A few weeks ago, I was erased for about the thousandth time.



It was during a Channel 4 News interview with feminist novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She suggested that while trans women might be women, they are different from cis-women because they have been raised in circumstances that afforded them male privilege prior to transitioning. “It’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are,” she said.

At best, it was a gross oversimplification. I was assigned male at birth, but I didn’t feel any male privilege as I was repeatedly verbally and physically assaulted because of my feminine gender expression during my childhood and adolescence. But I’m also not a trans woman. In fact, Adichie didn’t talk about me at all.

I am non-binary. I am neither a man or a woman. And despite a refusal from even some feminists to see gender beyond the binary, I am not going away.

To exist as non-binary is to endlessly reassert ourselves in the face of those who reduce us, again and again, to the binary of men and women. I'm made to float between the truth of my identity and a fiction imposed upon me. It’s the people who refer to me as sir, or use he/him/his instead of my gender-neutral pronoun, they/them. Or referring to me as Josh despite my constant reminders that my name is Joshua.

I have to reassert my visibility over and over. In the face of that, just being seen is hard work. I take selfies, I shoot short videos on my iPhone, and I write essays like this, all to claim a space where I exist. It’s a battle and it’s tiring, which is why people like me tend to get used to being resilient. But it’s made even harder when those who would be our allies don’t see us.