As a transgender person with male biology and distinctly feminine traits, I believe myself to be a unique variation of nature. I am not ashamed of who I am. I was not born into the wrong body. My genitals are not a birth defect. And I am not to be sterilized by psychiatry and a medical establishment that has run amok.

After a historic court ruling, I am free. I am the first non-binary person in the United States to be officially recognized. I refused to be classified. And now, I’ve been vindicated.

Transgender people such as myself were once a celebrated part of ancient civilizations. The downfall for transgender people began when societies and countries such as the US decided that I had to be made into the equivalent of a cisgender female. That was the only way to make my existence palatable for the sake of religious extremists, which insist that their gods have declared that males and female exist without variance or alternatives.



My court victory has broken a gender binary that many said could not be dismantled. In doing so, I have won the right to exist in any manner that I choose throughout the gender spectrum. The traditional constraints imposed by an unjust sex classification system of just male or female, that still governs those who lack my freedoms, has been lifted for me.



In the face of adversity, I have declared my right to define my existence and won that right. As a transgender person, I can no longer be accused of appropriating the identity of a cisgender female, because I have created my own, and been awarded the right to exist as that identity. But most importantly, my court victory has opened the door for all those like myself to also taste freedom from the gender binary.

The United States desperately needed a third sex classification of non-binary for all of the people such as myself that simply do not fit into the existing binary system of just male or female. As a transgender person who was forced to live as a male for nearly 50 years, and who then electively lived as a female for the following three years to alleviate my gender dysphoria, I have discovered that I am healthiest and best served by not being forcibly classified as either male or female against my will.



During my three-year journey to discover my gender identity, the experience led me to conclude that I must first and foremost make peace with my biology of being assigned male at birth, because it simply cannot be changed. No amount of female hormones or surgeries can change that. Similarly, no amount of male socialization or masculine life experiences were able to erase my feminine gender identity traits.



By having this lived experience as both sexes, I ultimately concluded that a different way to be transgender needed to be created in the United States, because classifying me as a female was simply not the appropriate solution for me.

The solution of how to categorize someone such myself with this mixture of male biology and female gender identity traits is not to attempt to turn me into the passing equivalent of a cisgender female for the sake of respectability politics. Or for the lack of other viable answers. And it was for this reason that I sought my needed solution: a non-binary sex classification.

