Andrea Kennat

For me, being nonbinary but still strongly female presenting is a daily battle. Some days it’s okay, other days I want to stab my eyes out if I can tell in the mirror if I have boobs.

Gender is something that I never thought would be an issue for me because I was raised Christian. I was raised to believe that being the sex you were given at birth is also your gender, forever. You cannot change it, or do anything to your body to make it different, or you would be seen as an abomination. Living this way for most of my life was very stunting and made me believe that these thoughts would make me hated by everyone I loved.

I wish there was something that I could do to go back and tell my younger self that there are so many people in this world that would still love me even though I am not a girl. I wish I could tell my younger self that they embrace it.

Every day is different: one day I feel really feminine and I am my boyfriend’s girlfriend, I am a pretty girl, a princess. Then the next day, I feel masculine and I am my boyfriend’s partner, I am handsome and I am just a person. There are also days that when someone assumes a gender for me at all, I want to dig a hole and die.

I want there to be a way for me to have boobs and then be able to take them off when I want, but be able to put them back on when I want them again. I have the same type of feeling with my entire body, but boobs are societally assumed as a female part. When they see boobs, they think I’m a girl. The feeling of being perceived every single day and that everyone might perceive me wrong makes me sick. I just want to be me, Ivory. I don’t want people to perceive me as a girl or a boy, I’m just me.

For others, nonbinary means that they don’t feel masculine or feminine ever. This is why it is a spectrum, where nonbinary is not the same for everyone. Femininity and masculinity are not the same for their respective genders because everyone has their own way of representing themselves.

I love being me, and being who I am, but sometimes it can be exhausting. I love that being nonbinary is so freeing when I finally have people who understand or just don’t care what I identify as, as long as I am authentically myself. When I first came out as nonbinary, it was not easy for anyone. Not me, not my parents or even some of my friends. I lost many friends, cut contact with family, and broke down in my car too many times to count because I was still trying to figure out my identity. It’s not easy to figure out how I want to be perceived on a day-to-day basis. Some just want to be androgynous all the time, but it is not that simple for me. Although being perceived as androgynous every day would be easier, it would not feel the same as I do on the inside.

At the end of the day, “nonbinary” does not mean the same thing for everyone. That is why it is such a special and unique identity. Being nonbinary is one of the most important parts of me because it was the hardest piece in my coming out story. It was not like when I came out as pansexual because that was just more natural, but the feeling of being nonbinary took so much time for me to feel. It started as me getting grossed out when someone would use she/her pronouns to refer to me, and then it started to be gross to hear my dead name. Most recently, I have found that the pronouns he/they have felt most comfortable. Being queer, especially nonbinary, has been such an amazing journey for me. I would choose this hard path over the path that everyone else wanted me to take. Being nonbinary is unconfined and a once-in-a-lifetime experience. From one side of the spectrum to the other, it’s all beautiful.