As both an artist and an openly transgender person, vulnerability is a big part of my everyday life. Living in a vulnerable way has a lot of drawbacks. So I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about whether the value really justifies the cost. It’s too late for me to slink back into the closet, but I sure could be less vocal and expressive. Everything I share is an opportunity to receive criticism...
Since I came out as agender, I haven’t talked much about my faith. It’s not because I’m ashamed that I’m going against my beliefs, which some assume. I am living in deep alignment with my beliefs. It’s because, in most contexts in which faith has come up, it’s essentially cisgender people demanding that I defend my existence (“lifestyle choices” as they might put it) against their impenetrable...
Your story is an abstract representation of you in the world. It comes in many forms: reminiscences with friends, anecdotes shared about you when you’re not present, individual imaginations of what your life is like. Your story is the framework people build to understand you. It can be accurate, or completely off the wall. It can be flattering, or it can paint you as an awful person. Whether or...
Classical piano performance is bizarre. I was immersed in it as a kid, and got into a love-hate relationship with it. If my biased read was accurate, my teachers thought I was talented, but disrespectful. I sometimes overheard them chatting with my mom, thinking I was out of hearing range, about how irritating I had been in the most recent lesson. It always upset me. I never intended to be...
I’ve written a lot of articles on this site for transgender allies—from a lexicon of transgender terms to a coming out letter to an explanation of why I pretended to be a woman. But there are brilliant trans writers elsewhere who have powerful stories and perspectives. Many of them have already written about concepts I haven’t gotten around to writing about—and cover important topics...
It wasn’t until age 30 that I finally came out as agender. It’s not that I didn’t realize I had no sense of gender before. I was painfully aware for just about every waking second. But I kept it to myself. Partially, because I’d been taught it was just a phase. Being cisgender was the only thing I was told was possible. So I kept holding out. I was trapped in this limbo—pretending to be a woman...
A lot of people tell me that it’s confusing for kids to learn about different labels for gender outside of just “boy” and “girl.” But I strongly disagree. As a former nonbinary kid who only knew of the labels “boy” and “girl,” the limitation was what was confused me. If I had known about the label “agender,” I wouldn’t have been confused at all. I would have immediately recognized that it...
I was raised conservative evangelical. I could say many things about that aspect of my upbringing—one being that I memorized a sizable chunk of the Bible as a kid. Of the thousands of words I memorized, there was one three-word phrase from a line Jesus said that I was often stewing on: “love your enemies.” Whenever the adults would discuss that line, it was always accompanied by talk of how...
There’s this trope in movies and shows where psychologists tell their clients to connect with their inner child. Often it’s presented as parody—almost playing off the concept of therapy as wishy-washy new-age BS. I’m in favor of a healthy dose of skepticism, and I do think people often hide mountains of bullsh*t behind aphorisms designed to make them sound profound. I used to think of the “inner...
I spent the greater part of the first three decades of my life passing myself off as a woman. I was an imposter the whole time. And the whole time, it made me miserable. (If this is the first article of mine you’re reading, I’m agender.) So why did I do it? Here are seven big reasons. 1. I thought it was my only choice In childhood, I learned that people were going to lump me in with...