A photo of my closet door, partially open
I haven’t written a blog post in a long time. A lot has gone on, the biggest thing being that I had umbilical hernia surgery in early March. I had a lot of anxiety leading up to the surgery, and the recovery from the surgery took more out of me than I expected. Then I got a pretty nasty cold that gave me a ton of brain fog. I’m just now getting to the other side of that cold, and it’s just been a few days now that I’ve had no pain in my abdomen from the surgery. So I’m slowly coming back to normal, and feeling like I have the ability to interact with the world around me.
However, it would be disingenuous to say that the surgery and the cold are the only reasons I haven’t written here. If I’m being honest, I have been trying to stick with a hopeful, “don’t give up” kind of tone in my last several posts, but that attitude of optimism hasn’t been the attitude I’ve had this month. Besides the frustrations of the surgery, recovery, and cold, I’ve been dealing with another pretty significant frustration, and that has prevented me from wanting to come here and share my thoughts, lest I disappoint those of you who read DCL. But I think it’s pretty unrealistic to expect myself to be always optimistic and encouraging, and so I’m giving myself permission to be real here.
I’ve shared a fair amount about my gender identity here on DCL over the course of the last several months. For a good chunk of time, I was feeling emboldened and resilient in regards to my gender identity, not wanting to yield to the oppressive environment around me. But the reality is that it truly, truly does not feel safe - in every sense of that word - to be someone who looks like me and have the people in my life use “they/them” pronouns for me. If I’m out in public in our conservative rural-ish suburb of Northeast Ohio, the safety I’m referring to is literally physical safety from violence. In the wild wild West that is the internet, referring to myself - someone who in every way looks like a cisgender man - as “they/them” means, at best, dismissive attitudes from people who couldn’t be bothered to expand their mindset on gender identity, and at worst, verbal harassment and bigotry.
In terms of personal relationships, asking the people in my life to use “they/them” almost feels like adding a level of difficulty and complexity that need not be there. I think it’s pretty unrealistic to expect that the people around me are going to truly understand all of the uniqueness of who I am. However, I think the people who love me do see me for who I am for the most part, and do their best to put in the effort to understand and embrace the peculiarities of my identity. That said, asking those people to consistently use “they/them” pronouns for me creates a barrier to communication because there’s a constant stumbling of words, quick apology, and then correcting of themselves that truly disrupts the flow of the conversation.
In most cases, when someone refers to me as “he/him”, it doesn’t so much feel like an act of aggression or bigotry, it just feels kind of not-accurate. If I were to pick a microlabel for my gender identity, it would be agender - I don’t personally feel like I can relate to what it feels like to be a woman, and I don’t personally feel like I can relate to what it feels like to be a man, and I just don’t necessarily internally feel I have a relationship to a gender. So in a sense, the pronouns someone uses for me don’t matter too much, because those pronouns are always going to be an approximation. While “they/them” feels like a closer approximation, “he/him” doesn’t necessarily hit me as offensive, just kind of not-quite-precise. But my gender expression - the way I look on the outside - is primarily dictated by what feels comfortable and convenient, and in my case, that means that I always have what is known as a masculine gender expression. Because I was assigned male at birth, and because I have a masculine gender expression, it’s extremely logical for the people around me to assume that I am a man.
So here’s where it’s going to feel a little bit like giving up hope. The fact of the matter is, I don’t believe that most people in the world are going to be willing or able to put in the effort to understand me as someone whose gender identity is outside of the binary, especially when I look the way I do. A lot of what coming out of the closet is about is revealing one’s identity to the world around us to be seen and understood for who we are. In the same way that coming out of the closet as gay felt scary and unsafe in 2003, coming out of the closet as non-binary feels increasingly unsafe in 2025. Perhaps if I felt compelled to change my gender expression in a more expansive way, I would also feel more compelled to be out about being non-binary so that I could be seen and respected for who I am in the world. And I think that, in many ways, it’s easier for people to see someone who looks to be androgynous or non-conforming in their gender expression and think of that person as “they/them” than it is to look at someone like me, whose gender expression aligns with a more binary convention, and think of me as anything other than what I appear to be. It feels like too much to ask - and unreasonable to expect - that people in the world and people in my life are going to interact with me - someone who looks and sounds like a man - and be able to see anything other than a man. The gender binary is too strong, it’s too reinforced in society and culture, and because of that, it doesn’t feel worth spending the rest of my life correcting people to use more accurate language when it’s easier and much safer to just go with the flow.
I recently reconnected with someone who I haven’t seen in almost 15 years. So much has changed about my understanding of myself in that time. But it feels too vulnerable and too precarious to reveal all of the ways I now understand myself to someone who “knew” the version of me that existed so long ago. I spent time with that person yesterday, and even though it was a really nice visit, I felt exhausted afterward because I had been putting so much effort into trying to be the person I was so long ago. However, I also felt like it was significantly safer to appear to be who I used to be. And in a really significant way, it truly felt like it wasn’t worth trying to ask that person to reconfigure the way they’ve known me into understanding who I know myself to be now.
There are a lot of people who use “he/him” pronouns for me who I do feel safe with and understood by. While language is powerful and can be an indicator of being seen and understood, I don’t think it’s the only indicator of being seen and understood. I know that there are a good number of people with whom I am safe, loved, and respected. If those people use “he/him” for me but continue to show me in the multitude of other ways that they love and respect me for who I am, I don’t want to burden those relationships by constantly correcting their language when it doesn’t feel like a necessity.
With strangers and casual acquaintances, I don’t expect to be seen or understood or respected, and so it truly doesn’t feel worth it to try to correct someone’s language.
And this point is hard to communicate but also hard to understate: there currently is no pronoun for me that feels “right”. When someone refers to me as “he/him”, it feels inaccurate and imprecise. When someone refers to me as “they/them”, it either makes me feel guilty for asking people to adjust their language in a way that doesn’t flow naturally, or - the majority of the time - it makes me anxious and vigilant and fearful for my safety. No one would think to refer to me as “she/her”, but that wouldn’t feel right either. Of those options, “he/him” feels SAFEST and easiest and most convenient, even if it doesn’t quite hit the mark. Unfortunately, when I hear someone refer to me as “they/them”, it more often than not sets off a danger alarm in my brain, and that alertness about potential dangers takes me out of whatever moment I’m in, and then trying to re-enter that moment feels jarring and taxing. While it doesn’t feel great to concede defeat, it does feel important to acknowledge the reality we live in, and it feels more honest to ask people to - at least for now - use the pronouns (“he/him”) that reinforce my safety than to use the pronouns (“they/them”) that - while more accurate - also put me on edge and threaten my sense of stability and security. In case it wasn’t obvious from this post, I am a trauma survivor, and it’s more important to me right now to feel like my safety is not at risk than it is to feel like the world around me accurately recognizes my gender.
While I don’t know that every blog post I write needs to have a take-away, maybe the take-away for those of you who read is just a better understanding of what it’s like to live as a non-binary person in this current climate. Am I going back in the closet? I don’t know if I’d call it that, but I also don’t that it’s something to be ashamed of if that’s what it is. I guess it really can’t be considered going back in the closet if I’m posting a public blog entry about it, but sometimes The Closet is where queer people need to be in order to be safe in a world that is hostile to us. I’m still going to experience my queer joy, I’m still going to be who I am, and I’m still going to think of myself in the same way I have. If anything, this blog post is asking those of you who read to take the time to give people like me the support and the space to be both celebrated AND safe. It also gives you an action item, and reinforces that it really is important to use the pronouns people ask you to use, even if the reason for using those pronouns isn’t as joyful as you’d like it to be. Maybe it also makes things easier, and will allow conversation to flow a little more naturally going forward. As always, I appreciate you taking the time to read. Sometimes life is messy, and it felt like maybe going ahead and writing about the mess was just as important as other posts that have been focused on strength and resilience. Do what you need to do in your life to feel both celebrated AND safe, and let me know if there are ways I can support you in feeling both things.