It occurred to me recently that I rarely write about my experience, specifically as a nonbinary person.
Sure, I mention that I’m nonbinary here and there, but that’s about it. Partly in honor of 🏳️🌈Pride (yay!), and partly because I’ve just been thinking about this a lot lately, I’m going to share something pretty personal relating to this facet of my identity.
Then, I’m going to connect this with the pagan/witchy practice of celebrating sabbats, like yesterday’s Litha/Summer Solstice.
So, recently, I was reading None of the Above: Reflection on Life Beyond the Binary by Travis Alabanza, and in the foreword, Alok Vaid-Menon writes:
“Certainly, it’s dehumanizing for trans people to be defined by the crude arithmetic of our anatomy. But isn’t it also dehumanizing to define ourselves by our certainty?
…In response to being told that we don’t exist, we overcompensate with certainty that creates no room for human doubt. In response to our fullness being abbreviated into a phase, we’ve responded with permanence: ‘I will feel this way forever.’ But forever, like a distant moon, is not a place habitable for human life.
We humans tend to move, evolve, change. And that’s okay.”
They go on to say:
“Certainty has been weaponized as a form of tyranny against trans people. We shouldn’t have to be perfect to be accepted; perfection is the myth—not us…Our cisgender brothers and sisters are not held to such extreme standards: they routinely access gender-affirming procedures and make vast, life-altering decisions without having to perform permanence.
We get to be in perpetual transformation. We get to be human.” (emphasis mine)
For me, performing permanence manifests in many forms, such as:
Feeling anxious, or even defensive at times, about my gender presentation. As an AFAB (assigned female and birth) person, most everyone assumes that I’m female. I get misgendered virtually every time I walk out my door, and sometimes I don’t even have to leave home! I can just talk to someone on the phone.
I love the way I look, so aside from not shaving my underarms, I haven’t done anything to outwardly deviate from a traditionally “female” gender expression. At times, I struggle to not blame myself for being misgendered. Maybe I should be “doing more” to convey my nonbinary-ness!
And then there’s the rigidity I experience sometimes around my identity. As Vaid-Menon writes, in response to people misgendering me—or worse, claiming that my identity isn’t real—I have the urge to “[respond] with permanence: ‘I will feel this way forever.’”
In truth, while I’ve never fit into the tidy, binary categories (does anyone completely fit, I often wonder?), there are times when I feel more aligned with masculinized traits (as in, traits that have been culturally/socially assigned as “masculine”), and other times when I feel more aligned with feminized traits.
And then there are plenty of times when I feel aligned with neither or some mixture of both.
(Other folks who feel similarly might use labels like gender fluid or genderqueer, though I choose to identify as nonbinary.)
📕 In writing my first romantasy novel, I (quite accidentally at first, more intentionally later)…
…created a space to explore romantic and sexual attraction in different ways. Initially, I felt guilty because my main characters in this series are cis-het…but guess what? That’s what I’m finding hot to write about (right now).
And it was through exploring this guilt that I realized I’d been limiting myself with expectations of permanence in yet another area of my life. If I’m nonbinary, my inner critic says, I should be nonbinary in all ways. Uh…okay, but that assumes that there’s a right way to be nonbinary.
(It also assumes that we beautifully complex humans can be anything, all the time.)
But if I peel away the labels and societal expectations and all the other nonsense, what I authentically want to write about (again, for right now, at least) is a cis-het couple experiencing swoony romance and super steamy sex. 🌶️
To make this even more personal…
…IRL I tend to present more feminized traits in the bedroom, whereas I rarely do while working, hanging out with friends, and just generally existing.
When I was laboring under the weight of “needing” to perform permanence in order for my personhood to be recognized, this felt like a sign I wasn’t “nonbinary enough,” but trying to conform to made-up standards significantly decreased my pleasure.
What does that even mean, being “nonbinary enough”?? Beats me! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This idea of performing permanence is something I’ve also experienced within my wounded family system.
Growing up, demonstrating natural human inconsistency was an “invitation” for people to tease or outright humiliate me. If I view this through the lens of compassion, I imagine this line in my family’s rulebook was an attempt to minimize scary unpredictability. If you demand that people stay the same, then you’ll never be surprised—and possibly hurt or abandoned—by them.
But people change.
They no longer want the same things they did before. Something that felt good last month no longer does. Something they didn’t care about before, now it’s important.
Staying the same, and in the “right” way, is too often a prerequisite to being afforded basic human respect in our current culture.
Think of a-holes on the internets who revel in pointing out people’s inconsistencies, as if not living your life like a polished PR campaign is somehow shameful.
This brings us to the connection with celebrating the sabbats.
When I was a baby witch over a decade ago, I wanted to cross all the witchy T’s and dot all the magical I’s. This included celebrating the sabbats and esbats “the right way.” (Are you noticing a theme in my personal growth arc? Hello/goodbye, perfectionism! 😆)
This led to some incredibly cool experiences…
(experiencing 👃clairolfaction for the first time during a solstice ritual; drawing down the moon and speaking, not exactly in tongues, but very poetically and—so I was told—prophetically in a way I had zero remembrance of later; and other adventures)
…but it also created a template for practicing magic that involved checking boxes in lieu of understanding and connecting to why I was doing a thing.
Check out this passage from Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity:
“Humanity soon developed rituals to structure and make sense of these on-and-off rhythms. Harvest festivals encouraged the intense work required each fall to bring in the crops, while elaborate winter celebrations helped add meaning to the idleness of the dark months that followed.
For the ancient Germanic peoples, for example, multiday feasts surrounding Yule, replete with animal sacrifices and the veneration of the dead around bright-burning fires, transformed the shortest days of the year into something more than hardship to endure.”
This is such a useful reminder that, at one point in time, these rituals weren’t done simply because somebody said so. They arose from a genuine need: a need to mark and honor time, to drum up motivation to get shit done, to connect with others and remember what the point of all the hard work was for.
Since you’re signed up for these emails, I’m guessing you have some connection to magical practice, whether that’s in the form of witchcraft, ceremonial magick, Jungian magic, or countless other flavors.
In your own practice, what’s your why? (This can totally change, btw!)
Are there areas where you’re expecting yourself to be the sort of magical practitioner you’ve read about in a book or seen on TikTok? Does that expression genuinely light you up? If it does, rock on with your magical self!
If it doesn’t, what might you explore instead?
If performing permanence isn’t a prerequisite to being a “real” witch or magician or human worthy of love and dignity and respect (and it very much isn’t)…
…what would you like to try?
Who do you want to experiment with being, even just for an hour or a day?
Not that you need it but—permission granted.
Happy Full Moon 🌝
