long-overdue gender identity update!
I shared this post in instagram a few weeks ago — kept it short due to character limits — and the DMs that hit my inbox after were staggering, gorgeous, and made me realize this is something I need to share more about.
So consider this the first in a series of posts unpacking a whole bunch of stuff I’ve never really spoken about publicly.
Goes without saying & I’ll say it anyway: my personal experience is exactly that & speaks for no one else.
I came out as nonbinary in 2021. I’d felt 100% genderless for about a year before mentioning it to anyone.
After an utterly shocking & ego crushing era, I felt alien in my body and divorced from all previous versions of myself.
Being called “she” felt cringy in my skin and distinctly small. It didn’t feel accurate or applicable to my experience.
Saying it out loud brought the wild, liminal experience inside me to light. It helped me explain WTF was going on. It helped me feel more real.
In my research on rites of passage for PhDJ in late 2021, I revisited Victor Turner’s analysis of liminal states.
Liminality (from the Latin word for ‘threshold’) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when folks no longer hold their pre-rite status but haven’t yet begun the transition to the status they’ll hold when the rite is complete.
Turner said “the attributes of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous” – and observed how gender can be an especially malleable quality during transitions from one way of being to another.
A lightbulb went off,
like OH THAT’S WHAT THIS IS.
All the ways I’d identified with femininity died.
A thousand things unwound and rewired during that time.
The one I want to praise here is my relationship with food, the recalibration of which proceeded to recalibrate me.
After more than two decades trying to fit western beauty standards by controlling my body through restrictive eating, I gave up.
In 2022, I made a choice to nourish myself without regard to how it might affect my appearance. I gave up the raw vegan and the detoxes. I ate things I hadn’t touched in years.
My body began to heal. The inflammation subsided. My hormones came back online. My body image & food issues DISAPPEARED.
… & I started to feel like a woman.
(For those who’ve struggled with eating disorders & been told they’ll never have a normal relationship with food — feel free to DM me. Full healing is possible.)
That’s my character limit so I’ll leave it there. Welcoming all questions, curiosities, resonance and different experiences rooted in love.