So yeah, any questions?

No current questions. 

Okay. Well then boy, do I have some questions for you.

Hell yeah, okay.

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Is there anything you’d like to say outright about how you identify in any regard?

Am non-binary. That’s it. That’s all I know. *laughs* 

Okay, follow up. What does that mean to you?

Heck. Uh… We got so far. *we both laugh* You know, I just know: not girl, not boy. Don’t fit in either of those things. I still have yet to fully determine how much of my brain stuff is gender and how much is trauma, so that’s always fun. I don’t know. I sometimes feel like my gender is simply the void, and you know, I like to just be Addison. Anything else is like, “Hmm. That’s not right. I don’t like that.” 

That’s fair. We’ll circle back on a few questions related to gender identity later.
So many people distinguish between several different types of attraction, including but not limited to sexual attraction, romantic attraction, sensual attraction, aesthetic attraction, and others. It is time to discuss what these mean to you. I know if you look up any of these phrases on the interwebs, then you get some generally consistent definitions that different web pages and articles will spit out at you, but I’m concerned about what these mean to you specifically. How would you describe sexual attraction? 

That’s actually a question that’s been on my mind a lot recently— of like, whether that’s actually happening. But that one’s really confusing because I feel like that is more determined by body saying things than it is by brain saying things, so it’s like, “Oh, hey, person cute person. Nice, want to do things,” and that’s about all I got. I don’t think it means very much at all. I feel like it’s mostly just a physical response to other types of attraction. 

Do you experience that?

I think I do. I mean it’s also made a little more difficult by the fact that I’ve been in a relationship since 2018. So I’ve been pretty consistently comfortable where where I’ve been in terms of that. You know what I mean? Like, I’m not worried like about whether I’m sexually attracted to anyone because I have a partner. It doesn’t happen super often. I don’t understand a lot of the time how or why people are sexually attracted to complete strangers. That is something that sort of baffles me. But I know, fairy occasionally, like maybe like once or twice a year, that’ll happen with me, but typically sexual attraction for me is based on actual emotional and romantic connections. I guess that sort of begins to put me under the demisexual label, but I don’t know how much I identify with that at this point.

Okay, romantic attraction. What’s that? 

When things feel safe and comfortable and [you] want to do nice lovely things for someone like dates and smooch and, I don’t know, romantic things like hold hands. 

Do you experience that? 

Yeah, absolutely. Unquestionably— I want to go on dates with people. I like that. 

Sensual attraction. Does that mean anything to you?

Oh shit. *laughs* Hold on.

Yeah, this is one that I didn’t really ever think about very much until I saw things on the interwebs putting this in a separate category. At first, I was like, “Why is this in a separate category?” 

I feel like it’s like a Venn diagram.

Describe the Venn diagram, if you would.

So, sensual attraction is more of the things that I was saying, like, smooching, wanting to hold hands, wanting to be close to, but then romantic attraction would be more like language, service, and gift-giving based. Like, “Oh, this person makes me feel like I want to express to them how much I love them.” Sensual attraction is more like, “I want to be physically close with this person, but not necessarily intimate in a sexual way.” 

Yeah. The last one I listed was aesthetic attraction.

That’s just when you see someone pretty. It’s like looking at a cool painting where you’re like, wow, that person looks really cool. 

How often do you feel sensual attraction? And how often do you feel this aesthetic attraction?

Aesthetic? Definitely all the time. Like I’m like, holy shit, that person is really cool-looking. Sensual? I think slightly less often than aesthetic or romantic but definitely more than sexual. A good middle ground.

Got it. I think it’s interesting that you pointed out that you feel that more than sexual attraction because I know some people that feel that in tandem with sexual attraction and can’t feel it without it, like sexual attraction is a prerequisite for that. But you’re saying almost the opposite. 

Yeah, that’s something that’s actually always confused me because I thought typically sensual attraction would be the primary one, right? Because to me, I think you want to hold hands with a person and want to be close with a person and then [other things]. Also, I feel like for a long time, like societally— and obviously this has this has shifted— but for a long time while we were growing up, that was sort of how was communicated too. You know, little juvenile things like “getting to first base” and then “getting to second base”— there was a progression into sexuality and I feel like that’s how my brain is wired, but not necessarily because of the societal programming— just because, like, one of these things is way more intimate than the other to me and is way scarier. 

What is the earliest that you can recall experiencing any kind of attraction to any other person?

That one gets kind of complicated as well. This stuff is all very weird. So I had my first crush on a boy in kindergarten, but I very much felt a pressure— like that was something I was supposed to be doing. Like, “I am in school now. I have to pick who I have a crush on,” which I’ve actually have noticed is kind of a very strong pattern amongst sapphic people. I’m not sure if this translates to achillean people, but I know I personally, and other people like lesbians, bisexual women, etc, felt very compelled at a young age. Like, “Oh, other people around me are experiencing attraction to boys. I have to do that too.” And that messaging was very much portrayed in media, so for all of elementary school, a lot of it felt very compulsory. I don’t think that I actually had a lot of legitimate attractions as like a child or any real crushes or anything until I got to middle school and I started to notice what like what kind of people I was attracted to what kind of people I was interested in. And you know, eventually figured out in eighth grade that oh, hey, I have a crush on a girl. Whoa. What the fuck? So yeah. I confused actual attraction with compulsory attraction for for much of my life, but then once I started entering adolescence, that’s when I started figuring it out. So yeah, I say like 14ish.

If present, how do you feel about your sense of libido?

It varies very wildly. So the fun thing about PTSD is that, based on anything from the time of year to who I’m around to the things that I’m experiencing it in my life, I can sometimes be very hypersexual like as a trauma response or I can become very very sex repulsed also as a trauma response and that just kind of depends on what’s going on in my life. So, I would say sometimes, it’s very high, but that is not often a natural state. It’s very much affected by the PTSD, but recently especially it can be very low and I’m like, who cares?

Yeah makes sense. I feel like there’s usually a lot of ambiguity in these types of conversations that I try my best to try to avoid because there’s a lot of confusion around relative terms. Could you talk about what you think what is characteristic of “high” or “low”?

Yeah, so to me, I think that high libido means really wanting to engage in sexual activities whether that’s with someone else or alone. Like, feeling that like physical response where your body’s like, “Hey, you want to do something about this.” When it’s low, for me that can mean two things: one, no desire is present and I’m just kind of going about my life, or two, the opportunity has presented itself and I’m feeling very disgusted by the thought and need to get away from it immediately.

Can you recall the earliest time that you experience your own sense of libido?

I started to become aware of it in late elementary school because of discovering things like masturbation and porn… which I think is maybe an early age to discover these things, but that’s fine. That was sort of like an early foray, and then late middle school/early high school is when I fully began to understand and experience it regularly.

Feel free to answer or not answer as much of this question as you would like and to whatever extent you’re comfortable— I’d like to ask how you discovered porn at what you consider to be in early age. 

Hmm. Honestly, part of it was just like, you know, I played a lot of flash games online… and there were some very bizarre ads and there were also very odd YouTube videos in my recommended videos and I was like.. “What the heck is this about? Hold on— you mean to tell me that there’s naked people ONLINE? I gotta know what this is all about.” I feel like it was a gradual realization, like, “…What do what do people even look like naked?” and then I was like, “Woah! There’s more to learn here than I previously thought…” *laughs* And so yeah, it was kind of one of those. It was like a slow burn.

And do you remember how you felt about it at that time? 

Yeah, I was mostly confused. I was like, “I don’t understand what people came from this.”

That’s fair.
Okay— How do you feel about your sexual education?

 Ha ha ha. [redacted southern state name]. Um, so luckily, also because I found porn through the internet, I also very quickly learned that I should be doing my own sex ed through the internet. This was also helped by American Girl, which is very weird and well, I don’t remember if it was Tampax? It was one of the tampon companies that started an online forum for young girls to get sex education, so like it was like chat rooms and forums and a blog site that was for adolescent teen girls to learn about their bodies and all this. And you know, I’m not a girl but at the time I thought I was. So I was on the website, and it was very helpful and it started to open my eyes to the fact, particularly after fifth grade when they first started teaching us about periods and all of that, that I was like, “Wow. Holy shit. They’re telling us absolutely nothing.”

It also helped that I got in a lot of political arguments online from a very young age. So because of that, I would often hear the talking point of the problems with abstinence only sex ed. So these things all kind of culminated and I was able to seek out and research in educate myself on these subjects whereas my peers were receiving absolutely no information other than, “Look at these scary STIs. If you have sex, you will die! Sign this abstinence only pledge please.”

On a scale of 0 to 10 then, how would you rate the sex ed programs that were presented to you in schools?

Negative 5. Solid negative 5. *laughs* If you need real data, say 0, but but my opinion is negative 5.

All right, great. Only negative numbers so far.
How do you feel about your gender identity?

Yeah— getting more acquainted just  in general, and I feel like maybe perhaps if I get more time alone that will be even better, because I feel like, personally, my gender identity is very much muddied by other people’s perceptions of me, because when I’m being perceived, even though I know I don’t have to and I shouldn’t I feel like there is a gendered standard that I’m supposed to be adhering to, society sort of compels us. So I feel like my gender is very hard to understand and an enigma. But also, I’m getting more comfortable with the fact that I have the rest of my life to figure that out. And also, I don’t have to fully understand it— I can just kind of exist.

Okay, there are a lot of people out there that don’t understand what somebody who says they are non-binary means at all. To one of these people that does not know anything, what would you say if they ask for an explanation?

Yes, they often do. Typically it’s pretty easy to just say, you know, I’m just not a woman and I’m not a man, and those are the two options that have been presented to me and none of them make any sense. Most women and men, especially those who are cisgender and have held that gender identity to themselves for their whole lives, have a very solid definition in their mind of what it means to be a man or a woman. That doesn’t necessarily look the same for person to person, but if you are a man or you’re a woman and you think to yourself, “What makes me this?” typically, you’ll find more answers within yourself that are not ‘I have a penis’ or ‘I have a vagina’; you’ll have a couple of reasons why you think that’s true. When I think of what those things mean to me? Doesn’t apply at all. I feel very uncomfortable and I feel like probably like a cis woman would if she were to be told that she is a man. Very uncomfortable and confused. So that’s kind of the easiest way to begin to get an understanding of what it means to be non-binary and just not adhere to the binary gender options that were given.

Were there any key moments in your life that you can recall that led you to your identity now, and/or when did you begin to feel dissonance? 

Like most things, there was an element of a slow burn to it. You know, when I was younger, there were some things that just did not make any fucking sense to me in terms of gender and sexuality. It really started becoming evident to me my junior year of high school when I started learning about trans people and the concept of being transgender that I was like, “Hold on. Wait a second. We might have found something here.” Because I’ve always had, varying based on what part of my life I’m in, some level of disconnect with my body— feeling very weird about it, feeling like something wasn’t quite right. And again, there was like a general level of confusion about sex and gender and being like, “I don’t understand why things are this way.” So junior year, I started learning about trans issues that I was like, “Okay, this might be a thing,” and I started questioning and started thinking, “Am I a trans man? Am I— I don’t even know what the fuck this non-binary thing is about— what’s going on here?” So I started really thinking about it, but at the same time, I was in and out of an abusive relationship, so it very quickly got shut down and I sort of was like, “Well nevermind— fuck that I guess,” and I sort of put it on the back burner. Then I got to college and I got out of that abusive relationship and I was like, “Okay, I gotta figure this out.”

So I knew that I had very bad problems with my body— very negative reactions when I looked at myself or acknowledged my physical being still to this day. I sometimes forget that I have an actual physical presence..? That I am an entity that other people can perceive. But I didn’t know how much of that was trauma and how much of that was gender, because again, there was always sort of an element of disconnect, but obviously it was made worse by my abusive situation. So I decided, okay look— these next couple years, I’m gonna I’m gonna figure this out. I’m going to put this together. I got in therapy. I made a lot of friends, and a lot of those friends were trans and I was able to talk to them about what their gender meant to them, how they were experiencing it, all of this.

I began to sort of understand non-binary identities. So I was in [a Facebook group that I admined] and I asked them if they could start using they/them pronouns for me, or at least she/they, while we were online so I could kind of test the waters because I was like, look, I don’t know what’s going on with this whole gender thing, but I just want to see what it would feel like if maybe perhaps I was not referred to with gender pronouns. And, holy shit, when I was referred to with not-gendered pronouns, I was like, “Woah, hold on. This is better. I like this a lot.” So I transitioned into using they/them pronouns only— you know, I publicly did she/they and then moved into they/them, and then I started thinking a lot about this reaction to not being gendered in conversation. I was like very caught up in this and I was journaling and writing and really trying to figure out what my experience was and how much of it was about what’s expected of me/rebelling against what’s expected of me. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that I obviously didn’t feel like a woman; I obviously felt very good when I was not gendered in conversation, and these things together are things that I can very objectively say are true. So even though I’m not quite sure what my gender would be— where I’d fall on the spectrum if at all— I didn’t have to figure all of that out. I could instead just be like, “Look, I’m non-binary, don’t ask me to explain that to you, I’m done.” And so I did, and everything since then has just been back to the slow burn of, “I don’t quite know where exactly I lie,” but I don’t feel like I have to yet. So yeah, that’s that’s the story. We did it

We did it! And here you are, explaining it. So, thanks.

So, for stats, on a scale of 0 to 100 percent, how comfortable do you feel with your current gender identity?

That one is hard to answer when you’re not sure exactly what the gender identity is. I would say a solid 57%. I feel compelled to say that number because perhaps— I don’t know. Solid 57. I can’t explain entirely why I think that’s the number, but that’s the number.

How do you feel about your body and what you wear and how does it relate to your sense of identity? 

I feel quite terrible about my body. My body is my enemy and I am at war with it forever. Though I will say, it’s not quite what it was before; you know, I’m not having panic attacks when I look at it anymore, so I guess that’s a good sign. In terms of what I wear, I’ve yet to figure that out. I have started to identify what I don’t like which I think is always a great place to start. But how do you dress as a non-binary person? I don’t fucking know. I like to dress comfy and that’s it. When it comes to like physical expressions of myself and gender, things get very lost in translation and I still don’t have a solid grasp on it. I do have a solid grasp on when it’s going badly.

How comfortable do you feel talking about sex, sexuality, gender, etc. with those close to you— your friends, your family, etc?

Gender, definitely way more so than sex and sexuality. Gender I feel relatively good talking about. Sex and sexuality? It’s not that I feel like averse to doing it or uncomfortable. It’s just like, how do I even articulate? I don’t know. 

Is there anything about these topics that you wish you’d learned earlier than when you did?

Yeah, mostly just that non-binary people exist. That’d be that’d be cool. *laughs*  If I knew that before, that would have solved a lot of problems. Oh my god. Yep. That’s it.

Are there any other topics that you wish to discuss?

Yes.

First of all, the concept of having sexuality labels as a non-binary person is like, what the fuck, right? This is something that I’ve yet to figure out because before I was non-binary, I was bisexual, and now that’s still the label that I use, but also, what does that mean? Because we tend to understand concepts like bisexuality, lesbianism, homosexuality in terms of same-gender/other gender, but when you don’t know what your gender is, how do…? Same gender, different gender, opposite gender? No. It was really funny because I was like, haha. This is funny because no matter what, I’m gay. And then one time as a joke, I was saying this at my friend Antonia’s house and as a joke, Berry was like, “No, you’re actually 100% gay and 100% straight because every gender is the same gender and the opposite gender,” and I was like wait, hold on…? No?

I gotta say, this whole determining who is gay and who’s not thing— it’s all a load of shit and I’m tired of it. I’m on a crusade against it— people are whatever they say they are and I would like to beat up anyone— especially on Twitter— who is like, “You can’t be a lesbian,” or “You can’t be gay,” or “You can’t be heterosexual,” because honestly, this whole concept of labeling sexualities is very helpful in terms of finding community, but also does not always work. That is all. That’s my crusade and I’m on it.