Non-Binary: Womanhood from the Margins

I was in my friend Bracha’s backyard, celebrating the end of preschool by making tree-hangings out of scratched CDs (to scare away birds) while her mom listened to NPR from a portable radio. I heard an unfamiliar word and instantly asked her what it was, excited to add another to my growing collection of meanings.

“A lesbian is a girl who marries another girl,” she replied.

“Girls can marry girls? Why don’t they all do that?” I turned to Bracha, “I’m going to do that. Boys have cooties.”

I remember scraped knees, bad haircuts, and my nemesis Andrew, who was two grades above me – the son of my favorite teacher. I was obsessed with him, but not like Bracha was obsessed with our classmate Nico. I had an overwhelming sense of competition, a compulsive need to beat him. I never considered that obsession seriously. I was seven years old. I didn’t need to sort out my emotions. I needed to find out how to skip my mandated cup of milk for the day. I was called a tomboy, and I liked it — boyhood seemed boundless. I leaned into it, destroying anything I owned that was the color pink. I took bets to eat bugs, went on all the scary roller coasters and denounced Justin Bieber frequently and publicly as I could.

My parents found out I had started puberty from a declaration I made at the dinner table.

“I’m dying,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I have cancer,” I explained, “One of my nipples hurts, and there is a lump. I know we’re supposed to get boobs soon, but it’s just one of them. It has to be cancer.”

My aversion to conversations about training bras, tampons, and especially sex led my parents to believe I was afraid of it all. They walked on eggshells around the subject, trying to have “the talk” without me putting on earbuds and blasting Green Day over them.  I wasn’t afraid of puberty but the loss of my hard-earned boyhood. I saw the way people treated girls, and the idea of becoming a woman turned knots in my stomach. I had no way to recognize this, let alone articulate it, as my hormones swirled and the release of Marvel’s Avengers occupied the majority of my thoughts, so I let my parents believe it was shyness and shame.

The first time I got my period was at a funeral. I sat in the pews of an unfamiliar church and felt the blood seeping between my legs. The first time I got catcalled, I went home and showered for an hour, scrubbing my skin raw, I wanted to shed what drew it to me. I told my best friend, and she said that I was lucky, she didn’t have boobs yet, and didn’t even get noticed. I didn’t know why suddenly everything connected to the way I was seen was drenched in dread; I thought I must be doing something wrong.

When I met Noel I felt like no one else in the world could understand me the way she did. The first time the two of us were alone was at her family’s Christmas party, where I was rewarded for maneuvering through conversations about my family’s Judaism by being excused from caroling with the group. We laid on the carpet of her living room looking at each other and pouring out all our deepest feelings and thoughts on God, and how to cope with recent realizations about our mortality. Being twelve is hard. She held my hand and finally, something clicked into place; things just felt right.

I used to joke that the hardest thing about being gay is wondering “do I want her, or do I want to be her?.”

It was a struggle in my teenage years to sift through what drew me to people. At first, I thought the divide between friendship and romance was the harder one to hold, but slowly I learned that identity can be shaped in someone else’s hands. As Maia held mine on a bench in the San Francisco MoMA, I felt the absolute certainty that I would become whoever she wanted. And once she left me for our classmate Roy — “It’s just so much easier with a guy” — I found myself thinking of both of them. Should I pick up the instrument like him or wear stickers for earrings like her.

I noticed after I kissed Amelia that she started wearing her Doc Martens to school with yellow laces instead of black, just like I did. Running my fingers through her curly blonde hair under her Arctic Monkeys poster, I found that feeling that I didn’t realize I had been desperately seeking. Everything was as it should be. On the walk home from her house, I decided that in appreciating her body, I could learn to appreciate mine.

I have always been fixated on the concept of womanhood: it enraptures and evades me. When I avoid it, it seeps into the corners of my life regardless. If I outright denounce it, I find myself trying to sneak back in.

For some time in high school, I tried to refer to myself in only genderless language, playing around with the mentality of being nonbinary. Some of those moments were marked by comfort and relief, but most were drenched in guilt. I’m not trans, I don’t experience dysphoria, I’m just trying to wear a marginalized identity like a hat to try on, and then take off. I don’t flinch when my father calls me his daughter with pride. I have learned to love the curves of my hips and sometimes even my chest. I spent a year in high school fighting with my mother to wear a pin that says “CUNT” on it, everywhere like a badge of honor, baring my teeth at the world that tried to tell me women are less.

My attachment to feminism made it hard to detach from gender; it was almost impossible to talk about my experience being perceived as a woman in this world without calling myself one. I thought of the bloody seat at church, the white-hot rage of getting catcalled, the satisfaction of being called a “bitch” for knowing more than my male counterparts and being proud of it. Those markers of womanhood I had reclaimed and held so close to my chest. I didn’t want to give them up. It takes a lot of strength to tell the world you are something different than what it has already deemed you to be. I resigned to let people think I was a woman, because what’s so bad about being one anyway?

I love women deeply; I am not one.

The gentleness with which Bracha’s mother and NPR taught me the word “lesbian” is something I have always been grateful for. The memory of her backyard is one of my earliest, the rainbow light glinting off the CD in my hand, dousing that word in beauty and love. When my classmates learned it, it was whispered as a taboo alongside words like “shit” and “suicide”. It was sneered at me and my Supercuts mullet between the lockers in middle school. When I found my community in high school, friends who switched pronouns by the month and let me gush about girls I was too afraid to talk to, the term “lesbian” was still regarded as too rigid, just as binary as heterosexuality.

We were so wrong. Lesbianism is not just girls marrying girls. It is the decentering of men in a hetero-patriarchal world, the space to explore gender and identity and love without the male gaze. Most of us are lesbians now.

Everyone I have come close to loving has been nonbinary, and when I was with them I always pretended I wasn’t, but I knew I was drawn to them because their rejection of gender meant they could understand mine. I thought I couldn’t call myself non-binary because of my lingering attachment to womanhood, but found clarity when I finally understood “woman” as more than opposite to “man.”

The only time I have been called a “girl” without it prompting a slight tug of contempt in my chest was when my partner called me their girlfriend. It was no longer a declaration of “this is what you are” but “this is who I love”.