My Queer Identity is Intentionally Enigmatic
On thriving in the ruins of what used to be my cis-straight identity
I sometimes wish I could start my coming-out story with a simple sentence containing five words or less.
Hey everyone, I am pansexual. Also, I am non-binary.
Or something like that. I wish explaining who I am was as easy as that.
When some of my friends came out to me, they would often not have to say much. I love men. I love both men and women. I think I am a woman. Instead, to do my identity justice, I have to do a lot of explaining. It’s a sit-down conversation — with snacks and beverages. Possibly some psychoanalysis.
In a heteronormative society, it is easy enough to understand what ‘gay’ means. I by no means want to insinuate that it is easy to come out or to make people understand the complexity of what it means to be gay on an individual level. Still, many coming-out conversations can presumably be had starting with a clear statement: I am gay. I am bi. And it might be left at that. But in my case, I expect questions.
How can you be pansexual? You have only dated men.
Wait, is that why you broke it off with your boyfriend?
When you cut your hair super short when you were 15, was that supposed to tell us something?
But you still relate to gendered terms, right? So how can you be non-binary, then?
Is that why you started wearing men’s clothes?
Will you start hormones soon?
In my head, I am being interrogated like a criminal. I need to put everything out in the open. My story cannot have any gaps or inconsistencies. Then, I realized that the person asking questions in my head is not my mother, cousin, or an old classmate.
It‘s me. Hi. I’m the problem; it’s me.
For the past year, I have struggled with understanding myself first and foremost. I have come to understand that I hate the boxes society uses to categorize people. I wanted out so badly.
Looking back, I can see that I’ve always scratched the interior of any box I was put in, desperate to destroy it. But here’s the thing about growing out of the box. There is no pre-defined path from there. It’s free fall.
In my attempt to leave behind the cis-heteronormative paradigm, I tried to lay out a path for myself. Make a plan. And I built more boxes. Less heteronormative ones, but boxes nonetheless.
And until that process was not finished, I did not think I could come out.
The queer community broadly construed, although a space that can hold transgressive identity at its core, has ultimately given rise to tropes, standard trajectories, and particular aesthetics as it has been in interaction with dominant society. Much of my journey toward my queer identity has been about swapping one categorization system for another. And clearly, I fit in neither the beige nor the rainbow boxes as neatly as I thought I had to.
My sexuality, although obscured by compulsory heterosexuality and a perpetual need for validation from men, has been somewhat easier to come into. Somehow, it has been more straightforward (pun intended) to understand my sexuality as a spectrum. And once I admitted to myself that I feel attracted to various genders, I became relatively comfortable with calling myself “pansexual.” Still, sometimes, even an expansive label like that can feel off.
I am still struggling to see myself under the trans umbrella. Nowadays, the term ‘trans’ is highly medicalized and, paradoxically, quite binary — even though it is supposed to contain non-binary identities as well.
What’s more, when people think of non-binary people, they might often picture a thin, short-haired, androgynous, possibly edgy person whose gender identity is entirely unclear from the outside. I mostly do not relate to the typical trans or non-binary narratives. So, on that understanding, I could not leave my assigned box.
It took me a while to understand that I didn’t need to choose a box to begin with.
I didn’t know better until I learned about and met people in the queer community who are similar to me. Seeing people like author Essie Dennis or Safe Space podcast hosts Emma and Hester exist and thrive has been incredibly affirming to me.
I eventually boiled down my search for the ‘right’ identity to one thing: What I have wanted all along was to break out of a system that has kept me small for 25 years of my life. Soon, it started dawning on me that I had to start embracing vagueness as part of my identity to be free — the very opposite of finding a ‘good’ explanation for the way I am.
One of my first aha moments was reading Marquis Bey’s essay collection “Cistem Failure.” In “Back in the Day,” Bey invokes the notion of anarchitecture to describe what it means to be trans:
The anarchitectural, by way of Jack Halberstam, is a process of unmaking that loves the process of re- and unbuilding more than the outcome of what the house looks like. If we have the body as house, as architecture, the process of anarchitecture does not care much for making things work inside the existing framework, brushing off dust there and tightening a screw here; it is excited about tearing the parameters apart. And this, Halberstam says, departs from the masculinist tendencies of modernist architecture and brutalist styles of a will to instantiate power (…) toward not a “feminine” destination but, indeed, revelatory in the project of dismantling and remaking.
Influenced by the tropes and standards often found in the queer community, by those readily visible identities, I still thought that after destroying our house, we must build a new one. A more spacious one. A more colorful one. Yet one with walls and rooms and floors and ceilings nonetheless. But that is the wrong task, and trying to work on it just kept me small for longer.
Then, for a while, I still could not conceive of how to make sense of an identity without any reference to my upbringing, society, and culture — the walls and rooms of my house. After all, how can I get rid of something that is forever a part of me, even if destroyed? It turns out that I do not have to.
I was able to eventually wrap my brain around this when I read Travis Alabanza’s memoir, None of the Above — specifically this snippet from their poetry:
My gender is something stopped halfway through.
A badly formatted tape-to-CD conversion, missing full potential.
The second character on a video game, without levels, no up or down.
It is an unfinished —
A body of water, potential to do so much, yet eventually bottled.
The idea of fluidity, of flexibility, of being just water, able to go anywhere, be anything — it felt like coming home when I read this line. Equally, the feeling of being contained by upbringing, circumstances, and culture — of being bottled — not in a restraining way but as a fact of life, as something that interacts with my gender, helped me conceptualize my identity in a way that feels authentic.
As I have been revisiting Bey’s book, I am seeing more and more clearly that the answers were right in front of me:
For trans is an itch that things are not enough, a project of undoing, be it gender, institutions, the fabric of the social world; trans is a project that cannot be haunted because it never tries to build a house.
Thus, the art of being queer, trans, gender non-conforming — whatever word feels best for the individual — is tearing down the house, the one that we built using society’s blueprint, and deliberately leaving it all in ruins. Remains of walls, tile, or decor will still be there. And that’s okay. It’s not necessarily about turning everything to dust.
Being gender non-conforming means getting comfortable with not having a new blueprint for how we live our lives. Dare I say, it means thriving in this indeterminacy. My identity, beyond some readily intelligible bits here and there, cannot be explained in a short sentence. And that is exactly the point.
This, to me, is true liberation.
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