Today, a trans friend asked me, “So, you’re nonbinary, right?” and, unaccustomed to the question, I fumbled for an answer for an instant.

Eventually, I said, “No, I’m female,” and left it at that, and though I probably should have been more precise, he accepted it as a reasonable response and moved on.

I can see why he might think so. My current hair style is the result of striding into a Super Cuts and asking the hairdresser if he could fit me in for a “guy cut” (4 on the sides, scissors on the top, thin it out) and striding out fifteen minutes later, because I don’t like fuss. Also, I don’t wear much makeup–just the slight dash of eyeliner and faint brow pencil I have always worn. I am wearing baggy denim trousers, a t-shirt, a duster, sneakers, and my usual gold chain and two signet rings (A couple of other trans friends complimented me on my look half an hour before the “nonbinary” comment). I hang out with a lot of people who don’t conform to the categories I grew up with, because it makes me feel more comfortable, and as if I belong. In addition, I’m aging, and cartilage keeps growing, so my ears and my nose are bigger than when I was young, and my jawline seems stronger. If I’m wearing a baseball cap and a sweatshirt, I sometimes get mistaken by strangers for a small man.

I decided a long time ago that I didn’t have to act feminine if I didn’t want to; “I’m female. This is what feminine looks like,” I started to say to myself, and stopped worrying about it.

But I’m your everyday old vanilla cis hetero woman, mother of one, widowed after 46 years of marriage, uninterested in romance, and I have big hips, a bust, and a high voice. 

I grew up with two basic categories. One was feminine, the category I was born into, and the other was masculine, the default mode for being a human being, at least according to everything I read. Women were (especially in literature) the “other.” Women were emotional, irrational, jealous, fiendishly devious, incomprehensible, and (by choice) subordinate. They had talons and red red lips, and their hair was extraordinary. They wore girdles and (when I was young) they all had high heels, stockings and garter belts. They weren’t bright the way men were, though they could certainly be shifty and beguiling. They could occasionally be the hero of an English adventure story, only as long as they understood they had to be sensible and disappear into the country of women, once they aged up. American women heroes were either children, Nancy Drew with all her drag, or Jo Marsh marrying that professor Bhaer who disapproved of her writing.

I, on the other hand, was blunt, impulsive, clumsy, bright, impatient, and given to wearing t-shirts and jeans. I didn’t want to give anything up, and I sure didn’t want to defer to men. I figured, therefore, that I must be some kind of covert guy, because that was the only other option available. The problem was, I’m not a guy. I’m not anything. I mean, there are lots more categories now. That’s a good thing, honestly. But just as when I was a kid, I don’t much seem to belong to any of the categories that are currently available.

I mostly don’t ponder the subject. It was just the question today that made me wonder. And now that I have gotten that out of my system, I can go back to forgetting about it.