How to tell if you are nonbinary? For this outdoor lover, it started with a hike โ and a new trail name.
In 2021, I thru hiked the Pacific Northwest Trail.
The PNT isn’t really a trail; itโs a series of ways to get from one very podunk place to another, through the highest available mountains between them.
It starts in a place called Glacier National Park, and hugs the northern US border westward, until that border hits the Pacific Ocean and so has used up its utility to the people who use borders as an excuse to put people who cross them in jail.
The first trail friend I made gave me the trail name Daisy because I couldn’t make a daisy chain, a simple climber’s knot. They’d sussed out something important about me that I hoped people could see. I put it in my Instagram bio. A friend saw it and asked if it was my new identity, and, grinning, I told her it was just a trail name. But her question had opened a question for me.
I told her it was just a trail name, but her question had opened a question for me.
In the northwest corner of Montana is a town called Yaak. To get there, I walked down an abandoned highway for a while until a sheriff pulled over and asked me for an ID.
A trans hiker who’d been through ahead of me had said on our hiker app that Yaak was a) sketch, and b) not safe for BIPOC or queer people. So I messaged them, said I was white and straight and (then) (I thought) cis, but that because of something straight guys could always smell on me, I also didn’t feel safe.
Flower told me that there were mountainsides full of huckleberries ahead, and more burned forest, and trail angels. We’ve been friends ever since.
I grew up in Austin, Texas, in the 80s and 90s.
Nowadays Austin has a reputation as an accepting place; back then, it was still Texas.
Most of my friends were girls. The few who were guys put a footprint in me. They bullied the heck out of me for being a hippie’s kid, gave me birthday presents that weren’t presents, sexually othered me at school, at their houses, whenever there was someone looking.
The casual cruelty of boys was a problem I thought I’d created by being something no one should be, misshapen and too full of girl. I wanted to see through everyone’s eyes, and felt like wanting that was wrong. I longed for preschool, when I had loved ballet, and was ashamed of how much better I felt being pretty and silly, before I’d been told by every boy that to live in fear of each other was the only way they, or we, supposedly, could exist.
The cop in Yaak told me I better not have anything weird on me or his dog would sniff it and get me.
In Idaho, an ICE agent on a dirtbike almost knocked me off the trail, and a hotel owner had an Aryan nations sticker in the window of the lobby.
These, just mountains. Mountains that people have been living in for millenia, fallen in love in, found new berries in, waded in the streams. An earth that we belong to and a border around its beauty drawn for no reason.
In 2022, I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. A wildfire took over most of northern California and southern Oregon, and so me and my trail friends, all cis women (at the time), had to run over to hike the coast for a while instead.
We licked banana slugs, ate fish and chips, met people biking from Alaska to Chile. I followed one of them on Instagram for a while; they got stuck in Mexico and were unable to continue because Mexico is beautiful and Chile was too far.
The northern terminus of the PCTl at the Canadian border was closed, because of, of course, another fire. So we took a boat thirty miles up Ross Lake, and made our own monument.
In our cheap and falling-apart raincoats, we waved little Canadian flags.
The sheer and unbridled joy at what we’d been through together, the songs we sang on the hike, the way we knew one another: I have never felt so much like a girl.
I made good grades in elementary school, so the school counselors ruled out ADHD. But they knew something was wrong.
I ended up in the principal’s office a lot for being weird: acting like a kangaroo on a Tuesday, careening around a classroom, having nervous breakdowns and acting them out as wailing fits.
As I got older, the fits got louder inside and utterly silent outside.
I took to drawing triangle prisms by hand during class, staring as deeply as I could into a notebook page, mirroring one wavering blue line after another with barely enough space between for the white paper to peek through. I caged myself.
The spring after I hiked the PCT, I went swimming every day with a nonbinary friend in Barton Springs, a quarter-mile long natural aquifer in downtown Austin that gleams in infinite teal.
One day, we went to a trans rights protest at the Texas State Capitol.
A hostile counterprotestor got in my face. A genderqueer person, a stranger, took me aside and asked if I was ok.
Later that night, in the cottage in my parent’s backyard, I told my friend, Bloom, that it had taken me a blip to understand that this kind stranger was asking whether I, seen by them as one of them, needed anything.
โI think I’m probably not cis,โ I said. โBut Iโm scared that the people I’m attracted to won’t be attracted to me back if I show it.โ
โMaybe,โ Bloom said. โBut maybe not.โ
When I graduated from Montessori ballet preschool, my mom asked me what kind of school I wanted to go to for kindergarten. I told her “park school”, anywhere I could be outside all day.
She tried to get me into a communal free school in the tall sand pines east of Austin, but they closed. The next best option was a public elementary school with a program in environmental science. I spent the next seven years finding out that it wasn’t really anywhere special at all.
The school wasn’t, that is.
Behind the playground, down a slope past the soccer fields, surrounded by a thicket of ragweed, was a creek full of crawfish and guppies and sometimes water moccasins.
When it rained, the creek would breach its banks, an immense force pushing everything else aside, along with everything happening inside me.
In the aftermath, the emerald water would shimmer, not from sunlight, but from the millions of tadpoles hatching at the surface.
The girls I played with and I would spend hours after school with square wire hand nets, pulling the babies out, looking at them, sending them back.
Every spring, after the torrential southern rain, the tiny heads of baby plants would peek through the clay silt. Their leaves, like minute ears, would wait and listen for morning, for sunlight. And then explode into jagged paintbrushes of red and yellow, hanging bells of bluebonnets, manes of golden coneflower.
I’m a high school special education science teacher now. There are kids in my classes who are unapologetically out, who will correct teachers to their faces if they get deadnamed, who are dramatic on purpose and careful around other people’s feelings and who sag their pants or paint their nails or carry huge plushies through the halls. They have pins on their backpacks that say “be nice.” I put a trans pride pin on mine so that they’d know.
This summer, I came out as nonbinary.
I’m getting used to using they pronouns. When I see queer representation in movies, or online, I feel like part of a family.
For most of my adult life, there were boundaries around the experiences of gay, bi, and trans people. To be someone with that identity meant learning to live with and love in the face of discrimination. That experience felt sacred, beyond me.
I had no understanding of queerness; of the truth about myself and how that truth had a home. For so long, the places I was certain I could find people I was safe with were found on a hidden and intuited map that shadowed a larger, hostile world.
We are the flowers that explode across a mountainside, the babes that grow beyond the borders of what we once thought we were. An adamant and purposeful movement of fireweed. The commitment to one another of their fuschia blooms, and the charcoal dust they hold onto so tight, their roots an unwavering will to live.
This essay took second place in our 2024 LGBTQ writing contest. Read more contest winners, or subscribe to our newsletter for early notification of the next contest theme and deadline.
Author Bio:
Daisy Allen (they/them) is a special education teacher, writer, long distance hiker, and seminarian living in Taos, New Mexico. They know the world does not always shine with quartz and pollen and glitter, but strive to see them everywhere anyway. They believe in you and your own journey towards wholeness.
