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Finding My Voice

Before I learned that there were words for people like me, I knew what it was I was looking for. I just didn’t know how to capture that in a way I could fit into my world and hold on to, to put my feelings into language. Without language, those feelings couldn’t solidify. Instead of a stable narrative, my memories of growing up to be what I would later call genderqueer are little flashes of recognition and fascination, sunk back down into what I had been taught I should be.

I spent a lot of time staring at famous faces in absolute wonder: Grace Jones, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Tracy Chapman, Brian Molko, Patti Smith. I had no idea what these people’s genders were, but I knew that I couldn’t tell by looking; that when I looked at them I felt full of possibilities and longing. I felt the same way about expressions of androgyny in classical art, in movies, in poetry. Where I couldn’t find them, I made them up; there were so many experiments with clothes and hair and makeup behind my bedroom door. I had murky, childish fantasies of being able to change my sex in any way I liked just by pressing a button on a magical machine. One of my most persistent daydreams was that, as an adult, nobody would be able to tell what my gender was, but that I would be so talented and so charming that nobody would ever try to find out.

But I can’t overstate how hard it was to recognize myself as neither/nor when the whole world seemed to run as one or the other. There seemed to be a little gender leeway allowed for some kinds of gay people—for gay men who did drag and butch lesbians—but both of those categories made me feel like an outsider looking in. The model of transsexuality I’d heard whispers of was similarly fraught. “Transsexual,” in this definition, meant a man who wanted to be a woman, or a woman who wanted to be a man. In the ways in which they were discussed by others, these people were still trapped by other people’s definitions, and the best they could hope for was to exchange one set for another, if they accepted being treated as a freak show. Beside which, there was the question of surety. In the newspapers, transsexual women always said “I knew I was a girl,” “I was a woman trapped in the body of a man,” but I barely knew what it felt like to be me, and didn’t know how I was meant to decide whether that internal experience fit into a boy or a girl camp. I felt trapped in my body a great deal of the time, but not all parts of my body: not my hands and not my voice. They always felt real to me. I could know that I needed my body to be different and, almost in the same moment, lose that knowledge from fear and from the impossibility of realizing those differences in an honest way.

It came to a head when I came out at the age of fifteen. I wasn’t sure of what I was meant to call my gender or do about my body, but I needed to be honest about my sexuality, so I told my friends, classmates, family, that I was bisexual (queer for preference), and then added the rejoinder “gender-blind,” because it was the best term I could come up with on my own. I mostly settled on the androgynous style that made me feel most like myself, and the binding that paradoxically left me able to breathe, but still felt enormous pressure to present myself the way other people wanted me to be—to be found attractive.

People had commented on my gendered appearance and behavior before; now, it was a subject for public debate. Some people said that they knew I had to be one way, because I was so “forceful,” “dominant,” and “like a man.” There were as many saying that I had to be the other, and for the opposite reasons—femininity and prettiness. Girls excused their crushes on me by saying I was like a boy, and boys got angry with me for their crushes, because why couldn’t I be more like a girl? All of that pressure pushed me into having to find an answer—but still I had no language.

After a year of reading absolutely everything I could find on being queer, I started noticing the breadcrumb trail left in the margins, in the footnotes. Alison Bechdel, author of Dykes to Watch Out For, was a godsend: the background detail of her comic strip often included the names of influential LGBT works and authors. I discovered Kate Bornstein, and ordered a copy of My Gender Workbook from America. I felt as nervous as if I had ordered porn through the mail. When it arrived, I could barely stand to open it, despite how desperate I was to learn what was inside. It was the old naming magic: I knew that, once I had the words, I wouldn’t be able to escape the fact of what I was. Bornstein used the term “transgender,” and in her broad, evolving description—the contrasting descriptions of other trans people which she included alongside her own—I knew I had an answer. Not that I had a category I could slot myself into, but that I finally had the key to unlock all that I needed to tell about myself, and a tool with which to craft my future. I found a T-shirt that said “gender free” and wore it with great pride, alongside my Doc Martens, black suits, and heavy eyeliner. I grew up, went to university, grew up some more, got better at explaining myself, set my heart on medical transition, had my plans changed by bad luck, got there in the end, found my place. I’m sure I’ll collect more words in the end, and look forward to watching them change and evolve in turn.

A QUESTION I am often asked is why, as someone who wants to subvert gender norms, I would want or need an additional gendered label. Couldn’t I simply refuse all descriptors? Or, failing that, call myself a feminine man or a masculine woman?

What this question misses is the twofold job of words like transgender, genderqueer, gender-fuck, androgynous. They do duty as the personal language for who I am but, far more importantly, their usage helps to develop a cultural language of greater gender plurality and nuance.

It’s not about absolutes, or strict lines of demarcation between degrees of gendered expression. There are women in the world far more masculine than I am, and men far more feminine. I don’t want to force them to use my words, nor do I have a desire to steal theirs. This isn’t about creating more fixed categories, with more rules about who can and can’t be admitted.

It’s about understanding that there needs to be space in our shared cultural language for every individual iteration of selfhood to be communicated accurately. We find our own personal language within the broader terms, and accept the universality of the broader terms within our own personal experience.

What is right for me is my own use of transgender, androgynous, genderqueer. It is in my appearance, in my crafting of my sexed body, in how I see myself in the world: a denial of being either a man or a woman, and the embracing of many wonderful things in both of those categories. It is only one way to live outside the gender binary: there are millions more. Some of these ways will seem obvious to an outsider, and some ways won’t, but they are all of them valid, and each word used is worth learning. Every time each one of us uses these gendered words, and others, we are enriching the total meaning of every term. The more we expand our definitions, the more space there is for everyone.

We push for the inclusion of these words into our common lexicon because, without them, it is so much easier to pretend that we’re too impossible to exist. Being genderqueer can be a daily fight against being made invisible. My words are a challenge to the people who would strip my experiences from me. What can be described can be communicated and made real, becomes a shield against that invisibility and dissolution.

Trying to take away someone’s language is usually the first step in trying to change them. When I was twenty-one I worked as volunteer at the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, a phone advice and listening service that was meant to serve the entire LGBT community. While explaining who I was, that I was transgender, one of the trainers shot me down: I couldn’t be transgender, she said, because I didn’t look transgender. Obviously, I was “just” a drag king. That’s what she wanted me to be, so that’s what she described. My ordering of my experiences into my own descriptors is a challenge to that kind of erasure.

Pronouns are a vital case in point. I do not doubt that the recent surge in the visibility of people like me is linked to the increased use of the singular “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun. When I was coming out, even that basic building block was lacking. Every time I was referred to with the wrong pronoun, a fundamental part of me was spoken away. The proposed pronouns I had read about—sie and hir—didn’t translate into daily speech, at least not for the people around me. Now, through the use of they, I can feel the daily difference made by a language that supports the validity of my self. Each correct usage solidifies the awareness that people like me are just as much a part of the world as any other person.

HAVING FOUND MY own voice, my own language, was part of the battle. The other part, far from over, is in trying to be understood by other people not prepared to understand.

The majority of strangers still try to place me as male or female. On any given day, I’ll collect a handful of gendered labels: “sir,” “miss,” “madam,” “mate,” and (my favorite) “my good man.” In the face of disagreement, some people can double down on their need to enforce what they see. One time, ordering a coffee to go, I listened to two baristas argue over what to call me. They kept correcting each other’s language: “Did she want a small or a regular?” “No, he wanted a large, no cream.” I joke that the difference between being a man or a woman is half an inch more on my undercut but, genuinely, how other people decide me is frequently confusing. I’ve been called sir with my mascara running, and miss in a three-piece suit. Being a semi-public figure, I find appraisals of myself in odd places: an academic text on the meaning of gendered identities was the strangest. The author was at pains to dissect my haircut along gendered lines, describing the shaved back and sides as masculine, the “shock” of hair in the front as feminine. If they had asked me, I could have told them that the reason I’ve sported a standard-issue hipster undercut for the past five years is because I live in central London and I found the temptation too great to resist. Once, in a master class, the famous singer giving instruction to a room full of young musicians waved her hand to encompass the whole of me and said, “I don’t know what this is.” She couldn’t even name me. I would be scattered away into pieces if I let other people decide me in their own words.

What the people who fail to understand me as I am might be surprised to learn is that their way of reacting to me, while common, is not the only way. Even when we are confused about someone’s gender, and don’t have a greater awareness of what it means to be trans, we have a choice to respond with kindness rather than cruelty. I’ve had some very special conversations with my nana about appearance, gendered norms, and being yourself; with her usual talent for appropriate understatement, she says, “Where would we be if we were all the same?” I’ve had similar conversations with my partner’s grandmother over coffee after dinner, about the gendered pressures we all feel, the compromises we all make between who we want to be and how the world wants us to behave. I teach music to students of all ages; I have never found a child who has a problem with how I look or how I refer to myself. Some older students can be—for want of a less anachronistic word—cheeky: one bright teenager who thought he could waste some lesson time by asking “Why do you look like Justin Bieber?” and by calling me “sir/miss/sir/miss/sir/miss/sir.” It was teasing, but it wasn’t cruel. Younger children seem to accept what they see without worrying. One small student asked me, during our second lesson, “Why do you look like a boy?” I told her it was because I liked looking like a boy, and asked her what she liked to look like. She thought for a second, and then said, “Tinkerbell.” After she had dusted herself with sparkly fairy powder, we went back to learning about Middle C, confident in the knowledge that looking how you want to look makes you better at piano. I’ve had people of all ages use a “they” pronoun to refer to me, without me asking them to, and I have friends and colleagues who had never met a trans person before they met me and yet took my gender, my pronouns, in their stride. It seems to have far less to do with gender than it does with broader issues of empathy and humility, and a willingness to understand that we are each the experts on our own lives.

I’m not sure how much longer it will take for people outside the gender binary to be considered legitimate. The rate of change so far has taken me by surprise, both in our current race forward and in our longer, historical, tendency to forget and roll back. What I am sure of, though, is that accepting people outside the gender binary has less to do with the idea of specific non-binary genders, and a lot more to do with working away from binary thinking in general. That we get better at seeing beyond us and them, valid and invalid, natural and unnatural, good and bad, and communicate instead the fullness of who we are to each other, respectfully, with compassion. When we are so surrounded by such diversity—in nature, in culture, in human spirit—how can we stand not to acknowledge it?

Not every—maybe even not many—people will want to designate their own gendered experiences as being outside the binary. But working for a less binary world would not only benefit trans people like me: we would all be the richer for it.