You can tell everybody
By: Heidi Cullinan
Tags: Coming Out, Nonbinary, Agender

When I sat down to draft this post, the song that popped into my head was “Your Song,” performed by Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge.

The movie entranced me when it came out, especially the performance of “Your Song,” and I burned it into my DNA. I couldn’t decide what I loved more, the siren beauty of Nicole Kidman or the winsome handsomeness of her costar. I wanted to be them. I wanted to be them both. At the same time. And what I think of today as I rewatch that scene, as the song is once again on loop, is how if I’d paid more attention to my reaction back then, I might have been writing this post sooner. But I’ve never been the quickest on the uptake, especially when it comes to myself, so we’ll take self-awareness where it comes.

Hi. My name is Jun Cullinan*, and my pronouns are they/them. I’m gloriously nonbinary and agender. Nice to meet you.

How wonderful life is, now you’re in the world.

There have been so many clues to this truth, but I really resisted it. I can’t blame myself for being slow. When I was born, even being gay was a binary. In fact, the first time I was called gay I didn’t know what it meant because I thought it meant I was happy.

“You’re gay!”

*big grin* “Thanks!”

I mean, it’s one way to disarm a hater.

But the binary has always done me in. I don’t know how to explain how very not an option it was when I was growing up. I mean, it was, but it didn’t present itself to me as I fumbled around through life. Plus even if I’d glimpsed that truth back then, I couldn’t have claimed it. So much of my life was uncertain and unsafe. The hell I was going to rock the boat. I followed the rules as best I could. I wore girl clothes and had girl hair and was never seen without makeup. Lord I HAD to have the makeup! Without it, I didn’t look like a girl!

Times changed, I got older. Nonbinary started to be a thing that I heard about. “That’s for young people,” I told myself as I wistfully wished I could be that free. Besides, I was busy with my child, my spouse, managing a rapidly worsening mystery pain condition, and then a writing career. I mean, I wrote about gay people and nonbinary people. Surely that would be enough.

Nope.

I’ve flat out never fit in. I’ve gotten good at the dance moves of life, sort of, but it’s been difficult to find my place in every respect. Especially when it came to being female. I’ve always been caught in the impossible tug of knowing the rules but being physically unable to follow them. I’m too clumsy and ungraceful — well, I have hEDS and an inability to maintain “normal” body awareness. I’m too tall — not like there’s much to be done about that, except slouch. My body isn’t thin and svelte like a woman’s — and I mean that my actual structure is wider and larger, like I’m a separate species. I’ve never been able to wear bracelets because my wrists are too big. Dresses were impossible because even when I was at ideal weight, my ribcage was wide. My feet have always been too big, and even as shoe sizes expanded, so did my feet. I was always sent to the men’s section, which made me feel angry and lonely. As I got older and my body weirder, I became allergic to makeup and earrings. Literally, I broke out when I wore them.

I just couldn’t get happy in my body. It didn’t help that it was broken for a long time and nobody knew why, and it really didn’t help that part of the problem turned out to be a diseased uterus that was trying to kill me. Then they took it out, and…well, shit went downhill fast.

I’d already barely felt female, and now they literally took the hormones that had been getting a lot of the job done. I felt so strange and awkward, and my body’s reaction to an abrupt removal of estrogen only drove it home. Once again I was weird, wrong, unable to play the game. I lost interest in sex entirely. I felt like I didn’t know who I was. I told myself I was being dramatic and tried to move on. I couldn’t.

For the past five years I’ve felt like the curtains of my life were slowly closing in on me, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I tried medication. Other medication. Therapy. New therapy. Psych AND therapy. I tried to write my way through. I tried to sit and let myself work through whatever this was. Nothing worked. It just got worse. And then my writing became more and more challenging, until I couldn’t write at all. Like a last gasp, I got one book out of me last October in a hot wild rush, and then…well, I’ve pretty much not written since, not anything that I can make work as a book. And then, just while I was starting to acknowledge I was in trouble and needed to actively work to fix things, the pandemic hit.

The way I’ve described it to people is my world has kept narrowing and narrowing until I wasn’t just in a small room, I was in a box, crouching down and hoping like hell I wasn’t crushed into atoms, when suddenly I realized there was a tiny little box on the floor. It was hard to see, even though I tripped over it a lot, but now that I literally had nothing else to look at. So the other day I pulled off the lid.

Maybe, just maybe, you’re not a woman at all. Or a man. Maybe you’re just you.

I didn’t even get the lid off before the contents exploded, like one of those blow up lawn ornaments. It filled the box, then shattered it, then kept expanding, and expanding, and then I realized it had blown up the entire house and carried me into the sky. I wish I could better explain that feeling. It wasn’t just being able to draw breath again. It was finally getting the right air. It was wings. It was everything.

I tried to be adult about it, to slow down and consider things carefully. I mean, just last month I posted something where I called myself cisgender. (Laughing now, because I remember I twitched and had a pang of envy when I wrote it, like I wished I could not be cis too, like I had to audition or something.) But I couldn’t back up and look at this from a third person viewpoint. That was me in the box. The real me. The whole me. The part of my brain that loves logic and control, that is cautious and in charge of keeping me out of trouble, it couldn’t even function. It wanted to say, “look, you barely understand the concept of nonbinary. You can’t even get yourself to use they/them properly for other people most of the time, and you struggle to use nonbinary language!”

Well, while that was all true, the part of me in the box just laughed and said, “Yeah, well, you had me all boxed up then. Time to fly. You can catch up as we go.”

And that’s pretty much how this has gone. There’s no sitting around and chewing on things, no deliberation. There’s no waiting. No nerves, no fear, just fucking joy and a force I cannot control or bend to any will but its own. I figured that out when I tried to be sensible and said it was too much fuss to change my name, that I knew who I was and that’s what counted. And then I would literally realize I’d been googling gender neutral names for an hour. The phone was in my hand and my mind was racing trying to find myself in the sea of possibilities. By Saturday I was out to Dan. By Sunday I had a name. Every day has been me trying to balance a rocket ship of gender euphoria with at least a minor bit of thought and planning.

Because I’m using this post to tell a LOT of people who I am, some of whom may have questions, I’m going to try to guess some of the questions and give my answers.

What does agender mean?

That I don’t have a gender. Gender is a construct, an agreed upon social thing. I’m opting out. My gender is nope. I’m nonbinary, and, technically, trans, in that I am transcending my assigned gender.

Are you having surgery and all that?

Well, yes and no. I’m not taking hormones, because I don’t identify as a man and quite honestly, this skin sack has been through a lot. I don’t know how well it would take to more hormone fuckery. Plus, while that’s very important to some people, it isn’t to me. Also, I’m not a dude.

But, I already had a hysterectomy because my reproductive organs were diseased AF, so I guess I had bottom surgery or something. I fully intend to at least do breast reduction because they’re heavy and killing my neck, but how much goes and why and in what manner is something I need to talk with doctors about. I don’t want to make my EDS more complicated than it already is, and I don’t want any chance of lymphedema or other unknown issues. Basically getting rid of the plumbing and the faucets has the nice side effect of making me feel less branded as a woman, but I don’t know how intensely I’d pursue surgery otherwise.

Are you still staying married to Dan?

Very resounding yes. I mean, it’s rare for men to attract me, but he did, does, and will continue to. Plus he’s my best friend, the peanut butter to my chocolate, etc.

But you write books. Are you going to start publishing as Jun Cullinan?

Nope! That’s a branding nightmare. Heidi Cullinan is my penname and walletname now. Jun is who I am.

Okay so which one should I call you?

Whichever. I mean, I think being Jun is a lot healthier for me, and I like being less gendered. And a fresh start. I mean, I’m still the individual who was named Heidi at birth because as my mom said, she had to pick something. And I’m still Heidi Cullinan the author.

But professionally I don’t interact much anymore and that WILL not be changing, so most of the time I’ll just be Jun, especially on social media. I’m still threading this particular needle, but don’t sweat it. And people who know me primarily as a reader can seriously just call me whichever feels appropriate. If Heidi Cullinan, author is important to you, go ahead and call me that. If you want to interact with Jun the person, call me that and use my pronouns. (I don’t know what Heidi’s are, but probably she/they for ease of management.)

I mean, a huge chunk of my readers won’t ever see this, because they just buy my books and read them. Since the start of my career, most of my readers are people not online. Are they deadnaming me if they never know me as Jun? Heck no. Heidi the author was always a separate entity, one I very much struggled to live up to. Well, she’s a legacy account now. Like I said, I’m still working things out, but it’s cool, I’ll get there.

Here’s the thing. I’m not twenty. I’m in fact kissing up against fifty. I am well out of fucks. If people don’t want to accept me — not author me, the person me — I don’t care, because people who reject the person me are people who don’t matter. My family, my friends — every last one of them when I told them were joyful, excited, and eager to call me by my name. I already know my readers will be the same. Zero angst, just love. I am a blessed, blessed person. I am fully supported and excitedly embarking on this wild, wonderful, uncharted section of my life. I have zero time for explaining why I my identity and truth matters, because if they can ask that question, they’re not worth my time. Because I AM almost fifty. Time is exquisitely precious.

I could honestly talk about being Jun, being agender all day long. I’ve gone from feeling like I was fading away into mist to being vigorously, intensely alive. My pain is less. My energy is through the roof. When Dan had yet another coworker COVID scare at work, my first thought was, “Well, if I get it, the fuck I’m letting it kill me. I have shit to do.”

One of those things, absolutely, is going to be writing again. I’ve been consumed with name searches and coming out to everyone (I’ve never been on the phone so much in my life), and honestly just being joyful. But the fire to write is in me. The fire for everything is in me, and in a way I have never known before.

I’m happy to talk about being nonbinary anytime, but for now I’m going to close with acknowledgements. I arrived to this place today on the shoulders of many, and most of them are young people. The readers and fandom friends I’ve followed who have helped my poor binary GenX brain open to the possibility of a prism instead of a set of poles. The trans actors who have played roles that rang with a truth that made me catch my breath, that stirred my own truth inside my soul. One Day at a Time for the nonbinary character who presented completely femme. Rachel Maddow for being beautifully, perfectly herself, for being the mirror onto which I gazed, wishing I could look like that, be that kind of human that simply told the gender conventions to fuck off. Elliot Page, whose coming out was the spark to my fire. Max, who graciously opened their DMs on Twitter and embraced me while I expanded into my truth, who has patiently let me gender euphoria at them for seven days straight. My child, the first person I talked about this with, who has gently been nudging me away from the binary ever since she stepped onto the earth. My partner Dan, who has done nothing but tell me he loves me and that he’s proud of me since I came out to him. To my friends and family who without advance warning or rehearsal said exactly the right thing every time.

Thanks to you all. I can’t wait to explore the world with you, fully present and accounted for.

Love, Jun.

*Jun is a Japanese male name. I chose it beacuse I liked the sound and the shape, because I liked that the spelling in the west is nonstandard next to June, because the name in Japanese had many meanings and yes, kanji. Mine is 洵, which means “truth.”