Got a SUPER QUEER haircut on Sunday and found some lip gloss I like today and I love this look so much I wanted to take some pics. Fancy crashed the party.

I have rosacea and mild dermatillomania related to it, but I don't have to cover it. It's just how my face is.

I am super cute, thanks!

Some goth vibesss

Today is Transgender Day of Visibility. “Is a day like that really necessary?” some folks might ask, even in the most well-meaning of ways. It's true that over the past 10 years or so, we have seen so much progress and so many more positive representations of transfolk both in media and in real life. Still, for every example of positive visibility we see, there are still just as many if not more examples of transfolk being vilified and mocked.

As a nonbinary trans person myself, today means a lot to me because I know that had our society had more positive representation and visibility of and for nonbinary folk, I would have come out years ago. I knew I was “different” as far back as middle school, and by high school I was positive that I wasn't a boy, not completely at least. As woke as we may have thought we were back in the 90s/early 2000s, the prevailing notion was that there are just some people who were born “the wrong gender” or “born in the wrong body,” which is a severely reductive way to define the trans experience. “I don't want to have gender reassignment surgery” is what I thought (which is still true), but since that was the only way I had ever heard transgender people talked about, I resigned myself to believing that I couldn't be trans.

And the thing is, I totally get it. We live in a very binary gendered society, and for most cisgender folks, it's easy to miss (and dismiss) how for a nonbinary person, even the most mundane decisions can be hard. There are the obvious discussions that we see today surrounding things like gendered bathrooms and locker rooms, but take a closer look the next time you go to the store and you'll see how nearly everything is gendered; we impose gender on deodorant, toilet paper, and even Q-Tips for crying out loud! So, how then is a nonbinary person supposed to navigate these experiences? Can I still call myself nonbinary if I use mens deodorant? Do I have to offset that by using womens bodywash when I shower? Am I conforming too much to binary gender expectations? Not enough? What's the “right” ratio? What does a nonbinary person look like? How does a nonbinary person act? How does a nonbinary person talk?

Being nonbinary and trying to explain it to binary people is like trying to explain the fourth dimension. We all implicitly understand what living in a three dimensional world because, like cisnormative culture, it surrounds constantly; it's the only existence we know. Like the nonbinary experience, we can talk hypothetically about a fourth dimension, we can try to imagine it and define it, but because it is so unfamiliar, any attempt to understand it is going to rely on the language we use to talk about the third dimension (cisnormative gender expectations). That is the burden of being nonbinary.

Case in point, just a couple of weeks ago, I was on a Safe Zone training panel with other LGBTQ+ folks, a space where I should have felt free to express my gender however I wanted without feeling the need to “prove” my nonbinary-ness, but I still felt that overwhelming pressure to do so. Knowing I was going to be on that panel, I wore makeup and my “Gender is over (if you want it)” shirt as well as a “mens” flannel shirt, but the existential crisis of authenticity was at the forefront of mind, as it is nearly every day.