Nonbinary

I don’t know who decided to label people like me as nonbinary, but I don’t identify as non-anything. Going down that rabbit hole means I’d also have to admit I’m non-Swiss, non-Christian, non-Black, non-malleable, non-activistic, and non-triangular…not to mention non-athletic, non-able-bodied, non-becoming, and non-svelte.

I’d end up a non-ending array of non-ness.

It’s not as if I’ve ever been non-aware of what I’m not. My non-determinability first came into sharp focus back in the 1960s, when I nonconformed to the wave of my generation’s historical nonconformity. Which is not to say I wasn’t a nonconformist at all—heaven forbid! I just nonconformed differently from the way everyone else nonconformed, thus making me a nonconforming nonconformist. A non-compliant non-participant. A non-traditional non-conventionalist.

Come to think of it, I honestly can’t remember a time I wasn’t non, even all the way back to when I was two or three years old. I looked girl but didn’t feel, act, or think girl, which essentially made me non-girl. Yet while I reacted and semi-understood boy, I didn’t have a penis. I asked my mother about it once, thinking maybe it’d grow in for my third birthday. It didn’t. Ergo, I was clearly non-boy; I was even non-tomboy. Of course, non is just code for nothing, which was exactly how I identified.

Speaking of my non-penis: myriad therapists claim my non-ability to remember my mother’s exact response to, “When will I get my penis?” is likely an example of a dissociative defense mechanism that protects me from painful memories. It apparently works quite well; I lack more memories than I own. Does that mean I’m non-defenseless?

Operating from inside my turtle shell, it took me far longer to recognize why I was non-normal or “different,” as my mother always called it, than it took everyone around me. One of those painful memories was being beaten up on the playground in second grade by two boys I used to play with. While all the girls stood around and laughed and my next-grade teacher ignored my screams, my former friends caught up my ankles with a jump rope and dragged me around the blacktop. When we came in from recess, my teacher, usually so gentle and kind, snapped at me for crying  until the boy at the desk next to me said, “Well, she is pretty bloody.”

My mother stormed into school the next day, causing a scene that forced the principal to assure me that “Boys will be boys” before he, in turn, forced my ex-friend to mumble an apology. That was a good final curtain for Mom, who dismissed any further discussion of the matter with, “He obviously likes you.”

Out from behind my delusional firewall, I understand now my friend did not turn on me because he obviously liked me, but because he was confused about me being non-boy after years of us playing together as boys. The time was late 1950s, the place a suburb of Chicago run on tradition and convention. What else could he do but strike out?

What else could I do but be non-oriented?

Absolutely nothing about girl ever made the slightest bit of sense to me, all the way back to pre-kindergarten. I used to play with three of the boys in my neighborhood—the one across the street, the one across the alley, and another one down on the next street. We’d run and climb things and explore where we weren’t supposed to go…until I was about five, and my mother said I had to stop playing with them and play with the other girls on the street. I didn’t even know their names and, thanks to my quirky memory, can’t recall them today.

But I was nothing if not obedient, so I played. Or at least tried to. They played house, an utterly pointless occupation as far as I could see. They played with dolls, Barbie dolls especially, and collected outfits for them and changed their clothes and had unbelievably inane conversations between them.

Then I managed to step on a board with three nails that went right through my Keds, discovered that other kids’ mothers had professional occupations (one girl ran to get her mother, a nurse), and my mother let me stay inside and play by myself for a while. Always my preference.

That wasn’t the only nail-feet incident of my life, by the way. A few years later while retrieving my bike from the garage, I put a nail into one of my heels. Jumping off to pull it out, I put another nail into the other heel. Our next-door neighbor heard me screaming, ran over, picked me up, and took me to our front door, where he interrupted my father watching a ballgame. My father would later brag about his paternal skill in getting me to the emergency room.

It was the first and last time I was ever held and carried in anyone’s arms. I didn’t know what to make of the sensation, but I was soon too tall and gangly for anyone to ever consider doing it again. So saith my mother.

And leaving her for half a day didn’t distress me that first day of kindergarten. My heart sank when the teacher said only boys could play with the cool stuff on the back wall of the room. The girls had to play with the toy kitchen and school-oriented stuff on the left wall.

A stove and sink? Chore toys??! And how was playing school supposed to be fun when—was I the only one who noticed this??—we were right there attending school?!

Being non-girl sucked, but I couldn’t get away from it. Everyone saw me as girl, especially my mother. When my first-grade teacher called home one day to say she couldn’t get my attention in class, my mother said I was probably daydreaming about being Queen Esther.

Why in the world did she say that?! I never daydreamed about being queen anybody! I never daydreamed about girl in any way, shape, or form. For the record, my fantasies centered on a boy, about my age, who had run away and gotten picked up by a guy on a motorcycle, who did undefined sexual things to him. Too young and certainly way too non-informed to know what those things might be, I kept my sky castles to myself, instinctively knowing it was wrong to fantasize about playing with my boy body.

Not about having one…just about playing with it. Because I believed I had one. Except I didn’t. And I knew it. But I didn’t. That duplicity rimmed the inside of my turtle shell. And I was wrong to even think about it. But thinking wrong is part-and-parcel to being a turtle. And I couldn’t get away from it.

When an older girl I didn’t even know mocked my clothes from the other end of the lunch line, my mother assured me, “Oh, that’s just sour grapes.” Okay, that kicked off years of wrestling with what “sour grapes” meant and how they could possibly have anything to do with being made fun of—something, apparently, any real girl would have understood immediately, or so I was later informed one of them. She gave me the “What's wrong with you?” look I’d come to know so well by that point.

And the answer was, “Everything,” as far as I could tell. I just didn’t get girl. I once got hung up on a passage in some girly book when the main character—wearing a tennis skirt over her tennis shorts because…huh?—purposely hovered her finger over a white-frosted cupcake so her friend wouldn’t reach for the pink-frosted one.

But why? What difference could it possibly make which cupcake the girl took?

“Because the pink one was prettier,” my mother said, giving me that “look” and shaking her head as if it were obvious.

And that added another repetitive layer of WTF to my inner shell: White frosting tastes the same as pink frosting. Cupcakes aren’t even as much as a small slice of cake and are always dry. What am I missing?!

Evidently, I was missing plenty and more non-conventional than people could accept. When my third-grade teacher told us to write our autobiography, everyone else understood that to mean: “List your birthday, who you live with, where you live, what you like to do.”

But having just finished Jane Addams’ biography, my reaction was: I’m just a kid! I haven’t done anything yet! What am I supposed to write about?

So being outwardly introverted and inwardly extroverted, I wrote about how my brother had stolen my birthright two-and-a-half years before I was born, ending the piece with, “…and nothing much has happened since then.”

I received my usual non-A grade for my efforts, plus yet another note to take home to my parents. For the record, though, when I recited the story at dinner that night, my brother rolled his eyes and said, “You just don’t know your right hand from your left!” Note he didn’t claim the story wasn't true. We both knew I was meant to be the older brother, not the younger sister. Damn, I’ve always wanted a brother.

As the days, months, and years kept going by, as they’re wont to do, I eventually figured out how to pretend to be girl, a non-sensible game at which I was, non-surprisingly, non-good. To this day I’ve never met another human being who didn’t quickly identify me as different. Non-usual. Non-regular. “I keep forgetting you’re not a man,” my brother-by-love said.

“I love you ‘cause you’re not gentle…I love you ‘cause you’re not graceful,” my husband wrote in his love song to me.

And that, as my grandfather used to say, is why I can’t give you an imitation of four Hawaiians playing the ukelele. Translation: all of the above is why I’d rather think of myself as a something rather than as a non-anything—and I’ll make that a non-gender based something, thank you very much, because gender is but a sliver of my non-specific nature. I couldn’t be more Gemini if I tried, with my inculcated inferior/superior complex, my extroverted introversion, and my masculine need to protect and provide butted up against my feminine need to avoid conflict.

Finally emerging from behind my turtle-shell barrier of lies, self-deprecation, and self-deceit, I recognize that the constant and non-divisible non-oneness within my non-separable corporeal and spiritual self/selves makes me a non-deniably valuable combination plate. A merged duality. A complete Yin and Yang combination of gender, nature, and spirit.

And there ain’t nothing non about that.