My name is Sky Blue. I’m 42 years old. I am male bodied, male socialized, mostly heterosexual, carry male privilege, and people mostly assume I’m male. But I don’t experience myself as male, and I don’t want to identify or be identified as male, though I understand I will be to some extent. But how I experience myself is fluid and does not conform to standard binary gender identities. 

Very broadly, I would say I am queer, gender queer to be specific, or nonbinary. More specifically, I am genderfluid. I use gender neutral pronouns. For me, pronouns are a minor signifier, but it’s one of the few easy ways to let people know that, who I may appear to be is different from who I experience myself to be, and to encourage people not to make assumptions. Despite how I may look, how I may behave sometimes, and how people might experience me, I am not male. I am not “one of the guys.” I’m not “bro” or “brother”, even though most people who call me that mean it with the sweetest of intentions. There are plenty of good bros out there. That's just not who I am. Within an awareness of privilege & oppression, and how that impacts our behavior and experience of each other, what I want is to be seen and known for the complex, fluid, and evolving person I am, and that’s what I want for everyone. 

Addressing Privilege & Oppression

I have to address this first. I have a lot of privilege, including male and heterosexual privilege. And because of that privilege, I questioned for a long time whether it was appropriate for me to adopt a marginalized identity. Part of that privilege is being comfortable with being assertive or even aggressive, in trusting myself and what I think I know, in knowing I’m less likely to be assaulted, and in having people be more likely to defer or acquiesce to me in a variety of ways. Just because I don’t experience myself or identify as male, doesn’t let me off the hook. I am committed to the ongoing work of developing my awareness of how this manifests in my behavior, be accountable for its impacts, and learn how to show up differently. 

The extent to which I do not have the privilege of being cis-gendered is minor in the scale of oppression. But the marginalization is real, and has definitely had real impacts on my ability to function and feel comfortable in the world, in a way that people who do not have that experience don’t tend to realize. Part of my work is to leverage the privilege I have to help undo oppression. I use my experience of marginalization to help me have a better understanding of how it is for others who are more marginalized. It helps me remember that systems of privilege and oppression harm everyone, even the most privileged, and it’s in all of our interests to work together to address it. 

What Does Being Nonbinary Mean To Me?

I believe gender is a social construct and is only connected to our physiological sex because of culture. Society mostly thinks they are the same. A clear indication of this in the fact that we use the same words, male and female, for both gender and sex, which makes it difficult to talk about them as being different things. Because we mostly only see two sexes, and because it’s beneficial to white supremacy/patriarchy/capitalism/imperialism, we’ve created two gender identities to go along with them. Certain qualities or characteristics are viewed as being masculine and others are feminine, and these have been packaged together as what it means to be male or female. Gender is the label we put on these packages. Even people who take a more progressive view of this tend to put characteristics into these boxes and will talk about men expressing their feminine side or women expressing their masculine side. 

I get that for many people, these packages, or some variation of them, align with their experience of themselves. I also get that for many people there are certain qualities or characteristics that are key parts of what it means to them to be whatever gender they identify as. I totally support that.

What I push back against is the gendering of qualities and characteristics in a way that makes it seem universal and like it applies to everyone. Again, I get that many people experience it that way and they have all of society on their side making it seem like it’s universal. But it’s just not true for me and many other people, which I think means it’s not universal, unless all of us self-proclaimed nonbinary people are just pathologically wrong, which many people believe is true, and many well-intended people think without realizing it. Caring is not a feminine quality any more than aggression is a male quality. The virtually exclusive reason for any difference in behavior is culture and socialization. Unless people happen to align with the packages offered, it doesn’t allow them to be the unique individual person they are, and this can be extraordinarily harmful to people.

What I also want to bring awareness to is that for many people, how they experiences themselves, how they identify, and how they present (including things they have control over, like how they dress or how they keep their hair, and things they mostly don’t, or have to seek care to change) might all be very aligned. For others they can be very different things. Until you start paying attention to this stuff, you don’t tend to realize how much people make assumptions and gender each other. If your gender experience, identity, and presentation align with the assumptions of binary gendering, you don’t notice it. For those of us who don’t have that experience, it can undermine our basic sense of connection and belonging in the world.

But what if we decoupled sex and gender? What if we truly saw gender not as a binary, not even as a spectrum, not even as a sphere, but as a limitless space of individual self-expression, and made space for people to be themselves, whatever that happens to be at any given time? That’s the world I’m trying to live into. 

What Does Being Genderfluid Mean To Me?

For some, the things they experience about themselves that are identified as being part of their gender are fixed. They have a consistent experience of themselves that they can build an identity around that guides how they choose to present themselves. And again, for people for whom this aligns with stereotypes and assumptions, there is a certain comfort they get to experience that others do not. But for others, gender is not a fixed experience. It’s fluid. I think one of the misconceptions about being trans-gendered is that it means a transition from one fixed gender identity and presentation to another that better matches the person’s internal experience. For some people that is exactly what it is, and I think we should support people in doing what they want to do to make that transition so they have a better shot at feeling that sense of comfort in the world. 

For me, my internal experience of things that would be put into the box of gender changes regularly.  Sometimes I feel big and tough and burly. Sometimes I feel soft and small. I loved being a nurturing caregiver to my child while also prodding her to be more driven and take risks. I love playing hard on the ultimate frisbee field and love congratulating my opponents when they make an awesome play. I’m ambitious and want to change the world. I really enjoy doing domestic work for the people I share a home with, and I tend to track people’s emotional states and anticipate their needs. None of this occurs to me as masculine or feminine, and it’s honestly bizarre to me this notion that any of this would be categorized in that way. They’re just different facets. I have a lot of different qualities that feel more or less predominant at different times or in different situations, and they’re all me and not me, and how I want to express myself is just how I feel in that moment. I suspect a lot of people are more this way than they tend to acknowledge.

This is part of why using gender neutral pronouns both matters and doesn't matter to me. They matter because they help remind people not to make assumptions, about me, and maybe also about themselves. They don’t matter because they’re signifiers of an experience that for me doesn’t exist in a box of gender and changes all the time. If it were more a thing, I might use “It” as my pronoun. As in, look at that cute, furry, little woodland critter, isn’t it cute?! If I were to claim the gender identity I really wanted it would be “tiger cub.”

Part of my fluid experience is that I don’t have a consistent experience of body dysmorphia. I have a large body. Usually it doesn’t feel right; I’m mostly shocked when I hug people at how much bigger I am than them. But sometimes it does, and I enjoy it. For me, as much as I might like to change my body, because my experience changes all the time, the only way it would make sense is if I was a shape-shifter, which would be AWESOME! That’s for sure the super power I would choose. 

What’s also challenging about being fluid and having the body I do is trying to express myself in different ways that align with my experience at the time. It was a whole lot easier to find a variety of clothes and mix up my appearance when I was in my 20’s and skinny and felt okay about how my face looked without facial hair. Trying to find clothes now is mostly just an incredibly discouraging and triggering experience. Even just finding non-gendered clothing is almost impossible, and for a while I’ve mostly just been wearing sweat and athletic clothes, which is fine, but not very interesting. I’m very rarely interested in actually trying to look like one of the binary genders, and trying to mix and match to create a different effect still largely feels like conforming to the binary to me. Even the fashion trends of most progressive circles (I’m looking at you ecstatic dance and burner scenes) that claim to be queer friendly still trend towards their own cultural version of binary cis-gender stereotypes. I also sometimes feel like even when I want to dress in a more stereotypically masculine way, I’m worried that people will see me and think, without even realizing it, “oh, that’s who he really is.”

Last year, I put together a tiger outfit for a halloween party, and I enjoyed wearing the ears so much that I started wearing them occasionally in all sorts of settings, at the farmer’s market, in meetings (I’m lucky to mostly work with people who loved this and I got lots of comments about how natural they looked on me), wherever, whenever I was feeling it. Except for the fact that it’s kind of a weird thing to do and I mostly don’t like drawing attention to myself, I often feel much more myself, whatever the hell that even means, when I wear them. Or at least I feel less like people are going to see me in certain ways that are not how I experience myself. 

On A More Personal Note

I’ve never felt like one of the guys, even the conscientious, non-misogynistic ones, who I think are great. There’s a comfort guys seem to feel in how they act with each other that feels alien to me, and when I try to play along I just end up feeling even more alone. I’ve tended to feel more comfortable with the more emotionally open and communicative socialization of women, but I often still have the same experience. I’m not one of the girls either. I often enjoy being in queer spaces, though I sometimes bristle at what feels like an emphasis on being trendy/hip/cool, or that it’s somehow better to be queer, instead of people just getting to be okay for who they are, including straight people (if the idea is that everyone should get to be who they are, then everyone should get to be who they are), and sometimes feel like people will think I’m an imposter for being mostly heterosexual. I think we collapse gender and sexual orientation in unhealthy ways too. I would love it if we could see physiological sex, sexual orientation, gender orientation, and relationship orientation as related yet distinct things that don’t have a deterministic relationship to each other.  

I’ve felt a lot of confusion and isolation in my life from not feeling like I fit in with typical gender performances, but not wanting to conform, and feeling unsure about how to express myself. I was teased and ostracized a lot as a kid and desperately wanted to fit in, but then said fuck it when I became a teenager, and gradually did present much more fluid. Though I’ve also done plenty of conforming. In many settings I’ve stuck with a more conformist gender presentation because it’s safer. As a large person who looks like they probably have a penis, physical and sexual violence is not really something I have to worry about, which is a hard privilege to give up, but it also comes at a cost.

Most of my life I’ve had the good fortune of being part of groups of people and having lots of people in my life who I feel seen and known and loved by for who I am, which has been a blessing. When I was in my 20’s at Twin Oaks, in the 2000’s, as in most places, the conversation around gender wasn’t as developed as it is now. But what’s interesting is that Twin Oaks, in its efforts towards egalitarianism, actually created a gender neutral pronoun in the early 70’s: Co. It never really caught on in casual usage, but did often get used in written policy. Otherwise, gender neutral pronouns were still in their infancy. And despite its flaws, I experienced the culture at Twin Oaks as very much allowing people to be who they are, and for that to change over time. So, for me, in my 20’s, I didn’t feel a need to assert a non-male gender identity. I just got to be who I was. 

In my 30’s, there were a couple points where I made a choice to conform to a male gendered presentation, to make my appearance less distracting in order to make the work I was doing easier. I thought it would make me more effective, which may have been true, and I felt like the work I was doing in the world was more important. But, again, conforming comes at a cost, which I only really started realizing in 2018 when more of my life started happening outside of Twin Oaks, and I was feeling less of a need to conform. 

This is a big part of why I started identifying this way and asking people to use gender neutral pronouns for me. Most of the world, even highly progressive circles, are still pretty stuck in the binary gender. And I have mostly not been in a community of people who’ve known me since I was 19. In some ways I really dislike needing to assert a nonbinary gender identity. It gets away from just getting to be myself. But unfortunately, unless I’m willing to perform in a way that makes it very clear, people, even very well-meaning people, still tend to make a lot of assumptions that might seem innocuous but are actually quite painful.

I also want to say that while there’s a lot of pain around the fucked up ways society views all of this and treats queer/trans people, there’s a lot of freedom and joy in the exploration of it all and getting to express ourselves in different ways. My hope with all of this gender identity stuff is that it’s opening up the door more and more for more and more people to explore themselves and how they want to express themselves. 

People talk about gender performance, and this makes a lot of sense to me. How we tend to express this package we call gender, to me, feels very much like a performance. And I love performing! I loved getting to play the MC in Cabaret, and being the lead singer for Thriftshop and Sexy And I Know It in the Twin Oaks dance band. DJing is a kind of performance to me, as well as being a sacred act of creating a group experience. I used to design and conduct a lot of rituals. And some of where I go when I facilitate events and workshops satisfies something similar. I’ve always loved being on stage, though I’ve always felt uncomfortable with improv. I’m uncomfortable being the center of attention unless I feel sure about what I’m doing and that it feels like a meaningful gift to the participants. I like to have a role, a character that I can embody that helps the audience explore another facet of themselves and life. I like the playfulness and creativity of performing, of getting to express different facets of myself. Just because it’s a performance doesn’t mean it’s inauthentic. Performing to me is very much about authentic expression in a particular creative form, and gender expression is just another form of that. 

Here’s to the ongoing exploration!