The day I told my boyfriend I was non-binary

10 years ago, Katje van Loon wrote a blog post calling for the creation of International Non-Binary Day on July 14, exactly halfway between International Women’s Day and International Men’s Day. Katje has told BBC gender and identity correspondent Megha Mohan why it is important that the day has become a reality.

There’s a meme that pops up from time to time about a bird that’s been called a penguin all its life. One day, the bird meets a doctor who tells it: “You are not a penguin, you are what is called a swan”. The swan is relieved. Suddenly, his whole life makes sense.

I had my swan moment in 2011, when I was in my 20s.

My grandmother had just died and I was in her apartment organizing her things. Trying to distract myself, I went online and, going from one page to another, I found the Wikipedia entry on gender identities.

It was here that I first read the definition of “non-binary”. In those paragraphs, I learned about people who don’t follow binary gender norms, people who feel they exist in a middle space outside of the definitions of male and female.

“This is me,” I thought. “I am a non-binary person. This is what I’ve been all my life. And I’ve never had the words to describe it.” I started to cry. I knew I had to tell my boyfriend.

the strongest girl

Theater was my favorite subject in high school. I liked everything, even carrying the heavy things we had used at the end of class. I was singled out as the “strongest girl in drama class” when it was my turn to put away the heavy set pieces with the boys.

So there I was, moving props with the boys, identifying as different from the other girls. But strangely, this was one of the few times when being different was a point of pride to me instead of a shame.

In a way, I was like my mother. People used to say that my mother was a “beautiful” woman, and much later I realized that they actually meant it as an insult to refer to her apparent lack of femininity.

She was a single woman, lawyer and educator. She wasn’t like the other mothers at school. She was just as comfortable fixing things around the house as she was when she was teaching her students or taking care of me.

I was like her in embracing non-traditional gender roles. But unlike her, I existed in another place. It wasn’t just that she didn’t feel “girly” to me, or that she was taller and bigger and less feminine. It was more than that: the label “woman” just didn’t fit me.

Growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada, and later in Hawaii, I got lost in fantasy books, in fictional worlds created by writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, inhabited by characters with no fixed gender identity.

At the age of 12 I began to write, creating my own fictional planets. Over a decade later I was able to publish a much revised and polished version of these worlds, the first in a series of science fiction novels.

In these creative empires, I played with gender roles; the characters oscillated between having male or female sexual characteristics. Writing gave me the freedom to imagine a less rigid reality.

As a millennial, I grew up on the internet. In the chats I found communities of people who talked about sexuality and I declared myself bisexual at the age of 14. First online and then in the real world, LGBT communities welcomed me when I opened up about my sexuality, and I felt a sense of belonging.

Expelled from the LGBT community

Later, when I was 20 years old, I fell in love with my boyfriend, Nathan. But this came at a price. I think there is no quicker way to be kicked out of an LGBT community than to be a bisexual woman dating a man.

People see you as “straight,” someone who doesn’t understand the struggle, and suddenly conversations and events don’t include you anymore. they call it the “bi-erase”, and it is a very real phenomenon. They stop inviting you to things. Private groups are created without you.

In my experience, people still understand sexuality the way they don’t understand gender identity.

When I found the Wikipedia page that explained my non-binary identity, Nathan was the first person I wanted to tell, but I was too scared.

When I saw him later that day, I was quick to say it: “I’m a non-binary person.”

Pause.

“So what is it that changes?” he asked.

Another pause.

“You may use different pronouns“, I replied. “Or that he calls me something else sometimes.”

He asked me if I was transgender. Was he thinking of changing physically in some way?

I said no, it wasn’t.

“Okay, I’ll try to remember your pronouns,” he said, “but I’m not very good at remembering things.”

We both laughed, relaxed, and the tension melted away. I explained how, growing up, I had felt misrepresented as this “other” person, and that now had a name to describe what it wasso I immediately fit into my own skin a little better.

We got engaged soon after and married in 2015.

For several years, I used different pronouns in place of “her”. I especially liked “zie”, which sounded soft and fun. They were gender-neutral terms that people used on the internet and did not determine the sex of the person.

for a while i was in favor of the pronoun “they” used in the singular (in English it means both “they” and “she”). But as I saw its use blossom and take off, I started to dislike it, and now I can’t stand it.

As a writer, I take language very seriously, and I have read several texts in which people use the pronoun “they” that really confused me as to whether they were referring to an individual or a group. Some writers argue that Shakespeare used to use “they”, to which I reply: “Very few people write as well as Shakespeare.”

Over time, my childhood love of fantasy writing turned into a career, as well as an outlet for my imaginary world outside of genre norms.

In my book “Stranger Skies”, I write about a goddess who falls from the skies to a planet that does not obey the laws of physics or biology. He discovers that in this world, gender is programmed, one is a man or a woman, but sex is mutable. People can change their physical body through a small semi-religious ceremony. This allows gay couples to have biological children without medical intervention. I have a lot of fun exploring these concepts in my writing.

A year after coming out as non-binary, I wrote a 153-word blog post about why there should be an International Day of Non-Binary People. I said it should be in July, halfway between International Women’s Day in March and International Men’s Day in November. There were some comments on the blog then, but it hardly spread on the internet.

I forgot about it until several years later, when I saw that International Non-Binary Day would officially be celebrated on July 14, the same day I suggested in my post. They were going to celebrate the organization Campaign for Human Rights, Stonewall, the website of the Parliament of the United Kingdom and even the web dictionary.com.

People cited my reasons for choosing the date, but only the gender non-binary Wikipedia page mentioned my blog as inspiration. This bothered me. A little recognition would have been nice.

Changes

Now, things have changed in my life. I am more comfortable with myself. I care less when people refer to me as a woman or use the pronoun “she”.

I used to be very much in favor of having a thirder gender marker in identifications, como passports or driving licenses, as they have in Argentina, Australia and India and have proposed in South Africa. But now I’m not so sure. Do I want gender minority data collected somewhere that governments can easily access? Definitely not. I have no faith in bureaucracies. I can understand why it might be important to some people in certain countries, but it’s not to me.

I also spend much less time on the internet. I don’t feel comfortable in either the conservative or the liberal pages. They gobble themselves up, waiting for people to say what they think is wrong.

We used to call it “the culture of reporting”, but now he has grown more heads, he is a beast. And it doesn’t help anyone, least of all vulnerable people who want to belong but know they can be pushed aside at any moment for saying the wrong thing.

I can imagine what you may be thinking right now. If I don’t want any new kind of ID, and I don’t need you to respect my preferred pronouns (still zie), What’s the point of being non-binary? Is it important to have an International Day of Non-Binary People?

Yes it is.

We can feel invisible in a world that has not yet fully understood what we are. So it’s nice to have a day that acknowledges our existence. Does it have to be a day where we are in the streets marching? No. But it would be nice to get some flowers.

I think being called a non-binary person is important internally. It’s important to me to have those words to describe myself, and knowing who I am allows me to be more comfortable with myself. I want people to be happy as they are.

And if having a day helps you be happy with yourself, great. That is the best result I could have hoped for from that blog post I wrote 10 years ago.