruptly during junior year, I thought of killing myself when I realized I was going to have to go back to finding clothes for school that worked.
I could go on and on with examples of how my atypical experience of gender made mundane, typical aspects of life feel intolerable and too difficult.
Waking up to being NB
I admit that I wish I had a clearer memory of when I discovered that I’m non-binary. And I also wish I could better explain what it means for me to have this difference.
I didn’t give much thought to gender until middle age. I didn’t realize there was any choice but to be female. But not thinking about it didn’t solve the problem. In order to accept and love myself, I had to face the reality of this difference I’ve always experienced.
When did I wake up to being non-binary? I believe it’s thanks to a friend I made at The Qualitative Report’s 2015 Conference, the second time I presented on autoethnography. She is a women’s studies professor and the first person I ever talked with in-depth about gender. We had an email correspondence for a couple of years during the time when I was first studying the theory and questioning my diagnoses.
In 2017-2018, I started a soft-launch of being in the world as non-binary. I added it to my Twitter bio and immediately had someone reach out and say, “Me, too!” It felt so nice to connect with someone who understood.
However, I also experienced resistance when disclosing being nonbinary to someone I worked with in 2018. I’ve never written about my experience at Third Factor Magazine, but I left because of irreconcilable differences with the Editor over gender. Suddenly, trans-phobia was upfront and personal for the first time. It would not be the last time.
While I have recognized myself as NB for the past seven years, I haven’t been very public or talked about it much. Still, acknowledging it to myself openly and at Yunasa made a difference, as seen here. This was written right after returning home from camp in 2021:
“I’m happier now that I feel like I can be myself and be gender nonconforming and non-binary. I should seriously consider they/them pronouns. It only feels tricky because of my family. How many ways can I be an outlier?” (June 25, 2021)
“Tricky” doesn’t begin to convey how complicated it felt to tell my partner, son, and mother about being non-binary. I told my son first, around the time I wrote the above entry.
Later that year, I was finally able to talk to Jason about it after being misgendered:
“At dinner tonight, someone referred to me and Jason as “gentlemen.” It was predictable. It opened the door for me to tell him that I’m a happier person now that I’ve stopped trying to fit in as female. I can never go back to doing that. It feels good to say that in here, actually. I try to think about how it must be for him to have me going through this experience of identifying as nonbinary. I think he really does support me.” (December 10, 2021)
A few months later, during the first six months of the podcast, we recorded an episode called Gender and Authenticity. Recording it felt difficult, and I saw that I was at such an early stage of the coming out journey. As you can see, I felt some dissatisfaction with my performance after it was recorded:
“We did the episode on Gender and Authenticity. It went well, although I felt awkward. I always do. Emma tells me not to be a gifted perfectionist. I know there’s some truth there. The episode was real, and I’ll be interested to see what people think.
I’m haunted by a couple of things that I said in the pod recording tonight. It shows that I’m at the beginning of my journey when it comes to gender. Ellie would say trans and nonbinary—it’s weird that I don’t think of them together. I think I feel like I have such a different experience [than her].” (March 19, 2022)
I will be honest and admit that I didn’t realize until this happened that the trans label fits my experience.
“Cisgender” doesn’t fit my experience, but I hadn’t considered trans a label that applied to me. This came from my ignorance about the terms and not realizing that “transgender” contains a broad umbrella of experiences that includes nonbinary. Much as we have differences in neurodivergence and types of neurocomplexity, there is a spectrum of gender diversity that goes far beyond male and female.
The Experience of Being Nonbinary
In 2022, my pronouns were she/they, and I talked about being nonbinary in my Elder Chat at Yunasa West. I told the whole community what I’m telling you in this post, which is the positive impact of accepting myself for who I am. During my preparations, I wrote:
“There are two words that I learned in my 40s that helped me feel less broken. The first one is overexcitability. The second one is non-binary. In the elder chat today, I need to talk about feeling like an alien. I never fit into the world until I discovered the gifted community.” (June 14, 2022)
This year, for my 51st birthday, Michael Piechowski sent me a book titled A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. He wished me a “Happy Nonbinary birthday!” Wow, that was pretty amazing to hear.
What a very special experience to read a book with a nonbinary character for the first time. It felt like such a kind gift from Michael. It has not been easy for him to understand what it’s like being nonbinary.
Last year, in June 2023, I used they/them pronouns on a name tag for the first time at Yunasa. It was an incredible experience getting to be myself with that group and learning to get comfortable with being nonbinary.
I kept talking with Michael about gender issues after camp, and I appreciated that he expressed some curiosity:
“Michael wants to know more about the inner experience of being nonbinary. I never felt bound by gender. I didn’t think of anything as off-limits because it was billed as “for boys.” I didn’t feel attached to either gender. I had the female parts, but I didn’t feel I fit into the category.
I was not comfortable in my own skin. I didn’t have a clear sense of self. It made me feel like I was a freak for a very long time. I didn’t know the word “misgendered” until middle age. That was so familiar.” (August 2, 2023)
I was concerned about how my partner, son, and mom would react to the news that I’m nonbinary. They have all been supportive, but it’s also clear that it isn’t easy for them to understand.
What a blessing it is to finally get to live with my own experience of gender as I understand it. I’ve found it difficult to explain what it’s like except to say it’s something I feel.
Being misgendered is traumatic. Feeling misunderstood and out of alignment with seemingly everyone else is lonely and painful. I’m sure it’s part of why I lived in an imaginal world for so long, where I could have relationships I wasn’t having in real life.
What can cis people do to be good allies? Normalize using pronouns everywhere. Get curious about other people’s pronouns. Offer them whenever possible. Know that your ability to correctly guess another person’s gender is more limited than you realize. You can’t tell someone’s gender by how they look.
Some of us have a different experience of gender that exists outside of the binary. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us. It’s been very affirming and validating to meet other adults currently in middle age who are gender-nonconforming and identify as nonbinary. It’s also been incredibly affirming to spend time around young people for whom gender is fluid and expansive rather than fixed and narrow.
How healing and unexpectedly wonderful to finally feel like I’m being myself. I realize now that I spent most of my life performing gender to make other people happy, and it was exhausting.
What if we think about gender dysphoria through the lens of positive disintegration? How can we support people on atypical gender journeys with this theory as a framework for understanding their drive for authenticity?
Being trans is not a problem. It’s something to celebrate.
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This is such a good post, Chris. What an insightful view into the impact of gendered dress codes on you as a child. Thank you for sharing.