or how we can still stand up for ourselves, however small
Today’s title from one of my favorite fuck you anthems, Martha Wainwright’s “Bloody Motherfucking Asshole”. Crank this up when you feel like singing the chorus over and over and over again.
This is one of those curves you can’t see coming when the year changes from 2020 to 2021 and you want to do something different to connect with people, so you sign up for this cool, free newsletter website to begin a new journey. What I knew about Substack when I chose that as the home for gentle animal was that it was easy to use and I liked the UI and it was totally free—all great things.
Friday morning I got what would be the final Substack newsletter from the wonderful writer Mary Retta (twitter) in which she detailed Substack Inc’s financial support of a handful of transphobic writers. I’d heard nothing about this because I am not on much social media and I don’t read the news anymore, so I did some research, and, yep, they’ve paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a variety of transphobic writers to get them to come write newsletters for Substack.
It wasn’t even a choice for me so much as a what next? I do not have time or space for transphobes in my own life, and I choose not to financially support businesses, if I can, who use their resources to support bigotry, hatred, or ignorance. Do I still get Chick-Fil-A sometimes? YES, okay, I’m human, I’m flawed, and a #1 combo is so fucking good. But gentle animal is mine and I want to continue it, and I don’t want to feel conflicted every time I write another post.
In the past, my reasons would have been purely ideological, a moral conversation about right and wrong—I am 100% sure it is wrong to discriminate against trans people and I know that morality, biology, and history are on my side here. But this issue, as of a year ago, affects me more directly now.
ooh, scary, personal information
A year ago, I began to identify as nonbinary. This is not necessarily the same thing as being trans, though some people do identify as both nonbinary and trans. I do not—I am not trans. But the reason these identities are so innately tied together is because they both essentially do the same thing here in America, which is to challenge our existing and extremely limited ideas of gender, often with great danger to the vulnerable people who challenge these ideas. The fight for trans rights is the fight for everyone’s gender rights, including your rights as a man or woman and my rights as a nonbinary individual.
I have always struggled with gender identity, or should I say I had always struggled—until I learned more about the nonbinary community. This is one benefit of growing older: if you can manage it, you get to keep up to date on all the new words that kids come up with for things you felt but never had a system to identify, or old things that lots of people have felt but that we, in this country, have wiped from history and refuse to acknowledge.
Nonbinary, put simply, is exactly what it sounds like: it refuses to subscribe to the Western idea that there are only 2 genders in a binary relationship to each other, male OR female, girl OR boy, woman OR man. Some days, imposter syndrome rears its ugly head and I feel silly to call myself this—it feels, simultaneously, overly complex and overly simplified at the same time. But in these moments, I take a deep breath, and I remind myself what the term means: it simply means that I do not subscribe to our Western binary system of gender, and I honestly think it’d be a healthier world to live in if more people did not subscribe to this binary. That, in and of itself, is enough of a reason to identify that way.
Frankly, I believe the many binaries of Western culture are mostly harmful to us, as they force us all to live inside much smaller boxes than we need to, or force us to rail against very small boxes that we shouldn’t have to exhaust the energy fighting. Sex and gender are different, but in this country, they’re welded together—if you read my last newsletter, with thoughts on cleaning, this is exactly what I’m talking about. For many years, I felt like I was expected to know how to clean or cook because I was born a woman based only on identifying the sex organs of babies (which sounds weird when you write it out that way…), and this turned cleaning into something I felt I had to fight against, because I was a woman but I didn’t do those things and I felt I shouldn’t have to. The biggest dividend that coming to better terms with my identity has paid out, for me personally, is actually embracing a lot more of the feminine qualities that I struggled against for so long because other people expected me to have them. And, again, as I type this I worry that someone will read this and think, “See, that’s proof that this is all nonsense, because identifying as nonbinary has helped her become more womanly, which she always was.” But this brings me back to the harm of binaries: maybe if I hadn’t been prescribed a gender identity from birth that had nothing to do with who I am but everything to do with social norms, we wouldn’t need the nonbinary identity anyway.
As I’ve said to anyone I’ve told who knows me, I’ve been genderfucking shit my whole life. Another way I know this identity is true for me, even when I sometimes feel anxious about it, is that it literally changes nothing about my life, other than many days it makes me feel more at ease with myself, who I already am. I feel most comfortable when I think of myself as a shapeshifter, when I am allowed to be who I am, in that moment or on that day or for that year, regardless of what masculine or feminine qualities that being encompasses.
I am generally a very private person. I don’t like announcing things, I don’t like people I’m not close to knowing intimate details about me and my life, hell, I didn’t even keep my birthday on Facebook (when I still had one) because I hated getting happy birthday messages from people I don’t talk to on a regular basis. I have “come out” about this new identification, among a few other new identifications, to very few people. But I also believe that, if I say I want to live in a world where I’m the majority for identifying outside the binary, then I can do some things to help foster that change, including identifying that way publicly. People don’t often consider something is possible for them until they see it—I know that was a major part of my struggle with these questions—and if I can ease anyone else’s anguish at all by living authentically and publicly, then I want to do that. As I get older, I see how easy it is to let old social norms dictate the way we think—the “kids these days” mentality—but I do believe that listening to younger generations can be expansive for us as we get older, can help us learn new things, broaden our worldview, and find greater peace with ourselves. They take what we give them, and they build on it, usually for the better. Age isn’t better than youth, not in all ways, and this is another harmful binary that we often subscribe to in this country.
Of course, I’ve had to think of some things, like pronouns. I honestly couldn’t care less about pronouns generally—because of this, I don’t feel much of a need to correct anyone’s usage of pronouns, or to ask for specific pronouns to be used. Since my name’s a little ambiguous, I’ve often been referred to as Mr. Kirin McCrory if someone hasn’t met me yet, and it never bothered me (in fact, I spent many years of my childhood being interpreted as a boy often and enjoying every second of it). Feminine pronouns are fine with me too—I was socialized as a woman and that’s how many people know me, and my femme presentation and straight-presenting marriage certainly doesn’t cause anyone to question feminine pronouns for me. I have started using they/them pronouns for formal presentations of myself for the same reason I’m writing this today—because I want more people to acknowledge and to get comfortable with the fact that gender identity is up to the person themselves, and that feminine signifiers do not make me a woman. I’d love for you to use whatever pronouns feel most comfortable or most appropriate for you.
You might have questions about this, and you’re free to ask them! I have loved engaging with other people’s questions, as they help me to continue to think about my own identity. Coming out about anything is traumatic for some people because it really changes what their life looks like, but as I said, this changes nothing about mine: M, my spouse, knows and is supportive and has been my main confidante as I figured this stuff out, and he loves me precisely because of who I am, this included; no one who knows me has been surprised; and all it does, for me, is give me a better understanding of myself. My hope in sharing this information is that it’ll help you have a better understanding of me, and give you some things to think about for yourself or the world.
what this means for gentle animal
Nothing. If you signed up for the Substack newsletter, which all of you have, I’ve migrated your emails over to a spreadsheet. I looked around at a few other free platforms to host the newsletter, but now I’m afraid of the same thing happening in the future, some platform making another at best ignorant and at worst bigoted error that I don’t agree with, and having to move this all over again. To avoid that, what I’ve done is set up gentle animal to be hosted by my personal website. You’ll still get newsletters in your email, but now they’ll come directly from kirinmccrory@gmail.com. You’ll still be able to like, comment on, or share posts by clicking on the links at the bottom of every newsletter, which will take you to the gentle animal blog on my website.
I’ll end this newsletter with my all-time favorite nonbinary meme that I’ve seen. Those who know me well know my infinite and eternal love for Will Smith, Scientology be damned, and so this meme feels especially appropriate for me:
Thanks for reading. As always, yours, ready to receive.
KM