She/They
When I emerged into young adulthood consciousness and came to understand the expectations of femininity that came with being female, and the place in the world it assigned to me, I was strongly uncomfortable and deeply frustrated. I didn’t feel like I was in the wrong body. I was fine with being female, but I experienced dysphoria about the gendered expectations of being a woman. The feminine expectations that I was judged on - how I should maintain my body, how I should express it, how I should dress and act, what I could expect for my future, how other people treated me – did not make sense. Why was my worth judged by how well I could present myself as acceptably feminine? Why did my body come with, for me unnatural, expectations of how I should behave?
I decided to reject anything feminine that didn’t make sense to me as best I could. In fact, I continued to be so perturbed by the experience of being a woman in the world that in my mid-twenties I began a PhD that set out to examine how feminists had defined what a woman is, and why women had historically been considered second class. I came away from my PhD with a sense of dissatisfaction. I had wanted an answer: a neat definition of ‘woman’. But feminists had been consistently at odds over what a woman was, gender definitions differed from culture to culture, and I hadn’t been able to find or to create one that satisfied me. That conclusion, underwhelming though it was, has come to make a lot more sense to me over time, because I think we can’t ultimately define woman or man and I don’t think that we should.
If, as a younger person, I’d encountered the option of being non-binary and a community to support this, I would have identified as non-binary. While I am no longer personally bothered by gender expectations, that is because I chose to live as a woman on my own terms some decades back, and not because gender expectations have gotten greatly better or easier for those people who don’t fit them naturally, happily or easily. For this reason, I have recently decided to identify as a non-binary person who lives as a woman to acknowledge that I do not believe in the legitimacy of binary gender. I do not believe that there are two boxes: one for each of two cis-sexed bodies each containing opposing sets of behaviour, dress, or characteristics. Just as bodies aren’t actually neatly binary, as this excludes and forgets the intersexed bodies among us, neither is there a neat gender binary.
I believe we should be free to decide how to own, define and express our gendered selves in ways that make sense to us, without having to wrestle through an inherited baggage of gendered social expectation attached to the type of body we inhabit. I believe that gender should be acknowledged as being beyond binaries and should be nurtured as a site of creativity, flexibility and ongoing evolution.
Sarah Nicholson.