(neuro) GENDERQUEER (a love story)

For most of my life, I never felt like I completely *fit* or that I was entirely at *home* anywhere. I often described myself as an "expatriate" in every community and culture I entered or tried to create for myself. I always spoke with a metaphorical accent.

This was an experience I shared with my late mother, I think, who spoke multiple languages, all with an accent, on account of having been a refugee and immigrant from a very early age. I felt like the life she had actually lived became a metaphor for my much more apparently settled life.

As a young adult, in the 1980's, I found an identity that felt as close to *home* as I could imagine then: woman, feminist, female friend, lesbian. I later took on some related identities that also became important: mother, homemaker, partner, wife.

None of those identities ever completely landed me at *home* though. "Mother" came closest, but it was still always a struggle.

Biologically, legally, and socially I struggled to become a mother and to be recognized as a mother. I'm coming to realize that much of that was on account of the gender binary.

Because I was infertile, I was suspicious and "unnatural." Because I was part of a family with two moms, I was a "legal stranger" to my daughter until I adopted her. Socially, even quite progressive friends suspected I wasn't a real mother because they couldn't quite figure out what category to put me in.

I suppose I can't completely blame them, though, since even I couldn't quite figure out what category to put myself in. This was not a cognitive dilemma, or even one of identity as I understood it then: I just knew that I didn't know how to perform being a woman in the ways my female friends and other moms did. 

Even among my "girlfriends," I largely felt on the outside: weird, awkward, unsure how to belong. It felt in equal measures an inability on my part to perform, and also an act of exclusion on their part on account of being so different and strange. But it never occurred to me to question the category of "woman" in all of that.

I also never experienced any dysphoria in my body, and I still don't. In fact, I think I have mostly felt the opposite: a dear friend once said that I have "body euphoria"! And I think this is right. I have always enjoyed my body and felt good in it. Even when I couldn't carry a pregnancy to term, I didn't have the experience that many have, that my body had "betrayed me."

Still, for much of my adult life, I was fairly dissociated from my body. That was more on account of not being able to inhabit it and express myself through it in the ways that I longed for. I was in a relationship of many decades in which my body was nearly irrelevant. I was mostly admired in my communities and relationships for being smart, so I came to feel that my body was mostly just a machine that carried my brain around.

But this was not how I actually felt about my body. When I was able to be in relationship with myself and others through my body—especially as a mother when my children were small, and then again when I decided to run a marathon, and much later in my second marriage—the experience was not only deeply healing, but felt exactly like coming home.

Even after I left my first marriage, I still was not thinking at all about gender in relationship to my Self, or in any way as part of the struggles I had experienced for so much of my life. 

I was, however, learning so much from the new trans people in my life after my old friendships and communities fell apart.

I was also meditating quite a bit on the irony that my new marriage to a cis, het man felt far more *queer* than my lesbian marriage ever had. I was becoming aware that my *queerness* at least, didn't fit into any neat binaries. 

But something finally began to click the more I listened to the experiences of my trans friends. So many of their stories resonated—not on a cognitive, intellectual, "oh I always KNEW" sort of level, but much more deeply and viscerally. 

My lifetime of feeling like a weird, broken, freakish outsider was already starting to make sense as I began to understand myself as autistic—and yet it *also* felt somehow related to not fitting into the gender binary. Maybe my gender is autistic, I thought. 

But I still didn't feel "non-conforming" or even "fluid" enough to claim those identities. Identity is such a complicated thing, and concerns about appropriation have always run deep for me. 

Finally it was something Dr. Devon Price wrote that made it all click for me, that it would be ok to claim whatever felt right for me. I'm paraphrasing here, but they said something like, "People ask me if trans people who disappear if we could actually get rid of the gender binary, and the answer is NO. It's *cis* people who would disappear!"

Zoinks! Such an "Aha" moment for me.

I guess I knew from that moment that I would eventually "come out." I believe in coming out (when it is possible and on our own terms) as a political act of both self-liberation and solidarity.

A few things I wanted to figure out for myself first though: 

Did I want to use exclusively they/them pronouns? No.

What pronouns do I want to use? She/they feels right.

What term feels best to describe my gender right now? Genderqueer feels like it fits almost perfectly. 

Or maybe neurogenderqueer!

And there you have it. Welcome to my love story, a story of finally—in the context of my growing understanding of my neurodivergent Self; of my epic love affair of a new marriage; of several treasured new friendships; and the healing communities that are emerging in my life—really feeling like I've come home. 

No longer a stranger in a strange land. Still 100% strange!