I feel confident and secure in my queerness.
It’s just that the rest of the world doesn’t always feel the same.
When I came out during my third year of college, I was in the honeymoon stage of my first queer relationship. I had previously come out to friends at my university and my immediate family, but by the end of 2013, everyone knew, including my extended family and larger university community.
I remember how thrilling and exhilarating that time was. The first time I went to Capital Pride in Washington, D.C., I cried happy tears behind my sunglasses. Throughout my college years, I went to queer bars and clubs and danced on raised platforms covered in glitter, red lipstick adorning the rims of shot glasses. When the Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land in 2015, I hopped on the Metro with my rainbow flag stuffed into my crossbody bag and celebrated amid a sea of revelers.
For years, especially during my time in college and the two years after, I was surrounded by a loving queer community. When I was in school, I could count the number of straight people I regularly hung out with on one hand. After I graduated and moved to a new state completely on my own, I worried terribly about making queer friends, but my fears were unfounded. In surprisingly uncharacteristic fashion, I approached people at rallies and bars and struck up friendships. The world I was assembling around me was explicitly and unapologetically queer.
As the years went by, however, that world got narrower and narrower—and straighter and straighter. Two years after I started to build a home in North Carolina, I moved seven hundred miles away to live with a partner who would eventually become emotionally and psychologically abusive. I had queer friends far away from college, my time in North Carolina, and the sex blogging world, but I was essentially isolated in my new life in Massachusetts, just trying to get through each day.
Outside of my partner and my partner’s friends, most people I interacted with—if I interacted with anyone at all—were straight. I started to feel increasingly more invisible as a femme person and would spend hours in a local queer coffee shop just to be around other LGBTQ+ folks, hoping fellow patrons would read me as queer. Unsurprisingly, setting up shop at the co-working table at the cafe day in and day out in a desperate attempt to be seen wasn’t enough to save me.
In all of this mess and struggle, I started to lose the joy I once found in my queerness. And if things weren’t interesting enough already, I started dating someone new after I left my abusive partner—someone who most people read as a straight man. Just like I know people look at me and think they see a woman, I know people look at me and think I’m straight. I know they look at us and see a cis, straight couple, even though that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth.
Eventually, the tolls of femme invisibility, gatekeeping who is “allowed” to call themselves bisexual or queer if they’re dating someone who is or is perceived to be a man, and losing my vibrant queer communities became too much to bear. I knew I loved being a queer femme, but the world—even people within the LGBTQ+ community—didn’t always love me back.
I know that some people don’t feel like their sexuality and gender define them or are central to who they are. For me, though, I’ve always seen my queerness—and now my lack of gender—as integral, inextricable parts of who I am. I knew I was exhausted by the gatekeeping discourse and of being perceived as straight, but I just gave up for a while, not even really realizing how separated I had become from celebrating my queerness.
Since coming out as agender, though, I’ve rediscovered that sense of pride in myself. Life feels more electrified: from the newfound confidence I feel walking down the street to the enthusiasm I have to actually write blog posts, everything feels energetic and invigorating. I’m finally giving myself permission to honor my queerness again.
It feels, interestingly, like stepping into my spooky femme identity. When I reclaimed my gothness from a former abusive partner who disparaged it, I learned to take joy in the things I was once taught to hide: all-black ensembles, spooky accoutrements and accessories, edgy hair, and fun patterns and prints. Now, through coming out as agender, I’m reclaiming my queerness—and claiming my lack of gender—in a similar way. I have a bevy of new they/them pronoun buttons and am planning to affix them to everything I wear out the door. I ordered pins and stickers with the agender flag on them, and each day, without fail, I ask my partner when he returns home from work if any packages showed up.
After far too long, I’m finally allowing myself to be playful, take pride in who I am, and unapologetically take up space as a queer, agender person. It feels damn good.
This is just my story. My lived experience does not reflect the lived experiences of all trans and non-binary people.
