Oct 11 | Dusk Child, Part 4 (Letters from the Coast)

This is the final part in a four-part series on my journey through gender identity and the claiming of my pronouns.

 

PART IV: FOUND

Now, several years after that tearful admission in the chapel, pronoun checks have become common in certain spaces. My friends are the most beautiful patchwork quilt of identities: gay, lesbian, two-spirit, trans, nonbinary, ace, demi, genderfluid. More and more of them have begun to use “they/them.”

But it still doesn’t feel right to me, and neither does that long-ago “ze.”

I start to wonder if I’ll ever find the right one.

Until I do.

My name.

It is the sum total of who I am. It is wholly mine, somehow both expansive and particular, boundless but succinct. It is nothing more than me, but so much more than the carefully cropped pastures of “he” or “she.”

I think this is the end of it, and yet I still hesitate.

It took me more than thirty years to claim this, more than thirty years to surface from the depths of my inner sea with this hard-won pearl.

It feels impossible and tiresome to explain, and so I rarely bother. I keep it to myself in many public settings. I stumble over my own pronouns at home, so long have I been conditioned to fold myself into the appropriate envelope. Straight and cis friends ask with such gentle hospitality if I want them to use my name as the pronoun and the openness of their love feels utterly unearned. Trans and genderfluid friends use my name effortlessly and I feel so seen.

One day we have a Clergy Day on trans identity, and my colleagues are introduced to the term nonbinary. I feel prompted to stand and explain that they know a nonbinary person: me. I am terrified but it feels right.

When I sit down, my phone is lit up with supportive texts from other people in the room.

 

I still stumble over my own self-image. The paradigm of my youth feels so very hard to shed. While I am often read as queer, being married to a man and visibly feminine means I am often invisible. I constantly question my own sense of self. Am I really bi? Am I really NB? Or am I just trying to be “special?”

 

The world is changing around me, and yet I am not quite ready to share my pearl with just anyone. The church, where I give (and receive) so much of myself, is still trying to make sense of these new cultural movements. It’s not always safe for me.

So like my sexuality, my gender remains in my pocket most of the time.

 

But perhaps one day, I will feel brave and certain enough to hang it on a pendant.