Member-only story
Why I’m Nonbinary and You Can Be, Too
Our cultural definition of womanhood cannot contain me.
When I was eight years old, I would get my friends to play sexy role-playing games with me. It didn’t take much convincing. We were all curious about our bodies and the idea of combining them in interesting ways. We all knew there was something called “sex” that adults tried to hide from us by spelling it out instead of saying it. We knew it involved being naked and rolling around together, usually in a bed. It seemed sort of illicit and exciting. A little scary, too, but mostly thrilling.
The games were innocent but also transgressive. In the one I remember most vividly, I would play a hardworking lumberjack, chopping down trees in the heat of summer. At some point, I’d stop to take my shirt off and mop my brow with it, like I’d seen the neighborhood boys do when they came to mow our lawn. I’d infuse my movements with masculine swagger.
My friend Laura would play my sweet, dutiful wife. Her main job was serving me platters of pancakes on my breaks. When she approached, I’d lay down my imaginary axe, smack my chops, and lay into the plate of pancakes with a “Thank ya, lil lady!” thrown over my shoulder to Laura. She would beam in full trad-wife pride at having taken care of her man. There were never real pancakes involved. It wasn’t about the pancakes. It was about the tension.
That was it. That was the whole game.
My mom worked my whole life. We had a housekeeper who stayed home to watch us. But even so, I knew at age eight that men were supposed to do manly things like chop wood and provide for their families, and that it was the wife’s duty to feed her husband and children and take care of the house. I had heard the phrase “man and wife” so often at that point that defining people that way — the man as his own entity and the wife as his obedient companion — became my world view, in spite of my hardworking, feminist mother.
I also knew that there was something…sexy…about performing manual labor with my shirt off and having a beautiful woman serve me food as a reward for my efforts.
After finishing the sequence, we’d switch roles. Laura would take off her shirt and play the lumberjack. I would put on a frilly dress…
