I’m going to tell you something I’ve been afraid to say for basically ever. And it’s gonna be messy, and it’s gonna go to some dark places (including eating disorders so pls be advised) because I’m barfing my heart out onto the page and hoping I can do it fast enough that I won’t reconsider, or hold back. I can’t say all this without first pausing to say this is only my story, and it’s a privilege that I am able to share it. I want to gently remind people that I’m only trying to speak for me and my own experiences, and in no way does that change or speak to others’ realities. I’m coming out (holy shit typing that made me anxious), so this is just my story.

My entire life I’ve not been a girl or a woman.

Growing up, I’d have hissyfits over being talked to or referred to as a girl. People have had to remind me that they see me as a girl or a woman my entire life, because it doesn’t exist in my head. All that ever has is “this isn’t me”.

When I was 12, I started smoking cigarettes because I thought they’d make my voice lower, and I was tired of hearing a high alien pitch come out of my face. About a year later, I started starving myself because i wanted to look like anything other than a girl, and because I didn’t identify with being a boy either. The closest thing I could find to what looked “right” was the waif thin androgynous body type, and when combined with my hatred of my own body I developed a full on eating disorder that I never told anyone about. At one point, I hovered around 100lbs, despairing that my hips were still wide, my shoulders and chest still broad, and that I’d be an hourglass no matter how much I starved.

I managed to recover, mostly, but the hatred of my own body remained, strong enough that I still can’t objectively see myself in the mirror with any sort of accuracy. I found out recently I’ve been wearing the wrong size of everything, always overestimating, always going baggier, always trying to hide what I’d been so ashamed of.

I knew I loved women early in life. It wasn’t any major revelation, because to me, gender seemed to be such an arbitrary line to draw between what you were and weren’t attracted to. It was a non-issue, because I legitimately didn’t think in those terms. But there was an easy model for this, a name I knew, I was Bisexual and that was fine. I fell in with the local lgbtqa+ folks and I started learning about other letters. I’m painfully aware of how misguided I was initially when I started listening to trans people, because the concept of switching one gender for another made no sense to me. I didn’t understand how anyone could “feel” like a man or a woman, because I didn’t feel like either and was projecting. Thankfully I stuck to listening and not talking, and after a while the reality sunk in for me - it’s not them, it’s me. Gender wasn’t a thing to me, any more than infrared light is, but that doesn’t make those things any less real, it just means my eyes don’t work on that spectrum.

Unlike Bisexuality, I didn’t have any easy models. I didn’t know anyone who felt the same way, I hadn’t seen anyone like that in popular culture. I had dated trans people and while we could bond over some of the ways that our bodies felt like aliens to us, it felt like they knew how they would change themselves but I didn’t know where to start, and I didn’t want to add more gender-based exhaustion and work onto my partners so I just… never said anything about that part of myself. I never said anything to just about anyone because I felt caught between people who wouldn’t understand and would likely treat me with fear or disgust, or people who knew all too well what it’s like to look down and see someone else, but already had to put up with entirely too much shit and didn’t need me taking up spaces for people who needed them more.

So I just kind of stuffed it down, assuming I was just weird and everything was likely tangled up with my eating disorder and general internalized misogyny in a gordian knot too thick for me to cut. But it leaked out regardless. I did drag shows with friends where I’d dress up as an aging used car salesman with sequined flame boxers. Another friend said she had a welcoming speech ready for whenever I was gonna come out as trans just in case. But still, I didn’t want to be a man. That wasn’t the missing puzzle piece for me.

Doing drag felt like an act of catharsis - to perform gender, to be something else for a while, to do it in such a tongue in cheek way to hide the very real vulnerability I felt going down that route whatsoever. I started to wonder if it would work the other way - if I could feel okay if I approached femininity as a performance too. I started wearing makeup when I was in my mid-twenties after this clicked into place for me. Performing femininity felt like doing a bit just as much as performing masculinity had, but performing femininity was rewarded in my everyday life. Performing masculinity didn’t feel entirely safe, but I would just play it off as being butch that day if ever asked about it. But being able to perform it at all - to play with it - was a huge step towards lessening my dysphoria and self-loathing. Looking at my gender presentation, my fashion, and my body as something to be worked on or decorated, to try to re-write it to say something, took a lot of the sting out of my hatred of it. In customizing it, it felt like something that was “mine” a bit more than the alien meat suit I had been trapped in. It was the power I felt the first time I dyed my hair an unnatural color when I was 13, but with more understanding. Departing from the “natural” body I’d been given and eschewing it for something that I had *created* let me start to see myself a bit more there, even if it was through a tattoo symbolizing something that mattered to me, or an outfit that I would design for a character who was feeling the way I was feeling that day, or makeup that had the color scheme of a poisonous animal whose intimidation I wanted to borrow that afternoon. So much of creativity and expression is rooted in empathy, and this outside-looking-in approach allowed me to empathize with myself.

Then I became a game developer, and while I could never escape being labeled a girl or a woman (or a fag on days I really passed as male) how people saw my gender suddenly mattered more than ever. The moment I became controversial, I felt the door to further exploration of what gender I actually was slam shut on me. Being a woman was hard enough, nonbinary-ness seemed like a whole other layer of abusive shit to stare down, especially when you’re at a point where if someone asked you “what are you”, you wouldn’t have a good answer. It was hard enough to try to get my foot in the door as a minority that people actually understood somewhat, I didn’t want to give people more excuses to look me over and shut me out. I don’t want to make this be about the suffering that not-cis people face in the games industry though, so I’ll move onto the other side of the coin - the support.

All the women and girls who had told me they’d looked up to me or found something inspiring in my stubbornness to continue making games despite gendered bullshit thrown my way, what would I tell them? It seemed so important for other people that I continue to be read as a woman, and I didn’t want to piss on the parade of people who already are being pissed on from nine other directions.

I feel this heavy burden of being a semi-public figure when I’m really not fit for mass consumption. Politicians, actors, other people who are pursuing a dream of living in the public eye probably prepare for this sort of thing, but it just kind of happened to me (In fact, my ex who kicked off GG actually tried to out me but it didn’t really stick, thank god, so that kind of complicated my feelings on coming out ever). It happened to me the way it can happen to seemingly anyone the way that our current information age works. The hypervisibility I had suddenly gained meant that playing and exploring had heavier consequences than ever. Not just for me, but for people who follow my work - taken out of context, someone experimenting with their gender presentation can absolutely look like they’re coming from the same place as every hack writer who wrote a “lol dude in a dress” sketch. I didn’t want to do that to anyone, least of all the people who would feel betrayed by it. Without divulging everything, I would be leaving the edges to be interpreted by the masses, and I wasn’t ready to come out and correct people and didn’t think that if I did, it’d be good enough.

But who you are inevitably slips out. I bought my first binder two years ago, after asking a couple closest trans friends, awkwardly, where someone might buy something like that. I took a huge step and posted a picture of me in boymode for the first time ever. My dad even liked it on instagram, successfully making me break down and cry in public. I worded it ambiguously enough that people who knew me at all would maybe start to see me a bit clearer, and people who didn’t care would see a tomboy.

And again, it grates. In arguments over how an unnamed company was going to present my work, they balked at my criticism of making the color scheme of their materials malibu barbie pink, saying “you’re a woman, you’re a feminist, this is on brand” essentially, as if they knew how to represent me better than I did. A women in games group I organized events with told me that I came off “too masculine” at times (no I never got clarification on that). And yesterday, a well-meaning friend told me someone was going off on twitter about how I was secretly Chuck Tingle and thus Problematic because I was a “cis straight lady” making gay books that had absurdity in them (though the absurdity was always about time travel and handsome living objects existing alongside dinosaurs, not that gay people exist and have sex).

I get some bullshit conspiracy theory made up out of internet nonsense daily, but this one sent me down a rabbit hole of feeling horrible about myself. I fell down a bad rabbit hole where I didn’t feel like I was *enough* - queer enough, open enough about my feelings of having a lack of gender, anything “enough”. It also puts me in kind of a no win position, where I felt like I had to either speak up, be more “out”, and risk that becoming a Whole Big Thing, or quietly feel awful about the whole thing. Normally it’s no contest, and not engaging with someone who is *likely* acting in bad faith is always the best option for me, but this time it really messed me up, probably because it was riding on so many years of baggage.

I hated that a rando had this much of an impact on my day. I think I have the self-awareness now to realize that it’s only because of the repression and living in fear that gives others that kind of power over me. I hate living with this big secret, I hate not knowing who I have in my life now that wouldn’t be around if they knew it. I hate feeling alone, and not knowing how to figure myself out more and find other people like me. And if there’s one thing being aggressively vulnerable on the internet despite people trying to take you down for it at every turn has taught me, it’s that it’s always been worth it to me because I’m never alone, and that there’s usually so many people like me with the same fears. If I now no longer count as a “woman in tech”, maybe that’s ok, because maybe there’s other people who aren’t men or women that need to feel less alone too. Maybe the fact that I’m still treated as a woman in tech is enough, and my actual gender doesn’t detract from that.

So here it is:

I don’t know what I am yet, but I know what I’m not.

I’m not straight. I’m not cis, and I don’t think I can keep pretending to be cis just to get by. I’m not a man. I’m not a woman. I don’t want to be a man. I don’t want to be a woman. I don’t ever want to have the pronouns conversation because I feel equally apathetic to being called “he” or “she” so I guess if you just want to be accurate go for “they” but I won’t be offended by any. I’m not a crossdresser. I do have gender dysphoria. I don’t have an ideal self in mind. I don’t know if I want hormones or surgery, but I don’t think so because I don’t think that they’d help me move forward, since it still seems like you have two options there. I’m not well versed in what comes next, and I’m not immune to fucking up, but I’m not going to shrug off that responsibility and will do everything I can to do this the right way and make up for it when I failed at that. I’m not ever willing to speak for anyone else’s experiences or lives, unless they’ve specifically asked me to.

And despite so many people’s biggest wishes, I’m also not Chuck Tingle. Sorry.

I would, however, like to start working toward capturing a fraction of the magic of David Bowie or Prince or any of the number of the queer genderfucking icons we lost last year. There are some extremely stylish shoes that need filling.    

Anyway, I’m not gonna be mad if someone doesn’t know, or if people have a hard time with this. I don’t really know what comes next. I mean, I’m sure the assholes of the internet will do the thing they always do, but that’s no different from any day that ends in y for me - I mean, after people have so recently combed my grandfather’s obituary looking for dirt on me or my family, how do you go down from there? Anyway. I feel some weird mix of fear and relief at the same time, even just writing all this down. All I can hope for is that the people I’m close to will be honest with me, won’t be afraid to ask questions, will respect me if I can’t answer right then, and still see me as “me”. I’m hoping I can talk to other people who feel similarly, especially people who feel similarly and feel as alone as I do. I’m hoping people can show some mercy if they take issue with me talking about this stuff, because I’m new to it and willing to learn but I fully accept I don’t know enough yet. I’m hoping people actually listen and don’t write me off as “crazy” or any of the other meanspirited ignorant stuff people say about anyone who isn’t in line with traditional gender roles corresponding to what they were assigned at birth, but if they do, I hope it’s nobody that important to me. I’m hoping I can summon the courage to post this. I’m hoping that the only response I get from people is just “okay cool”.

All I really want is to not have to pretend anymore, for people to understand, and to see me as me. Not a man, not a woman, just me.  

Some gross goofy nerd who looks like an anime regent of dubious gender that can’t stop making terrible dad jokes.