Beth

So I, in both elements of queerness and transness I didn’t tell them until I had moved out, and it wasn’t so much that I thought they would react badly, it just felt like I should have my own space in case something did go terribly wrong, and I think that’s true of a lot of queer and trans people, and even though I’m quite open with my parents and we have quite at times like a friendship instead of like parent and child relationship, I think that having my own space meant that I was like less afraid of being rejected because even though it would be terrible if my parents had said, “We don’t want to interact with you anymore,” I already had my own life that was separate from them, but they have been I would say supportive, but also they don’t really get it.

So they kind of, I make a lot of art about transness and queerness and my Mum follows me on Instagram so there’s, like when I came out to her as non-binary it was because someone had said something horrendous about trans people on Facebook or something, and she was like one of my Mum’s friends but she was not really her friend anymore. And I was like, “Right, I’m gonna come out to my Mum so that I can explain to her why I feel terrible right now.” And she took that all on board, she was like, “You know that, that doesn’t make any difference to me,” which is not the ideal thing to say but like you know when people say, “Oh it doesn’t matter,” but it does matter, that’s why I’m telling you, but I know what you’re trying to say is “It doesn’t make me not like you,” and so sometimes you have to just be like, “Okay that’s not what they meant, let’s just move on.”

Yeah so they kind of always filters through my Mum as well, so like I’ll tell my Mum something, and she tells my Dad even though, even though I have a good relationship with my Dad, he just, like he’s the one who’s kind of like, “So what’s gone on in the kids lives?” and then my Mum’s like, “Here’s the newsletter” rather than me like talking to both of them individually.

Yeah, but they took it quite well, and the, when my girlfriend came out to like the big extended family rather than just me and our friends, they were like, “Oh well this might take us a while to you know change names and pronouns and stuff,” but they did really well, they didn’t mess it up once. And I think that having me as like a first experience helped, I’m glad that that’s the case, but I also think they still don’t use my pronouns, and that’s not because they don’t know them, but again it’s with the whole like not having a, a reference point for what non-binary is. But they, like they definitely get a binary trans woman and therefore will use her pronouns and her name, but there are less, they don’t understand it as much with me.

So obviously there’s no way of having like an X marker on your doctors forms and stuff, so that’s kind of, that, cos either doing that or having Mx as my title is like normally a segue into so these are my pronouns, you know but because so often going to GP’s for me is about something that’s considered feminine, or womanly or you know, so there was a time where I had to go to my GP cos there was a lump in my boob, and it turned out to be nothing, but you know I had to go and see a GP and he had to poke around in my boobs, and I was just like now’s not the time to say, “Oh can you use they/them pronouns when you talk about me?” Because I’m not having that conversation when I’m topless in a doctor’s surgery.

But I think the good thing is the online, so we have like an online… I don’t know what it’s called, like a, you can book appointments through it, and like request medication and stuff, and on that I can change my title to be Mx so every time I get a prescription which is, it has Mx [Name] on it, which is it’s a nice thing to see, but off topic again, but my girlfriend because her NHS number hasn’t been, so you know you have to, if you want to have your gender changed you have to get a new NHS number, for that to happen. It seems like a very convoluted way of doing it, but you know, so they can transfer stuff over but they, you know there’s no history of you being a different gender on that file.

So she’s had to have her, she can’t just change her title to Miss, it has to be Mx until they’ve changed her number, which seems like a very bizarre system, like it’s a title, you can change your title without anything else happening, so, I don’t know. But yeah, generally my interactions with GP’s are so gendered in themselves that it’s quite difficult to explain stuff to them, but the same GP’s have been really great with my girlfriend but again I think that’s an understanding of binary trans people. I mean they don’t have a great understanding of binary trans people, but they still have a reference point for what that is.

I saw a couple of different like CAMHS therapists and things, and I never felt like I could fully open up about that aspect because of the cisnormative lens on things. And I like, I couldn’t even open up about like just queerness in general, cos the people that I saw never represented me and I think that one of the difficult things that I feel with counselling and therapy in general is that because you’re told, well they, the counsellors are told not to make it about them, not to share their own experiences, it makes it very difficult for people who come from marginalised backgrounds to feel safe enough to share information and make connections.

And I think that there’s a lot to be said for having someone who understands at least a little bit of where you’re coming from, and I don’t think I’ve ever had any kind of mental health support from anyone who wasn’t a straight cis white woman. I don’t think that’s ever been the case. And I feel like they often felt like they were relating to me because they were women, and they saw me as female and that wasn’t something that I felt back, and so I think well like well I’m a woman, you’re a girl, we have that in common. But I did not feel comfortable with them, and I honestly think despite the fact that I am also not comfortable with men, I would’ve felt more comfortable having a man be the person I talked to, because then they wouldn’t have made that assumption that they had that base connection with me. But also, I’m afraid of men. And not in like a men are scary kind of way, just in a, the patriarchy kind of way.

And I started my periods when I was 10 years old and they were excruciating. I took a week off every month from school because I couldn’t function. And they made me sick and yeah, and it just made me like hate that aspect of my body. So I think even if I hadn’t felt conflicted about having been told that I had to act a certain way because of my gender, I think that I would have had that resentment against like womanhood and the fact that everyone was like, “Oh well you’re a, you’re a woman now.”

And the fact that like every time I’ve ever been to like a gynaecology unit or seen a doctor, it’s very it’s always in like the women’s hospital, it’s always in you know this area, which even though it was in [city] and they do a lot of stuff to try and make that better for trans people, it still wasn’t great at the time.

What else was I gonna say? I’m just going to look at my notes quickly. And yeah also like definitely being read as female I think people were more likely to dismiss the pain I was in, so I, from when I was about twelve till when I was seventeen, when I was actually diagnosed with endometriosis, which was the cause of all the pain, I had so many doctors just say to my Mum, with me in the room, they’re making it up, they’re not in pain, they’re not, you know experiencing this, it must be psychosomatic, there must be something else going on, and so yeah I spent a lot, I was very depressed for a very long time. I spent a long period of time trying to figure out why no-one would listen to me.

And I, like definitely thought at the time that was because I was considered a woman or a girl and that they saw that as a reason to not believe what I was saying. And I also, like I don’t feel like that’s got better as I’ve now identified as non-binary, like people don’t like to listen to trans people either, but I feel a bit more agency in myself, when I’m like, “No I am non-binary and I feel this thing,” because it kind of gives me some control.

I’ve always find online community really helpful, I find it quite frustrating when people say that social media is really bad, and really terrible because normally the people who say that are the kind of people who can find people like them by opening their door and shouting, you know you could throw a stone and find twelve people that are like you. Whereas I think especially with queer people, like the internet is a big deal, and I, I grew up in kind of the period where people started getting smart phones when I was about 12, 13, and it became so much easier for me to find all of these communities that I couldn’t physically connect to, and especially for people who are queer and trans and are aware of it when they’re younger finding that community online and not having to tell your parents what you’re doing, is really important.

So like when I was working in, in the LGBT youth group I wanted to make sure that that other people who were working there and, and the company we were running under was aware that the people who were coming to the youth group were the, the only the people who had marginally supportive parents could get to the area easily, could afford it, like the, the group didn’t cost anything but travelling there did. And so like online community can’t just be passed off because you know physical community’s considered more important. And hopefully because of the Coronavirus, people will start to realise that.

And I think that being disabled is the same experience, like knowing that I don’t have the energy to go out sometimes, I don’t, my body is not co-operating with me but I can talk to other people who have the same experience without going anywhere, without really needing to do anything, like laying in bed, holding my phone sometimes is quite painful, but it’s better than nothing. And it really helps with isolation, and I think that it’s difficult to see like companies and workplaces and stuff just now saying, “Actually we can do working from home, actually we can do this, actually we can do that,” when if it was a disabled person asking last year, they would have said, “No, that’s impossible, you can’t work with us then.” Or you can’t come to this school, or you can’t go to college, or you can’t do university study.

Like my college would have refused to do any teaching that involved me being able to do it from my bed, and I did, I taught myself my GCSE’s essentially, because I wasn’t really able to go to school. I did go, but I had like thirty percent attendance and I think that making resources available online and building communities online is much more important than people want to believe it is.

I think it’s weird, because when I was, so before I knew what non-binary was, I kind of, I understood myself as bisexual because that was the word that was available to me, and the one that made the most sense, like I didn’t have any other you know it was, it was the LGBT and I didn’t really have the T, but and I think as I, as I like moved into understanding my non-binary identity, and transness as a whole, I kind of still felt comfortable in the bisexual identity, but I kind of understood it more to be like it was never about being attracted to both men and women, it was about being attracted to people of the same gender, and people of different genders to you.

Which the other day bought up a really interesting question about whether or not that just makes me straight because my gender is not the same as anybody’s gender, so everybody’s gender is different to mine, so am I a straight person? No. But words are weird. And then kind of as I’ve gotten you know older and I’ve kind of felt that queer works because it is so, so broad, and it basically just means I’m not straight, and I kind of also use it to mean I’m not cis, like it’s a, I’m not what you expect of me, that is it. Which I find really empowering because then I can be whatever, and the ways that people try to define me don’t have any effect on me because queer is the thing that I say, but also when you say you’re queer to a straight person, well a straight cis person, and then you say you’re not allowed to use that word though, it becomes quite complicated and I keep trying to explain to, I do some like LGBT education and I try to explain to them that you are only allowed to use queer about someone if they say that they are queer. You are not allowed to use it about everybody, it’s an umbrella term, but don’t use it as an umbrella term. And they’re like, “I don’t get it.”

So I mean that’s kind of the point to be fair, but I do think that only focussing on, or only wanting to identify with things that are the broadest definition, has kind of helped me, so non-binary obviously is an umbrella term in itself, and recently my, my girlfriend said, so what does non-binary mean? And I was like, “It’s an umbrella term,” and she goes like, “But then what is your gender?” And I was like, “I don’t know. That’s kind of the point,” like I don’t think there’s a word for it at the moment, and I’m not that desperate to find one [video glitches] that my word is gonna be something that everybody understands, so there’s no point in particularly labelling myself, in a more narrow term, especially everything is fluid, everything changes, and I don’t want to say this is the thing that I am, and then have that change, and have to feel like that’s a really big deal.

I think just, them having that information and actually listening to trans people, which shouldn’t be a big hurdle but for some reason is. And like paying attention to what they’re saying, and learning how to use gender neutral language, just in general, and also I question the, I mean in general I question the necessity for having sex markers on things anyway.

Cos, I understand that in some cases it’s a way of making sure that you get the care that you need, or something, that’s directed for you. So things like cervical screenings, or huh, I can’t remember what it’s called, there’s a certain thing to do with your veins, that is only like is more of a risk for people assigned male at birth, and like when you get to like, I don’t know, like 60 or something they want to check that, but basically I was reading a whole thing about how you need to make sure that that information goes to the right people, like trans women don’t need to get appointments for cervical screenings, generally, but also I was talking to a lot of intersex people about how language needs to be much more specific, because when you’re, if you’re talking about say periods, you saying a person with a vagina is not necessarily including, or it doesn’t necessarily include all the people that you’re talking about, well not like some people have vaginas and don’t have periods. Some people don’t have, like some cis women don’t have periods, some intersex people have a vagina but no uterus or whatever. So, like having, I just, you need to be specific. And I think that GP’s could do well to like actually have that information and understand that.

I am a parent and my girlfriend is his mum, and that’s how it works. And it’s quite interesting to see how people just assume that he now has two Mums, because I think it’s easy for people to look at non-binary people and just go well, “I don’t understand that, I don’t have a metric to measure that against,” and to just kind of, “You look like this to me, so that’s what you’re going to be.”

So like he’s been going to the same nursery since he was about one and a half, and his whole the whole time he’s been there they’ve known that the name that I use as a parent is Zazzy, and they’ve never used that for me. So he has these, and it’s not like an intentional malicious thing, but they’re, they’ll be like, and hospitals do this as well, where they’ll say, “Oh Mum can you do this,” or, “Oh Dad, can you do this,” and I think, like I understand that you don’t time to learn everybody’s names, all the time but it does, every time you have to think do I come out to you? Do I have this conversation again? And it’s always quite a difficult thing to decide, especially in the moment. And also like, well sometimes when you have that conversation and it’s so exhausting to have, and they say, “Oh okay, I’ll take that on board,” and the next time they come in, they refer back to the, the other thing that they were saying, and it’s like okay, well that clearly didn’t stick. So it’s quite a difficult position to be in.

And also in a way my, I think like my girlfriend’s experience of going from one binary gender to another, in other people’s eyes has made it like easier for her, so she’s, everyone kind of sees her and goes, “Oh something’s different.” Whereas with me, I’m just essentially, I mean I don’t look anything like I did when I was younger but that doesn’t, it’s not because I’ve changed from a binary gender to a different binary gender, and I think that people struggle to understand that.

What would be helpful for pregnant non-binary people?

I think that like the smallest but first step would be to not have everything be about pregnant women and mothers, like pregnant people as you just said is an easy thing to say, it’s an easy way to change it, and I have another anecdote: I was at, when I was working at a youth group, they had a sexual health nurse come in, and we basically discussed like 90% of the group was trans, and we discussed with her beforehand the importance of using non-gendered language so being very specific. So if you’re talking about what she would have said was, ‘when a man and a woman have sex’, which I don’t know why she was talking about this in a very queer youth group, but you say, you know like penis in vagina sex, or whatever like you need to be very specific, and she was like, “Okay, okay. I’ll try my best; I’ll try my best.”

And she kept messing it up and so like halfway through this talk we stopped and we said to her, “Okay just a reminder, can you try to use neutral terms,” and she said, “Okay yeah, I’m really sorry, I thought I was,” and then like so I said, I explained to her, I was like, “So for example, I am a non-binary parent. I had a baby, but I’m not a mother and I’m not a woman.” So, like, and she was like, “Okay, okay.” And she says, she went, “When a pregnant woman,” and then she looked at me and then she said, “Oh I mean lady,” and I was like “What?” Those are the same word.

And so that, like, is, it’s something that obviously takes some time to learn but you should take that time. And I also think that representation is really important, I have never found another non-binary parent who looks like me, like most of the non-binary parents that I know are very androgynous, like and I don’t know them personally, I know of them, are very androgynous, have, since they had their child had top surgery or you know had top surgery previously to having, or being pregnant, and also the majority of them are American. I don’t know whether that’s just the overlap of the people that I follow, but and I like the trans pregnancy as a whole seems to be very focussed on trans men being pregnant, so the trans pregnancy project I’ve kind of followed a bit on Twitter, but it is very trans masc focussed. And that’s not who I am, but I am still a trans person who was pregnant.

I think it’s really important to, and I talk about this all the time, but I think it’s really important to curate your social media, and I think that, I, people don’t necessarily think of that when they’re on social media, that like I don’t follow people who make me feel bad, or if I follow someone and then every time I see their posts I think I don’t like that, I don’t relate to that, this is making me feel bad, I just unfollow them. Because it’s about having a positive experience and it’s, I think a lot of people say, “Well you’re just, you know in your own echo chamber,” but the reason that that is because if you’re not in your own echo chamber you are causing a lot of harm to yourself, that you don’t necessarily need to experience, and so curating your, your Twitter timeline, or your, or your Instagram feed, or your Facebook just by you know unfollowing groups, or you know unfriending people who just don’t want to learn, don’t want to adapt, makes your experience much better.