Coming Out as Non-Binary and Mad at Age 45, in a Pandemic *
By: L. Harris
Tags: Queer, Coming Out, Mental Health, Nonbinary, Madness

CN: suicide, psychiatric oppression, violence against QTBIPOC

[If I am to be honest, I have been utterly terrified to write this piece. Frightened that I will get it wrong. Wondering if I have the right. Concerned that I will cause harm. I don’t come from an academic perspective, and I don’t feel sufficiently steeped in all aspects of theory and praxis relating to this conversation. So I say in advance to anyone reading this: I am sorry if I get it wrong. As a white settler/occupier in the settler colonial U.S., I am learning and unlearning so much. I do not expect you to do the emotional labor of educating me. I am trying every day to do better and actively seeking to undo my own ignorance, as one small way to resist and help dismantle the horrors of this country, and to fight for what is just.]

On July 14 of this year, International Non-Binary Day, I came out. I was just shy of turning 45 years old when I proclaimed my non-binary-ness on the Internet. However, I definitely didn’t expect that everyone got the message I broadcasted out on social media. Certainly my Tweet into the ethers, my tiny big announcement, was lost amidst the barrage of fascism and white supremacist violence permeating lives and social feeds.

Since declaring my non-binary gender identity, it has been a slow and sometimes awkward process of explaining it to loved ones. Asking people to use they/them pronouns. There are some things I have not yet been able to find the words for, like what to say when loved ones send me pictures of what I can only describe as my former self, a total non-representation of who I am now. I have received a lot of apologies as well-meaning friends misgender me, which I graciously accept. And I do truly understand. Some of these folks have known me in my previous gender identity for 20 years or more. They are learning and unlearning along with me.

*

Why did I wait so long to be who I actually am? This is a question I have asked myself a lot.

When I was fourteen years old, I tried to kill myself, and I ended up in a locked psychiatric ward. There, Chelsea, a cheerleader who had stopped eating, the person who was my first roommate, gave me some advice. She told me that in order to survive in that place, I should figure out what they wanted me to say, and say those things. I should figure out what they wanted me to do, and do those things. Only then would they let me out. She was right. I escaped the worst of what happens to young people in those facilities by being compliant and likeable and polite. By flying under the radar of the enforcers. By taking my rage, folding it up, and burying it so far deep inside no one would ever see it.

The other thing I noticed was just how many of the kids I was locked up with were queer and/or presented in gender non-conformist ways. At the time, I didn’t have a political analysis for what was happening to us: how these facilities were set up to enforce the heteronormative, sanist, ableist, white supremacist social order and to punish young peoples’ divergence from those norms. I just knew that queer people, people who didn’t fit into a gender binary, mad people, were locked up and harmed.

Figure out who they want you to be, and be that.

Chelsea never said those words, exactly, but that’s what I took away from being locked up.

I got very good at performing conformity for survival.

*

One of my first loves was a trans-feminine person. We met when I was just 18. When we met, she was still living a cisgender identity. When she told me she was a woman and wanted to live as one, and asked if I was OK with that, I said, I love you, not your gender. And I meant it.

The more she moved into her femme presentation, the more I departed from mine. It wasn’t a fully conscious process, but it felt authentic. I didn’t identify as male in the way that she knew without a doubt that she was female. But I acquired a closet full of men’s clothes from the thrift shop, and deeply enjoyed how I looked and felt in my blue Dickies and button-up shirts, my long hair pulled back into a ponytail.

It was 1993, and Brandon Teena had just been murdered. Just as intended, this publicized execution shot a new streak of fear through all trans people already living in a climate of oppression, and the people who loved them. What I remember was that my partner and I began to feel paranoid when we were out in public in our military town. We went out less and less, withdrawing into our own world.

Eventually, I went away to college and we entered into a long-distance relationship. While I was at college, my mother died at 46, a life ended by anti-mad oppression and ableism. My partner and I ended our relationship amidst the crush of my grief, mostly due to the strain of being apart. After college, I slowly began to shed the men’s clothing. To perform a more gender conforming role again. To submerge my queerness. It also wasn’t fully conscious. I think I was doing what felt safer at the time. And I acknowledge the privilege in being able to choose to perform.

*

My fear of remaining outside the binary was shaped, in part, by my formative years in the 1980s and 1990s, where you were either distinctly male or female, butch or femme. Trans identity was submerged, where I came from. The stuff of hiding. Masculinity and femininity were these crystalized, hardened things. I did not find fluidity or the in-between anywhere.

As the child of two mad people who were diagnosed with what gets called “serious mental illness,” I also learned of another binary: sane and insane. The message I got over and over again was, don’t be like them. I saw “insanity” leading to deprivation of liberty, oppression, and death. “Sanity,” in my mind, became equated with survival, the chance at a life outside the walls. A chance at life, period.

When I turned 18, I consciously decided to stop performing the role of a mental patient. I rejected all the diagnoses that had been assigned to me and the ways in which my life experience had been pathologized. But even in rejecting oppressive aspects of the medical model, and eventually becoming an outspoken critic of that model, I held tight to sane-passing behavior. I was still being who I thought they wanted me to be. There was such deep sanist and ableist conditioning to be “recovered,” to be “well,” to “have it together.” And so I worked very hard to pass for sane in the world, hiding and suppressing so many parts of myself.

For me, internalized sanism was inextricably intertwined with the performance of a cisgender identity. My fear of letting all my madness and my queerness and my wildness out. The terror at the potential consequences of that. An ongoing desire to fly under the radar. If they don’t notice me, if I don’t stand out, they can’t hurt me.

I reiterate the privilege in being at any level of choice with any of this stuff. Particularly, Queer and Trans* Black and Indigenous People of Color (QT*BIPoC) and disabled folks, the most oppressed people in our society, lose their lives every day to murder, suicide, and carceral systems as a result of being unable or unwilling to pass.

Survivors’ guilt is real. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think of my loved ones whose lives have been destroyed because they didn’t pass.

Sometimes there is shame in having been able to perform so well, for so long. And I have found compassion for the person who saw the best means of survival in such performance.

It nearly killed me to suppress myself in this way. But I am still here. Which has everything to do with my whiteness.

*

It goes without saying that we are living in a time of profound and anguished transition, with the planet experiencing a pandemic that is clarifying and magnifying much that has been hidden, submerged, denied. And the pandemic takes place within an unfolding global omnicide, killing off all that is alive. The future is now, and it is one composed of our worst fears. It is a fiercely urgent thing, this future, demanding that we not look away.

Within the portal of this pandemic, I felt my gender identity shift quicken as I simultaneously lost all ability to sane-pass. I didn’t even fully recognize how much energy the performance was taking until I was stopped from performing.

As the planet’s shit hit the universe’s fan, I was feeling the reverberations in my own being. Even before COVID, I had been internally combusting, slowly, for some time. My devotion to work was a form of “flight,” a socially acceptable response to trauma. The toll of being a survivor who consistently produced past exhaustion was coming due. My body and the mind it housed were becoming undone in what often gets pathologized as “burnout.” 2020 just poured the gas and lit the match atop the smoldering being I had already become. It was not a breakdown but a necessary breaking apart, what felt like a just and authentic response to the burning world around me.

After George Floyd was murdered, and after the protesters were teargassed outside the White House, just a few miles away from where I lived, rage just firehosed out of me. I had never, ever been so unafraid of authority or speaking the truth. And it had its consequences. I was summarily dismissed from my dream journalism job at a critical psychiatry webzine for calling out the all-white leadership team for enabling white supremacist and transphobic behavior. I had never, ever been fired from a job. I’d always been so good, polite, so well-behaved.

After the firing, I ruptured. I was no longer able to be good, or to produce anything, for a very long time. I had been stopped.

In the space beyond the stop sign, I departed from consensus reality and entered other worlds. I began to hear voices like never before. I began to experience alternate realities not previously perceived within my being: sublime, frightening, and everything in-between. My mother’s ghost and I began to converse in real time. My tongue spoke and sang new languages. I was visited by other dead, beings from other worlds. I have come to cherish these non-physical connections.

Such experiences are often labeled as “supernatural” and “paranormal.” These words represent another set of binaries, delineating what is normal and what is natural, as opposed to what is not. According to whom? These happenings are normal and natural occurrences in cultures past and present, where life is not carved up into the “normal,” the “abnormal,” or the “supernatural” and ”paranormal.” Most of us occupiers in settler colonial societies have been heavily conditioned against non-physical connections, against speaking with ancestors, communicating with the dead, or interacting with anything that can’t be perceived with the five senses. We are taught to believe that such experiences are the stuff of “mental illness,” “delusions,” fantasy, or entertainment — not to be trusted as “real.”

In alternate realities, I was birthing another version of me. On June 17 of this year, a few days after the firing, I woke up and felt altogether different. The thoughts in my head seemed as if someone else was thinking them. Occupying my skin felt like a novel experience. The best way I can describe it is that I was visited, then inhabited, by a future version of me who has now taken up residence in this body. A version of me who did not know gender, who could not comprehend gender. This was not a “better self.” None of that mythic, self-improvement crap. It was a new self, albeit one who barely recognized the self that had formerly occupied my body. It has all been a very consensual takeover, although maybe it doesn’t sound like that, the way I am describing it. It’s difficult to put these non-consensus reality experiences into the English language. I’m just so glad this new self is here.

These months have been surreal, confusing, and frightening as much as they have been clarifying. When I shared with trusted friends, even people in the mad movement, about what I was experiencing, there was a range of responses. Some people just ignored me. At least one person I trusted with what was happening went behind my back and talked to another friend, saying they were “worried about me.” I discovered what it felt like not to be able to portray my experience in a way others could understand, to be an object of concern.

After the massive shift in June, I experienced an equally intense collapse in the autumn. The mind-state of wanting to die just descended over me like a thick velvet curtain. Every night I went to bed praying that I wouldn’t wake up. It felt like this state of consciousness would never end. Looking back, I feel lucky that I didn’t end up in a psychiatric hospital. That is due to those loved ones in my world who were able to listen and provide non-judgmental support, having health insurance and access to therapy, as well as unseen support from ancestors and the non-physical world.

Another shift lifted the autumn curtain, revealing a new reality that feels a bit more integrated. From this place, I’m finally able to write again. I don’t at all assume that I will stay here. Madness is so often full of surprises, twists, and turns. I am here for whatever comes.

*

I have read lots of articles about what it’s like to come out at “mid-life.” I am 45 years old but I am not “middle-aged.” I don’t at all take it for granted that I’ll have a second half of life. Nothing is promised in this world. My mother died at 46, the age I am now approaching. How many of our queer, trans, and mad loved ones did not make it to “middle age,” let alone elderhood?

No, I won’t take anything for granted. A death cult, a virus of the mind, far more destructive than COVID-19 will ever be, has taken over the planet and wants all life extinguished.

The past, present, and future are merging into a fiercely urgent, now. Perhaps it has never been any different. Perhaps it just seemed that way to me.

*

What does it mean to be non-binary? This is a question I notice non-binary people get asked a lot. It seems there are as many answers as there are people, as it should be. What I know is that I reject the gender binary for myself. But the “non-” is not merely a rejection of the binary, but an exploration of what could be beyond it and outside it. At this moment in time, I feel like I am all genders at once. My gender is no longer a static thing. It is an evolving, living essence, something I no longer need to “figure out.” The end of “figuring it out” is a potent mixture of terrifying and liberating.

As for madness, it is non-binary-ness of another sort, defying the sane/insane binary. Madness is a fluidity of the mind, the in-between spaces of the mind. For me, the ability to move between multiple realities and timelines at once, not just the consensus realities we are taught to accept as “real.”

Coming out as mad means I am finally open about experiencing voices and non-consensus realities, beliefs that would be medicalized and pathologized as “delusions.” I was always so terrified of toggling away from consensus reality into unknown realms of consciousness and perception. I had always discussed madness as if it was something in my past. I used the safer, fuzzier language of “lived experience” instead. Now that I have openly declared my madness, I feel my mind queering itself within this temporary home of bones and flesh, transgressing its established boundaries and externally imposed frameworks. This, too, feels both terrifying and liberating.

For me, coming out as unapologetically non-binary and unapologetically mad has been a process of “deep queering” — ongoing revelation of a shimmering, holographic universe beyond all categories, binaries, and constructs. This new space my body occupies is where I’m initiated into the mysteries of being alive in these most unsettled and dangerous of times.

It is my hope in writing this, that I can help create just a little more space for someone else to be more fully who they really are, as so many others have done for me, for us all. I will end here, in remembrance and gratitude for all the transcestors: the queer, the mad, the neurodiverse, the gender non-conforming. The non-compliant ones. The ones who kept, and keep on, pulling apart all the binaries and constructs and exposing the great and shining worlds beyond, so that the rest of us could perceive them and travel there, too.

* I wish to acknowledge Donovan Ackley III, Iden McCollum, Kit Jones, Rachel Lewett, Bruce Owens-Grimm, and Kitty Sipple, who read, witnessed, and provided thoughtful comments and encouragement as I wrote this piece. Without their support, I would not have been able to hit “publish.” Thank you, thank you, for giving me strength.