Nonmonogamy – What Am I If I’m Not The Best?

Three medals stamped with 1, 2 and 3 on a podium where the 1 is raised the highest and 3 the lowest. Via Pexels

Content note: this post refers to my eating disorder (without many specifics)

I’ve been driven to be The Best since I was little. It didn’t really matter what I was doing – maths, football, following rules, reading – I needed to feel like I was either already The Best, or on a very fast path to becoming The Best. Baby Me wasn’t just disinterested in activities that I struggled to master, but actively afraid of them, incapable of stomaching the feeling of being bad-to-mid at something. My perfectionism paralysed me in a lot of areas, and also made me an insufferable teammate when I was forced into group activities. (This was actually one of the biggest reasons my mum bought gaming consoles for our household, to expose me to something fun and rewarding, with minimal stakes, that I wasn’t perfect at first time. I imagine I would be even less fun to play games with if my mum hadn’t put in long hours encouraging me to engage with things even when I wasn’t winning.)

I’m sure y’all can infer the sorts of wounds that make a kid’s self-esteem contingent on being The Best. For me, these wounds festered throughout my adolescence, and I got competitive about dieting, driven to be the thinnest, to win in the battle against my own body. I wanted to be the best writer, maybe the funniest person in the room, maybe the best at seducing strangers on the internet, but more than anything I wanted to be the thinnest. In any given room, in my year group, in those pro-ana forums I crawled in secret, I wanted to be the thinnest.

Therapy (and a desire to eventually have babies) eventually pulled me away from this fixation, but only far enough to create room for a new one. I was dating now, and I needed to be The Best possible partner. After all, he could leave me at any time, for anyone. I had so many flaws, in my 16-year-old mind, and I had to address them. He liked alternative girls, so I spent some of my very limited money on (botched) piercings. He liked redheads, and at least once a month he had to tell me not to dye my hair red. He liked sex in particular ways, so that’s what he got from me. The whole time, as I was trying to reshape myself into someone who could keep him, I watched the horizon like a hawk for people prettier than me, funnier, thinner, kinkier, and if I thought I spotted one, that same I’m-not-The-Best terror flooded me. It was a miserable existence, and I only blame him for miseries unrelated to this one. This wound seemed almost as old as I was.

Nonmonogamy didn’t come into our relationship as a cure for this, but instead for unrelated anxieties I had about the permanence of “forever” and the possibility of missing out. (Essentially, I had fallen in love and moved in with a guy before ever even touching a boob, and at 17 the idea that I might die without doing so was genuinely a bit heartbreaking.) It was clumsy and painful with him, partly due to the trickiness of converting a monogamous relationship to anything else and partly for other reasons, but when I first saw the girls he was ogling on Tinder and realised that they were no longer my competition, an intense relief overtook me. I didn’t have to match these girls in hair colour or number of piercings or BMI or anything else, didn’t have to watch like a hawk for signs they were stealing my man, because we were sharing. A sense of sisterhood with women suddenly seemed a lot more possible.

That relationship ended, and I moved on, and I never went back to monogamy. Nonmonogamy has brought a huge amount of joy into my life in addition to the above relief, and I’m glad I saw through the hypercompetitive framework that monogamy encourages (especially amongst people of marginalised genders). There’s just this nagging feeling of insecurity I have, not about myself in comparison to any of my metamours specifically, but instead a more abstract question along the lines of, “if I’m not The Best, do I still have value? Am I still special? Will you still keep me, even if I’m not exceptional – and why?”

In trying to heal this, I’ve asked myself the possibly-brutal question of why I keep people in my life if they’re not The Best in every imaginable field. The answer is that 1. The specific and unique combination of characteristics they have, the way those characteristics and experiences interact with each other and the choices they make in response to those things are irreplicable and beautiful, and 2. A lot of the qualities I value in other people (kindness, curiosity, passion, etc) are things that are too nuanced to be measured and so the only person I’m constantly assessing to see whether they’re The Best is… me.

Monogamy gave me a sense of safety in the idea that I was The Best in at least some capacities – I must be, otherwise he’d have left me by now. Nonmonogamy is helping me to slowly, slowly unlearn my understanding of The Best as an achievable state and love as a meritocracy. Outside of relationships, I still find myself wanting to be The Best writer or The Best OT patient or The Best lots and lots of other things, but I’ve been prompted to question what drives that. What capitalism (and, I suspect, especially my stint at private school) taught me was a healthy drive to achieve was actually an anxiety fuelled by framing the world as a competitive place where comparing myself to others was critical to success, or even survival. That does not have to be the case, and regardless of the monogamy thing, it’s my opinion the more of us that try to unlearn our perception of other humans as competitors, the kinder and happier a place the world will be.

It’s Getting Fucking Scary To Be Trans In The UK

Trans pride flag; horizontal stripes in the order blue, pink, white, pink, blue

Content note: this article mentions transphobia, violence against trans people (including murder) and medical injustice. If you’re trans and especially trans in the UK, feel free to miss this one out 💙

I’ve been away a while with personal stuff (including the start of Occupational Therapy, which I plan to write about fairly soon) but I’m back, because it’s getting scary to be trans in the UK.

It’s no secret that transphobic sentiment is on the rise globally, but I live in England, so a lot of my focus is currently on British transphobia. This post is to affirm the terror that a lot of British trans people are currently experiencing, but it’s also to notify our international friends that shit is bad over here, in the hopes that we can add to the growing pressure on the UK government (and, to be honest, the UK media and general public) to treat trans people humanely. Asking nicely hasn’t worked, and there are lives on the line.

There are a number of arenas in which trans people and our allies are fighting to be treated with dignity in the UK. If you’ve lived in a decidedly transphobic country yourself, you may be familiar with these classics: access to “single-sex spaces”, access to adequate and timely gender-affirming healthcare (especially for kids), the placement of transgender inmates in gendered prisons, our right to participate visibly in society and our right not to be ridiculed, assaulted or murdered. We’ll go through each of them, but first I do want to highlight that the majority of the British public still don’t seem to be actively, violently transphobic. A significant portion of people are under-informed or misinformed about trans people, especially given the viciousness of some media outlets whenever there’s an opportunity to demonise us, but people are often receptive to information on how to be more kind and inclusive. This doesn’t help me feel safer about the small minority of Brits who are violently transphobic, but it comforts me to think there are still people out there who are reachable.

We’ll start with the single-sex spaces bollocks. This is almost always a problem in the context of women’s spaces, which lines up with the global convention of assuming transfeminine people are violent (especially sexually violent) and cis women therefore can’t share spaces with them, especially sensitive spaces like changing rooms, bathrooms, DV shelters etc. This obviously ignores the possibility that a transfeminine person might be attracted to men or asexual, but it also ignores all the data that indicates that trans people are not more likely than cis people to commit sexual assault, but we are more likely to be victims of it. My personal pet peeve within this discussion is the notion that a cis man would want to pretend to be trans, opening himself up to ridicule at best and violence at worst, in order to commit sexual assaults when cis men are out there committing said assaults without all the hassle, and they’re still not being prosecuted. An alarming number of sapphic cis women seem to have bought into the idea that sexual interest in women makes a person a threat to women, which is another reason I wanted to sound the alarm bell about all the transphobia: other marginalised groups often end up as collateral damage. (Remember that; we’ll come back to it.) You’ll note that transmasculine people are conspicuously absent in this discussion, and that’s because transphobes view us as women and “women” are not perceived as a danger to the cis women they’re forced to share spaces with under policies based on one’s assigned gender.

This brings me neatly onto the next issue I wanted to address: transgender inmates. By design, this discussion is about people in prison. Whilst being in prison does not automatically mean you’re a danger to others, there are people who equate criminality to danger, which means that every trans inmate that makes a headline reinforces a connection between transgender identity and danger to others in the minds of the general public. That’s my first point, that trans inmates are disproportionately represented in British news media, giving the impression that the whole trans population is criminal. My second point relates to the housing of trans inmates according to gender assigned at birth. Nobody I know who has interacted with Britain’s criminal justice system would agree with this, but at least on paper it’s supposed to be more rehabilitative than punitive. Nonetheless, there seems to be a consensus in some circles that trans inmates deserve to be housed inappropriately, no matter how humiliating or dangerous that could be – or rather, the more humiliating and dangerous, the better. Whether or not you think punishing someone beyond the sentence handed down by a judge is morally okay is, I guess, a personal matter, but the specific way these prisoners are being punished is also going to have ramifications for non-criminal trans people. It reinforces that trans people aren’t “really” the gender we claim to be, and implies that our rights are more conditional than those of cis people, which gives people permission to misgender us, or worse.

The healthcare part mirrors this – our right to healthcare doesn’t extend to gender-affirming care. In the UK, we have the National Health Service, or NHS, which is taxpayer-funded, free at the point of access and, in theory, provides comprehensive health care to every British citizen. In reality, it has been sucked dry of funding over 13 years of Tory governance, so all healthcare takes a while to get hold of. However, gender-affirming care exists on another level of pisstakery, and has for years. Until recently, a clinic called the Tavistock Clinic dealt with gender-affirming care for under-18s, and its waiting lists reached at least four years. Then, last year, trans children lost that strained resource entirely. Trans adults face similar wait times unless they shell out for private care, which the NHS is usually reluctant to take over even once assessments and blood tests are done and all that’s necessary is a prescription for hormones. Trans people are also paid less on average than cis people and a cost-of-living crisis is gripping the UK, making this pivot to private healthcare especially painful.

The last and most upsetting thing I want to focus on is our physical safety. Last year, a 16-year-old trans girl called Brianna Ghey was murdered by two of her schoolmates, who had been exchanging violently transphobic text messages about her. Every trans person I knew (and a lot of allies) were deeply affected by the news of her death. We were also deeply affected by the nature of the reporting around the incident, which tried to insist that her murder was not a hate crime and actually had nothing to do with her being transgender. In a UK where hate crimes against trans people have been ramping up for years, one as brazen as this reminded us all that we aren’t safe, and the reporting reminded us that a lot of the UK’s more influential voices will not have our backs if the worst happens. It is a scary place to be transgender.

So, why should you care? Well, if you’re cis, you might not be as safe as you think. The people who are invested in keeping us out of public spaces aren’t psychic, and you hear anecdotes all the time about butch cis lesbians being bullied in bathrooms by people who have mistaken them for trans women. It goes deeper than that, though – transphobia attributes cis male sexual violence to trans women, which to some extent absolves the patriarchy of any blame, it paints sexual interest in women as deviant and dangerous, and it paints any behaviour outside of the gender binary as deviant too (which is the same ideology held by fundamentalist religions that don’t let women wear trousers). It also undermines the bodily autonomy of anyone using the NHS, since it introduces “correct” and “incorrect” reasons to seek healthcare, and the bodily autonomy of anyone dressing unconventionally, queer or otherwise. If you don’t care about trans people (and you should – we’re great), I hope you at least care about your own rights, and you’re ready to make some noise.

LGBTQ+ Pride Events UK 2024

Switchboard – National LGBTQIA+ Support Line

Pride: A Complicated Experience

I haven’t been to a tonne of Pride events.

I came out to myself as bi when I was about 13, and as nonbinary when I was about 17. Unusually, I think, I didn’t feel any internalised shame about my queer identity in the traditional sense. When I realised I was bisexual, I was excited about it: excited about my newfound connection to the LGBTQ+ community, excited about the possibility of kissing girls and excited that I’d found a label that fit me, after a year or two of worrying that I was simply a lesbian who was very bad at lesbianing.

When I came out to myself as nonbinary, I felt a degree of anxiety that I wasn’t not-cis enough (I didn’t experience all the dysphoria that mainstream media promised me, and I’d only put the pieces together as a young adult), but mostly I was, again, excited to find a word that fit my experience of gender. I understood, in theory, that a lot of people needed the Pride movement to allay their feelings of internalised shame, fear and grossness about being anything other than cishet, but whether it was the autism or my mum’s accepting and loving influence, I never felt bad about being queer.

This didn’t mean that I was uninterested in Pride events, but I didn’t feel any desperate pull towards them. I could experience the joy of being part of the LGBTQ+ community online, in the comfort of my own home, and that felt like enough for me. The first time I went to Pride, it was for an unconventional reason: I was deeply, deeply depressed, and it was a reason to leave the house.

My hometown’s Pride event was, and still is, mercifully grassroots in nature, held in a spacious park and never too crowded. But this didn’t stop me from feeling overwhelmed, especially when I found that there was nowhere for me to sit down and rest my disabled little legs, and nothing was signposted, leading to me getting turned around and confused at least twice an hour. I loved spotting other people’s flags, starting conversations with people about their dogs or their outfits, and talking to the people who ran stalls relevant to my interests, but I left the event exhausted and overstimulated and had to spend at least a couple of days in bed or otherwise in my pajamas, recharging my limited energy.

Bigger Pride events, as you can imagine, intimidate me. I went to one in my university city and found it so challenging that I slipped away on more than one occasion to the outskirts of the event, taking deep breaths and chewing on free sweets obtained from various stalls and booths. I know lots of other people find Pride inaccessible, and this year, I stuck to my hometown’s event – but still needed to be babysat by my girlfriends and metamour, reminded to eat, and encouraged to leave earlier than most people might because I was ready to lie down on the grass and give up.

This is why I feel conflicted about Pride. I already felt like it might not be for me, since I didn’t experience the internalised shame that so many LGBTQ+ people talked about, and after having found so many Pride events to be lacking in the accessibility department, I felt that even more strongly. Couple that with a police presence which makes my autistic nerves run higher than the volume on the main stage’s speakers and the ongoing online discussions about who “belongs” at Pride, I’ve often wondered what Pride does have to offer me.

The thing is, Pride as a concept is great. I enjoy rainbow paraphernalia and I even enjoy watching corporations desperately try to cater to me (only to drop the facade on the 1st of July) and then watching other LGBTQ+ people mock them for it. Pride month is fun, it reminds me of the importance of community and visibility, and it gives me an excuse to respond melodramatically to every minor inconvenience (“It’s raining? During this, Pride Month?”). But I’m starting to acknowledge that I pressure myself into attending events that I don’t really need to be at. I already know my community exists, I have created safe spaces of my own to be queer in, and I don’t feel gross or ashamed or anything other than pleased about my queer identity.

I know Pride does a lot for a lot of people. I love seeing people at Pride events blossoming with confidence they might not feel anywhere else, and I appreciate that there exists a space where everyone can just… be their authentic selves, without fear of repercussion. But with gatekeeping, corporate involvement, inaccessibility and the rest of it, it’s a movement and a series of events that I feel somewhat disconnected from.

I will continue to defend my LGBTQ+ siblings’ right to attend Pride events, obviously. I want to speak up in defense of asexual and aromantic people’s place at Pride and about the ways that a police presence can make POC and neurodivergent people feel deeply uncomfortable, but I might not need to push myself into events to achieve that. I suppose it’s a result of internalised ableism, something I do experience a lot of, that I feel like I need to do what my abled friends are doing whether I actually want to or not. And I suppose it’s important for me as an activist to confront my internalised ableism, and that might mean staying home from crowded, noisy, police-infested Pride events when I need to.

I’m still going to buy shit with rainbows on it, though. I’m always going to buy shit with rainbows on.