Being Seen (Patreon)

I’m an enby. I’m non-binary. I experience gender outside of the male/female binary that most of society is organised around.

There are boys, there are girls, and then there's people like me - the secret dark gender that exists between our reality and the astral plane.

There’s going to be some preamble, because I just want to talk things through, and then we’re gonna get to the main event.

So I’m an enby.

How do I know? Well, I have those dark days where I’m doubting myself, just like everybody else: Is this real? Am I queer enough to qualify?
And I mean firstly - this is so obviously just a voice of self-doubt. There is no qualifying, there is no trans paperwork you have to fill in. There is no queer DMV.

But secondly, when I do have those worries, increasingly I say well let’s take this logically. If you’re not an enby, are you a cis man? No.

The simple answer to me comes from Judith Butler’s theory of Gender Performativity. Gender isn’t necessarily something you are but rather something you do. A lot of non-binary people are simply refusing to treat gender like it’s real and strict and absolute when it’s patently obvious to a lot of people, both cis and trans, that it isn’t. I want to communicate a gender identity that most people don’t understand, and that will definitely come with challenges, but I want to be open about it so other people like me feel more okay about it too.

My channel as a whole deals with issues of representation quite often, be it the slim representation that minoritized groups get, or the dishonest representation mental illness gets, or the frankly weird representation women get in media - hey did you know we live in a society that has a problem with women? 

Anyway, last year I made a video called Seeing Yourself which was about both my experiences of Borderline Personality Disorder and also how BPD is represented in the media. The less obvious choice I made with that video was to choose to be representation in a form of media for people with BPD.

A big part of the premise of this video can be explained in the tailed-off sentence: When I made my video about BPD I looked at representation of BPD in the media and now that I’m doing a video about non-binary gender I… yeah. I’m choosing to be visible, because, well someone has to be.

This essay is about being seen and how important that is.

I didn't want to transition online. I wanted to be exactly who I was already and just tell you. If I wasn’t sure who I was yet, and showed that in a video, I’d be crystallising it. I’d be making an immortal version of myself where I wasn’t who I wanted to end up being. However that presents a pretty serious problem. Namely that I can either be open about my gender right away and risk having to change it or try to wait until I think I’ll never have to change what I say before talking about it at all.
But I kinda realised, some of that fear came from fear of actually accepting who I am, and that’s not an okay thing to let make your decisions for you.

So who are enbies, and what are we up to? Well, mostly normal stuff: going to the movies; having lunch; plotting the inevitable downfall of the bourgeoisie; learning to skateboard; quarantining, obviously; crushing a brewski with the boys; holding hands and thinking oh no my hand is too sweaty and warm and they know oh no it’s not too warm it’s too cold it’s cold and sweaty that’s clammy that’s the worst thing to be oh god oh fuck; playing video games; just hanging out, having a chill time.

Gender isn’t the most important in the world to most people most of the time. Your gender becomes incredibly important to you when you encounter barriers. When men are pressured not to show any feelings, when women are made to feel unsafe because of their gender. It just so happens that for non-binary people there are a heck of a lot barriers, like going out in public presenting a gender besides the one you were assigned at birth, or getting legally married recognised as your gender. Those are pretty significant barriers and there are a bunch of them and - yeah it would be fair to say my gender is fairly important to me a bunch of the time, largely because of that.

To explain let’s take a detour and talk about hair loss, because hey, yes, hello, I am going bald. I started going bald when I was 14, I get people in my mentions on twitter when I talk about it talking about being 30 and balding and I am Ready To Kill. But for the most part, I am fine with my hair, and how it is, and how it’s going, even when I want to present more feminine.
I really, sincerely, don’t dislike my hairline, and any time that I do dislike it, that insecurity very clearly comes from other people. Like, I don’t look at my hair and feel upset by it itself, I worry about other people not liking how it looks. And to be clear - not the slugmen in YouTube comments who try to make me feel bad by talking about my hair. Somebody who stands an inch of hairline away from total ego death and tries to attack others based on that fear is just mad pathetic.

No, I’m talking about people I care about: friends, family, people I want to like me, people I might want to date. Those are the hypothetical people I imagine disliking my hair when I feel bad. And yet, I never look at other people with thinning hair and actually think they look bad. It’s clearly something that comes from societal standards of how different kinds of people have to look, and to that effect my hair is a pretty perfect microcosm of everything I feel about gender.
If everyone who insists baldness is bad didn’t exist, I could know for sure with absolute certainty if I liked my hair, if I was totally fine with it, and whether or not I’d like to take any hair loss treatment.
From this point forward, it’s a process of making sure I’m only doing things that change my behaviour, my body, and my clothing because it’s what I want, and not to overcome someone else’s idea of what’s wrong with me.

Whether I decide to go with it or change something, that’s about me, and it doesn’t detract from how beautiful bald people are. Patrick Stewart: beautiful! Chemo patients: beautiful! The trans woman with the receding hairline: beautiful! Dwayne The Rock Johnson: Mwah Mwah Mwah! Beautiful!

My point is, if nobody else existed I’d be having a whole-ass iconic gender moment all the time, and so I’m just taking some time to pretend like nobody else exists.

We’re nearly at the main event, I promise.

Now to start in the least optimistic place possible:

I've talked before about the Berlin holocaust memorial as a piece of art. The Memorial to the murdered jews of Europe. I need to also talk about the memorial to the murdered gay people. It’s on a separate site, near the memorial to the murdered jews. It isn’t like its more famous counterpart. It’s a grey concrete box with a viewing window. The first time I saw it, I was terrified of looking inside. Looking in that box serves as a very good metaphor for what it is to discover you're queer.

This memorial was set up to commemorate gay men specifically, but I think it speaks to all LGBT+ people, and I hope that by the end of this essay you’ll understand why.

A friend of mine recently released a video coming out as bisexual, and in that video he talked about Heterotemporality - the idea of a way that the normative groups in society experience time as opposed to the way non-normative groups experience it. In his case straight folks versus gay folks, in this case cis folks versus trans folks.

A key feature of Heterotemporality is the ability to predict what your whole life will look like based on a mold straight people are expected to fit - at a certain age you should meet someone, get married, have children. At a certain age you should have a job you’re going to keep doing, and advance through a career.

Future historians may ask “what was a career?” Documents suggest that an eldritch race referred to as “baby boomers” may have at some point expected everyone to have one, but what was one? 

Queer people, who face challenges of discrimination at every one of these points, can’t mark time in the same way, and as a disproportionately impoverished group, certainly can’t expect to meet the milestones of career progression, home ownership and so on. This is a way that Queer Time fundamentally differs from Heterotemporality - straight people have an itinerary to stick to.

But I’d like to talk about Queer Time being less linear than straight time.

Queer temporality - the queer perception of time, whatever you want to call it, is likely to be so much less linear because there is so much more waiting involved in being queer. The nature of transition, or coming out, or just coming to know who you are is that you will look back on little moments, few and far between from a long, long time ago and realise that you were already being the person you are now, back then - just for an instant. 

This leads to the phenomenon known in the trans community as “egg”. When you’re an egg, you’re very obviously trans, and everyone can tell, but you haven’t figured it out yet. “No no I’m definitely a girl I just really sports, and baggy clothes, and that androgynous nickname all my friends use for me” “I’m definitely a boy I just think men should get to be beautiful too, you know what I mean? Well not every man, I guess I mean me, like I should get to be beautiful - but as a man, which I am - a man” “Yeah I’m cis, I’m just really invested in trans topics and the trans community and I spend all my time advocating for trans people and all my friends are trans and I’m constantly jealous of them but I’m definitely cis”. Nobody tells you you’re an egg, you just look back and realise hey, that was an egg moment.

As time goes on hopefully you get to be yourself more and more and you just get to live life normally and straightforwardly, and you don’t need those little moments any more, but in that time in between, when you don’t get to be yourself all the time you hold on to these instants like precious jewels. You hoard them. You keep them in a safe chest and when you experience them you experience them all simultaneously.

THE POEM STARTS HERE

It is April 2007 and I am in primary school. The teacher has just announced a competition in the class, and the class is deciding how to split up. I am filled with dread. For years this has gone the same way. The class will decide to split up into boys and girls. This time I will ask if I can be on the girls team. Nearly all of my friends are girls. Everyone in the class will shout this idea down, and the teacher will dismiss it out of hand. I won’t ask again.

It is 17th December 2019 and I am with friends. I feel safe and happy and drunk. An enby I might be in love with has just read me a poem about choosing to be alive written by a trans woman. It was beautiful. 

I think I've just realised for the first time what homotemporality might look like. I might be experiencing it. I don't know when I started experiencing it. 

Tomorrow I will talk with a nonbinary barista at Starbucks about their fantastic eyeshadow. They are sweet and wonderful and they drop teabags all over the floor because they try to carry too many at once, but they are impressively calm about this. Calmer than I would be. Their name tag says “They x Them” underneath their name. It occurs to me that they are seen here by maybe a hundred people every day.

It is 20th December 2018 and I am seeing the nonbinary barista for the first time. They have a beard and dark lipstick and I am like a rabbit in the headlights of their beauty. I have never thought before this moment that I could look good with lipstick because of my beard. 

It is 11th November 2019. I am sitting in McDonald's right after filming my video Comedy and Masculinity. I've just finally made up my mind that I'm definitely going to make this video and I've told Natalie. She asks how I'm going to tell my mum and I don't know but I know I need to tell her before I release this video. Natalie says if I'm scared I could write her a letter and before I can consider whether I want this or not I am crying. It is too much. I don't know. I just don't know. 

It is June 2013. I am reading Watchmen by Alan Moore for the first time. The story of Jon Osterman, who is killed in an accident and then reassembles himself from nothing will later inspire me to do a bit for a video that is more of a poem than an essay. It strikes me for possibly the first time that instead of evolving, like the cocoon from which a butterfly hatches, sometimes transformation can be destructive and violent. Sometimes to turn from one thing into another first you have to be completely destroyed.

It is February 10th 2018. I have just seen the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe for the first time and I am walking towards the memorial to the murdered LGBT people. I am terrified.

It is September 2002 and we have just moved to a new city, and I have moved to a new school. My teacher smells of dried tea and dehydration and strong perfume. Later other kids will tell me this is “old lady smell”. She writes my name in cursive, where I am still learning to write it printed. In her squiggly writing my name says “enc”.

It is January 23rd 2020 and I am reading a book of poetry by a trans woman called Jennifer Espinoza. It is the same book my enby friend was reading to me last December. Each poem is too beautiful to bear and so I need to take breaks.

Jennifer Espinoza publishes poetry as Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, incorporating her birth name into her name as a reflection of how much of her art is about her transition. 

It is December 2016 and I am in Starbucks again. I am here every morning, because my job as a programmer is well paying enough for me to get a coffee every day, which is a novelty.

It December 2016 and I hate my job. The office space is aggressively gendered. My father, who was epileptic, one described a minor seizure, or absence attack, to me as being like a big creature was filling every inch of the space - like all the people were existing in borrowed space this thing, the air, was letting them be in. To me, this is gender in my office. The enormous creature called gender presses against every surface and fills every nook and cranny. I cry in the bathroom at least once a day.

It is December 2016 and I am in Starbucks and the barista calls out “uhhh Enc?” and although the order is not my order I know what has happened and I say “eric” and another enc comes forward to claim his coffee. It seems weird to me that this enc has never heard of enc before. It feels like a strange secret to me now.

It is 2018 and I don't think I can look inside the memorial to the gay people murdered in the holocaust and the best way I can explain why not is “I don't want to die”. I know how the world I live in treats L, G, B and T people. Especially T people. T people more than anybody. I don't want to die. I also don't want to be this other thing. I don't want to let go of my pretense of who I was, and let it blow off me like a tarpaulin in a storm, uncovering the half constructed machine of me, that still needs so much work. I don't want to die. I am terrified.

It is November 2019 and I am back in Berlin. I am about to look into the memorial for the second time, and I still don't feel ready. I remember what I saw last time so clearly in my mind's eye. Inside the stone block an androgynous figure sits in the dark, alone and imprisoned. I can see it even before I can see it. I am wrong about this. In a moment I will look inside and see what is really in there and I will realise that the memory of what I was afraid of seeing in January 2018 was clearer in my mind than what I actually saw. I will start crying before I even understand what is going on.

It is October 28th 2019 and I am watching a YouTube video in which somebody I know is publicly revealing that he is bisexual. This is where I learn about heterotemporality.

It is Christmas Day 2018 and I have sent my mum a script in which I talk about being bisexual. I only realised after I sent it that I have never talked to her about this before. I am very nervous. Someone at the dinner table mentions Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which I joke about copiously in my script. My mum shoots me a smirk and I smile. We share a laugh and an instant later I realise this means she has read my script.

February 10th 2018. I am dying.

It is June 2017 and I have been fascinated with name changes for a long time. It seems like such an essential part of being trans, but also just exciting. An opportunity to reinvent yourself. 

I have decided I don’t want a different name. I am realising that the way people who know me say my name feels different to the way people who don’t know me say it. 

I think of the other enc in the Starbucks who didn’t know about enc. I think enc might be a secret I can choose to let others in on. People who know me well can know.

It is April 21st 2020 and I have decided I want a new name, but I also want my current name. I want many names for all my ways of being. I want to be Eric and I want to be Enc and I want to be… Hm… who knows...

It is December 14th 2019 and I am pretty sure my mum doesn’t look at my twitter, where I talk about being an enby all the time, but then I mention a tweet I made and she says that she saw it. I am filled with too many emotions that are too complex to describe in words.

February 10th 2018. I am becoming.

It is August 4th, 2010. I am at a summer camp and an enby is asking me to go out with them. They won’t start to tell me they are an enby for at least 6 years. We will be together for 9 years, 3 months and 10 days, until they tell me that we have grown apart. I am going to learn an enormous amount about them, myself, and the world in general, simply through knowing them. 

It is January 29th, 2020 and I am wearing a skirt for the first time. It is exciting. It is scary. After months of telling my partner and my closest friends I wish I could shapeshift, I feel like I’ve learned how to. Suddenly my body is a different shape, a different style. I am feminine. The days where I wake up and hate my body because it doesn’t match who I am don’t have anything to frighten me with any more. When I feel masculine, when I feel feminine, when I feel multitudes of both, I can just be me.

Judith Butler put forth an influential theory talking about how gender is performed, and although many trans people seem to dislike it, I like it. If gender is performed, then it is art, just like all other human creation, and if I perform my gender for others to pick up on and interpret, then I can put on a whole-ass show. I can be nuanced, and dramatic, and complex. My gender can have themes. I love themes.

It is April 17th 2020 and we have been in Quarantine lockdown for over a month. I really wanted to come out to my mum in person but it's feeling more urgent that I do it all the time, especially as I've worn a skirt and makeup about half the days of Quarantine so far. Quarantine has its own weird effect on time and I'm starting to wonder whether gay, straight, cis or trans, roughly 90% of the population will have a good understanding of what I'm talking about by the time this video comes out anyway.

I need to figure out what this script is doing, but Quarantine mode is absolutely anathema to writing. 

It is June 3rd, 2013 and my sister is moving out. Throughout my childhood we were best friends, practically inseparable, thick as thieves. Our favourite film was The Matrix, which I will not find out until a year from now was made by two trans women. My sister is moving out, aged 22, to live away from home for the first time. She told me that she is a girl, and despite everything I didn’t believe her. I am an asshole teenager who has never heard of being trans. In 1 year I will hear about the Wachowski sisters, who made the Matrix. In the next 5 years I will see her once, and we will barely speak.

It is 4 and a half years later, and Natalie asks me if I think about getting back in touch with my sister. The truth is I think about it every day.

Quarantine time 2020 I am considering getting really into crabs. My new video ideas notes reads “crabs?”

It is February 2nd 2020. A friend is telling me about someone from her home town who died in an accident and was buried as a man because her family didn’t know she was a woman. My friend has a tattoo of her own name on her arm, and she explains this is so that nobody can take her identity away from her. It occurs to me that my fascination with renaming is a fascination with owning and claiming your own identity.

It is April 2020. Did you know the largest species of crab, the Japanese spider crab, can reach up to 12 feet long from claw to claw? 

It is 1:45AM on Tuesday April 21st 2020. I am in bed reading Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s poems. Yesterday I told my mum about my gender. She already knew.

It is February 10th 2018, and I am looking inside the sculpture. Behind the glass window a video plays on a loop, showing two men kissing. Behind them are scenes of homophobic persecution - figures in nooses, protests, hatefulness - but the couple stand defiant, totally carefree, and in love. Everything I was afraid of is in this box nonetheless, but there’s also something else in there, and it is beautiful.