NB

NB

I don’t know what I am anymore.  Queer, Trans or Non-Binary; Eunuch, Castrate or Spado.  I was assigned male at birth (or shortly afterward). I never felt like I was one of the other boys, but I wasn’t attracted to them either.  I have never wanted to have a female body. I’ve never dressed in drag. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a feminist. I was a man. But I never felt like a MAN.  I couldn’t ever quite do it. I liked my penis. I held it a lot. The possibility of making children felt important. I moaned aloud and wept profusely when that possibility was gone.  

I slid off the cis male end of the gender sphere when I started receiving androgen deprivation therapy as treatment for stage 4 prostate cancer.  Now I occupy some queered corner of gendered experience with, I hope, a fair percentage of the roughly 40,000 men who start ADT each year in North America.  

As I write, I’ve been on ADT for three years and my body has changed as a result.  At first I wanted out of this body. It had betrayed me. But now I am coming into it.  It’s a new, “both/and” body, liminal, masculine and feminine, posing a problem for the binary.  I no longer hold it.