are you a girl or a boy or nothing at all

International Transgender Day of Remembrance was on Tuesday and I helped to coordinate an event in my workplace. I recently joined my department’s LGBTI Network as a co-chair and it has been so wonderful and warming so far. It has kept me busy for the last couple of weeks and I feel like I am going to get a lot out of it, personally and professionally. I can already feel a tiny community building around me - someone stopped me in the hall last night after 5 to say that they thought the event was so powerful and they spoke to me just as if I was an old friend and we’d known each other forever. It was full warmth.

The event on Tuesday was a lot of labour – both in terms of organising and emotionally. My pal PJ (also non-binary) and I did a lot of the heavy lifting and we pulled it off in two days before the event. It was a super stressful last minute rush which peaked with me crying about murdered transgender and gender non-conforming people in front of 50 people. A lot of people hugged me and thanked me and have emailed me to tell me what a good job I/we did. I am so drained from it still four days later and I feel like I am never going to recover.

I spent the lead up to the event feeling like an imposter about my gender and about being in the trans community – I’m still not sure if I fit into the trans community personally. I have so much privilege – and I feel like my voice was probably not the best to have delivered what I tried to at the event. I am very feminine-appearing and I am in a hetero-appearing relationship which affords me a lot of privilege and safety. I live in a country where we did not have any trans deaths on the 32 page list I taped to the walls (not to say there were none, maybe there were, but they weren’t publicly acknowledged if they exist). I have the choice of not saying anything at all if I don’t feel like coming out to someone – and that is a lot.

I went into the event already drained and already feeling so nervous because it was my first event as part of the network, my first event as an openly non-binary person at work, and my first time coming out to so many people in a room – a lot of people who had known me for several years before this without me ever breaching the subject, and a lot of strangers who I had never met.

I am glad that I spoke, and I am glad that people found it engaging and they now know that trans people are being murdered worldwide just for existing. I’m glad their names were read. I’m glad that maybe someone in the room thought about their cis privilege. I’m glad that it was impactful and that I am able to have a voice on behalf of people who have died for being different from ““the norm””, but I am sad that the voice of someone who has experienced serious discrimination or violence based on their gender identity and transness was absent in the room.

Someone asked me to post about gender on my blog once and I never have. This is largely due to the fact that talking about my gender or non-gender still makes me incredibly anxious and distressed after four? years – and also partly due to the fact that I don’t have a heart-warming story about how I’ve always felt wrong in my body since I was a child.

I don’t really remember when I started questioning my gender identity. I just remember feeling kind of uncomfortable being called a girl, and then more uncomfortable, and then more uncomfortable, and then eventually uncomfortable enough to be like stop!! calling!! me a girl!! I didn’t feel really like a girl anymore, and I sometimes felt more like a boy, and I sometimes felt like a girl but it was getting pretty rare. I finally was like HEY I’m genderfluid and I think? that was in 2014 where I was like I kinda hate looking like a girl and being a girl and I cut my hair off and stopped wearing skirts and dresses for a bit and bought a chest binder and just basically tried to smother whatever was inside me.

I don’t remember when I publicly asked to be called they/them instead of she/her. I don’t remember when I stopped referring to myself as genderfluid and started using non-binary instead. But I remember my dad asking me what this bullshit I was posting on the internet was about not being a girl and asking what I was instead if not a girl. I remember a couple of people’s mum’s misgendering me while complimenting me, and still persisting after being called out, and then me being just very uncomfortable about it and eventually deleting them from facebook. I remember internalising it every time I was and am called a girl at work. I don’t breach the conversation with my parents now and I don’t think at this stage that I ever will. My family still calls me a sister, a daughter, an aunt, and I silently internalise that.

It took me 2 years to bring up the subject with any of my bosses at my current workplace. It took me 8 months  after coming out to my boss to come out to my team, because she left 2 weeks later and it was so hard to tell her that I had to go outside to cry about the weight of it all after having the conversation. How could I do it again?

My team is incredibly supportive, and I love them deeply for applauding PJ and I when we both came out. I’ve changed my work name to Sam, my email address is Sam, my email signature is Sam, and my boss double checked with me that my name in their signature block was okay AND included my pronouns too. I am very warmed and also I want to cry a lot that I spent so long not talking about my gender. I don’t know how to talk about it still, and questions leave me anxious and I am still so happy when someone KNOWS without me having to tell them or asks me when they meet me. I want it to become so common that I’m no longer surprised and thankful when someone asks me for my pronouns, I want that so so hard.

Luv forever xoxo Sam

oh PS like the actual most important part - Ro Allen the commissioner for gender and sexuality spoke and then personally thanked me and hugged me and said my last minute idea of taping dead names to a wall was An Art Installation. Also here’s some pics of me before and after crying l o l