As
a political science major who came into my college career with a background in
politics, I sometimes joke with my friends that I haven’t learned anything and
am about to graduate with a degree that gave me no additional knowledge. I
often point to people who study STEM and look at the amazing things they are
able to create after their graduation as proof that they have learned amazing
things that they will use to change the world. Take a computer science major, for example, they study things like coding for years in order to create popular
apps that all the hip kids use. Now, of course, I have learned several things
from my studies, but my knowledge is a lot more theoretical than practical.
Still,
I’m extremely fortunate to live in a world and in a society where I reap the
benefits of those whose studies are more practical. One of my latest obsessions
is the app TikTok, where young people make memes and videos about a variety of
topics. The algorithm, or how the app knows how to show you things you’ll
enjoy, is highly complex. Many creators on the app joke that the algorithm
knows more about the person watching the videos than the person even knows
about themselves. I never expected that to ring true.
A
few weeks ago, I was mindlessly scrolling through the app while work was dead.
When you work for SafeRide in the middle of a global pandemic, you tend to have
a lot of free time on your hands. A video popped up where one character was
speaking to a second. The first character said to the other that being a
lesbian “felt different from being a woman” and that they felt as though it was
a unique relationship to their gender. The second character, a cisgender
lesbian woman, mentioned that she did not feel as though she was any different
from other women. In her eyes, she was just an average girl. The first character is
then revealed to be nonbinary as their pronouns, “they/she,” flash on the
screen.
Mindless
scrolling through an app full of memes and funny, relatable content rarely
gives me a pause—unless, of course, I see a recipe that I just have to try out (feta and tomato pasta,
anyone?)—but this made me stop my mindless scrolling and think. I had always felt
that I was different from being a woman, and had chalked it up to how my
sexuality caused me to identify. As a lesbian, I thought it was normal to
experience some degree of separation from my gender, which I always felt I had.
Just then, dispatch assigned me a ride. I put my phone down, making a mental
note to think more in-depth on this later…
The
next day, I spoke to my fiancée, Maddie, about the video I saw. Maddie is
nonbinary, so I figured they would not mind if I spoke to them about it. Of
course, they were happy to speak to me about what I had seen and how it had
made me feel. We spoke in-depth about exactly what the separation was that I
felt.
I
knew that I had always felt different from other girls—I wasn’t into shopping
or makeup, I never played with dolls as a kid, I liked shopping in the men’s
section of clothing and abhorred the idea of wearing a dress. Deep down inside, I always dismissed these feelings as a
feminist. Girls don’t always have the same interests. Toys and clothes have no
gender. You should do and wear what you feel most comfortable in. Plus, I never
felt as though I had real dysphoria—I was happy to have the body I have. I
didn’t want to surgically remove my breasts to feel like more of who I was, nor
did I want to have a penis (although sometimes my fiancée and I would joke that
life would be so much easier if I had one, a nod to sexism and homophobia). But
with that being said, I also never felt entirely comfortable with my body. I
had always thought that this had stemmed from the media’s portrayal of women or the
expectations set by society.
But
then we started speaking about gendered language. I didn’t mind when my brother
called me his sister, or when my parents called me their daughter. But due to
my short hair and the “pandemic chic” style of covering half of one’s face, in
public, I sometimes get mistaken for a man. People will call me “sir” or “dude”
or some equivalent—that is something that has never made me feel bad and that
I’ve never taken offense to. But, when I open my mouth and speak back to them,
they correct themselves: ma’am, lady, miss—and for some reason that always made
me feel… Bad? Weird? What the hell was the right word for it? Wrong? I mean,
even receiving an envelope with “Ms. Hunter Bullard” written on the front
always just made me feel… meh.
Maddie
understood how I felt. They told me about how when they started going by
they/them pronouns, they felt like things were just… right. I didn’t really
know pronouns were supposed to feel that way. I had always seen them as
neutral. I had started out countless meetings rambling off my name and my
she/her pronouns that it didn’t even strike me that things could be different.
“Am
I having a gender identity crisis?” I asked the person who I will one day
marry.
“If
you have to ask me that,” they said, “then yes, you probably are.”
I
still wasn’t sure about my identity, so I decided to dig a little deeper. Fortunately
for me, in my queer theory class, we were reading literature on trans rights
one week, and the next week, literature on breaking the norms. In Wilchins’s
2004 book, Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, the author
describes the “small t transgender,” or what many of us now would describe as a
non-binary individual. Reading more into the theory, I realized just how much I
related to it. I realized that maybe, just maybe, the jokes about TikTok
knowing someone better than they do were right. And that my fiancée, in their
infinite wisdom, knew best. I began to use the internet to experiment with
they/them pronouns and loved how they made me feel. Although I’m still
technically comfortable with she/her pronouns, they just make me feel neutral.
Meanwhile, they/them pronouns make me feel right. So, thanks to the internet,
an app, conversing with those around me, and most importantly, queer theory, I
was able to find my true identity as a nonbinary individual, one who has broken and will continue to break societal norms.
