Itchy Sweater

This column was written by me about two years ago. Here's the English version - een Nederlandse versie is hier gepubliceerd: https://www.tijdschriftlover.nl/columns/gender_is_als_een_kriebeltrui

Imagine that you’ve worn an itchy sweater, all day and every day of your life. The sweater fits well and it’s comfortably warm, but it itches like hell. Because you’ve worn the sweater your entire life, you don’t know any better. You’ve learned to live with the constant discomfort. You’ve learned to ignore it as much as possible, to push the itch away. Everybody wears that same sweater and nobody’s complaining about it, so the itch must just be a part of it, right? Don’t complain, just carry on, like everybody else. But then you meet people who say that they’re also bothered by their itchy sweaters, and you find out that the sweaters actually don’t itch for most people, just for some. That you can also just take off the sweater if it does cause you a constant itch. Imagine that after over 40 years of constant itching, you finally work up the courage to take off that sweater. Ahhhhh, finally liberated from the eternal itch! That’s what it felt like for me when I “cast off” my masculinity. A liberation, a feeling of euphoria, a feeling of finally being myself and not having to pretend any longer to be something that I’m not.

Hi! I’m Alba. I’m 45 years old and I’m not a man, nor am I a woman: I’m non-binary. I only found out about this a few years ago. My entire life up to that point, I had played my role as a man because society clearly expected me to play that role. I looked like a man, so I should behave like a man, right? When my then 15 year old child came out to me as non-binary, I went looking for everything I could find about what it means to be non-binary, and I realized that I myself am non-binary too. The first person who I came out to as non-binary, was my child. It was the start of a joint quest into the vast and wondrous territories beyond the gender binary. My child lives with their mother in a far foreign place, but despite that physical separation, the bond between us has grown much stronger these past few years. We can share everything with each other, even our deepest desires and insecurities.

Life beyond the binary isn’t easy. Every time you fill out a form and are forced to declare whether you’re a man or a woman, every time you get a letter or an email that greets you as “mister”, that same old itchy sweater is forced back on you. The more often it happens, the more disgusting it feels: dysphoria. Time and time again, companies and organizations tell me that I really do have to choose between either “man” or “woman”. Often, they’re working on a new system that will offer more options, but for now, it is what it is. From the payroll system your employer uses, to your power company. From your internet provider to your healthcare insurance. From dating apps to supermarkets. When you least expect it, somebody runs up to you and forces that itchy sweater on you again, and again, and again.

Even the government discriminates against non-binary people, despite the constitution of the Netherlands clearly forbidding discrimination of any resident of the country based on their gender. You see, the gender “X” does legally exist, as a gender neutral alternative to “F” (female) or “M” (male), but there’s no legal framework to request your registered gender to be changed to “X”. While binary trans people should soon, with the ratification of the new “Transgender Law”, be able to just go to their town hall and request for their “M” to be changed to “F” or vice versa, non-binary people will then still be required to file a lawsuit against the state and go before a judge in order to be able to change their “M” or “F” to “X”, because the new law still doesn’t create a legal framework for requesting that “X”. This is why my passport still features that itchy sweater “M”, and every letter that I receive from the city, from the tax office or from any other governmental or official organization, gets shoved through my mailbox including that itchy sweater.

But a new generation is knocking on our door. Among the Babyboom generation, 0.5-1% identify as transgender and/or non-binary. Among Gen X, which I belong to, it’s 1-2% and among Millennials it’s 3-5%. But the Zoomers are here. The first half of Gen Z, including my kiddo, has reached adulthood. Among their generation, 5-10% identify as transgender and/or non-binary, a true explosion of gender diversity. The future is not just looking bright; it’s lit up in all the colors of the rainbow. I, for one, am sorely looking forward to a future in which I can finally and definitively throw away that itchy sweater and nobody can force the damn thing on me anymore.

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