on Gender

i – something other

The moment I felt the most sure of myself was when I was a building.

Not literally, of course; this was during my second session of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. A dialogue with my therapist, eye mask on and ambient music playing, my prescription troche dissolving in my cheeks. The bitterness was distracting, at first, but numbness swept it away.

Have you ever been something other than your body?

It’s quite freeing. It’s something I’m sure everyone has done, at least in childhood – imagined flying above a field, gliding on a hawk’s wings, or diving through the ocean. As a kid, the world seems boundless, limited only by your imagination, what you can picture yourself doing.

As I lay there, I felt my senses change. My veins were streets. My eyes were the streetlights illuminating them. But the core of me, my essence, was a building.

Have you ever been to Corporate Woods? That’s where my session was. The building I was on the third floor of was a lot like what I’d turned into. A blocky, beige monolith, shimmering with rows upon rows of windows. The parking lot at my feet was packed with cars, the trees on the medians waving in the breeze. It was overcast, just like in real life, and I could feel the weight of the fog pressing down on my shoulders.

I should clarify. I knew I was… not a woman long before this ketamine trip. I’ve known since I was a small small child that I didn’t quite fit as a girl or a boy. But this is the most tangible example that I can confidently draw upon, where it was so evident, it made so much sense, that I have to share it.

The city spread around me, extending out through my limbs, the cars and trucks and buses scurrying like ants on their paths. I was aware of all of it, but it was indistinct; smudges on the edge of my vision. What was more noticeable than the traffic was the emotion, how I could share the intensity felt all across the city.

Then, as soon as it began, this vision faded, and I was something else; an orbital platform, a landing bay for starships, my pylons reaching down through the stratosphere in a surface-to-orbit elevator. Even more fantastical and nonsensical than an office building, but equally right.

As the sun shone across the landing bay, blinding white, I was suddenly spinning through the void as a spacecraft, thrusters firing to continue my momentum. Then I felt my tread shaking the ground, reticles prickling my vision, and I was a war machine, a god of destruction in a mech’s body, my arms hot with plasma.

Too much daydreaming, too much science fiction, I’m sure. But none of this was alarming. I just felt acknowledgement…this is what I get to be for right now.

Now, it’s unwise and unfair to extrapolate an entire gender identity out of a ketamine trip. Take this as an example, perhaps even the apogee of my understanding of myself as Something Other.

I came out as nonbinary when I was fifteen. Some would say that’s too young to know that kind of thing, but again, I knew even before that. I just didn’t have the word until then.

After all, words are important in all of this. Supremely so. Words shape the way I think. And until I had the word, the word that let me wrap this all up in a nice little bow, I was supremely confused.

ii – something palatable

What does a “nonbinary” person look like? Some would, perhaps jokingly or perhaps in a mean-spirited jibe, say a short white person with a goofy haircut dyed some fantastical color (oops, they got me).

But really, a nonbinary person can look any way they like; gender presentation =/= sex =/= gender identity. At least, that is my belief and how I live my life; I understand many would not agree with me, and we run into this discourse often in queer spaces.

Frustratingly, despite that I would never criticize anyone else for not being “nonbinary enough,” or for presenting hyperfeminine while using he/him, or vice versa, I still fight a deep-set fear (paranoia, even?) that I myself am Not Nonbinary Enough.

This is especially prevalent when I need to introduce myself to new people; I should just say “I’m Eden, I use they/them pronouns,” and call it a day, but I find myself dancing around that and simply praying that I look Nonbinary Enough for others to realize it. I rely too much on others to pick up the slack for me, deeply appreciating when a friend corrects someone else or points it out, feeling too sheepish to say anything myself.

These doubts that cluster in my mind are things I can address and debunk, so I’m repeating them here to add explanations for my answers.

Where do these questions, these doubts come from? These days I’m surrounded by people who recognize and affirm me: my coworkers, boss, partner, and friends all use the correct pronouns, and I’m sure if I changed my name they would use a new one. I don’t want to blame it on my childhood – how blasé! – but in this case I think it’s the truth.

My relationship with my mother could be a whole other essay, but in summary, I was not given respect by her, or consideration, and the notion that I am my own person with my own ideas still has not been accepted. It might never be accepted. For the foreseeable future, I am proceeding as if that acceptance will never come, and I believe that’s part of what still causes me doubt in my internal model of myself.

As time passes, less time around her and more time as my own independent self, I am becoming more and more confident that I know who – and what – I am. This essay so far may seem wishy-washy, may make it seem like I’m not confident at all. I am. I promise to you I am. I’m trying to share a snippet of the confusion I went through, so you can better understand my conclusions.

iii – the form you want

Before we continue: Imagine for a moment that your body isn’t yours.

Not in the sense that you’re puppeteering it, or that you’ve been removed from it, but more in the sense that no matter what you do, it can’t be what you need it to be.

Perhaps this comes across as very childish; I’m sure we all wanted wings or a dragon’s tail at some point when playing at recess. But yet again, I mean this in the very abstract sense. Imagine if you were told that your body physically could not be what you wanted.

For the sake of my example, let’s pretend you were assigned female at birth, like me. Sex is immutable, or at least that’s what we are taught. There are certainly some rare exceptions, like intersex people, but they are often ignored or intentionally obfuscated to make things easier. Two options, black and white: male and female, XX and XY.

So, you’re a female. You have your XX chromosomes, your primary sex characteristics like your womb. You have your secondary sex characteristics that won’t develop until later, like your breasts or how your fat tends to collect at your hips. And then, there’s the social layer of it all; something that in a modern interpretation can be considered your gender.

For me, one of my biggest sticking points is my biological sex. I am female, sure, but I don’t want to be. I also don’t want to be male, either.

How would you distance yourself from being “female”? You could take hormones, perhaps have top surgery or a metoidoplasty or another “masculinizing” procedure. But I (perhaps incorrectly) have thought of that as counterbalancing the “female” by “adding male,” attempting to either completely swap sexes or to reach pure androgyny somewhere in the middle. That simply isn’t what I want.

I like to joke, in reference to the memes I run into now and again, that I want “HRT that makes you a robot.” Obviously, that’s not how HRT works (yet… someone get on it!). But beneath the joke, I think there’s a kernel of truth to that. I’ve always felt a connection to robots, to vehicles, to computers and trucks and The Machine in a wider sense.

At my first burn several years ago, lounging with my friends, I thought of a get-to-know-you question: “What would your perfect form be like?” The qualifiers were: you can expect to still fit within society / not be denied opportunities because of your form, magic and advanced tech are on the table, and you could keep as much or as little of your current body as you want.

I want you to think about that for a moment, too. What would yours be?

Some of my friends said “I don’t know, my body right now…?” Others wanted to be taller, stronger, and so forth. From what I can remember, the most fantastical it got was wings or elongated elf ears… I was the only one that wanted to become an enormous machine, a vast industrial apparatus or even a more abstract digital consciousness.

Now I should finally explain why I would want to be a machine. How would that work? How is being a landing platform in space or a building or a mech gender affirming?

This inclination – this love for the inanimate – has been with me as long as I can remember. As a toddler I loved going to Touch-A-Truck, I loved trains and fire trucks and semis and airplanes, and as soon as I was allowed to use a computer, I loved that too.

Through all of that, I felt some sort of kinship with these machines, some bone-deep empathy or perhaps yearning. I have always been an anthropomorphizer, someone who names their pencils and phones and takes as good care of my belongings as I can because I don’t want them to get hurt, and it’s amplified with interactive things like a piece of technology.

It’s almost like I see the humanity essence of… something worthy of respect in each of these things. The same goes for plants, animals, and so on, but I especially feel it in regard to human-made objects. I’ve been told many times that I have a deep capacity for empathy, and I of course feel it very strongly in regard to other humans, but I suspect my attachment to the inanimate is higher than normal.

So, that’s the baseline explanation. I feel deep care for my belongings and other objects. I could easily imagine how I could still be loved and cared for (maybe only by someone like me) if I were one of these objects. But to dig deeper, there are two more aspects I want to explain.

One: Usefulness and wanting to be wanted.

Two: Distance from the traditional expression of gender/sex.

I think it’s fair to say that my biggest want in life is to be useful. I want others to recognize how helpful I am! I want to be appreciated, to be loved, and to be good at what I do.

I feel that my belongings and machines and items are incredibly useful, and appreciate them for how good they are at performing their tasks. My car, Greenie, is great at its job of getting me where I need to be, safely. My computer, Flynn, is great at its job of facilitating tasks and letting me play games. My pens are great at their job of making clean marks when I need them to, and so on. Each thing has (at least one) purpose and I crave that simplicity.

If I were, say, a building, wouldn’t my purpose be extremely straightforward? Wouldn’t the measure of my success be: do you have walls and a roof? Are you sheltering the people inside? Do your amenities and plumbing and electricity work?

Again, again, I know this sounds so childish. “I want to be a computer or a pencil because then my purpose is clear-cut and easily achievable!” But can you understand? I want a form that makes me feel confident, and Other, and useful, and none of that can be found in the body I have right now.

Regardless, though, I am stuck with this body. So, as I mentioned already, I have decided to treat femininity like a mask – a costume – that I can put on and take off as I want. When I put on my makeup, or a dress, or do my nails, I imagine that I am modifying my form in the way I need it to be right now. I imagine it wouldn’t feel much different if I had modular limbs or firmware updates or something like that.

I try to remind myself that my body is a machine, of a kind, and maybe it’s not that bad.