Non-Binary

Nothing about being non-binary tells you who you fancy. Those are two separate questions and you're allowed to still be working on the second one.

If you're dating, the word partner will do a lot of heavy lifting. Some people will treat you as an interesting variation on a woman, or on a man, and you'll clock it fast. That's a filter working, not a verdict on you.

If you've been with someone fifteen years and you're telling them now, they may need time to work out what it makes them, not just what it makes you. That's a fair question. It stops being fair when it turns into years of nothing changing.

If you're not out, being loved partly is not nothing. It's also not the ceiling, even if it's the ceiling this year.

And if you're on your own: nobody is required to be witnessed by a partner before this counts.

Gender turns up in bed more than people expect, and it's usually the last room where the language changes.

Some non-binary people want to be wanted as neither thing, with no words attached at all. Some want words, just not those ones. Some like being read as a man or a woman in that hour specifically and nowhere else, and that isn't a contradiction, it's a place where you get to pick.

Some of you have gone quiet about sex altogether, because being touched as the wrong thing is worse than not being touched. That's common. It tends to shift when the words around it do, though not on any schedule you can book.

Some of you feel very little desire at all. That's a separate fact about you, not a symptom of this one.

Saying which words you want, beforehand rather than during, does most of the work. It's an awkward two minutes that buys back whole nights.

You don't have to hate your body for the word to fit. Plenty of non-binary people are fine with theirs and simply want different things said about it.

Others want particular changes and only those. Top surgery and no hormones. A low dose for two years, then stop. Voice and nothing else. There's no package deal, whatever the shape of the form on a waiting list implies.

When dysphoria does show up it's often boring rather than dramatic. It's not being in any photos. Showering in the dark. Not looking down. Flinching at a recording of your own voice.

If you bind: watch the hours, never sleep in it, and nothing improvised, no tape and no bandages.

If you're on a waiting list, the wait says nothing about you. If there's no list where you live, and no clinic either, that says nothing about you either.

And keep your screenings. Whatever word is on your file, your body has the organs it has, and if invitations get sent out by gender marker where you are, you may have to ask for yours.

Work, if you're in it, is where you'll do the most maths.

Whether to put pronouns in the signature, or on the badge, or nowhere. Whether it's worth correcting the client mid-call. Whether to say anything to the one manager who gets it wrong deliberately and then smiles. Whether the uniform comes in two versions and what happens when you ask for the other one.

You can be out at home and closed at work. That's a normal way to live, not a compromise you owe anyone an apology for.

If you are out at work, the thing that actually helps is one colleague who corrects people so you don't have to. It sounds small. It halves the load.

And if you're somewhere that saying it would cost you the job, or the visa, or the reference, or more than that: staying quiet is a strategy. It isn't a character flaw.

Parents often grieve. It's a strange grief, because nobody died and the person is standing right there, sometimes making them a cup of tea.

Expect at least one round of 'you'll always be my little girl' or 'my son'. Expect the aunt who nods warmly and then gets it wrong for four years. Expect one sibling to be far better about it than you'd have predicted, out of nowhere.

Young children usually take about eleven seconds. The adults are the slow ones.

If your family is religious, or your language has no word for this, that's not automatically a closed door. It may be a slower one, and you are the only person who can judge the risk in your own house.

Some families never come round. If that's yours, the people who get it right on the first try do exist, and building your life around them is a legitimate plan.

There's no requirement to tell anyone, ever. Saying nothing doesn't undo it.

If you do want to: start with one person, and not the hardest one. Not the parent, not the boss. The friend who once said something offhand and decent about somebody else.

Keep it short. 'I'm non-binary. It means I'm not a man or a woman. I use they, and I'd rather you didn't pass it on yet.' Swap in whichever pronoun is true for you. That's the whole script, and the urge to explain for twenty minutes is nerves, not necessity.

Expect the first time to sound fake in your own mouth. Most people report this, and most say it fades after they've said it a handful of times.

You can also come out in pieces: pronouns to one group, the word itself to another, nothing at all to the rest. That's not half-hearted, it's how most people actually do it.

If where you live makes this dangerous, getting through the year quietly is a plan, not a failure.