No Longer a ‘Guy’, But a ‘Flaming-Hot Mess of a Queen’: The Role of Language in Contemporary Nonbinary Autobiographical Life Writing

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the employment and role of language in selected contemporary Anglophone nonbinary life-writing narratives. Initially, it contextualises these works within the present-day nonbinary visibility and representation debate and through the discussion of older similar life-writing texts, foregrounding the theme of authorial agency over one’s representation in relation to diverse readership. In the analysis, I explore how the narrators relate their language-related struggles, both with their environment (e.g. [un]acceptance of their pronouns) and with the identity formation in the absence of vocabulary. Some narrate the search for, and affective response to finding a suitable existing vocabulary. Narrators and their loved ones who prefer creating their own words are discussed in the second part of the analysis examining existing vocabulary alternation, neologisms, and language creativity. I show how nonbinary autobiographical life writing is impacted by the authors’ hyperaware metalingual engagement with imperfect language, and demonstrate how they recreate this language as a ‘site of resistance’, successfully navigating its oppressive binaristic genderedness to narratively construct and visibilise their identities on their own terms.

KEYWORDS:

• Nonbinary
• life writing
• gender identity
• metalanguage

Introduction

In their 2019 memoir Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story, Jacob Tobia recounts the moment when they adopt vocabulary of their own choosing to describe themself after years of living without appropriate words. Among the words they abandon is ‘guy’, which they substitute with ‘flaming-hot mess of a queen’ (237). Tobia echoes the experience of gender-diverse (and other differently marginalised) individuals who find themselves facing the limitations of the language in which they think, speak, and write. This language does not include appropriate vocabulary for their identities, rendering them discursively invisible; moreover, its fundamental systemic properties leave little space for creation thereof. This is one reason why nonbinary authors often appear to write in what bell hooks (1994, 168), inspired by an Adrienne Rich poem ‘The Burning of Paper Instead of Children’, termed ‘oppressor’s language’. And yet, echoing Judith Butler’s (2009, x) argument that precarious populations can employ the oppressor’s language ‘not to ratify its power, but to expose and resist its daily violence’, the authors demonstrate that language can be recreated as a ‘site of resistance’ (hooks 1994, 170). In this article, I¹ discuss how language is used in selected autobiographical life-writing narratives by contemporary Anglophone nonbinary authors. Considering the historical moment in which they are writing, I show how these authors approach language as a ‘site of resistance’, where they claim, reclaim, and create words for themselves, and share their identities and experiences on their own terms.

The examined texts are the graphic memoir Gender Queer: A Memoir (2019) by Maia Kobabe, the memoirs Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story (2019) by Jacob Tobia and In Their Shoes: Navigating Non-Binary Life (2020) by Jamie Windust, and several short-form life-writing narratives in the anthologies Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (2019), edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane, and Non-Binary Lives: An Anthology of Intersecting Identities (2020), edited by Jos Twist, Ben Vincent, Meg-John Barker, and Kat Gupta. While most authors are based in the United States and the United Kingdom, some anthology contributors are based elsewhere or do not specify (similarly, not everyone states their age, ethnicity, race, and assigned sex). Some works mention the national context: Jamie Windust (2020, 176) and the Non-Binary Lives editors (2020, 28, 236) address the transphobic discourse in the United Kingdom, while the United States-based authors mention bathroom bills (Koonce 2019, 193) and gay marriage legislation (Tobia 2019, 102–104). However, due to my focus on the narrators’ discussions of language, particularly in terms of self-naming and as used in a private setting, the national context did not emerge as a factor significantly influencing my observations.

The article approaches these texts as life-writing narratives; to contextualise them as such, I draw mainly on other past and present nonbinary, genderqueer, and trans life-writing texts. All life narratives ‘inevitably refer to the world beyond the text’ (Smith and Watson 2010, 12; see also Kacandes [2012, 380–383]); some texts, autofiction being an obvious example, disrupt this reference more overtly than those discussed here that openly and frequently refer to the outside world through mentions of historical and contemporary events, locations, and individuals. The analysed narratives are also not overtly experimental in structure and style, and in terms of the represented identities, they seem to fulfil the convention of Lejeune’s (1989, 5) autobiographical pact, presenting ‘the author, the narrator, and the protagonist’² as identical. Not only literary life narratives, such texts are often simultaneously testimonies to lived experiences of marginalised individuals; these two readings are not easily separable. While the article does not aspire to discuss the lives of flesh-and-blood nonbinary folks, occasionally a discussion of ‘the world beyond the text’ helps contextualise the narratives. Then, I draw primarily on the editorial introductions to the analysed anthologies and on Eris Young’s They/Them/Their: A Guide to Nonbinary and Genderqueer Identities (2019).

In an article focused on the importance of language, it is imperative to remain mindful that the use of terminology such as ‘nonbinary’ situates the text into a particular, in this case Global North cultural context. ‘Nonbinary’ refers to identities outside the distinct binaristic categories of man and woman; other similar words are, e.g. ‘genderqueer’, ‘trans’, ‘gender nonconforming’, and ‘gender diverse’. Stemming from a ‘post-structuralist, queer mode of thought’ about gender (Young 2019, 65), the terminology is flexible, fluid, and dynamic. Consequently, many members of queer communities do not agree on the definition and use of individual terms and labels (Rajunov and Duane 2019, 21).

Acknowledging its limitations (particularly being a definition by negation), here I employ mostly the term ‘nonbinary’. While the texts feature also the terms ‘genderqueer’ and ‘trans’, both carry connotations that render ‘nonbinary’ a more appropriate option. The word ‘queer’ in ‘genderqueer’ may carry ‘reclamatory connotations’ (Marilyn 2012) and suggest political readings, which not all the authors might subscribe to. Many members of queer communities endorse the definition of ‘trans’ as an ‘umbrella term’ for ‘everyone who is confronting the social boundaries of sex and gender’ (Feinberg 1996, 5), and indeed some authors self-identify as trans; nevertheless, in mainstream discourse, the term ‘trans’ is often connected to the binary gender system. The main reason for choosing ‘nonbinary’ is that all the authors either use the term to refer to themselves or otherwise express that this label is acceptable to them, even though it is not necessarily the (only) one they identify with. They, in fact, use many different words to talk about themselves; these different names and labels, how they comment on them, and what kind of relationship they express towards them are a crucial part of the subsequent analysis. The article thus touches only on a fraction of the terms nonbinary and genderqueer folks use in their everyday lives. For example, while the term ‘enby’ is relatively widely used and inspired an Internet debate for its potentially infantilising connotations (LeClaire 2019; “What Does Enby Mean” 2022; Njoroge, n.d.), it is not discussed here as it appears in both anthologies scarcely and neither instance suggests that the choice carries a specific meaning.

Representation and intended readership

Discussion about nonbinary life narratives is difficult without mentioning the real-life lack of visibility and representation the nonbinary folks report (Barker and Iantaffi 2017; Conlin et al. 2019; Young 2019), but it means discussing a moving target. Nonbinary visibility is currently rising, which is attributed to the growing awareness and adoption of a nonbinary label (Monro 2019; Diamond 2020; Hammack et al. 2021), widespread Internet access, and the adoption of a nonbinary label by a few public figures (McNabb 2017, 55). Explicitly nonbinary characters appear in mainstream television (Erzepki 2021; Oppliger 2022) and visual nonbinarity is utilised in beauty and fashion advertising (Wiid, Müllern, and Berndt 2022); however, these representations are criticised for featuring mostly white, non-disabled, slim, and androgynous-appearing individuals (Bergman and Barker 2017, 38; Young 2019, 33, 104; Honkasalo 2020, 60).

Considering this context—a moment of transformation when previously largely invisible identities are entering mainstream awareness, though their representation is still limited and is yet to be translated into a society-wide and institutional acceptance—it is significant how the analysed authors and editors reflect on the issue of visibility and what possible impact it may have on their authorial and editorial choices. Introductions to both anthologies mention the limited mainstream representation of nonbinary people (Rajunov and Duane 2019, 20; Twist et al. 2020, 15). The editors of Nonbinary title one section ‘Visibility: Standing Up and Standing Out’, while the editors of Non-Binary Lives voice hope that the anthology will increase the visibility of gender diversity (Twist et al. 2020, 240). Jamie Windust (2020, 14, 15) criticises the expectation of ‘easily digestible’ nonbinary representation and expresses hope that nonbinary people will finally be ‘heard, or listened to’ if more of them make their voices heard together. Such comments suggest that at the time of writing their narratives, some authors and editors perceived the visibility of nonbinary identities as inadequate and intended to contribute to this visibility with their life narratives.

Another gender nonconforming autobiographer Alok Vaid-Menon (2020, 13) identifies a potential reason behind the unsatisfactory representation: ‘A lot more airtime is given to other peoples’ views of us rather than to our own experiences’. Control over one’s own representation has been a contentious issue particularly for trans authors, whose early life narratives often appeared prefaced by medical practitioners (Prosser 1998, 126) or accompanied by an academic commentary. Trans scholars and activists (Stone [1991] 2006; Wilchins 1997, 21–24; Namaste 2000; Serano 2016, 195–212) criticised theoreticians exploiting trans existence, and texts such as Stone Butch Blues (Feinberg [1993] 2014) and Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (Bornstein 1994) challenged the medicalisation and the resulting binary and trauma-centred character of many older trans life narratives. Feinberg ([1993] 2014, 359) prohibited attaching introductions to the future translations of Stone Butch Blues, stating that it needs ‘no expert between reader and protagonist’. Contemporary trans authors further challenge the ‘transition memoir genre’ (Jacques 2017, 357) and the ‘Classical, Binary Transgender Story’ (Tobia 2019, 3): for example, Meredith Talusan’s 2020 Fairest: A Memoir claims that she would not have needed to transition had she lived in a society that accepts femininity in male-bodied people, and Laura Kate Dale’s anthology Gender Euphoria: Stories of Joy from Trans, Non-Binary and Intersex Writers (2021) combats the focus on trauma and dysphoria. The growing diversity and number³ of life-writing works by nonbinary, genderqueer, and trans authors contribute to them controlling and shaping the discourse around their identities.

The authorial and editorial choices on representing identities and lives are also inevitably impacted by the intended readership; after all, as Nancy Miller (2007, 545) argues, ‘[t]he reader … is the autobiographer’s most necessary other’. In an autobiographical narrative, readers expect the fulfilment of certain genre conventions, notably the autobiographical pact, the truthfulness of the narrative (Eakin 2008, 21; see also Miller 2007), and the intelligibility of the narrated identity; these all depend on a shared culturally specific understanding of concepts such as identity and truth (Smith 1998, 110; Eakin 2008, 45). As the example of trans life writing suggests, marginalised identities are often most intelligible to general audiences in trauma narratives (Rak 2013, 184); problematically, it is uncertain whether the audience position is empathetic or voyeuristic (Douglas 2010, 152). The nuanced dynamics of the marginalised author-reader relationship with a focus on transsexual⁴ autobiography is discussed by Jay Prosser (1998, 101), who highlights its coexisting audiences and addressees: before an autobiography is written and published, medical doctors elicit a coherent transsexual narrative as a condition of providing healthcare. Later, the published narrative is read both by possibly voyeuristic mainstream readers; the author might still cater to them by providing some conventional tropes because their reading contributes to rendering the transsexual history visible, and by others in the community of shared experience, for whom such autobiographies provide representation and roadmap (124–130). Finally, transsexual authors also write for themselves because the autobiographical narrative allows for the constitution of a transsexual identity otherwise potentially rendered invisible by a medical transition and for rewriting the medical narrative of transsexuality (115–130). Prosser’s discussion reveals autobiographical writing as a site of exchange between the writer and their different audiences.

In the author-reader relationship, the reader’s position may span from a shared experience and compassionate witnessing to objectification and suspicion; I am interested in how the studied authors and editors address the existence of this readership, and whether they acknowledge any impact on their narratives. A brief look at other life-writing works addressing nonbinarity and genderqueerness suggests that the expected readership reflects the growing visibility of the narrated identities: while Riki Wilchins, Clare Howell, and Joan Nestle’s pioneering anthology GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary ([2002] 2020, 17) addresses directly those with a shared experience: ‘This is book for all of us. It’s about the parts of us that have always been considered socially embarrassing, it’s about the voices that every movement has left out and left behind’, contemporary texts more often acknowledge the possibility of an ‘outsider’ reader. Trans Love: An Anthology of Transgender and Non-binary Voices (Benson 2019, 13) addresses them in a friendly explanatory manner: ‘maybe you’ve just picked this up, enticed by the cover, and now you’ve read that first sentence you’re feeling a little confused. Well first, don’t worry! I’m going to run through some definitions, go over the basics and do the groundwork, so that we’re all on the same page’; the introduction subchapter in X Marks The Spot: An Anthology Of Nonbinary Experiences (Hendrie 2019, 9) titled ‘Dear Cis Person Who Picked This Up Looking For Answers’ states: ‘This book is not intended to be for a cis gaze though I do hope that you can learn from it’. Though different in tone, these direct addresses demonstrate the expectation of curious readers from outside the community.

Similar expectation of coexisting varying audiences is evident in some analysed texts. Jacob Tobia (2019, xxii) hopes their storytelling will provide healing for everyone, ‘[not] just for gender nonconforming people’. Jamie Windust’s (2020, 16) mediation on the lack of empathy for trans and nonbinary people asks the readers: ‘Take yourself out of your own being and think, just for a second, of the lives of trans people, and how you can become a better person by helping us out’. An address to outside readers appears in the Non-Binary Lives introduction: ‘We hope that this collection will offer you an insight into the diversity of non-binary people’s lives’, alongside an address to nonbinary readers: ‘we hope that you can connect with the stories that are told’ (Twist et al. 2020, 16). Finally, the editors of Nonbinary foreground the authors’ representational labour, stating that through sharing their stories, the authors ‘[cultivate] a new branch of gender’ that can grow both in ‘the minds of outsiders and the spirits of their own’ (Rajunov and Duane 2019, 21).

This expectation of a diverse readership possibly explains the occasionally adopted explanatory, didactic, and academic tone. Both anthologies’ introductions specify terminology and mention the importance of intersectionality; Nonbinary (2019) also explains the concept of gender. The narrators corroborate their intimate and personal experiences by referring to Butler (Valcore 2019, 129), Churchland (Kobabe 2019, 199–203), Lorde (Barker 2020, 162), and academic studies (Smith 2019, 248; Windust 2020, 100). These elements and strategies can be traced back to older works by nonbinary, genderqueer, and trans authors; for example, Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw (1994) and Riki Wilchins’ Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender (1997) both interweave personal episodes with informative discussions of trans experience, thus formulating theory grounded in the lived experience (Jacques 2017, 357–358). However, adopting an explanatory tone certainly does not equal an unequivocal acceptance of a representative or a didactic role; the studied texts can be rather understood as sites of negotiation where the authors navigate expressing their identities on their own terms and deciding what kind of information they want to share with their audiences and in which way, whether and how to contextualise it, and, crucially, who should benefit from sharing this information. For example, while Tobia (2019, xxii, 39, 295) emphasises healing for everyone, when voicing hope that publicly sharing their experience will pave the way for the next generation of gender nonconforming folks and their families, they situate the beneficiary of their representational labour within the community. Furthermore, their chapter ‘Beloved Token’ and Sand C. Chang (2019) essay in Nonbinary ‘Token Act’ suggest through the use of the word ‘token’ frustration at being ascribed the representative role in their everyday lives. Other narrators corroborate that ‘[e]xplaining [themselves] is exhausting’ (Tolu and Tolu 2020, 71) and convey discomfort with ‘speaking for every gender-nonconforming person ever’ (Smith 2019, 248). Jamie Windust (2020, 173) reiterates that nonbinary individuals should freely choose when they want to share their experience and ‘not be expected to or ushered to do so at all times’. The narrators emphasise the emotional labour tied to the representative and didactic role and the need to ensure that the individual is not coerced into adopting it.⁵

Challenging language: feminist and queer life writing

Navigating diverse audiences and their expectations involves considering the language that conveys one’s identity and life story. The broader theme of language as an oppressive power that the marginalised writers challenge and transform is also present in postcolonial and diasporic writing (Ashcroft 2014) and works by writers of colour (hooks 1994, 167–176). Zooming to the gender and sexual language oppression (though these are often interwoven in the colonial and white supremacist oppression the beforementioned authors write against), the struggles of feminist writers to challenge patriarchy in language in many ways precede the attempts of the nonbinary and genderqueer authors to challenge its heteronormativity and binarism. Since the 1970s, many feminists fought against the generic masculine pronoun (Livia 1999) and used words such as ‘wimmin’, ‘womyn’, and ‘herstory’ to draw attention to and resist the sexist biases in language (Mills 1993, 118; Pauwels 2003, 551–555). Some studied works employ these terms: ‘womyn’ (Janib 2020, 86), ‘humyns’ (Nicholas 2020, 172), and ‘herstory’ (Tobia 2019, 141, 302, 312) without discussing their background. Gesturing to the exclusory character of some communities from which the anti-patriarchal terminology originated, Igi Moon (2020, 156) calls ‘wimmin’ those who denounced and excluded leather-clad lesbians like them. This exclusion has impacted mainly trans people, but some feminists equally challenge the legitimacy of present-day nonbinary identities (Young 2019, 101; Head 2020, 129). It is important to note that connotations of similar words may differ; for example, Brian Jay Eley (2019, 215, 216) writes ‘womxn’, which some writers of colour and Indigenous writers use as a reference to intersectional oppression (Ashlee, Zamora, and Karikari 2017; Sy 2018).

Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness (Hall [1928] 1981, 204) discovering a word for herself in her father’s library and Alison in Fun Home (Bechdel 2007, 74) learning about the word ‘lesbian’ from a dictionary are well-known examples illustrating that preoccupation with language and search for words for oneself can be found in queer texts that preceded those discussed here. Nevertheless, language appears to gain particular prominence in nonbinary and genderqueer authors’ works. As Young (2019, 45) points out, in most languages spoken in the West, it is ‘nearly impossible to speak conventionally without assigning [oneself] or others one or the other binary gender’ and ‘the gendered (and often binary) uses of language throughout the world present one of the biggest obstacles to the social and legal acceptance, and perceived legitimacy, of nonbinary and genderqueer identities’.⁶ The ability to speak about one’s gender identity effortlessly is a part of a broader ‘cisgender privilege’ (Serano 2016, 161–193) from which nonbinary folks are excluded; this may impact not only their process of self-identification but may create friction between their identities and environments.

Below, the article discusses how the analysed life narratives address these tensions; such reflections on language are, however, again not a new occurrence in trans and genderqueer writing: Riki Wilchins ([2002] 2020, 47) identifies ‘writers struggling with language used about them and against them, even as it struggles back, twists in their hands, and erases their sounds’ as ‘[a] recurrent theme’ in the anthology GenderQueer. Echoing the narrators discussed here, Jess in Stone Butch Blues exclaims: ‘I’ve got no language’ and expresses a wish to have ‘our own words to describe ourselves’ (Feinberg [1993] 2014, 301, 278). These older texts also offer examples of the resistance to inadequate language: when Kate Bornstein (1994) uses neologisms like ‘gender outlaw’, ‘gender terrorist’ (71), ‘gender defender’ (72), and ‘gender blenders’ (91), and Riki Wilchins (1997, 13) refuses to be ‘a spokestrans (or spokesherm)’, they draw attention to the language’s limitations and simultaneously counter these limitations by creating space for their identities.

‘Language creates the space that identity is given to fit into’: language as an everyday struggle

Reflecting on the increasing nonbinary visibility, some narrators address its inadequate and misleading character and emphasise the importance of agency over one’s representation. Writing about language and its absences and possibilities is one strategy of sharing a prominent aspect of life as a nonbinary person with their diverse audiences on their own terms. The narrators might speak about absences and searches, but, through the potential for resistance that the oppressive language carries, they can fill these absences with the words chosen, reclaimed, and created by themselves, and thus widen ‘the space [their] identity is given to fit into’ (Simms 2020, 230).

The memoirs Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe (2019) and especially Sissy by Jacob Tobia (2019) include in-depth contemplations of language. Though Jamie Windust’s (2020) In Their Shoes does not discuss language extensively, it engages with it creatively and touches on the language-related themes. The anthologies Nonbinary (2019) and Non-Binary Lives (2020) exhibit a similar focus on language; both introductions mention that language ‘fail[s]’ (Twist et al. 2020, 18) nonbinary people because it ‘remains steeped in binary constructions’ (Rajunov and Duane 2019, 17). Both books consist of thirty short life-writing narratives. In Non-Binary Lives, fifteen of those discuss language as a phenomenon. Seven other chapters mention naming, terminology, labels, and pronouns. In Nonbinary, nineteen texts address language-related matters; an additional six mention language without extensive discussion.

These recurring references and the overall creative and deliberate character of the writing corroborate that in these narratives, language is not a neutral tool to convey one’s life story; often, it rather is a marked textual presence drawing attention to itself. The texts include metalingual references to identity words (‘we had only “lesbian and gay” until the 1980s’ [Head 2020, 126]) and discussions of the words’ character (‘[m]ushy is a gross word’ [Tobia 2019, 73]). To address their genders and identities, the narrators employ devices such as alliterations (‘Traversing Transfemme Troubles’ [Jas 2020, 53]), similes (‘I feel like a superspy, flipping through my passports to decide who I am going to be’ [Smith 2019, 248]), neologisms (‘Thempathy’ [Windust 2020, 171]), and metaphors (e.g. Jamie Windust opens their text with the metaphor of wearing someone else’s shoes to emphasise the necessity of empathy with marginalised identities). For Tobia (2019, 299), language itself is a metaphor for (over)thinking about gender: ‘Thinking about your gender for too long can be like spelling. If you write out any word and then look at it for too long—tomato, paucity, preponderance, disintegrate—the spelling will start to look funny’. When thinking about gender, the narrators consider it both as a concept and as a word. Nino Cipri (2019, 269–270) adopts what they call a ‘kitchen sink approach to … gender’, in which gender is ‘a process of addition instead of subtraction’; these additions include everything they consider a meaningful ingredient of their identity: ‘[m]otorcycles’, ‘boots’, ‘[w]hisky’, ‘[c]ats’, and ‘[b]aking, but not cooking’. By reframing gender as a process, Cipri echoes Christopher Soto (2019, 275), who proposes gender as ‘a narrative instead of a word’. Widening and reconceptualising deficient words is only one of the strategies the narrators employ to navigate binaristic language. In the following pages, I will give more examples of the endless creativity with which they undertake this quest.

The pronoun ‘weathervane’

Pronouns are perhaps the topic related to nonbinary identities that most penetrated the mainstream discourse. Eris Young (2019, 55) argues that the debate is ‘fundamentally one of autonymy—the ability of a demographic, especially a marginalised one, to name itself and thus claim agency or control over how it is referred to, and by extension, treated’. For Young, pronouns serve as a ‘weathervane’ (13) signalling their communication partner’s attitude. Pronouns stand between an individual’s identity and their environment and represent the speaker’s acceptance or lack thereof of the nonbinary individual’s preference. Unlike labels of gender identity (which may be partially or completely private) or terms for nonbinary kinship roles (which are confined to an intimate familial setting), pronouns are used by a significantly wider circle of contacts, such as one’s workplace and neighbourhood community.

It is hence not surprising that mentions of pronouns are amply present in the analysed narratives. Several narrators describe how they first revealed their nonbinary identity by publicly announcing that they would change pronouns. This announcement is often depicted as a moment of contradictory emotions, accompanied by fear of unacceptance. Some describe the negative reactions including confusion (Howitt 2020, 213), ignorance, and belittling (Nicholas 2020, 168). Family members failing to use the right pronouns make Jamie Windust (2020, 51) wonder whether ‘the inability to use the right pronouns means that somewhere, deep down, there’s a slight harbouring of resentment and lack of care or belief for [their] identity’. In these negative experiences, pronouns represent the ‘painful’ (Chang 2019, 93) and ‘frustrating’ (Korn 2020, 141) feeling of erasure. The narrators compare this feeling to physical discomfort: it feels ‘like when [they] forget to cut the tags off [their] T-shirt, scraping [their] skin and making [them] itch all over’ (Drake 2019, 230), having ‘a rock stuck in [eir] shoe’ (Kobabe 2019, 207), or ‘burning [themself] with a pair of straighteners on [their] ear’ (Windust 2020, 50). The experiences that the narrators relate go from ‘relentless exhaustion’ (LJ 2020, 65) to feeling ‘stupid … embarrassed … inauthentic’ (Nicholas 2020, 169) and ‘scared’ (Erlick 2019, 301). Furthermore, pronouns not only induce but also channel negative feelings. s. e. Smith (2019, 246) confesses: ‘Sometimes I want to call myself “it,” in defiance, in rage, to make a point’. The narrators depict the dehumanising experience of misgendering through incorrect pronoun use as a source of stress, frustration, and fear.

On the other hand, colleagues and families’ acceptance of the narrators’ pronouns (and in the extension their identities) often mark moment in the narrative where a crisis mitigates. Additionally, the decision and the ability to defend oneself and require others to use the correct pronouns are portrayed as an act of bravery connected to the realisation of one’s identity. Jacob Tobia (2019, 237) describes insisting on their pronouns as one of the stages of becoming comfortable with their identity and with expressing it: ‘I wasn’t “he” anymore. I was “they”. I started to correct other people when they got it wrong’.

While insisting on preferred pronouns is a valuable self-assertation, some narrators express awareness that they are touching on a sensitive topic. Cisgender people might view this requirement as a source of conflict and feel attacked if corrected, as demonstrated by the annoyance of Drew Simms’ (2020, 233) colleagues when Simms introduced a ‘misgender jar’ at the workplace. To address the potential source of conflict, some narratives adopt an appeasing tone. Maia Kobabe (2019) says that getting pronouns right is a process where sometimes mistakes happen, but the value resides in good intentions. E stresses that e initially also struggled with other people’s epicene pronouns: ‘I would correct people only to turn around and make the exact same mistake 30 seconds later’ (172). Similarly, Drew Simms (2020, 233) says that they ‘must accept some responsibility’ for the fact that their colleagues do not always respect their pronouns since they ‘don’t like to correct people’. Jamie Windust (2020, 51) calls for patience for family members who ‘have been using other pronouns for [nonbinary people] for decades, so asking them to change this overnight can be something that takes time’. The narrators unequivocally declare their right to the preferred pronouns, though they might temporarily adopt a didactic role and a tone of tolerance and encouragement for mispronouning cisgender people.

Putting a name to all the nameless: identity formation in the absence of language

‘[N]ew ways of talking about [oneself]’ (Tobia 2019, 237) come hand in hand with new ways of thinking about oneself. For many nonbinary individuals, the connection between language and sense of identity is permeated with absences; in the words of CK Combs (2019, 136), ‘[i]t’s almost impossible to form a sense of identity without the words to describe [oneself]’. Jacob Tobia (2019, 86–87) compares the absences in the language they felt as a teenager to the absence of a word for the colour blue:

Did you know that for millennia of human history, in languages across a significant portion of the ancient world, there was no word for the color blue? (…) Homer was famous for writing not about the deep blue sea but about the wine-dark sea. Without a word for ‘blue’, the color of wine was the closest Homer could come to describe the brooding, tumultuous ocean.

When I look back on my early childhood and adolescence, I feel like a Greek poet.

Tobia further discusses how the language absence complicated both their younger self’s self-identification and communicating their experience articulately to others. The sense of a lexical absence as an obstacle in formulating one’s identity appears in narratives by H. Howitt (2020, 209), Drew Simms (2020, 229), and CK Combs (2019, 136), often in different forms of the expression ‘I did not have a language for me’. These nonbinary narrators feel that language ‘collapses’ and ‘fails’ (Wilchins 2019, 12) them. They corroborate Jules De La Cruz’s (2019, 288) argument about the need for ‘a new lexicon to describe that which has always existed but has heretofore not been acknowledged’. They want language to finally meet the real-life experience of marginalised people who did not have an opportunity to create their own labels in the past.

For most authors, nonbinary vocabulary was not available when they started to contemplate their gender identity due to age differences and the absence of Internet access. In their works, the narrators mention the terminology they adopted before starting to identify as nonbinary, often including some version of ‘I called myself … ’. They also describe uncomfortable feelings that these original labels did not adequately express their identities. Several narrators say that they called themselves ‘tomboy’ or ‘butch’. For Drew Simms (2020, 230), ‘butch lesbian’ was the ‘closest thing [they] had heard of to what [they were] feeling’. Similarly, Annelyn Janib (2020, 86) recalls that ‘[g]rowing up, the only word [they] could use to describe [themself] was “tomboy,”’ but the word ‘didn’t quite fit’. The metaphor of clothes is also employed by michal ‘mj’ jones (2019, 65), who remembers that they ‘finally tried on the term “gay” at fifteen’. Adam ‘PicaPica’ Stevenson (2019, 240) did not wear the label ‘androgyne’ as a piece of clothing but rather as a ‘shield’. Jacob Tobia (2019, 87) similarly describes that ‘in the absence of the modern language … [they] used the best language [they] had at the time’; in their case, using the word ‘gay’ as a substitute ‘set in motion dual arcs of self-discovery and self-loathing’. The process of self-labelling, even with later abandoned labels, is nonetheless portrayed as crucial to many narrators’ self-realisation journey, because they ‘would otherwise be erased by labels that other people assign(ed) to [them]’ (Smith 2020, 42).

In the absence of Internet access, several protagonists are depicted searching in literature for terminology to capture their experience. Maia Kobabe (2019, 43) recalls ‘look[ing] up “gay” and “lesbian” in a dictionary’, while Kory Martin-Damon (2019, 294) learned in the library about the term ‘Gender Dysphoria’. Jacob Tobia (2019) recalls the relief of ‘having scientific words’ (64) after reading a book about puberty mentioning homosexuality and bisexuality, identifying labelling their experience as a part of the process of accepting it. Before the protagonists have a chance to enter a community of shared experience, the discovery of an existing term represents the existence of such a community. However, the accessible literature frequently includes limited vocabulary that does not reflect the full spectrum of gender diversity. Drew Simms (2020, 230) describes the benefits of discovering new terms through their community: ‘My new friends were teaching me a new language, sharing writing with me that was less than 40 years old and contained voices that rarely see mainstream print’. The search for an appropriate label for oneself might be laborious—and conventional medical and psychiatric texts often do not bring satisfactory answers. Nevertheless, the protagonists’ affective responses upon finding a new label for themselves testify to the impact of that discovery.

The narrators employ emotional language, hyperboles, and similes to describe their feelings of surprise, joy, and relief, and narrate their physical responses to emphasise the strength of the revelation. Maia Kobabe (2019, 189, 142) states that after first hearing the Spivak pronouns (e/em/eir), e ‘got the biggest tingle down [eir] spine’, and that eir heart was ‘pounding’ upon seeing multiple gender options on Facebook. Lucy/Luc Nicholas (2020, 167) recalls that ‘[w]hen [they] first heard about gender-neutral pronouns, it blew [their] mind’. Jaye Ware (2019, 154) recounts that ‘something clicked’ the moment ze first encountered nonbinary genders in literature. While Aubri Drake (2019, 229) narrates their first encounter with the word ‘genderqueer’ as the feeling of being ‘struck by a bolt of lightning’, Melissa L. Welter (2019, 69) employs a nature metaphor, suggesting a more gradual process: ‘[i]t fell into my heart like the seed of a redwood tree on moist soil’. The word ‘genderqueer’ was ‘an epiphany’ to Chai-Yoel Korn (2020, 138) because ‘it gave [them] a new language to feel comfortable in [their] skin’.

In these life narratives, the discovery and adoption of appropriate vocabulary are followed by a growing sense of confidence in one’s identity and of ‘the power that comes with language’ (Koonce 2019, 190). One of the expressions of confidence is employment of possessive pronouns, as illustrated by Jacob Tobia (2019, 237):

I stopped saying I was a ‘man’ and started saying I was a ‘person.’ I stopped saying I was a ‘guy’ and started saying I was a ‘flaming-hot mess of a queen.’

And yes, while I knew on some level that these were just words, … they were finally my words.

For some narrators and in some situations, the confidence and power come with choosing their words from the existing lexicon; nevertheless, the texts surveyed here also reveal that modern terminology and its mainstreamisation do not necessarily result in satisfactory labels for everyone. Some narrators do not fully identify with ‘the catchall nonbinary label seeking to put a name to all of [the] nameless’ (Govoni 2019, 49). The label ‘nonbinary’, alongside other mainstream terminology, ‘reflects the frustrating but necessary process of defining oneself only in opposition to what is already defined’ (Rajunov and Duane 2019, 18). Some of those who stress that ‘[n]onbinary individuals are more than simply both, neither or in between’ (18) find the term ‘nonbinary’ as a negative definition unsatisfyingly limiting and consequently resort to self-naming and creation of neological labels.

‘There are no words that exist, so new words have to be made’: stretching, creating, reclaiming, and rethinking the language

When ‘[t]here are no words that exist’ (Janib 2020, 88), nonbinary narrators often create new ones. Many illustrate this experience through the changing of their first names. The name change plays as prominent a role as the change of pronouns, since it represents not only an identity transition but also the public declaration of that transition. The narrators frequently open with a discussion of their given name and the level of its genderedness. michal ‘mj’ jones (2019) frames their narrative ‘Namesake’ with a question whether their mother ‘knew’ (62) when she gave them, a person assigned female at birth, a traditionally male name. In their narrative, the process of accepting their name parallels the process of accepting their identity. Levi S. Govoni (2019, 46), who comes from an Italian American family, perceives words ending in ‘a’ as feminine, and his given name Alanna, ‘therefore, with its myriad a’s strung beautifully together, is the melodic equivalent of a set of ovaries’. Through the potentially dysphoric metaphor, Govoni emphasises the uncomfortable genderedness of his given name. Katy Koonce (2019, 184) decided not to change her name to honour the connection with her mother, and CK Combs (2019, 142) struggled with telling his mother about his name change because ‘[t]he name she gave [him] was something she made up herself, and [he] cherished the story behind it’. Regardless of the decision for or against the name change, the narrator’s original given name commonly appears as a link to their nationality and biological family.

Those narrators who do change their names frequently address the meanings of their chosen names. Levi S. Govoni (2019, 49) says that he chose his name because it means ‘joined in harmony’, and it represents his refusal of the limits of binary gender. Adam ‘PicaPica’ Stevenson (2019, 239) chose the online handle ‘Pica Pica’ because it ‘is the Latin name for the European Magpie’; similarly to the bird, Stevenson would ‘fly both sides of the gender divide and pick all the shiny things’. Other narrators discuss creating different personas for themselves and giving them names as a part of gender exploration. Edward Lord’s (2020, 114) female persona was called Alex; Katy Koonce’s (2019, 185) two male personas were John, ‘a straightforward guy who dug ditches and built fences’, and Steve, ‘the star quarterback’. Due to their symbolic role, names and the process of renaming oneself are commonly chronicled in the studied narratives, representing not only a link to the protagonists’ families and childhood communities but also their identity journey from exploring alternative personas in youth to reaching a sense of unity as a nonbinary adult.

An identity journey may also include alternative terminology and labels; these may be self-created, created by a close person, or cocreated. Jacob Tobia (2019, 146, 74) recalls that as a young person they created the term ‘gender transcendentalist’ and they further identify as a ‘gender-seer’; Al Head (2020, 130) calls quemself a ‘gender-morphic’ person; Jaye Ware (2019, 150) uses terms ‘gender confused’ and ‘gender questioning’. The narrators combine the term ‘gender’ with their feelings about the phenomenon, thus creating a neological self-label. This creation is in the narratives commonly accompanied with a feeling of loneliness, when creativity appears as forced by the absence of available vocabulary and community.

The need for new vocabulary is expressed even more prominently by nonbinary narrators who are a part of a kinship unit. Their partners and family members, who seek to convey respect and appreciation for their loved ones’ identities, are portrayed as likewise grappling with the absences of language. Katy Koonce’s wife calls her ‘genderful’ (2019, 191), a possible attempt to counter the negative definition of the word ‘nonbinary’. Since queer people are often viewed as excluded from traditional family bonds (e.g. Ahmed 2010, 90, 95), and because of the strongly binaristic character of the Western conceptualisation of family, the absences in the language for family relationships are even greater and slower to be filled than the labels for nonbinary self-identification.

The narratives examined here portray different ways of navigating the binary language of parenting. Katy Koonce (2019, 192) prefers the label ‘mommy’, as she associates this label with the positive relationship with her mother; her anecdote about creating a bathroom nickname with her son to avoid this address in men’s room exemplifies some of the nuances of nonbinary parenting. CK Combs’ son (2019, 143) calls him ‘he-mommy’ or alternates between ‘mommy’ and ‘dad’. michal ‘mj’ jones (2019, 67) recalls suggesting to their pregnant partner that they can be called ‘baba’ and describes the contentment both partners felt about that ‘warm, blanketing term of endearment’. Jules De La Cruz (2019, 289) also describes contemplating an appropriate label as a nonbinary parent. Because of her long fascination with the Czech Republic, De La Cruz’s wife calls De La Cruz ‘Mužy’—the Czech word for ‘man’ (‘muž’) but with the feminised ending ‘y’. After her pregnancy is confirmed, she suggests the label ‘Mamuž’ (289), a combination of the Czech words for ‘mother’ and ‘man’. The inclusion of a foreign word thus provides an escape from the intensely experienced genderedness of one’s mother tongue. The intimate word shared only between the informed parties represents a link to a place to which they have a close connection. These are examples of how the narrators tend to present the search for non-binaristic language for kinship bonds in more positive language than they narrate the search for neological self-labels. The protagonists navigate these language limitations together with their loved ones, whose creative language solutions express love and respect for the protagonists’ identities.

Sadly, not only their loved ones create labels for nonbinary folks. Many narrators recall being assigned disparaging labels. The reappropriation of slurs is one of the strategies adopted by marginalised communities to counter language violence. Jacob Tobia (2019) recounts that during their youth, they were only given negative labels for their identity, such as ‘sissy’ and ‘faggot’ (xx). Tobia recalls associating these slurs with feelings of ‘embarrassment, dread and loathing’ (xxiii). The appearance of this disparaging vocabulary marks the moment in the narrative when they start experiencing strong shame related to their identity, as compared to the ‘pre-shame’ (17) years of their childhood. Tobia describes how later in life, through self-love and acceptance, the slurs ‘transform[ed] into badges of pride’. They assert that they ‘adore’ these words and ‘take pride in them’, calling themself ‘the most effervescent, gorgeous, dignified sissy that the world has ever seen’ (xxiii). Tobia narrates a nuanced relationship to these derogatory words, once the only language available. Instead of distancing themself from them, they employ linguistic reappropriation as an empowerment tool.

The authors’ creative language choices seem to stem from the hyperawareness of language’s power to ‘both [enforce] gender norms and [allow] for the subversion of the same’ (Young 2019, 46). Maia Kobabe (2019, 194) claims that ‘to initiate a switch in thinking’, it is necessary to ‘start with a switch of words’, identifying language as a precursor of societal change. For this reason, Jacob Tobia (2019, 93) refuses the term ‘closet’, which connotates that queer people are ‘dishonest or immoral for concealing [their] identities’, instead proposing the word ‘shell’, which indicates necessary protection from the hostile environment. The shell metaphor is employed also by Kobabe (2019, 70), who draws emself contemplating eir gender identity hidden inside one. Similarly, exclusively through the drawing and without a textual commentary, Kobabe (112) depicts emself sitting inside a cracked eggshell when considering the complexities of romantic relationships. H Howitt’s (2020, 211) ‘hatching space’ represents a time of deteriorating health and coming to understand themself as a person with a disability; they compare this time to a hesitant adoption of a trans label. These two passages possibly refer to the metaphor of an egg describing a person before understanding their trans identity. In this metaphor, used primarily in online spaces, cracking an egg symbolises the irreversible moment of understanding one’s identity; hatching describes making this identity public (besides Internet locations like subreddit r/egg_irl, the metaphor is referenced by Julia Ftacek in the 2021 essay ‘Reflection: Egg Hatching; Or, Letting the Eighteenth Century Be Trans’).⁷ Tobia’s (2019, 93) comment that ‘the metaphors we use to talk about queer and trans experience matter’ demonstrates that metaphors are yet another site of potential subversion and transformation of the inadequate language.

Conclusion: ‘a battle of words, a battle to determine the fact that I am flesh and bones’

‘Language is everything’, states Annelyn Janib (2020, 88), gesturing to the situation in which many authors discussed in this article find themselves: the discomfort of not having appropriate vocabulary available, higher dependence on metalanguage, and anxiety from sharing one’s pronouns and labels with people around lead them to forge a more conscious relationship with language that translates into their life writing. For nonbinary autobiographers, language is not only a tool they use to write their life narratives—often the narratives are about that language. They address its genderedness and binarism by narrating the feelings of confusion and erasure they experience in the absence of appropriate labels for themselves. Language stands as a metaphor for an identity when they narrate the search for vocabulary they could claim as their own and the joy and contentment of finding such words. Names, labels, and pronouns often represent different stages of the identity journey of the narrator: initial self-identification, subsequent sharing of the identity with their environment, and navigating the environment response to it. These narrators not only search within the existing language; they challenge its genderedness and binarism by employing alternative forms of words and by creating their own terminology and labels. Building on the legacy of trans, genderqueer, and other marginalised voices in life writing, nonbinary writers enter the ‘battle of words’ (Janib 2020, 88) and employ the ‘oppressor’s language’ to carve a space for their identities, to reclaim the discourse around them, and to visibilise these identities on their own terms.

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Notes on contributors

Karolína Zlámalová

Karolína Zlámalová (she/her) is a PhD candidate at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. In her research, she concentrates on the representation of gender in contemporary Anglophone life writing.

Notes

1 It is important to acknowledge that I do not identify as nonbinary. Similarly to Sarah Ray Rondot (2019, 172), I also believe everyone should work against the hegemonic binary gender system, and all this labour should not be expected from marginalised people. Nonetheless, I am aware of the often fraught character of the theoretical engagement with trans and gender-diverse experience. As an outsider, it is imperative to consider how much space I, as a researcher, take within and through this article. This consideration translates into my methodology: the article focuses on the element of this particular group of life narratives that many of the authors overtly identify as central to their texts; it strives to centre the authors’ voices by employing extensive direct quotes rather than paraphrases, and, especially when commenting on these direct quotes, a descriptive, rather than an interpretative and analytical tone; if it contextualises the primary texts, it draws mainly on other trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer authors, scholars, and activists. Through these methods, I hope to ensure that my reading only foregrounds and never overwrites the authors’ autobiographical voices and agency.

2 Though the primary texts reveal little distinction between these three, in this article, an ‘author’ refers to the flesh-and-blood person writing in a particular time and place; I, therefore, use this term mainly when discussing the context of the text. A ‘narrator’ refers to the voice relating the life story in the primary text, and a ‘protagonist’ refers to the acting character in this text, who might be, for example, the narrator’s younger self.

3 Apart from the works cited in the article, other recent examples are, e.g., Genesis P-Orridge’s 2021 Nonbinary: A Memoir (with Tim Mohr) and Krys Malcolm Belc’s 2021 The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood. Nonbinary and genderqueer authors are also featured in life-writing anthologies like Written on the Body: Letter from Trans and Non-Binary Survivors of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence (Bean 2018), Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives (Grimm, Morales, and Ferentini 2021), and Queer Life, Queer Love (Bates, Nour, Beal, and Beal 2022).

4 When referring to Prosser’s Second Skins (1998), I use the term ‘transsexual’ that he employs in the text.

5 As elsewhere in the article, I focus on how the narrators reflect on the expected audiences, thus disregarding interviews, blurbs, readers’ Internet comments, and other paratexts. The third memoir discussed in this article—Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer (2019)—demonstrates how these can create a vastly different story. Kobabe does not address readership explicitly in the memoir; in media, e stated that the imagined audience was eir family (Kobabe 2021). However, two years after its publication, Gender Queer became a target of school bans throughout the United States. The text and its author gained widespread visibility and became a part of a broader conversation on appropriate audiences for similar texts. The fact that the author, whose initially imagined readership was intimate, is now in the countrywide news outlets asserting the importance of queer representation in school libraries and defending the appropriateness of eir book for school children (Kobabe 2021; Lavietes 2021), is an apt commentary on the conditions of adopting a representative role.

6 As I am editing this article, Sebastian Cordoba’s Non-Binary Gender Identities: The Language of Becoming (2023) was just published as the latest addition to the debate about the relationship of nonbinary people to language.

7 Importantly, while many folks readily adopt this metaphor, some perceive it as shaming people who are suspected of not being aware or open about their transness (see Grace Lavery’s 2020 article ‘Egg Theory’s Early Style’).