I’m 55. I’ve known I’m Bisexual and Non-Binary all my life. So why am I talking about it now? Isn’t that just going to make people uncomfortable?
Well here’s the thing: I basically presented as a Cis Het Man for 20+ years because it was easier to go with the flow, my career choices presented enough challenges without making things harder, without rocking the boat. And part of that was having very few examples in society, very few role models of what someone like me looks like. How it works. And now I have a choice, to stay hidden, it not being a secret but also not quite myself either or be part of what I needed in my life
I had a cardiac arrest a few years ago. My chances of survival were scarily slim - around 5% as best I can work out. For me I’ve taken that as my life being in “extra time”. A chance to do the things I want to do, not the things I was doing because it was expected to. Around the same time I left the company I’d been one of the founders of. While I learned a great deal I also made a lot of mistakes and perhaps being a CTO isn’t what I’m cut out for (my opinion on that changes though). Because of all this AND Covid lockdown the last few years have been a time of reflection: what am I doing with my life? Who am I.
In particular the non binary part of my life has come to the fore. I’ve always known I am like this but I didn’t have a good way of thinking about it. When I was younger most of the “information” around was what I now know to be anti-gay propaganda: “cross dressing” “transvestite” all loaded words for behaviours that were still criminal not that many years earlier. I didn’t really even talk to people about it because I was led to believe it was some kind of perversion - that there was probably something wrong with me that shouldn’t be talked about. I guess growing up in a small town didn’t help and the whole “life is for other people not you” kind of attitude still fairly prevalent in a lot of Northern towns in the UK.
But, thanks to the spreading LBGTQ+ movement, I’ve come to have language to think and talk about who am I. And more importantly what it means to me. I’ve always struggled with “Male” culture, it’s not me at all. One intriguing (to me) aspect of that is it makes sense of how I struggled with gay culture when I was younger - it was very male and not what I was looking for at all.
So: I love skirts, dresses, makeup, doing my hair, matching accessories, jewellery. I don’t want stilted conversations about cars and sheds and football but all this is hard to talk about without falling into stereotypes. And that is also an important part of the “non binary” thing. For me the rules of gender are stupid - why should we police the population into two camps depending on their reproductive mechanisms. It seems weird. I guess though my sexuality comes into this too because I don’t really see that difference in who I’m attracted to - I like people, I don’t really care what shape their bits are - you can have lots of fun no matter which parts they have!
What does all this mean? I’m increasingly comfortable being myself, and it must be said noticeably happier. I’m getting braver about going out wearing skits and dresses (non of my clothes are now what you’d call ‘male’ clothes but some things are more noticeable than others) I’m stopping myself from policing my own behaviour to be “male” (as you start thinking about this stuff actively it is astonishing the amount of active policing of gender that is in our every day culture - and in ourselves. For me being non-binary is largely learning to stop caring about fitting in as “A Man” and being my natural self) but I also want to talk about it - it’s really helpful to see how other people have understood these things, how they think about it.
If this makes you uncomfortable - then so be it. There are many people like me who just want to be their natural selves and not fit into whatever culture deems “appropriate”. If your view is that we should all fit in then we probably aren’t going to get on anyway. But in these difficult times, as the UK and US seem to be sliding into authoritarianism, it feels more important that those of us who are creative , different , care about others , think about things , do show our faces however briefly (the nearly dying thing has made me super aware we can be here on minute, gone the next - our life is no-one else’s but our own. We owe it to humanity to live our best lives. We really do)