My Gender, My Compass

There’s this question that lives in the air around me, even when no one dares to speak it: What are you?

Sometimes it comes in softer forms: Are you a boy or a girl? Which box do I tick? Which side of the aisle do you walk down? Other times it’s a silence glance, a scanning of my body for clues, like people are cartographers trying to measure me against a map that was written long before I arrived.

For a long time, I thought that map was the only one that existed. Male. Female. Two points. Two roads. Two possible lives. To step outside them was to be lost and o I spent years trying to convince myself I was one or the other, pressing into shapes that never fit, biting my tongue when my body whispered back, This isn’t you.

In all of that questioning, I lacked one thing. The language to describe my feelings surrounding my gender.

Non-binary, for me, isn’t simply the absence of being a man or a woman. It isn’t the grey void between two poles. It’s a form of reclamation of my identity. It’s reaching back into histories where fluidity, multiplicity, and expansiveness were once normal, natural, sacred. It’s taking back my body, my identity from a modern culture that tried to dictate what it should mean.

My gender is not a compromise.
It is not confusion.

When I call myself non-binary, I’m not saying I’m empty of gender. But rather, my gender goes beyond your binary border. I am not the gap between male and female. This is not a linear spectrum.

Some days my expression lean soft with fabric draping loosely, jewellery catching the light, my skin speaking for itself. Other days I crave sharp lines, silhouettes that slice. Sometimes I want neither, sometimes both. And sometimes I want to surprise myself.

Masculine. Feminine. Androgynous.

I’ve realised that expression is not about performing a role for others but following my own heart, my own compass. Each choice (hair, clothes, movement) isn’t random. It’s a signal for where I’m at today.

The beauty of a compass is that it doesn’t ask you to stay still. It simply tells you where you’re pointing in the moment. My gender expression works the same way. It doesn’t matter if I walked east yesterday and west tomorrow. What matters is that I keep trusting it. Keep moving. Keep allowing myself to turn in the direction I choose to move.