i'm not non binary no more

something more like wayward

“craziest walk back of all time, i’m not non binary no more,”

I said in a reel last month. This video resulted in a number of folks agreeing and of course a number of dense debbie downers intentionally missing the point. When I say I’m not nonbinary no more, I mean I don’t relate to defining myself in negation. It menas I don’t relate to the abundance of yt tender queers being heavily associated with the word…i just have felt an urge to find a different framework to describe myself within. language loses its elasticity, we are seeing that in real time. i’m not rebuking nobody who is non binary, but for me, it doesn’t seem to describe my lived experience anymore.

My gender is Black first. We seem to forget that our gender, as Black people, is at the whim of who is interpreting us. In queer spaces, I was often regarded as someone who’d automatically be characterized as masc. In straight spaces, I was often regarded as hyper femme Jezebel or a hyposexual mother figure. But what I have found in my ten years of being non binary is that my gender and its expression has always been up for debate based on someone else’s relationship to Blackness.

“Blackness ruptures the laws of gender just like the laws of the state seem intent on rupturing Black life” - Hari Ziyad

I don’t like leaving myself to the whim of misinterpretation, but I don’t think Blackness is ever meant to be fundamentally understood by the world surrounding us. nor do i necessarily want it to be.

i think of ocean vuong describing queerness as going beyond the bumpers on a freeway and venturing out into an unsure unknown open space. i’ve been thinking a lot of the concept of fugitivity - what does it mean to be captured by a lexicon of identity signifiers that are used by the state for categorization. Describing myself within those limitations were just no longer satisfactory. Which led me to consider Saidiya Hartman’s emphasis on waywardness, which is something i resonate with far more deeply:

I wanna embrace abandoning my gender because it feels akin to self determination. to blow up what was and make do with what could be. I want to be relentless in my struggle towards defining myself which also means unchaining myself from language that for ME, is doing more harm than good. “When the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe” I get ancy. And this is just me and my practice, no part of what I’m saying is an imposition onto others. Regardless of whatever gender construction I make for myself, walking away from non binary is also choosing to delink myself from the current terms and conditions associated with said gender. Part of living in the mode of survival is calling upon improvisation and pivots when necessary. even if it is unpopular or impossible to understand.

My gender shifts alongside me on the run. It’s dependent on who I’m around. Who is absent. Who is present. My gender is ancestral. Undefined. Alien. Perilous. Shapeshifting. Ever present. Cannot be reduced to a term. Or. An ideology. My gender responds to “girl” n “bro.” It is auntie and uncle. My gender is resistant to identity reductionism. It is wayward in its survival. It’s an opaque unknowable thing. Tangible to only me and the feeling that I get when surrounded by kin. It’s a vibe. It’s a wave. It’s a prayer. It’s a eulogy. It’s a manifesto. And an opportunity. to abandon knowing everything and finding somethin in the nothin that remains.

*the work of Hari Ziyad, Mia Harrison, and Saidiya Hartman influenced this piece greatly