This is Queer: Dae
Gender and attraction — these are experiences Dae prefers to live without boundaries. They approach these concepts with fluidity and a great sense of possibility.
“I was around 18 or so when I first found the terms non-binary and genderqueer, and it was a huge lightbulb moment for me. For a few years at that point, I’d been questioning my gender and making occasional frustrating efforts to pass as a boy,” Dae shares.
At 33 years old, they grew up in the 90’s with a progressive view of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people but had little exposure to trans and nonbinary people and role models.
“I sang in a church choir, and I loved that my voice was deeper than the other girls’. I kept daydreaming about developing shapeshifting powers so that I could turn into a man. I was so dismayed when I got my hair cut off and it didn’t immediately lead to people seeing me as a guy or not knowing how to gender me. But it was harder to find trans voices online then, and when I looked up information about trans men and transition options, I had a hard time seeing myself in what I found. So I thought my only other option was to push those feelings down and ignore them.”
Dae’s experiences of attraction as a young person were different than those around them, too. Girls around them were gushing over Leonardo DiCaprio as Titanic came to theatres, but Dae found themself infatuated with the beauty of Kate Winslet. They adopted the term “bisexual” as a teenager and still feels it fits at present, an important acknowledgement of their attraction to men and nonbinary persons, despite find themself most often attracted to women.
“I’d meet a girl and become absolutely infatuated with the idea of being her friend. It took a while for me to recognize things like this as attraction or crushes. I think even though I knew that queer people existed, I had so little exposure to queerness that it was hard for me to recognize what my feelings were. My ideas about love and attraction were very influenced by all the movies I watched, which were very straight. I started figuring it out at 13, and I felt like a late bloomer! Which seems silly in retrospect, especially since I definitely don't have everything figured out now.”
But Dae knows that “figuring things out” is a process, a fun one that is life-long and likely ever changing. They also acknowledge that there are always questions.
“I can’t always tell if I find men attractive or if it’s just gender envy. So my bisexuality is very theoretical sometimes. My questions about my sexuality are often closely tied to my gender as a non-binary person. How do I want others to find me attractive? Would I be okay with a partner being attracted to me because I’m female-assigned-at-birth and don’t present as a man? There aren’t always easy answers to those questions.”
And amongst all the questions, Dae is always exploring, trying on new identities, discarding others. From watching drag king videos during pandemic isolation and practicing those looks with dreams of performing one day to navigating finding men’s clothing for their 5’4” frame, it’s an evolution, a work in progress, a journey.
“I love being queer, but feeling like I don’t fit neatly into one category or another can be challenging sometimes. Even though I’ve been navigating being non-binary for at least a decade at this point, it’s still easy to feel like I’m supposed to find myself on a more binary path at some point. That someday I’ll be confident that I’m a trans man or feel comfortable calling myself a woman. Neither of those things have happened so far. I’m genderfluid, so sometimes my feelings about that do fluctuate. I try to make peace with that fluidity and acknowledge it as part of who I am, but it does make things like making decisions about transitioning difficult. I’m not sure right now if I’ll have top surgery or start testosterone or not, but those options are on my radar.”
In essence, living outside the binary is living outside definition, living with ever present questions to explore. And in many ways, this seems to be the greatest adventure of Dae’s life — so far.
