NB: My Non-Binary Life

Just 8 episodes, where Caitlin Benedict explains a bit of their journey with gender and how they came to terms with the fact that they’re non-binary. They’re accompanied by the amazing Amrou Al-Kahdi.

The end of their journey is titled “Surviving And Thriving”, and of course it’s moving and full of hope. With Amrou Al-Khadi and other artists, they talked about:

• the queerness of the ocean (life)
• being out and open and in a queer community
• joyful memories The podcast ends with a quick succession of testimonies from enbies all around the world and it was quite moving :)

Other episodes:

• 1. “Realizing”. Takeaways:
  • “In a way, you can’t really ‘have your sh*t together’ as [an enby] because you’re constantly questioning and interrogating yourself”
  • some ppl don’t like “non-binary” because it’s basing your identity on rejection, they prefer “genderqueer”
  • visiting the museum of Transology with curator EJ: all the feels
  • we should be able to just play with our gender!
• 2. “Words”. They talked about:
  • the pronoun “they”
  • other languages’ approaches to gender (Turkish, Italian, Finnish, I think a Native Canadian language as well)
  • “the womb of God” in the Qur’an
  • favorite queer books (including “Queer: A Graphic History” that I’ve recently bought!)

• how it feels to change the way you address people you’ve known for a long time

• 3. “The Look”, with Jamie Windust. They talked about:
  • dysphoria
  • tips to look more of a certain way (very explicit descriptions of binding and tucking)
  • what masculinity and femininity mean to them
  • the difficulty of looking good in a blazer when you’ve got wide hips
  • and cross-dressing a mannequin (with consent).
• 5. “Bodies”, about, well, bodies, and dysphoria, and sex. (Quite explicitly) It felt like the conversation was too brief but they touched on:
  • moments where they realized they wanted their bodies to look different
  • SRS and non-binarity
  • ideal not-gendered worlds v. the world we live in
• 6. “Stories About Us”, about stories and representation. I just jotted down some titles:
  • The Argonauts, a memoir written by a cis woman who talks about her NB partner
  • Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series has a lot of GNC characters
  • “it’s not often we find ourselves in the mainstream [stories]. It’s something we have to find around the edges.”
  • Sailor Moon has sapphic and genderfluid characters
• 7. “Home”, which features a lovely conversation between Caitlin Benedict and their dad. They talked about:
  • coming out to their family (who were the last people to know)
  • how social networks keep people up to date with your life
  • using “they” might not be not “radical” enough ^^ (because it’s commonly used when you don’t know someone’s gender, but here you do know: they’re nb)
  • neo-pronouns and the Scrabble dictionary