Sometime ago I contributed to a local queer zine. I tried my best to express nonbinary angst into a few lines of poetry; especially the unrest I felt due to gendered expectations of society, and how I felt I had to beg God for respite. On certain days I feel capable of articulating the feeling of being disconnected from my birth gender. On certain days I feel I do not.
It has been years since I settled into the nonbinary identity. It gave me comfort I have not experienced prior, a sort of serenity in gender expression. I no longer feel constrained by the performances of my gender and I feel I have addressed the part of me that writhes constantly in pain. I don’t feel like my gender suits me. I always feel like wearing clothes too small, except the clothes are my skin. On most days I feel shapeless.
Language, I believe, could never truly illustrate the feeling. I could be excellent at descriptions and still the feelings I evoke with my writing are crude imitations of what I want to express. Nobody can truly feel what others feel despite all the advances in language and technology. Only impressions of it. Like putting a sheet over a face and feeling with your fingertips. You miss out on the color. The inadequacy of language means we will always strive to illustrate reality to our best but never be able to replicate it.
Emotions could be transmitted, but the flavour changes. My sadness and yours differ. Dysphoria, I find, is not a unique experience, but not a common one either. I would never be able to sufficiently describe dysphoria to someone who never experienced it. If I tell you: my fingertips lose feeling, my heart aches deeply, my name sounds so far away, my tongue is dry and my legs don’t touch the ground, will you truly understand me? Will you ever feel what I feel if you’ve never felt it? Have you ever described grief for your own body to someone who has never lost theirs?
These feelings drive me to identify myself. I find people with similar experiences because I have labelled myself, identified myself into a certain group. Similarly to how birds undergo speciation from geographical separation, the separation of experiences have distinctly separated myself into a categorical identity. Certain experiences drive certain people together and certain people apart. Paradoxically, the need to define the self is the need for a community of people with similarities with you. The self is intertwined with others.
Identity comes with its own set of experiences and expectations. While experiences help push people to a certain identity, I do think identity shapes the type of experiences people receive. I could pass as binary gender (you’d be surprised at how much stigma coloured hair carries; simply not dyeing your hair makes you look like you don’t engage in much trouble) but when I chose to identify a certain way, I have made myself prone to hateful experiences.
How disturbing the world is that I face persecution for wanting a community that feels the way I do. Truly I only yearn for the day to be understood. I hope one day despite all the limitations of language, others will try to understand.