I was initially disappointed in myself, while I working my innards out, for having a gender that is not clearly one thing or the other. I worried I was like the Church of Laodicea, luke-warm, neither sommat nor nowt. Jesus properly blasted the Laodiceans for being weaksauce, saying ‘I spew thee out of my mouth’, which is never an encouraging thing to hear.

I sought encouragement - anywhere Biblical where something is in the middle but acceptable. I made tenuous clutches at ‘in Christ there is neither male nor female’ - that’s me, I said - and ‘male and female he created them’ - to which I replied, ‘male and female? That’s my category’ - but I suspect I was wilfully misinterpreting them. My search continues, for any Bible portion that embraces a middle choice. Tragically Goldilocks’s non-binary porridge is considered apocryphal at best.

If I’d been binary trans, if I could say, ‘I am a woman, and what’s more always have been, waiting in my own wings’, I’d be so. It would be clear and magnificent. If I could say ‘I am a man’, that would be tidy, it would be pretty dull, but it would be something. But on my most self-defeating days I would cry out, in pen and ink, ‘I am half a nothing!’. Just nothing but half of a nothing. I didn’t really believe this. I said it just to hurt and irritate myself, just like I deliberately pronouce ‘apricot’ as ‘app-ricot’. I know it’s wrong, but I’m like to annoy myself and needle myself in these little ways.

It would have been easier, or at least cleaner, had I been able to say, I am a trans woman, I’ve changed my name to this, I’m she/her — not that I’m saying binary transition is easy. For from it! But people can conceptualise it. The core idea be quickly explained, like flicking a switch. Ah! A woman! Non-binarily, I feel I come out to people without presenting much idea of who or what I now am. That makes it very easy for people to ignore my non-binarism. I come out, but I have the same name and wardrobe, and from their point of view it’s no different that if I’d said I was fruitarian or immunocompromised or barren. They can take it on board, and yet never think of it again. It’s like I’ve come out, but not as anything, just in general. Arguably I have the boon that I can avoid rocking the boat, and sort-of avoid letting it impact some relationships. I haven’t mentioned it at work because it’s simply never come up. My non-binarism means I can hide, like a platypus, who are very reclusive animals. But hiding is not very charming. The world can look at me and say, ‘who is that strange lumpy man?’. Non-binarism isn’t something our culture is taught to recognise.

One of the very first things we’re taught at school is that there are boys and girls. There are women and men, wives and husbands, nurses and doctors. Yes, those were treated as gendered terms in my education, and even in Theme Hospital. I think a lot of people still don’t know what non-binary is, or think of it as an aesthetic or a subculture rather than a gender or absence of gender. At times it’s easier to not come out than to come out with an explanation and a discussion of whether gender is or isn’t an inherently binary thing.

Explaining that to myself was tricky enough. Having to realise, If I’m not a man, but I don’t think I’m a woman, trans or otherwise, what am I, and what even is gender? And I could fill the remaining 21 Ben Thems answering that question, but I won’t.

I’ll only say that I believe (and assume) gender is not a matter of body or of mind, but of soul. It is not, like biological sex, a matter of chromosomes or genitals - though even those things are not binary, as XYY or intersex folk may attest. It’s not all in the mind, because I don’t think you can learn to be a gender, or ingest hormones pre-natally to ensure your child is born trans. I don’t think you can be educated into a gender, nor be hypnotised into one. Some people do try the latter — the Internet is full of wonderful things — but if you’re expecting a YouTube video to hypnotise you into being a girl you’re probably one already. Gender is vague and messy and means different things to different people and different cultures. It very much does and doesn’t exist. Like love, like a funeral service, like a reward or a friendship it isn’t an inherent property of the universe. We create it. The concept is passed on to us and it means something to us.

I was wrong to count my non-binarism as Laodicean. It’s not like that church, which half-believed and half-acted and gave half a damn. Because non-binary isn’t half-trans, it’s not half-male or half-female. It is itself. I’m entirely non-binary. Perhaps you are too. It isn’t half way along a sliding scale between two points — because that would be an inherently binary conceptualisation of it. It is different to any of those things. So what if non-binary, in my case, is not tidy. Neither is my loft, but it’s really where I do all my best work.

Incidentally, some people tell me I should be pronounching ‘Laodicea’ as ‘Laodissea’, but that doesn’t sound nearly so pleasing, nor can it be used in a Bodicea-related rhyming couplet. There are a few words that I think I’ve stumbled onto a pronunciation that I prefer over the accepted one. I will stick to my guns on Laodicea, Onesimus from Philemon, and the gen 1 Pokémon Blastoise.