Cassidy Rae Proctor

Becoming a parent was the final key in fully accepting who I have always been — non-binary In 2020, three days into lockdown, I became a parent. It happened with all the expected exhaustion and excitement. There is another cliché that you don’t read about or hear about. It is the nightmares of your child dying through some awful failure of your parenting: tumbling down the stairs after I trip, giving in to the desire to sleep or a car accident as a result of that same sleep exhaustion.

Man? Woman? What about neither? Cassidy Rae Proctor reflects on what it meant to them to be in the non-binary space For years, I joked that I was ‘bad at being a woman’. It was my excuse for the way I looked, the way I dressed, the things I liked, and my struggle to understand romance in the way others seemed to. Like that U2 album that for a few years came preloaded on every iPod, my gender was what it was because someone else had decided it should be there.