Are you a woman and wondering whether you’re non-binary? Answer me just one question - do you LOVE your overalls? Wearing overalls doesn’t mean you’re non-binary. Liking them or appreciating their practicality doesn’t mean you’re non-binary. But if you LOVE overalls like most women love a pretty dress… you might want to Google “masc woman” and see how much that resonates.
I’ve been non-binary my whole life - that’s how that works - but I didn’t have the words for it or access to the attached community until fairly recently. So I’m still developing a sense of self that accommodates comfortably those aspects of myself. One of the recent developments is stocking up on overalls, because I LOVE them. I feel beautiful and sexy when I wear overalls, even though objectively I realize that that’s not true. At least, not always true. Some of the overalls I got on sale are too large for me and make me look about as sexy as an astronaut dressed for a space walk. I love them anyway.
As a result, I’ve been wearing overalls to the dog park. Trying to reconcile the fact that I surely look very strange - even men don’t wear overalls to the dog park - with the fact that I feel completely confident when I do it. Side note: it’s hard being baby queer in your 50s. Way easier than being recognized as queer and harassed half to death your whole life, but still hard.
So what starts happening right away when I start wearing overalls to the dog park? Men start treating me more like a man. I’m sure a lot of them would object to this on general principle if they could. I guess like me their instincts outrun the social roles we’ve all been trained in our entire lives. Here’s the fun part - TWICE in the last three weeks, men have picked fights with me at the dog park. That’s roughly 2/3s of the fights I’ve even SEEN at the dog park. I guess they see me as a smallish, low-status man who they can pick on? Or as someone whose position in the hierarchy is unclear? I don’t know. I’m more man than most women, but that doesn’t mean that I understand them.
Here’s the weird part. It turns out that I’m… pretty good in these situations? Good at standing my ground, good at de-escalating, and I think reasonably good at figuring out what actually happened. If it keeps on happening, though… at some point I may have to rethink whether I really want to be wearing overalls to the dog park.