Learning I’m Non-Binary 60-Plus Years Later

“I never realized how much you look like your mother,” my first cousin told me at my father’s funeral three years ago. You don’t know the half of it, I thought to myself. Twenty years earlier, I went to London for a transformation that resulted me looking a slightly less attractive version of this cis woman cousin. That image, more than the experience itself, so horrified me that I refused the polaroid that captured the moment for posterity. But the photo was forever burned in my brain.

At the funeral I vowed to myself I would get to the bottom of why since adolescence I always felt different. I cleaned out my dad’s house, which I was luckily able to sell the last weekend before the pandemic lockdown. While going through drawers, I discovered a 1960s letter from my mother to my grandmother about her taking DES, the fertility drug, when she was pregnant with me. I did some research about DES and thought, perhaps I found an underlying biological reason for what I clearly suppressed for decades, throughout a long marriage, a divorce, and two kids, now in their twenties.

I kept telling myself that my fondness for occasionally wearing women’s clothing was a stress reliever. Admittedly early on there was a fetish aspect to this proclivity, which I shared with my future ex-wife before we went to bed for the first time. She wasn’t fazed and early on…