Ginger HawthorneAfter 40 years of struggle, two years of therapy, 18 months since a breakthrough and 10 months of exploration and experimentation, I’ve come to a realization that I’m ready to say out loud.
I’m bigender.
I’m dominantly male, but I’ve come to accept that my femininity is real, that it’s okay, and that it’s not just a set of thoughts and behaviors. It’s a core part of my identity. By recognizing myself as bigender, I can accept both aspects of myself as a cohesive whole, for the first time in my life.
My pronouns are still he/they, but I’m keeping an open mind. I’m not planning to physically transition in any way. I’ll still use men’s bathrooms, until the glorious day that we eliminate gendered bathrooms altogether.
I also don’t feel like I have two separate identities or discrete components to my identity. I think about it in a similar way to how you might describe ethnic heritage. If you’re half German and half Italian, do you have two discrete senses of yourself? Of course not. You’d have a single identity that happens to be informed by multiple perspectives. That’s how it is for me.
I’m not asking you to understand it, and I’m not asking you to accommodate me in any way. I just hope that you can continue to respect me as the same person I’ve always been. The only thing that’s changed is that I know who I am now.