Before I Came Out as Nonbinary, My Gender Was Thin

I needed to fight my way out of the trance of thinness in order to find out what else was possible, in order to finally see myself.

Every couple of weeks, I get an urge to throw out all my clothes. I find some reason or another to suddenly hate a random piece of clothing I own: maybe a patterned button-down I used to wear to work or a slinky top I might wear out on a Friday night. Or else I grow out of it, my belly pushing against the waist of once-favorite jeans, arms tight in the sleeves of a worn T-shirt, and I want to purge it all and start over. One item fits wrong and suddenly nothing feels like me anymore. I frantically gather piles of clothes in my arms, not bothering to try on what I assume no longer fits. I lug enormous bags to the post office to donate by mail. Then I buy new clothes to replace those that most recently betrayed me, but they aren’t quite right either, and we begin again.

I feel like I’m always in transition.

Two years ago, I sat on the roof of my in-laws’ townhouse in Baltimore, sipped a whiskey ginger, and told my wife I wasn’t sure I felt like a woman anymore. In the time that followed, I started slowly coming out to friends and family and simultaneously entered the most intense phase yet of my recovery from anorexia. For the first time in my life, I am heavier than the average person of my height. For the first time in my life, I eat when I am hungry. And I do so against the canvas of a shifting gender identity, with newfound permission to explore who I am and who I might become.

My body has changed quickly in this time, and so has my understanding of myself. Genderfluid and nonbinary are two words that feel comfortable lately. I’m still learning my way around them, but at least I feel like I’m in the driver’s seat. This body, though? I’m not so sure.

My therapist reminds me that, when I feel like recovery has taken away my self-control, it’s the eating disorder that’s talking. When I was restricting food, overexercising, and lying to my loved ones about whether I had eaten that day, that’s when I wasn’t in control. That’s when something else, a gripping fear—a grave illness, truthfully—was in charge.

When I was very thin, I also struggled with clothes. Not so much fitting into them—that part was easy—but knowing what would feel like me, what would make me feel like myself. I believed skinny cis women (as I identified at the time) wore flouncy tops and dark jeans and blazers, so I wore flouncy tops and dark jeans and blazers. I wore dresses to weddings and pencil skirts to job interviews and never dreamed of cutting my long hair. These days, my wife will sometimes find a shirt from my very-skinny years and ask, “Did you really like this? Did this really feel like you?”

The problem, of course, is that nothing felt like me back then because I didn’t stop and think about who I was when it came to gender and self-expression. I spent all my energy focusing on staying thin and held space for little other self-discovery. Who needs gender when you’re skinny? I didn’t.

*

For three decades, I didn’t question my gender. I gradually came out as bisexual in the late 2000s to mixed reactions. My parents didn’t throw me out, but they didn’t quite know how to respond. My first girlfriend was also my best friend—classic!—and the rocky end of our relationship left me feeling sad and lonely. I wasn’t ready to commit to queerness so publicly back then, and my self-doubt made me an inconsiderate partner to someone I cared about deeply. Thankfully, things changed for the better in the next few years; I went away to college and made queer and trans friends there, and I eventually got louder about my queerness, living like there was no need to come out anymore, like I was always already out. I loved it.

Throughout all this time, I struggled with my eating disorder in the background. Anorexia had come about when I was very young, no more than nine or ten, and manifested throughout my life as a tormented relationship with food and exercise. My disorder reached its crux the year after I graduated from college. I dropped several sizes and stopped getting regular periods. I had full-blown panic attacks at the mere thought of missing a workout. I wholly believed that nothing mattered except the smallness of my body.

Meanwhile, I kept up my persona as a proud queer person, performing assurance and confidence in who I was to everyone around me. It was the early 2010s and I spent a lot of time on queer Tumblr, where fiery, hyperspecific conversations about the meaning of various identities reigned. As a result, I had an above-average understanding of trans and nonbinary identities—at least for a cis person. I followed trans content creators on social media, read books by renowned trans authors like Leslie Feinberg and Janet Mock, and strove to be a good ally. But it never occured to me that a label other than “thin woman” might apply to me. I couldn’t even imagine wanting to be categorized as anything other than how skinny I was.

In the later 2010s, when a handful of loved ones shared their own revelations about identifying as nonbinary, I felt jealous. I envied their sureness—not even their exploration or explosion of what gender is and could be, but simply their certainty. Then the pandemic came, and in all that extra time I had, separated from friends and family while stuck inside my apartment, I started to wonder if maybe there was something true to me other than cis womanhood. Celebrating the transitions of my friends and listening to their stories, whenever they offered to share them with me, helped me eventually come out to myself: the recognition that if I longed for something when I saw it in someone else, it might mean something about me.

But I didn’t—I couldn’t—explore my gender identity in my disordered body. The only form of self-expression that mattered was my thinness. My gender was thin.

But I didn’t—I couldn’t—explore my gender identity in my disordered body. The only form of self-expression that mattered was my thinness.

*

I remember shopping for clothes during my thinnest year, late 2013 or early 2014. I was fully immersed in queer Tumblr as a prolific blogger on the site, posting several times a day about queer news and culture. The more involved I became with the queer community—online and via my circle of friends—the more drawn I was to masculine-of-center styles: boxy fits, clean lines, dapper shoes. In the past, I’d believed my figure disallowed me from wearing butch button-downs or straight slacks from the men’s section, like so many of my nonbinary friends did. Not so that year.

For the first time ever, I bought fitted men’s clothes at chain stores and spent my nonprofit-assistant paychecks on button-downs and jackets I didn’t need but desperately wanted. I once spent over an hour in the H&M dressing room, swapping out looks, admiring my thin silhouette, and sizing down, down, down. I looked so out of place, walking around the store with my arms full of men’s shirts and ties, that a male customer assumed I was an employee and tried to take the items out of my hands.

I loved my body’s sleek, straight lines, the absence of curves—the paper-thin ideal I now know society holds up as peak nonbinary, according to the fashion brands and media that laud androgynous styles on skinny white bodies—but mentally, I held firmly to womanhood. I was curious about gender-neutral pronouns but felt like it would be appropriative to consider using them myself. And coming out once had been enough for a lifetime, I thought.

I know now, of course, that gender is not about what you wear or about what your body looks like. I know that I was nonbinary the day I put on my wedding dress, that I am nonbinary when I wear a suit to an event, and that I will be nonbinary no matter the shape of my body. I know that physical transition is critical to some nonbinary folks, inaccessible to others, and unimportant to others still. But in those early days of self-exploration, I wanted desperately to be perceived as something other than a cisgender woman, even if I didn’t realize it yet. Even if I wasn’t ready to figure it out. As long as I could also be thin.

After I began to heal from my eating disorder, those skinny- and slim-fit men’s clothes were the first from my closet to go. Recovery gathered on my hips and in my belly. I grew out of my 32A bras. My ass simply will not quit. I no longer look like the stick-straight feminine ideal I worked so hard to embody, nor like the archetype of nonbinary identity, its thinness and androgyny, that I might have once pulled off. Because I am still recovering—and because recovery is messy—I often miss what I used to look like, even though I was very sick at the time.

But I am filling that space in my heart with something that will actually nourish me: books and television and Twitter threads and TikToks that affirm nonbinary identity in all kinds of bodies, and good, good friends who model a slew of genders and body sizes—who know that one does not define the other. That’s the gender euphoria I am looking for: the idea that gender has no body type. That I can be whoever I am, no matter what I look like.

*

When I finally came out as a nonbinary woman in early 2021—a pandemic trans, as it were—I attached a lot of asterisks. I’m not not a woman anymore, I told my loved ones. I still think of myself as a wife, a sister, a daughter. All of that is still true, but I feel increasingly certain of also being nonbinary, of being more than one thing at a time. Is that allowed?

Coming into a new body and a new gender at the same time has been tricky. I no longer look like the version of myself I knew best: the thin version, sure, but also the version that’s holding something back. I am working hard in therapy to unlearn the deep-seated fatphobia that tells me this new body is a worse one and am instead finding ways to celebrate it. I eat three meals a day! I don’t have panic attacks after eating anymore! Isn’t that great?

At the same time, I’m on the brink of discovery. There is so much about my gender—about myself—that I don’t yet know. I have no idea how I will feel or how I will look one year, five years, ten years from now. I think I’m unlikely to pursue top surgery or change my legal gender marker, but who knows? I’m trying—I promise I’m trying—to be excited by all this uncertainty, instead of abjectly terrified.

But at the very least I know that for the first time in thirty-one years, I think of myself as more than my body. In recovery, and in gender exploration, and in my thick thighs and big belly, I am learning. I am learning what I like to wear and how I want to feel and how I want to be perceived. I am learning that, even when I was at my thinnest, I didn’t like myself, and that maybe now is my chance. I am learning that I am worth getting to know.

That’s the gender euphoria I am looking for: the idea that gender has no body type. That I can be whoever I am, no matter what I look like.

My wardrobe isn’t perfect yet; there are still pieces I can’t stand, relics from my old lives that aren’t quite me anymore. In the back corner of my closet is a pile of jeans I no longer fit into. I know every therapist in the world would tell me to just get rid of them, to get them out of the house, but I am holding on to them for reasons I can’t quite explain. I don’t have any menswear left. In fact, my clothes are skewing more femme than they used to. I bought a slinky dress for a wedding. I actually like my new boobs. I don’t think I look like any archetype at all, and that’s okay.

I expect that it will take a while before I feel settled into this newness, before my body and my gender feel like they are really mine instead of costumes I am trying on. But I would like to believe that I’m dedicated to the process, that I am embracing each new feeling as an opportunity instead of running from it. I do not love my new body every day, but I am grateful for what it’s brought about. I needed to fight my way out of the trance of thinness in order to find out what else was possible, in order to finally see myself. The image gets clearer every day. Recovery is ongoing. So is gender, I think.