Customize

The first time I questioned my gender identity, I was playing Pokémon Black and White. 

If you’re a 90s kid or a nerd like me, you may know that older Pokémon games offer an infamous character selection screen with the tagline, “Are you a boy? Or a girl?” at the top. Before players can begin their mission to catch ‘em all, they must select between one of these two options. 

And, for the first time, I wasn’t sure which one I wanted to pick. 

Both of the pixelated options were promising. It wasn’t that the girl character was over sexualized (like in so many games) or that the male protagonist was so bland that his canonical name should’ve been “White Bread,” but I wasn’t sure which of these two options aligned with me the most. The boy wore a blue jacket, loose, dark pants, and gripped the rim of his baseball cap as if in salute. Blue was my favorite color at the time (I was deep in the throes of a Percy Jackson phase), so I was drawn to his outfit, but the girl’s clothes had their own appeal. She wore a white tank top with a cropped vest, distressed shorts, and black and pink combat boots. Though we shared the same muted brown hair color, my hair was so thin that it would take a miracle and several trips to the salon to make it as full and luscious as hers. 

I had never questioned who I was until then. I looked back and forth from the charismatic boy to the spunky girl, wondering why it was so hard to choose one of them. It should’ve been obvious, right? When I was born, the doctor glanced at my sex organs and marked the “F” on my birth certificate, and that was that. I was female. Isn’t that all gender is, really? A smudge of ink on a paper? 

While I wasn’t expecting a damn Pokémon game to be the beginning of my self-discovery, it wasn’t the last incident where I struggled with this aspect of myself. I frequent group exercise classes, which are very women-dominated. Whenever the instructor said something like “let’s go, girls!” or perhaps an enthusiastic, “you’ve got this, ladies!”, I’d feel something churn in my stomach, like I had swallowed cement, and it was hardening in my intestines. Even within these classes, I felt like an outsider, like an alien taking the form of a human woman who was curious to experience the novelties of a gym. 

But it wasn’t their fault, how were they supposed to know? I dressed like a woman, looked like one, talked like one, but I didn’t feel like one. How should I explain that to people? Should I get one of those red and white “My name is…” stickers they use at social events and write: “Yeah I know I look like a woman but I’m not, don't ask me why haha thanks!” 

Sadly, I don’t think that would work out too well. 

I’d always heard of things like internalized racism and homophobia, where someone is a part of a marginalized group but still has harmful opinions of that group. I realized I had some kind of nonbinary phobia, which was odd to me. I was bisexual, which I realized shortly after watching the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which is a strangely common sexual awakening amongst many people for a film involving a pirate curse and the East India Trading Company. But being bisexual never perturbed me. Maybe it was because I was surrounded by the LGBTQ+ community for my whole life. Some of my family members were gay, and about 90% of my high school friend group were proudly queer at the time or realized they were gay later on in life. But something about being nonbinary felt wrong. I felt wrong, and when I looked at other nonbinary people, I felt that they were wrong too. 

I had a nonbinary friend in high school who came out a few years after graduation. After they came out, they chose a cool and androgynous name like Sam. Names like these are so elastic, they could be woven into any situation, and nobody would bat an eye. Sam could be your car mechanic who could pinpoint exactly why your decades-old rust bucket of a car made a “grrahhhh” noise just by starting the engine. Sam could be your child’s swim coach, a college student that didn’t particularly like working with children but needed some extra money to pay the rent. Sam could be your elderly, retired neighbor who spent their days telling kids to get off their lawn or else. 

Sam could be anybody. 

When Sam came out to me, I was not the most receptive. At the time, even though I shared the same feelings about being outside of the gender binary, I felt that, if I couldn’t be comfortable with my identity, then there was no way that any nonbinary person was truly at ease with themselves. As flawed as this thinking was, I was convinced that if I was apprehensive about my gender, then everyone else was, too, and they were just hiding it better. 

Since then, I apologized to Sam and explained everything. They were very relaxed about the whole thing, saying something along the lines of, “no problem, my dude!” Even though they were very understanding, I still felt like a rotten friend for dismissing them because I couldn’t overcome my own nonbinary phobia. 

And, honestly, I was a bit jealous of Sam. They had a unisex name. Physically, they had more androgynous features. They could pass easily as either a man or woman depending on how they presented themselves. I, on the other hand, am very obviously afab, no matter how I dress, and it makes it so much harder to accept myself. How was I supposed to feel that I lived outside of the gender binary when I looked like a generic white woman? 

I wish I could live in a video game and customize myself. 

I want to live in a character creation screen, where I could adjust the angles of my face, the size of my biceps, even the plumpness of my lips, depending on how I felt that day. I wish I could alter the size of my hips, the width of my shoulders, and the sharpness of my jaw. I’d love to live in a universe where I could customize my physical features and present myself with the body that resonated with me the most in that moment with a simple click of a button. 

Unfortunately, I’m bound by the laws of physics and logic, and cannot bend reality to my will. Perhaps that’s for the best, because I would probably spend hours of my day customizing my features and make very little progress in every other aspect of my life. 

There’s still nothing I can point on my body and say, “see? That’s what makes me nonbinary,” but maybe that’s the point. There’s a particular beauty in ambiguity, of how two people who look nothing alike are aligned by living outside of the binary. It proves that gender is socially constructed in hopes to simplify something so robust and unique for every individual person. 

I’m comfortable with who I am now. Though people still use she/her pronouns for me, I let it roll off of my back like waves crashing over sand. Those people don’t know how I feel, but I do. And I know that what I feel is valid.

And all of this first started when I was 12 years old, my Nintendo DS lite gleaming in my hands, with the pixelated Pokémon Professor asking me the pivotal question: 

“Are you a boy? Or a girl?” 

I look at both of them, the confident boy, the girl with her hands on her hips. 

I picked the boy. I wanted a change of pace, since up until now, I’d always chosen the female characters. I wondered what it would be like to experience this game from a different lens. I would still be catching the same Pokémon and challenging the same gym trainers, but how would I feel about exploring this world as a boy?  

And blue is fucking sick.