International Non-Binary People's Day 2022

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Today is the International Day of Visibility of Non-Binary People. This day is located exactly between International Women's Day (March 8) and International Men's Day (November 19) and aims to raise awareness of the problems that non-binary people around the world have to face.

Many countries don't recognize us, Spain being one of them. Which means that in my ID card and other oficial documents they identify me by a gender that doesn't correspond to me and for me it means a problem. Imagine that you have to mark a gender that you don't identify with in the mandatory box because there is no other option. Or that every time someone addresses you they misgender you and this happens because very few people in society ask for your pronoun when addressing you for the first time or laugh at you if you use a pronoun that those people think is wrong or simply it doesn't exist. How would you feel?

For a better understanding, the question is, what is gender? It's a social construction in which everything has been classified as "masculine" or "feminine", each of them having social roles, behaviors, activities and attributes, so depending on your genitals, they will classify you as "man" or "woman". But here there is an error since biological sex is one thing and gender identity is another. They are two completely different things. In fact, there aren't even only two sexes, we must not forget about intersex people who usually mutilated at a very young age to assign them a sex and gender that both doctors and parents believe is correct without letting that baby grow up and decide in the time. Fortunately, in the future Spanish trans law, the genital mutilation of intersex children will be prohibited and they won't be assigned a gender until they decide for themselves. 

Therefore, non-binary people don't participate in binary gender, even from a very early age in my case. I remember that when I was 5 years old I hated being called "girl" and although I didn't identify myself as a boy either, I used the masculine pronoun because I felt absolute rejection towards the feminine one and my gender expression was also different from the one I was assigned at birth. I hated "girlish" clothes and "girlish toys." He preferred to wear trousers and shirts and play with Playmobil, vehicles or puzzles. To this day I still feel the same and I don't use pronouns and when I have to, I feel more comfortable with the pronouns "they/them" or "him". 

I remember when I was 7 years old I wanted to dress up as Superman (I've always identified myself with male characters or "masculine" female characters) and my grandmother told me that it couldn't be possible because Superman was a man. Of course, I didn't understand it and I thought what was wrong with wanting to dress up as a character I liked, I didn't pay attention to his gender. Do you know what I ended up dressing up as? As a fairy godmother, with a horrible pink dress. As a result, I developed a strong hate for pink colour and dresses. 

If you look closely, they were already clear signs that I was a non-binary little person. In fact, I never minded being mistaken for a boy, not even as a teenager. What's more, many times I played the game and pretended to be a boy and made me feel good. But of course, at that age and in the time in which I had to live my childhood, in the 80s-90s, there were not much talk about transgender and transexual people who identified themselves as a man or a woman and there wasn't the information that there is now.

My mother got very angry with me twice. One was around the age of 8 because she wanted to force me to wear the dresses she bought me. One day I took a pair of scissors and told her that if she forced me to wear them, I would cut them off. The other time I was around 10-12 and it was because I always used the masculine pronoun. One day she got tired and told me that I should have been born a boy and be called me Juanito -Johnny- (I did it unconsciously, if we short Sionnach as Sion, it means John in Welsh). From then on I stopped using the masculine pronoun so frequently and unconscious I began to speak in inclusive language because I refused to use the feminine pronoun and when I had to use it out of obligation, it was and still is as if I were talking about another person. To this day, I still avoid using pronouns towards myself.

Years passed and as I grew older, I had more doubts about my identity. My grandmother, the same one who didn't want me to dress up as Superman, realized that something was happening and I don't remember exactly how old I was then, let's say between 12 and 14, she told me something that I still have in my mind today: " Now people can have surgery and change their sex." That made me wonder if I was a transgender boy. And I had that doubt for several years until I realized that the problem was not in my body even though I didn't want my breast to develop. Fortunately it's small and it's not a big problem for me as I can easily hide it with loose clothing. That was something about my personality and it couldn't be changed. I kept telling my mother that I didn't identify myself as a woman or a man, it was something that was outside the gender and surely there were more people who felt the same way. 

Fortunately, society has been evolving and about two or three years ago, by chance, on a television program they talked about gender identities and they talked about non-binary people. I excitedly told my mother, "See? There are more people like me, now I know who I am." There all the doors were opened to me and I understood everything that I had lived. I began to investigate and discovered that within the non-binary gender there are other identities such as genderfluid, third gender, neuter, agender, xenogender, bigender, trigender, pangender, demiboy, demigirl... All my doubts were resolved and I was finally able to understand that I'm an agender person, that is, someone who is out of gender because there is no gender identity which to identify with. And comments like "this is a women/men thing", "the man cave", "you won't understand because you're a man/woman" bother me a lot... No! These are all social norms that the only thing they do is separate people by a silly thing like gender. 

You may also wonder if non-binary gender has always existed. The answer is yes. In traditional cultures like the Hawaiian, among others, non-binary people had different or even special roles. In indigenous people of North America there are the so-called Two Spirits. You can search on Google about this subject, it's quite interesting and you realize how people who don't follow the stupid roles that a heterocisnormative society marks have been and continue being persecuted because from our childhood they educate us by making us believe that the right thing is to be hetero-cis.

As soon as someone with a closed mind heards about the non-binary gender, there are those who make fun of it by saying nonsense as absurd things as "well, I'm a dinosaur and tomorrow a horse". Let's see, we are talking about gender, we aren't saying that we're not human beings, so with comments as absurd and immature as that they are demonstrating the null knowledge they have on this subject. Comments like "there are only men and women, the rest are inventions" are also useless. So, explain why they know they are a man or a woman and not other gender without telling the typical explanation of "because it is known by the genitals". Is it that someone has to tell you who you are, you can't decide it by yourself if you don't identify with the gender assigned to you at birth and without asking? Do they even know how a transgender or non-binary person feels? Because this is not a disease or a childhood trauma that has to be cured.

And let's not talk about the vocabulary in Spain. I know that many people are bothered by the pronoun "elle" (them) because it's not included in the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy). For your information, the pronoun "elle" was in the RAE's "Word Observatory" and they eliminated the word after a few days because it caused "confusion". Instead, they accept stupid words that don't have sense or the anglicism word "podcast". So I encourage people who speak Spanish to use "elle" instead of the masculine "ellos" when it comes to a group of people of different genders so that if it's included in our vocabulary on a regular basis, the RAE will finally include the neutral pronoun and stop making fun of us. All words have been invented at some point and this is how languages are built and evolve. If official acceptance of the neutral pronoun has been achieved in other countries, in Spain and other Spanish spoken countries have to be achieved at some point.

Nowadays, there are more and more websites where you can choose between more than the two normative genres. On both Instagram and Spotify I have been able to choose the "other gender" or "non-binary" box, which is appreciated because that means they take us into account. I hope that one day in my country they'll recognize non-binary people and we'll be able to change our gender on the ID card and thus stop being completely invisible and ignored. A law has recently been aproved to protect the rights of transgender and LGBTI+ people, but once again, non-binary people have been left out and we remain invisible despite it  has being asked to be included in this law. Thanks to this law, trans people will be able to easily change their gender on their ID card and conversion therapies, among others, will also be prohibited.

There is also very little visibility in movies, television series, books, comics... Normally the characters are cisgender people and when a character from the LGBTI+ community appears, it's usually the comical character full of clichés. I was glad when in the Loki series the character was identified as genderfluid without falling into comedy. Loki can transform into any person regardless of their gender, and that has been both in Norse mythology (in which he also transforms into animals of either gender) and in the comics and the MCU movies. He is officially genderfluid in the MCU, it was confirmed in his series. Add to that that he's openly bisexual (or maybe pansexual), so I love the idea of one of my favorite characters being non-binary.

It has always been difficult for me to identify myself with characters from series and movies and when I have, it has been with men or masculine women. One of my favorite characters is Oscar from the manga and anime "The Rose of Versailles". She is a girl who was raised as a boy and that's how she lived throughout her life. I was able to identify with her/him because she uses the masculine pronoun, dresses and behaves masculine. She tried to appear more feminine and it didn't work out, returning to her masculinity. Although the manga is from the 70s and non-binary is never mentioned, the character is clearly genderfluid and ambiguous.

I also like Sapphire, the "Knight Princess". She bears quite a resemblance to Oscar as she was also raised as a boy, she is also genderfluid and ambiguous.

And there is also Sailor Uranus, who also has a masculine aspect. It's something that I like about the Sailor Moon series, there are an infinity of LGBTI+ characters.

In the movie John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, "The Adjudicator" was translated in Spain as "Adjudicadora", the female form. They is a non-binary character and was completely lost in the dubbing, giving them the female gender and thus making their identity invisible. I was very annoyed that they eliminated this detail and it's one more example that non-binary people aren't taken into account and don't dare to use the pronoun "elle" (them) in dubbing for fear of the public's reaction. Also, Asia Kate Dillon, who brings the character to life, is also a non-binary person and was the one who asked for their character to be non-binary as well.

As for my family, my mother accepts it but she doesn't quite get used to the idea. And there are very few members of my family who know that I'm an agender person and although they have accepted it, they continue to address me in feminine even though they know that they are disrespecting me and I don't like it. It's exhausting having to remind them that I'm not "her", most of the time I pull my face or don't even answer due to mental exhaustion. At work I never say what my gender identity is (although I do speak in neutral, without using pronouns for myself) to avoid dismissals or comments and disgusting jokes. For all this, we must continue to make visible and normalize the existence of the non-binary gender. Open your mind and unlearn in order to learn.

At the end this has been a long entry, I hope it has been pleasant to read and you have found it interesting.

Thanks for your visit!

Sionnach 🦊

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