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Because that would make it easier for me. I didn’t know which of the other labels suited me best… so could I just use the umbrella term as an identity?
Forgetting all about food and coffee, I sat down and began thinking again.
Chapter Sixty
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that non-binary was the right term for me. Right now, I felt I didn’t need any more information than that. It was enough to simply recognise that I was outside of the gender binary, outside of the strictly defined ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories. I didn’t know whether I was demigender, or agender, or bigender, or one of the many other identities that fell within the ‘non-binary’ spectrum. Perhaps I would discover that over time, and would be able to update my label accordingly if I so chose. For now, it was enough to simply say that I was non-binary.
Relief filled my veins, potent enough to make me quite lightheaded. Finally. Finally I had a name for this thing that I was. A non-binary person. Not a woman. Not female. Born female – or Assigned Female At Birth, AFAB for short – but non-binary as an individual. Non-binary.
“Non-binary,” I said aloud, even though there was nobody to hear it.
And again. “Non-binary.”
“Non bi-na-ry.” I broke the term down into its individual syllables, almost tasting each of them, wrapping my tongue around the letters. Then I breathed in, a deep inhalation, only realising as the sweetness filled my lungs that I hadn’t been breathing properly for what seemed like forever.
Perhaps I never had.
‘I never knew what it was like to fly until I let myself breathe in.’
A line from a poem.
Which had struck me so hard when I first read it in my mounds of research.
By K Alexander.
A non-binary actor.
About being non-binary.
I exhaled.
Bingo.
Chapter Sixty-One
Now I thought I’d figured it out, I didn’t really know what to do with this revelation.
At some point, I knew I’d need to come out publicly. Again. Coming out as a lesbian in the 1990s had been no picnic, but this was an entirely new ball game. Now the old fears came flooding back. I’d tried so hard to prove myself impenetrable, and ‘normal’, after my post-Lyndsey breakdown. They’d know that the façade was all a sham, and that I was an Other, a ‘Prefer Not To Say’ on tick-box forms.
And then there was Petra.
God, there was Petra.
If we did end up getting divorced, I’d be coming out into the world alone. Whether we stayed together or not, I knew that I’d have to tell her at some stage. It might change things, for the better or for the worse. After her reaction to Anonymity Smith, I was confident that she wouldn’t scream or cry or make the sign of the cross to ‘scare away the devil’, all three of which her mother had done upon learning that her younger daughter was gay. But would she still want me?
Because, as I’d thought before, Petra was a lesbian. I didn’t need Google to tell me that a lesbian was defined as ‘a woman who is romantically or sexually attracted to another woman’. Would she still be attracted to me if I didn’t identify as a woman?
Then my brain screeched to a halt and took off once again in a slightly new direction.
Hold on a second. In that case, surely I wasn’t a lesbian either. If I wasn’t a woman, how could I fit into this clear-cut definition of the sexual orientation that I’d always regarded as an unmoveable part of me? ‘Lesbian’ was etched onto my soul. Melded onto it with the strength of the most powerful solder. To lose that label – even if I was gaining another – would be like scraping off a layer of my skin: exquisitely painful and leaving me raw and bleeding. My hands began to shake – I couldn’t not be a lesbian. It was who I was!
The hunger pangs (that came from some thirty-six hours without food) faded into obscurity as I grabbed my laptop. When I asked it to define a lesbian, it was exactly as I thought. All the top results agreed with my personal definition. My heart sunk.
Then, halfway down, one line caught my attention.
Some nonbinary people also identify with this term, it claimed.
I clicked hurriedly, but the page from which it came was simply a list of LGBTQ-related terms, much like the ones I’d already seen.
