![]() Some of them choose to sidestep my pronoun use and just use “McKenna.” Others try to be supportive, but have this mentality of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Some questioned my need to come out in the first place, believing that non-binary gender should be the norm anyway. Reactions from other family members about my pronouns have varied. But he reassures me that he’ll get this down, and all of this will become our norm soon. I sometimes get discouraged and feel overwhelmed. I try to kindly correct him when he slips up, and he tries to understand when I get frustrated with him. He’s gotten a lot better, but he still sometimes messes up. He might say, “They is non-binary” or, “I went to the movies with they.” Or, he’d say, “She is, they is, I mean they are…having coffee with a friend right now.” Or he’d use the incorrect pronoun and then correct himself and it stood out then, too. Because of this, when he’d refer to me my pronouns awkwardly stuck out, which made me feel even more different. At first, he wasn’t sure how to incorporate them correctly. This change in pronouns has taken Greg some time to get down. At first, I feared that the way we did things was too radical or too difficult. And they got offended when they never saw the twins wearing the gendered clothes they had purchased for them. Some in our family were angry about our choice for their names, specifically their surnames. People relate to them the way I wish people would relate to me. We’ve noticed that because of how we dress them, people, including ourselves, often relate to them more like children rather than boys or girls. One has my surname and the other has Greg’s. Our twins have gender-neutral first names. We certainly didn’t want it to happen before they were even born. We wanted to prevent them from being thrown into a box, based on their gender, for as long as we could. Some family members thought this was because we wanted it to be a big surprise, but our goal was the opposite. We kept their assigned gender a secret from everyone until they were born. Before our kids were even conceived, we planned on raising them in as gender-neutral of an environment as we could. Greg and I have an ongoing conversation about gender. My coming-out didn’t come as a surprise to anyone who really knew me, but it did bring clarity to a part of myself I had been struggling to understand since I could remember. Shortly after their birth, I discovered that there was a term for how I experience gender: non-binary. It wasn’t so much that he encouraged me-it was expected, and it was our norm.Ī year and a half after we met, we got married. In many ways, he’s very feminine, and masculine, and he shows his entire self all the time. He’d start singing or dancing just about anywhere, would strike up a conversation with anyone, and was not concerned with fitting the stereotypical image of a cisgender male. But, I learned pretty quickly that Greg was fully himself. I wore a blazer to cover the tattoos on my arms because I feared a “normal” guy would see them and run. Our first date was in September, in Texas, and it was hot. He was working full-time at Taco Bell, paying his way through college, and I was in graduate school. Sometime in the middle of all this, I met my husband Greg online. ![]() I dated a series of guys, who I’m pretty sure were mainly interested in me for my body, and I felt like I couldn’t be myself. I shifted away from wearing both men’s and women’s clothes and tried the hyper-feminine thing. In college, I experimented with my appearance. I became more aware of the norms I did not fit into, and people’s reactions when I crossed those lines, and I didn’t know why I didn’t fit. As I got older, it became more difficult to be my full self. But for the most part, I felt the freedom and had the confidence to cross gender lines. And I started to feel the restrictions that gender placed upon me, and I didn’t like them at all. ![]() By that time, I was no longer allowed to run around without a shirt on, and started to notice the appearance and behavior differences between girls and boys. I didn’t think much about gender until sometime around 2 nd grade. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and are not necessarily based on research conducted by The Gottman Institute. Through the individual stories and experiences shared in Real Relationships, we aim to paint a more realistic picture of love in the world today. Editor’s Note: We’ve been studying relationships for the last four decades, but we still have so much to learn. ![]()
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