It’s not Your Fault

Trigger alert: this may offend you. Read at your own risk.

Dear Nonbinary and Transgender Non-Allies,

I acknowledge and accept that you do not understand my queerness.

I understand—truly—why you have such a hard time wrapping your brain around someone like me, much less adjusting your emotions to embrace who and what I am.

After all, you are a single-natured human with a binary perspective. In your existence life is good and evil, right and left, up and down, cause and effect. Anyone, anything, outside those parameters must needs fall into the category of “wrong,” since the only other peg hole you can envision is “right.”

Being thus limited, you simply do not have capacity to grok nonbinary possibilities nor recognize the correlation between an infant with an irregular body part like a cleft lip and one with non-nature-matching sexual organs.

Hey, it’s not your fault. You were born that way. You are the most commonplace of all homo-sapiens breeds. You’re like a French bulldog, a labrador retriever, a domestic short-haired tabby. You’re a black-and-white penguin in a vista of other black-and-white penguins. It just worked out that way. After all, what we look like and where we’re located is merely an accident of birth, right? Isn’t that part-and-parcel to the Almighty’s ineffable plan? Otherwise… well, we’d all be the same, wouldn’t we?

But we’re not.

So sure, it’s gotta be tough to understand those of us who were born different, even though we’re each spread out at various places on multiple spectrums: Gender. Intelligence and emotional quotients. Neurologic/brain health. Pigmentation, sexuality, nature, personality, ego, and scooby dooby do. None of us is just one thing. But I can see how you, a black-and-white penguin, a short-haired tabby, would be flummoxed when confronted with a Puffin or Norwegian Forest cat. We’re so… ya know… not like you.

Especially since “nonbinary” has nothing whatsoever to do with sexual attraction or desire, the way lesbian, gay, bisexual, or asexual (low or absent sexual attraction or desire) designations do. Nonbinary is all about that nature spectrum.

Now, I’ve had a lot of cats in my life. At one point, we had seven felines roaming around our 1,800-square-foot place, which made for some interesting interactions. Squeak and Moe, having similar natures if not coloring, got along well and played nicely together. AJ and Kit, even though they had the same Mama, just simply did not. They had completely different natures.

It’s absurd to think all human breeds would or could have the same or even similar natures. That’s the stuff of fantasy and Romance—the “can’t we all just get along?” ideal that would instantly end war, poverty, divorce, and even sibling rivalry. No, what makes us all so different isn’t our skin color, education, or financial standing but, once again, our natures. And if’n there is a master plan, that obviously must be part of it. Right? Of course right.

Astrology tries to clump birds-of-juxtaposed-birthdays as having similar natures, but there are too many exceptions for those groupings to be actual rules. In fact, from my utterly nonscientific observations, no single model considers the full stock of spectrums before toe-tagging a person as this or that. Which is why there are both male-natured and female-natured gay men. I’ve met plenty of male-leaning straight women as well as undeniably girly lesbians. Some wag came up with “metro-sexual” a decade or so ago to describe straight guys who are obsessed with how they look and smell—so obviously at a different spectrum juncture than the guys who are happy if they walk of the house with matching socks.

The one thing we all do have in common, I suppose, is the need to classify ourselves and everyone else—a craving so ubiquitous it’s gotta be more than human nature. I’m gonna call it a species trait. And I’ll bet some grad student finagles a grant to study that trait so the reality we all know is codified in a scholarly paper. Ain’t academia grand? But I digress…

As circular as all this may seem, it nevertheless underlines my point: nonbinary is not about sexual proclivity or attraction; it’s about having dual natures. Twin flames within a single corporeal mass. Male-female living as one yet not really either. I think Native Americans call it Two Spirited. It matters not the hashtag nor pathology label, it all comes back to the same thing: I and my fellows are both and neither girl/non-girl, boy/non-boy.

Ergo, transgender is a logical extension, i.e., genitalia that non-matches our more dominant girl/non-boy or boy/non-girl nature. Of course, not all transgender folk are nonbinary. And not all nonbinaries are trans. Because that would be too simple. Boy, I’d love to read the research paper on that Sudoku variant!

But getting back to my apology…

See, I used to be just like you. I used to think I had a binary perspective and irregular sexual organs for my theoretically singular nature. I honestly believed I was a black-and-white penguin and that my every other species member—them being like me/me being like them—could always see both sides of any given coin. Heck, I used to absatively rail at my students when the guys didn’t grok female sensibilities and the girls didn’t grok male. How could they not see what was so plain, so obvious… to me?!

Which is why I’m sorry. So sorry. I was wrong. It wasn’t their fault. They were all (well, mostly) regular black-and-white penguins. I was the distinct one. I don’t mean to be braggadocious, but they simply didn’t have my breed’s capacity to see beyond their own character, their inherent attributes. They were all just too… singular.

I am not. As nonbinary/transgender, I’m gifted with the ability to realize (if not always appreciate) both my male and female natures… to be disturbingly aware my penis is AWOL… and to recognize how unnatural my upper-chest protuberances are. I must have been all of eight or nine years old when I read James Thurber’s “War Between the Sexes” and consciously recognized just how much my comfort zone doesn’t match my chassis.

Irregular sexual organs for my dual nature.

So let me be explicit, because the LGBTQIA+ rainbow umbrella can be misleading to the blindered mindset.

What makes me nonbinary is having both girl and boy sensibilities. Even when one or the other feels foreign or makes no sense in a given situation, I cannot NOT experience both dispositions. What makes me transgender is my extreme noncomfortability with my female corporeality.

Please don’t feel bad that your limited proclivities prevent you from envisioning a non-singular being. You’ve been that way all your life, just the way you were born. It’s not your fault.

Just like I’ve been the way I was born all my life.

Being non-deity oriented, I don’t know if praying about it would help you. Have you checked to see if there are any conversion-therapy programs that can de-constrict your fundamental makeup?