I came out as a transgender male to my birth family when I was 13-years-old. It didn’t go fantastically, but I was lucky it didn’t put my housing or safety into immediate jeopardy. Nevertheless, I wasn’t allowed to transition. Even just using “Ray” — a shortened form of my deadname and one of my childhood nicknames — was suddenly a hard task for them. I was put in foster care less than a year later.
Though initially devastating, this ended with my adoption by a lovely gay man who I now get to proudly call dad. Coincidentally, being adopted allows one to change their entire legal name, so I lengthened Ray to Raymond, kept Journey as my middle name from birth, and took my adoptive dad’s last name, Whitney.
In high school, I was solid in my identity as a boy. Being perceived as that was important to me, though it didn’t happen consistently until after I switched schools at the beginning of sophomore year, at which point I’d been taking testosterone for six months. Perhaps it happened too consistently, though — I was rarely “clocked” by other members of my community. In other words: Other trans people also assumed I was cis. I realized I didn’t like that much, since it made me feel alienated from the people who would best understand this facet of my identity, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
A couple of years later, during the pandemic — which started just two months after I turned 18 — I grappled with the conflict of whether I truly liked being associated with the concept of manhood or not. Being a boy had been fine, but graduating to man by becoming an adult brought societal connotations that didn’t fit me. Comments like “You’re such a man!” in response to me saying I do or like something stereotypically masculine made me feel strange, though I recognize their good intent. But I didn’t want to be seen as a woman either!
So, you may be thinking: Big whoop, you’ve rediscovered what being nonbinary means. That should’ve been the end of it — but what made me feel conflicted by this revelation was that I still liked the way I looked: broad, hairy, and bearded. I wondered, “How can I still look the way I want to while getting people to see that I’m not actually a man?”
The unfortunate answer to that question is, given current societal standards, I can’t — at least, not without repeatedly explaining myself. Nonbinary identities are still heavily associated with androgynous expressions, but androgyny has never really meant half masculine, half feminine. Masculinity is too potent; just one masculine trait puts a heavy thumb on the scale. Ever since puberty, I’ve had wide shoulders and no waist, and for just as long, I was made to feel that those traits meant I was never going to be girly enough to be respectable, desirable, or correct.
Not every child who experiences that goes down the gender-questioning path, but it’s what I did. I didn’t really care about being the right kind of woman, I just wanted to be the right kind of something. I found this in being a boy, since I had “boyish” interests — I could rub elbows with the bros over video games and Dungeons & Dragons — but that was temporary. I was always destined to end up where I am now: ambiguous, labeless, and unconventional.
However, despite frequently playing with feminine expression, my obstinance to not shave my beard, I suspect, has ensured that most people just assume I’m a cis gay man who likes to wear skirts and dangly earrings. In conversations with other queer women — particularly cis women — I’ve been told how much privilege I have simply because people believe I’m a man when they meet me.
To a degree, this is true and on purpose. Even when I started using my gender-neutral middle name and any pronouns, I had no intentions of making another legal name change or switching my gender marker from M to X. Doing that takes a lot of effort and doesn’t affirm me in a way that I personally feel is important. But, more crucially, being perceived as within the binary instead of outside of it keeps me safe in many situations.
Having the ability to put on a believable “Man Performance” is a privilege, but I think some overestimate how far this actually extends. Returning to the idea that I am often perceived as a cis gay man: Gay is not a meaningless modifier. Unless I put work into it, I am “obviously queer” to many people — being able to exist like this safely is a luxury afforded to me based on my circumstances and where I live. As much as LGBTQ+ allies want to believe they solved homophobia by legalizing gay marriage, that’s far from the reality — and Harvard is all the same. I’ve had harmful interactions with students and faculty alike during my time here.
It feels like I can’t win. When I was inadvertently “stealth,” presenting myself as cis in all or most contexts in high school, I felt separated from my community. Now that I have fully rejected that, some members of my community have tried to make me believe that I am somehow opening myself up to the discrimination I face and thus deserve less space to talk about it.
Such intra-community hostility against masculine non-men is nothing new: Masculine nonbinary people, such as myself, have their presence in spaces intended for “women and nonbinary people” questioned, especially if they are believed to be assigned male at birth. Butch lesbians have long grappled with depictions that make them out to be “predatory.” We are told we can’t know what it is like to have people assume less of you based on your appearance.
The lack of solidarity seems a bit backwards, doesn’t it? In a world growing more polarized by the day, drawing divisions between different “types” of queer people serves only to weaken us against movements that seek to bring us harm — all of us.
This isn’t to say that acknowledging how queerness intersects with other marginalized identities and expressions isn’t important; I just think framing it as an hierarchy of oppression seems antithetical to the vision. Or, at least, to my vision: a future in which gender diversity is so normal that it’s not even notable anymore. Alex Walton, a musical artist I interviewed last year for WHRB, said it best: “[Being trans] is integral to me only because of the current systems of how society works. If I was trans in a society where none of this mattered … I wouldn’t think about it. … Which is not to say I’m not proud of being trans, but this being so integral to me is against my will.”
In the meantime, I will continue to resist all attempts to stratify or homogenize my community. No two queer people’s experiences are exactly the same, even if their chosen labels might be, and that’s quite alright. Isn’t that what being queer means, after all?
