I recently made a (now deleted) post about how I have much discomfort about the way the concept of “passing” is handled by a lot of trans and cis people. I am a non-binary transfem who has no desire to pass. Unfortunately, it seems like, in the process, I reeled in comments that just seemed as if they were a wholehearted attempt to invalidate my experiences and speak over me.

I do not desire to pass, but my ideal presentation would be viewed as androgynous to a lot of people. To frame how this works for me in the construct of passing, my idea of androgyny is one that makes me the most comfortable. I’m not trying to necessarily strive for what explicitly makes me the most androgynous, but rather I’m trying to strive for what makes me the most comfortable in my own eyes. What this condenses down to is me seeming very androgynous to a lot of people, but I must stress that this is not necessarily the mindset I’m operating under, and that makes it very different from a lot of mentalities that some trans people have about passing.

There is a good deal of validation when someone gets confused about my gender presentation not being easy to shove into a binary box, yes, but it’s still beyond the point. The reason why I go by any and all pronouns is that I just want to look in the mirror and see a version of Angel that makes Angel the most happy. Whether this means going outside yields most people calling me a he, most people calling me a she, or most people not knowing what to call me isn’t something I can bring myself to care about. If I’m happy with how I perceive myself in that mirror, then I “pass” enough to myself, and that’s that.

Unfortunately, due to me phrasing that I desire androgyny, this led to a particular user saying “weLl AcKchYualLY, you Do wANT TO pasS! YOU jUsT wAnNa paSs As noN-BINarY!!!”, and this type of comment, that got upvoted mind you, made me highly uncomfortable. I don’t sense bad intentions, but it’s deeply inconsiderate of the point of the post. I’m rejecting the boxes that typical notions of “passing” put people into. For someone to handle this by turning around and trying to shove me back into a box by making a new take on passing to apply the term “passing” to how I handle my gender identity felt incredibly invalidating to me. Be careful to not turn gender binary into a gender trinary because this reeks of that. Furthermore, it also concerned me because it seems vaguely enbyphobic by trying to convey a certain idea of “passing as non-binary,” when non-binary experiences are just so damn diverse.

Speaking on that last point, there was another user who identified themselves as non-binary but saw themselves being adjacent to binary trans women in many ways. This user thought that because, in my context of me being non-binary and speaking on how my experience differs from a typical binary trans person’s experience, this means that I’m invalidating non-binary people who feel they can relate a lot more to binary trans people than I can. Once again, this was not my intention nor is anything I said at odds with accepting that non-binary people are highly diverse. I’m wholeheartedly aware of the diversity of non-binary experiences and that a non-binary person can experience gender in the way this user brought up. However, I wasn’t speaking for the entirety of non-binary people obviously; I was speaking for how my sense of non-binary gender identity relates to this issue specifically. This is why, once again, this seemed like an effort to speak over me for not being “all-encompassing” about speaking on non-binary experiences, an experience that will, undeniably, be very diverse by default.

The last comment I want to speak on was a comment that made me uncomfortable, where a user chimed in saying that they don’t have a sense of “wanting” to pass, but they still pass for safety reasons. Once again, this is not an invalid sentiment, but it rubbed me a very peculiar way for this to be stated. I hope they weren’t trying to give advice because I simply cannot go about my gender this way. Me shoving myself into a notion of being cis-passing is inherently dysphoric for me. Trying to live out my life as a binary woman or a binary man will cause dysphoria, distress, discomfort, and a feeling of inauthenticity either way. For all intents and purposes, me trying to pass for safety is like a binary trans woman living her life out as a man for safety. I just cannot do that and simultaneously be comfortable with myself. If I could, I’d just stop taking my hormones, cut my hair short, and be as masculine/gender-conforming as possible to live out my life as a cis man, not as a binary trans woman.

This all caused problems because, even before making this post, I was going through a rough moment of deep internalized hatred, something that you can even see reflected in this post [CW: (Internalized) Queerphobia] I made just a bit ago. My internalized hatred gets exacerbated when I feel like my unconventional experiences as a queer person are not valid. I feel like even other queer people oftentimes feel like I don’t deserve the same basic respect and decency that they’d give for other queer people because I’m just too fucking queer I guess. I’m too freakish, disgusting, weird, abnormal, anti-assimilationist, and just too much of a d-generate and an abomination for even other trans people to think I deserve basic decency in having my queer experiences heard and respected, and apparently this extends to Hexbear of all places!

I was going through so much fucking hell that morning that I reached a point of suicidality, and I had to have my partner comfort me to a point where I could sleep off all the emotional turmoil I was feeling. I’m now awake, and after making that post I just referenced in the above paragraph, I had to talk to her again just to feel human. Most places I go to, be they online or in real life, have a hard time reassuring me that I deserve to be treated with respect, dignity, and even have basic human rights. I do not want Hexbear to become another one of those.

This has been bugging me so much, and you see that because even after waking up, I still felt immensely self-hating and suicidal. My partner, who is a cis woman, is the only reason I kept myself alive because, for some reason, she’s the only person that has ever been able to truly make me feel understood and heard. I feel less distressed after being able to work things out with her, and she’s currently busy doing some work, but I told her I was going to be speaking out about this issue on Hexbear more, so here it is.

As a black non-binary person, I’m used to most trans people not wanting to listen to anything I say. At this point, I don’t expect a lot of trans people, even on HB, to understand how painful that feels, but at least this fucking once, I really want people to understand the pain that I’m feeling right now.

Thank you.