There is a particular kind of cruelty in the way people wait for you to contradict yourself.
As a nonbinary person, I fought to become myself. Initially? Very loudly, but not theatrically. After some years, it evolved into a conversation with myself internally. Quiet. Questioning and answering, silent adjustments. On the outside? I dismantled expectations, unlearned scripts, and refused gender roles that never fit.
I didn’t “become” nonbinary. I stopped pretending I was something else, plain and simple.
Over time, I softened into myself, into a kind of casual acceptance. Not constant dysphoria. Not constant declaration. Just ever-present self recognition.
And then I got pregnant.
It wasn’t planned. Not in the romantic movie way but in the “we U-Haul-lesbian’d” it kind of way. That’s a story for another day. My identity? My personhood? My “gender”? Something shifted. And yet, nothing did.
It honed in. Like life took me to its blacksmithing workshop.
Nothing fundamental changed but I have experienced a change.
Pregnancy didn’t suddenly make me understand the concept or experience of womanhood. If anything, it further complicated it. It forced me to confront how loosely and inconsistently that word is defined.
What in the entire hell is a “woman” exactly?
Is it biology?
Is it a social role and its expectations?
Is it capacity and how much you can bear before you break?
Is it softness or the lack thereof as those of us of Black descent know?
Is it how much I can sacrifice and smile while doing it?
The word stretches so far that it almost basically collapses under its own weight.
What pregnancy did do was cement my own personhood.
I was created to give birth, full stop.
Not in a universal way.
Not in a political way.
Not in a “this is what women are for” way.
Not even in a biological way.
But individually.
Spiritually.
Embodied.
This specific experience was meant for me, specifically.
And here is the part that frustrates me: I know some people will read this and think, “See? You were never really trans or nonbinary or whatever you claimed before.”
But that logic assumes that identity must be rigid to be real, to be valid. It assumes that if I experience something traditionally associated with womanhood, it overrides everything else I know about myself.
It doesn’t.
Giving birth did not erase my nonbinary identity. It deepened my relationship with my body. It didn’t suddenly make me a “woman”. It made me even more undeniable to myself. Society reduces pregnancy to womanhood; which is convenient, sure, but it is incomplete.
I am more than my capacity to build a human within myself.
I am more than my biology.
More than a category.
More than what makes other people comfortable.
I experience womanhood tangentially. I brush up against it. I borrow parts of it. I reject other parts. And I get to do that. I have permission to do that.
Because identity, for me, is not a destination. It is an orientation toward myself.
It evolves.
It focuses.
It reveals.
Pregnancy did not change my gender.
It sharpened my understanding of who I am. And that matters more than anyone else being proven right.
For anybody reading and if this post resonated with you, what would it look like to treat your own personhood as something you are allowed to practice….instead of something to prove?
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