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I certainly do trans the hell outta gender, slipping all over that spectrum like a droplet of mercury. This has been my vibe long before transition and it still is now, when I consider myself to be beyond transition. But to be nonbinary, in a sense, means that I eschew not just the idea that there are only two genders, but also that those two genders are polar opposites, existing at either extreme of a continuum or spectrum.

For some, to be transgender means to move determinedly across that very spectrum—or from some perspectives, to leapfrog from one box to the other—which requires a great deal of confidence in the theory of gender’s binary construction. Such perspectives, therefore, make the amalgamated label trans-nonbinary an oxymoron.

I can because I am trans-nonbinary. Though, depending on the day and who’s asking, I might also say I’m gender-expansive. Or gender-liminal. Or genderqueer. Or gender-weird. Or, in some contexts—in particular when I think I’m keeping it simple—I might say something like “my gender is in the middle,” although I’m aware that phrasing frames gender as the binary I otherwise and so often declare that it is not. Despite my string of alternative labels, the increasing prevalence of nonbinary nearly guarantees some familiarity, which makes it useful. Except that my gender—however I express it and whatever I choose to call it—is always already refracted through the lens of my Blackness. 

                 to be unwritten     or to be illegible 
                 to be invisible     or to be inexpressible
                          or to have conjecture drawn  
                 like Black stripes  like barcode  
                 like the shadow of steel bars 
                 on the body      on the being 
                 on the body being 
                 on the being in the body   

Audre Lorde writes, “That is how I learned that if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” Word. Still, on the one hand, the ways in which I define myself and the names I call myself are often just jotted in the margins of who I actually am, to be erased and rewritten at will. On the other hand, who am I if I can’t summon something definitive to relate myself to others in the world? How will they know me? What’s to stop them from getting it wrong? And what are the consequences for me when they do? On the real, as a Black, queer, trans-nonbinary person, shouldn’t I expect to be misinterpreted and misunderstood? 

                 tags and labels and names 
                 stitched together  
                 a patchwork quilt 
                 i drape over myself 
                 the real real
                 ragged edges  and all
                 the mends and seams show
                 names and labels and tags 
                 to rip and reinforce 
                 this cherished assemblage

* * *

It seems that it was a long time before I actually came out as, well, not-cisgender; though, in retrospect, I’m certain that I had hoped my proclamations over the years as lesbian, queer, and dyke were announcing just as much about my queer gender as they were about my queer sexuality. When I finally did come out as not-cisgender, I came out as Two-Spirit. 

Back in the early days of my transition, marveling at the multitude of changes the mirror revealed, I found myself often thinking of salmon. I pictured a sleek, serene, seafaring fish metamorphosing itself into a jut-jawed, thick-skinned upstream hurdler. Both forms beautiful in their own ways, and made even more so by the ability to achieve this drastic remaking. I thought about their transformative journeys from saltwater to freshwater and how, for most of them, there is no return to the sea. It was around this time that I learned about Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of nepantla: “a Nahuatl word for the space between two bodies of water, the space between two worlds.” She writes, “Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. . . . Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of ‘home.’” Staring at that mirror, I imagined myself as one of these nepantleres. And I wondered about those fish who, like me, dwell in brackish waters their whole lives and manage to thrive there, where river meets and melds with sea.  

                 girl you    gotta let me    
                         let me go  
                         boy
                 thinks i’m crawling toward his face
                 thinks i’m spreading my shoulders 
                 into the corners of his broad back
                 Diana  let me tell you      i ain’t

* * *

What kind of man will you be? 

A therapist asked me that once. Jarring. I wrote and later published a poem about it, which reads in part:

                 what kind of man will i be? 
                        no
                        i will gather water 
                        and offer that to this endeavor
                 then while i am building 
                 and turning     over the earth    
                 i will be
                 like damp soil and silty rivers        
                 like rain saturating the land
                 like shores with miles of sea stretched between

Beyond that, I had no answer. I had no plans to be a man. 

I had spent years carving out my space as a proud and visible queerio. Not only did I not want to be cisgender—as neither woman nor man—I also did not want to appear to be cisgender. To do so meant to risk losing the legibility of my queerness, to inadvertently build a new closet around myself. 

In the years in which I was read exclusively as a cisgender man, while I was grateful for the relative safety and social ease of passing privilege, I confronted the perpetual questions of disclosure: Who gets to know? Who needs to know? When do I say it? And what do I say? How do I attempt to account for who I am?

                 gender and desire  stymie
                 and stick in the sludge  label-logged
                 so often  the call to come apart  
                 to unlace myself into the mire
                 to point to each fragment     this is    that is
                 to press names onto these sticky intricacies 
                 who do i say i am   when 
                 who i know myself to be  
                 is unnameable

Works referenced

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation

Ian-Khara Ellasante, “earth, water, and what is built,” in Hinchas de Poesía 12

Ian-Khara Ellasante, “let me tell  you: Diana,” in We Want it all: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, ed. by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel

Ian-Khara Ellasante, “Radical Sovereignty, Rhetorical Borders, and the Everyday Decolonial Praxis of Indigenous Peoplehood and Two-Spirit Reclamation,” in Ethnic and Racial Studies 44

bell hooks, “Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body”

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches