Don’t Fence Me In: A Nonbinary Woman’s Tale

I’m free from a shackle, I’m free from a chain

My body’s just a body and my name’s just a name

-Amyl and the Sniffers, “Don’t Fence Me in” 

My entire life, being a woman has both been an important part of my identity and something I dislike. I don’t really know a better way to explain it than that. I was raised by a feminist mom who made sure I knew that Barbies weren’t realistic examples of female bodies and Cinderella, my favorite princess, should have done a better job of standing up for herself. She also introduced me to She-Ra, my favorite superhero, and established my love for unconventional women. 

Despite my mom’s protests, though, I still loved Barbies, pink, and glitter. But at the same time, I wanted to play with the boys, and I didn’t understand why there were seemingly arbitrary rules like girls can’t pee standing up  (apparently no one poops standing up, learned that the hard way) and girls can’t run around shirtless, but boys can. 

The sophisticated reader of this magazine might recognize little me as a queer kid icon, loving rainbow and glitter but also wanting to destroy gender roles and the binary. But remember, this was the early 90s, so the best I got instead was name calling and confusion. 

Plus, as I got older, things got more confusing, not less. I was interested in feminism in college and enrolled in women’s studies, only to be told upon class starting that they were changing the name to gender studies. This opened up my world to a whole new host of ideas and concepts that had before been unfamiliar to me, and like a lot of other millennials in college, I began to understand things like gender, queerness, pronoun use, and fluidity in addition to romantic and sexual orientation. 

But still, I was hesitant to apply these ideas to myself. Someone else now uses “they” or “he” instead of “she?” Awesome, what name do they go by? Between my love for seeing others happy and my academic embrace of gender theory, there was never an issue there. But little old me? I may be poor, but I’m a cis, white woman, damn it, and I need to just chill. 

*Cue the dramatic music* Or am I? 

Much like when I came out as bisexual, my nonbinary identity is something I tried to push off for as long as possible. I tried to write off being bi as hormones and puberty, then experimentation and being a stereotypical college kid, until it just got impossible to deny that my attraction to women romantically and sexually is any different than my attraction to men. With my gender identity, I was constantly faced by a system of thoughts that felt, frankly, cyclical and a little frustrating:

As a person with a vagina in 2022, and a person who has lived almost 33 years that way, it is incredibly important to me to advocate for the rights of other folks with vaginas, as we do not currently have the same rights and protections under the U.S. government that folks without vaginas have. And as someone who was socialized female, there is a lot of that socialization that will be with me forever. And a lot of it I like. I’m a Libra, and I live for aesthetics. I like music, TV, and other media that is super femme. And I don’t suffer from gender dysphoria: I like my breasts, my vagina, and for the most, part, aside from internalized fatphobia, my body. I like being a femme-bodied person. 

But then there are the things I can no longer ignore. I don’t like being called “female” or “a girl.” I like playing aggressive metal music and dating women, which I don’t necessarily think are things that automatically make someone masc, but society may beg to differ. And I feel most comfy with a queer hairstyle, wearing a band t-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. I don’t like when things are separated into “men’s” and “women’s,” even bathrooms. I nearly had a breakdown and started sobbing when I thought the tour I was going on was going to end up with segregated sleeping arrangements. 

I have friendships with men that feel like stereotypical “gal pals” type friendships, and friendships with women that feel like I’m their guy friend. Both “she” and “they” feel equally fitting, and sometimes I want to be ultra-femme, other times not so much.

But despite all that, or maybe because of it, I still couldn’t really reconcile what I was feeling or how I should be fitting into the world. I didn’t want to give up my “she/her” label, but I also didn’t want to be tied to it forever like a cross to bear until I die. 

That’s when, once again, after a lifetime-long love affair, punk rock saved the day. Punk songs have a very beautiful way of stripping away all metaphor and pretension and just saying what they mean, and Amyl and the Sniffers are one of my favorite queer, contemporary, feminist punk bands. In their song “Don’t Fence Me In,” quoted at the beginning of this article, vocalist Amy Taylor has a line I couldn’t get out of my head for the longest time: My body’s just a body and my name’s just a name.

Leave it to the punks to make it so simple. On the same record, Taylor sings about being a person with a vagina, having to carry a knife when she walks home at night, and about not being taken seriously by men at shows. But despite that lived experience, she also doesn’t want to be a slave to the binary. She wants to be perceived as simply human. 

From then on, that became my mantra. I didn’t owe anyone an explanation—I can have a nonbinary name, a femme sense of fashion, and present any way I please. It’s completely valid to embrace the experience of being a woman and wanting to exist outside of that and be more than that, and that goes for anyone else who finds themselves between binaries. 

It’s important to note that I by no means have it all figured out, and that’s OK: I don’t have to. Life is a journey, and it’s all about figuring out where we fit in when it comes to whom we love and are attracted to, how we show that love, what to do with our lives, and how we express ourselves, so it makes sense for our gender expression to be part of that journey as well. 

And, for those who don’t like that, go ahead and take the other indispensable piece of advice from Amly and the Sniffers, in the song “Freaks to the Front”:

If they don’t like you as you are

Just ignore the cunt!