Growing up, the only blueprint society gave me for not fitting the standard boy mold was being gay. So when I noticed a difference in how I viewed the world compared to other boys my age, I lumped everything into that one available category. But orientation is about who you want to be with; gender is about how you need to exist in your own skin. For me, that existence was defined by an underlying sense of otherness and a deeply rooted discomfort with my genitalia. I started tucking in middle school and shaving my body in high school, acting out a somatic necessity long before I had the language to explain it. It is incredibly hard to open up to people when you lack the vocabulary to explain how you feel; I could never have a conversation with my parents about wanting to remove my genitalia because I couldn't explain why I wanted to. If the books about puberty or the sex ed classes of my youth had acknowledged that people who weren't cisgender existed, it would have saved me decades of isolation and heartache.
Woven entirely through this struggle was a fierce, desperate desire to serve in the Marine Corps. For more than thirty years, I have ruminated on that path, watching the boot camp videos of Marines marching in perfect, disciplined unison and feeling a profound longing for it. Intellectually, I know that serving during Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the height of the Iraq War would have been a psychological pressure cooker; it would have demanded the absolute erasure of my true self. Yet, the ache remains because it highlights how unfair the world is. In a tolerant society, that life of structure and shared purpose would have suited me perfectly, but the system forced an impossible choice: give up my soul for the uniform, or walk away to survive.
By the late '90s, I found the Eunuch Archive. It was a digital Wild West where severe body dysphoria sat right alongside extreme fetish culture. Without access to safe, mainstream medical care, I turned to the archive's fiction section to cope, gravitating toward stories where characters were forced into genital removal through extreme power dynamics. That was a protective psychological loophole; if the character had no choice, they were absolved of the crushing societal shame of wanting a neutral body. It was a terrifying era. I personally knew at least three people who took matters into their own hands, tying off their genitalia to force tissue death before heading to the emergency room. That was the brutal, desperate cost of a system that refused to see us.
It wasn't until the later 2010s that the concept of being non-binary entered the cultural lexicon, and it took me years to realize that the non-binary experience isn't a monolith; it is a varied landscape. Finally, in 2024, everything culminated. I untangled my somatic dysphoria from the concept of a sexual fetish once and for all. I realized that my desire for physical nullification was a rational, identity-driven need to align my body with my internal reality. I am not on the gender binary, which by definition makes me non-binary.
Living in the current political climate, I look at the world today and feel a profound terror for trans and non-binary youth. To see a generation of kids receive validation and celebration under one administration, only to be systematically crushed and branded as "gender insanity" by the next, is a devastating whiplash. I know the exact cost of the wasted time and the agonizing silence they are being forced back into. It is a brutal reality to watch your entire existence be politicized as the scapegoat for a global ideological war. But having survived the absolute shadows of the past, I know the truth: we exist, we have always existed, and no political pendulum can erase the validity of who we are. I no longer need a fictional captor, a hyper-masculine armor, or an extreme power dynamic to justify my reality; I am allowed to choose a body that feels like home, autonomously and without shame.
