My Sex is Nonbinary Too
My sex is of a nonbinary quality. This shouldn't be a very radical statement, but sex is as heavily binarized as gender is and there are certain expectations society has about sex. Your sex has to be either male or female, and whatever happens outside of that rule is treated as an anomaly. You're expected to fall into one of these two categories and in order to move away from the very strict box you were placed in, you'd have to undergo a physical change in order to fit the opposite category. At birth, you're female, and you'll stay that way until you make the difficult decision to get surgery. Now you're male. You’re assigned male at birth and are assumed to be of the male sex. That is, of course, unless you get that surgery to change it all. It's so very linear and conventional, and quite frankly misses so many nuances to the human experience.
My gender is who I am and is intrinsically tied to most other aspects of my identity. I'm a transgender man, I'm a nonbinary man, I'm an autistic man, I'm a man of many talents. No matter how my identity shifts and expands, the same gender is always present. Gender is inevitably relevant no matter which part of me I'm talking about because it gets tangled up in all the other pieces of me, and I don't see why that can't be true for the physical parts of me. My body is a part of my identity experience because it is a part of me.
Of course, I consider this a man's body no matter how I was supposedly born or what I choose to do with it. I call my body a man's body out of a need to take control over an event - an assigned gender at birth - that I did not consent to and that doesn't fully describe my relationship with gender accurately. As for sex, this is a highly intimate part of me that has been medicalized and binarized against my will just as much as the rest of my body, but bodies aren't meant to be policed in this way. Bodies are not meant to be at the mercy of medical biases.
My gender is not a medical anomaly nor anything that derives from physical limitations. I’m not a man because of what my body does, but because of how I view my role in society and how I subvert what society expects of me. For others, they may be a man (or another gender) because they want to fill a specific role in society rather than subvert it. Either way, this is what makes a gender and not what doctors assign to us based on perceived physiology. Likewise, my sex should not be placed under the scrutiny of doctors just so they can call it what they want based on their personal biases and my sex should not be relevant to what is expected of me in society. The sex binary is a construct that I've happily broken away from just as much as the gender binary.
Sex has always been a concept that was forced on me: It determines “what's in your pants” (according to cisgender and transgender people alike) and there are two categories that trans people have to fall into. People have this viewpoint that gender and sex are separate, but somehow they bastardized that concept into the idea that your sex is immutable but your gender is not. I've been told by both trans and cis people, both allies and bigots, that I will always be female because that's what my sex is called. In order to change that, I would need extensive surgery and hormone replacement therapy, according to them. Even so, we are often assumed to always be the sex we were assigned no matter what we do.
I don't subscribe to the sex binary in any way. While my gender has some overlap with the gender binary, my sex is a different thing altogether. I refuse to give my sex a binarist label and even reject sex-related terminology that is typically expected in the trans community: I don't talk about my AGAB, I refuse to call myself “FtM” or “MtF”, and I don't call my sex male or female. No matter what my physiology is, I consider my sex to be of a nonbinary quality, existing outside of the sex binary and being unable to be contained within the typical allotted binary boxes we're often expected to fit into. As someone who is transmaverine - maverine being a quality outside of pre-existing governance - I exist outside the governance of bodily convention.
When I began to really be aware of all the intricacies of my identity and all the pieces that make my gender what it is, I looked into how binarism limits my self-identification. As I grew to understand myself more and more over time, I began to shed all the baggage that comes with conformity and convention. Eventually I landed on the topic of sex. Whether we want it to or not, sex plays a huge role in gender exploration, and it's often expected that we either have a sex that matches our gender or that we subvert sex linearly (that is, we move along a straight path from assigned sex to a new sex.) None of this was ever appealing to me as a concept and so, instead of playing a part in this performance, I decided to reject it altogether.
Some folks are of the male sex, some are female, some consider themselves to be in-between, and some are null of sex. Many of these concepts are physical in nature and have a defined blueprint, which is what society expects from all people. But I don't feel like any of these terms accurately capture how I view my sex and I don't believe that changing my physiology is the only way to gain access to a nonbinary sex. If my gender can be man without having to change myself on a physical level, then my sex can be nonbinary in quite the same way. Nobody should have to undergo costly and stressful surgeries just to be seen as who they truly are.
There's a particular term that was always thrown my way whenever I brought up the idea of having a nonbinary sex. That term is altersex. It's a word for those who wish to change their sex to something unconventional or who view their sex in a way that does not fit societal standards. For a while I had assumed that the desire to physically transition was a prerequisite for altersex people to use the term, that there had to be some kind of physical change planned in order to fit the label, but apparently the definition was expanded early on to include those who simply viewed their sex in a nonconforming way. Still, this term goes out of its way to separate itself from gender labels, but I prefer to use a label to describe my sex that is typically used to describe gender. I don't see my sex as something incompatible with my nonbinary gender and I don’t believe my gender and my sex should use entirely separate and distinct descriptors. I call my sex nonbinary and I think that it would benefit a lot of trans and nonbinary people if they tried to do the same. Try to say “I am a man and this is a man's body, therefore my sex is male,” or “I am nonbinary and this is a nonbinary body, therefore my sex is nonbinary.” This can work for any kind of gender, really.
Of course, there are dozens of labels out there that can describe sex in nonconforming ways - neumel (neutral sex), aporale (aporine sex), oumel (outherine sex), enbinmel (nonbinary sex) - and a number of them may come pretty close to describing exactly the way I view my sex. Enbinmel is right there as a word for having a nonbinary sex, so why don’t I choose this one? To me, it’s empowering to use a term that is typically used to describe gender to describe sex instead. It’s a way for me to queer sex with the same aggressive nonconformity with which I queer gender, to say “fuck you” to all convention and label myself on my own terms, even if it makes no sense to most people.
That’s really the struggle right now: Trying to help make sense of nonbinary sex for people who view sex as a physiological two-part model, because I can see myself having to explain that my nonbinary sex doesn’t have a specific “look” and that it’s just what I call my sex. I call myself bigender, which in turn also doesn’t “look” like anything. I call myself a man, neutrois, transmaverine, and none of these things have a “look.” But people tend to hold on to the material and seem to prefer some kind of visual evidence of gender. Masculine is masculine and feminine is feminine. To some, nonbinarity should have some kind of visual signifier so that they can wrap their heads around the concept. The problem is that gender is not that simple and while sex may be assigned based on specific observed traits, it’s not that simple either.
To those folks, I say: Gender is a construct that is entirely mental and traditionally, there may be some kind of perceived aesthetic that matches or subverts specific genders, but it’s otherwise more flexible than traditionalists tend to view it. Sex is something assigned based on biases and can pave the way for how we are raised and what is expected of us in society. We can call our sexes whatever we want and we can choose to break away from our assignment if it means living a more authentic life. Sex, gender, and many other aspects of our identities are very personal and it really shouldn’t concern others how we choose to navigate these concepts. It often feels like all of society is an oppressive force of conformity with few options for exploration. Many of us choose to look at all the options forced upon us and simply say “no thank you!” or “not applicable!”
I never talked much about my physical transition goals in videos or blog posts and the older I get, the less inclined I am to do so. I don't need a specific transition plan in mind just to convince others to view my labels as valid and I'm sure as hell not shelling out money for a surgery that can “perfectly” encompass all the many facets of my gender. Few nonbinary people even have access to nonbinary options for surgery because of the heavily binarized medical field and the expectation for sex to be of two distinct physiological categories. This is why being able to call our genders and our sexes what we want, both equally, is far more beneficial to our individual journeys of self-exploration. We are valid because we are self-identified.