Why I Stopped Using They/Them Pronouns After 13 Years
Description
The very first person I told about my new pronouns was my roommate, a punk vegan chef, in our crowded Montréal apartment in 2011. I was sitting on the edge of his bed, wringing my hands in my lap. The sun, dappled by the trees outside, spilled through the windows onto the wooden floor. I watched the dancing motes of dust like my life depended on it.
“I think I might be non binary.”
My roommate visibly relaxed, clearly predicting much worse news. He clapped me on the back and affirmed what I’d said.
“How do I know, though, if I’m really non binary? I don’t want to appropriate an identity that’s not mine to claim.”
“I don’t think you should worry about that,” my roommate said. “If you feel that you are non binary, then you are.”
I considered him an expert on such matters, since he was a trans-masculine person with a bachelor’s degree in gender studies. He was the first trans person I’d ever been close to, and he was patient in teaching me how to respect him and people like him, despite how many times I put my foot in my mouth. I looked up to this person. We shared an emotional intimacy often reserved for lovers, although we never touched, (except for one accidental NYE champagne kiss we both pretended never happened).
When I later heard him refer to me as “they” to our friends, my cheeks flushed: I glowed with an inner pride and a sense of belonging.
As a young queer person, my social circles were filled with people who’d been shamed and rejected for their desires, or for failing to correctly perform their gender. Our choirs, dodgeball leagues, dance parties, and potlucks were places where we could feel normal, where our differences were not only okay, but maybe even hot.
Coming from a high school where only two people from my graduating class of 360 were out of the closet, I revelled in this newfound freedom. No longer would I let suburban hairdressers tell me how ugly I would be with short hair. We were creating our own looks, our own trends, and we didn’t need the world to understand. In fact, I relished how unwanted male attention withered away as I strove for a more masculine look.
I began binding my chest, getting haircuts at the barber, and considering a testosterone prescription. This uncanny feeling I’d had for so long at girls-only sleepovers and change rooms—that I did not belong, that I was not a real woman, that I would be exposed and tossed out—finally had an explanation: I simply wasn’t a woman. I was something else, something liminal, in-between, something you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Embracing this ambiguity, declaring myself as an oddity, as outside and beyond the whole mess of gender, was comforting. It felt a lot like home.
Before I went to the gender clinic for the first time, I’d asked a friend of mine to coach me on what to say—and what not to say— to the doctor in order to get testosterone. I didn’t fabricate anything, but I was strategic in what I shared, because my goal was not to discover whether gender dysphoria was an accurate diagnosis for me. I’d already diagnosed myself, and was not open to the possibility that I was wrong. My only goal was to do what I needed to in order to get the prescription.
My childhood was sprinkled with evidence of masculinity from a young age: I went to school as a moustachioed Robin Hood for Halloween in grade two. I always ended up playing the boyfriend in make-believe games with my friends. I cut my hair short several times in high school, despite dire warnings from the aforementioned hairdresser.
And yet, I insisted on wearing a thrifted flower girl dress to the first day of kindergarten. I loved beading, sparkly gel pens, and not playing sports. I often lamented that my last name was gray, instead of pink or purple.
Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, I can’t say that I was ever gender dysphoric. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t recoil. Nudity and sex were not distressing to me, not in any special sense. I’d never dissociated from my body the way I’d heard some trans friends describe. And although I’d always had this out-of-place feeling in girl’s and women’s spaces, it is no longer clear to me that the best explanation for this is gender dysphoria.
While I was grappling with all of this, the definition of trans was morphing: lines were blurring. People were starting to say you didn’t need to have dysphoria to be trans—perhaps you simply experienced gender euphoria when you dressed in a gender nonconforming way. It was becoming unpopular and old-fashioned to think of transition as a linear change from one gender to its opposite, entailing a specific set of medical treatments.
I remember discussions about micro-dosing hormones to achieve an ambiguous presentation, and how you could always stop taking them, so it wasn’t a big deal to experiment. Some people spoke of gender-affirming medical treatments as if they were simply another type of body modification, like piercings or tattoos.
In this environment, it was easy for my discomfort in women’s spaces and my flirtations with masculinity to combine with a vague yet ordinary twenties misery into a shape that looked a lot like gender dysphoria.
You may be wondering whether I feel that I was convinced by my social circle to pursue this, and the answer is no. As young and dumb as we all were, my friends were thoughtful, kind, and understanding people. I don’t think the occasional digs at cis people caused me to go on hormones: remember, as a non binary person, I was already exempted from this dreaded category, even without physically transitioning. We were all very into body positivity, so we did our best to offer support and affirmation to each other in our current forms.
That being said, the queer world is not free from social influence. As I alluded to earlier, it’s incredible to go from being an undateable third wheel along for the ride with your straight friends, to finding a place where your strangeness is considered beautiful. It was a revelation that I had options other than continually fa
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