‘Man, I Feel Like a Human!’: How Coming Out As Non-Binary Made Me a Better Feminist

By Laura Griffin

‘Man! I feel like a woman!’ I hoped I would never disappoint Shania Twain, but on her most famous line, I may be guilty of doing so. This is because, looking back, I never had a moment where I felt particularly like a woman.

I have always been intrigued by the idea of what a woman constitutes. What does it mean both on an individual and societal level? What makes it an identity instead of just another label for people to try to live up to?

People like to downplay the ordinary kind of magic that is language. What’s in a word, a label, a name? I can understand why for some labels can become incredibly restricting, especially with something such as gender that can fluctuate and change like a season or a tide. But while naming something doesn’t make it permanent, giving it a name in the first place is usually the result of extensive late-night research, thoughtful lunchbreaks, and a leap of faith into the dark. It’s a quiet act of revolution to say ‘this is who I am in this moment in this wonderful, difficult world.’

I had heard the term ‘non-binary’ before last year, but I’d never given it much thought beyond supporting other people in their need to live as themselves. During a quiet session with a cup of tea, however, I started to make a parallel to my pansexuality, where I can fall in love, lust or just attraction with people regardless of their gender. ‘Hearts not parts’ is a really easy way to remember it. It got me thinking. If I can’t see gender in other people, what do I see in myself? Sometimes I may slide across the extremes of the gender scale for short periods of time, but for the most part I’m either somewhere in between or I leave behind the scale entirely.

Until then, I hadn’t interrogated it much. Deciding what was for supper before running out for an evening rehearsal at the local amateur drama group, or what chores I had to do before the next morning always seemed to grab my attention and keep it. Sitting down with my thoughts has always been a little scary – but taking the time to hear them, debate them and delve into them led me to an experiment. Buying a binder.

I took time researching the type of company I wanted to buy from, measuring myself again and again and reading anything I could find on how to actually use a binder so as not to hurt myself. I placed my order and waited on tenterhooks until it arrived in non-descript packaging. I took off my bra – something that I had lived and struggled with for about seventeen years – replaced my cotton shirt and wriggled into this new piece of clothing.

Waiting the two weeks for it to arrive was an interesting experience. Half hope and excitement; half incomprehension wondering what I was doing and what I was trying to prove to myself. Things are fine, why try to fix what isn’t broken? As soon as I looked into the mirror with the binder in place, though, every thought in my mind was silenced. In that moment, I felt and looked more like myself than I had in years.

That’s not to say that I became a blank slate as my identity became a little clearer to me. There are parts of the old me that cling like tentacles on the bottom of a pirate ship. I still love to bake bread with my sourdough starter Rosa. I still like to wear flowery skirts and swim in a shockingly red swimming costume. My voice is still high-pitched and polite. I still devour Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott.

However, the more I thought about these lingering things, the more I realised that any one of these things can be enjoyed just as much in my new way of being. Not one of these things made me more of a cis-gender woman. In fact, it could be quite harmful to think certain things are feminine pursuits only – in just the same way that thinking partaking in a dram of whiskey on a cold night and wearing braces with edelweiss are the domain of men. I do all of these things, and yet they do not make me more of one or the other. They just make me a human being. It was this realisation of fluid, encompassing humanity in myself that started the gears working and will, at the end of the day, keep making me a better feminist.

It may seem contrary to the non-intersectional feminist that in realising I’m not a cis-gender woman, my feminism will become better. Haven’t I turned my back on womanhood, after all? But, as Audre Lorde once said, ‘I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group.’ Feminism should always be a camp of many canopies.

I can now see more plainly the gatekeeping that can happen when trans folks want to dive into the personhood they know is theirs, and yet are sometimes told or made to feel as though they’re somehow lacking. Womanhood can be a wonderful, equalising thing – so why are we wasting time denying it to human beings who know who they are? Isn’t womanhood diverse and wonderful enough to allow its ranks to swell beyond the ideas of yesteryear? What is womanhood anyway? What society says it is? How very restrictive and stagnant for something that should be allowed to grow and bloom like a garden in June.

Feminism can change anyone’s life for the better – so long as we are open to the blooming diversity that is humanity, and hear the cries for equality from whoever is shouting for it. Being nonbinary and seeing myself and everyone else as human beings first strips away a lot of straw men that dot modern rhetoric when it comes to gender and identity. Whilst we might not all identify as non-binary, the idea of seeing people as human beings first and foremost may be a breakthrough when it comes to how we treat each other. If we’re all human beings first, after all, it makes it much less palatable to single out certain people for discrimination.

I don’t want this outlook to be misconstrued as being gender-blind or colour-blind when it comes to the many problems we see affecting marginalised groups. These problems cannot be solved if we ignore the very real societal problems that lead to discrimination in the first place. Instead, this is more of a call to action for feminism to recognise the varied humanity of the marginalised, and that action should be taken whilst understanding the wider context of the problem.

This also means including trans folks in modern feminism and questioning how trans groups are welcomed by modern feminism – which also includes non-binary folks, like me. We want to be represented in the discussion that is modern feminism, along with so many groups that historically never got a look in. Seeing the hearts before the parts of any marginalised group may be part of how feminism grows in the twenty-first century.

Hopefully one day gender will not be seen as a barrier or grounds for discrimination – and we can all sing ‘Man! I feel like a human!’