What’s your name?
Have you ever been called ‘Lex’ or ‘Xander’?
Not really. I get called ‘Al’ a lot. A guy I worked with thought
my name was ‘Alexis’ for a good few months.
What is your role in Age UK Wirral?
I was brought on as part of the Kickstarter program. I’m one
of the social and media people. Somehow my name is in every single email that
seems to go out, I’m just everywhere. I’m the one who puts things up. I’m the
one who's emailing around the company to say, do you want to be on the
internet? And I also work with Jenny and Emma to create content for Age Uk
Wirral. So, it's part content creator, part marketing parting, and I’m also
sort of like a mouthpiece. I guess it sounds like I'm being the leader if I'm
the mouthpiece but no, I'm just the frontman.
What does a typical day in the life at Age Uk Wirral?
Well, at the moment I’m working from home. It's funny because
I get up and tell my dad: “I’m going to the office!” and he’s like “You don’t
work in an office!”
Basically, I get out
of bed, make breakfast, turn on the laptop, answer any emails and then anything
else I do tends to change from day to day because of the content side of the
job. Some days I’ll designing a poster’s for Ellie, some days I’ll be sending
things back and forth for Lynne, some days an email gets sent down from Jamie
and I’m posting up what he wants. It's very responsive.
It's different every
single day, which is what I quite enjoy. And if I'm not doing actively doing
something I’m emailing the social media team saying, what are we doing guys?
I’m a Jack of All Trades, to be honest.
So, what is nonbinary?
Nonbinary is identifying as neither man, nor woman. If you
imagine a binary code is one or zero. It’s one or the other, I am neither one
nor the other. Non-binary can be a lot of different things for a lot of
different people. For some people that means something like a third gender, for
others it means gender fluid. For myself, it means I am technically agender,
which means I do not identify as anything.
Do you move about on that spectrum or are you firmly
somewhere in the middle?
If I were gender fluid, I would move about, I am quite
firmly away from the line floating off somewhere. I’ve heard terms like
demi-sexual and there's demi-man and demi-woman and that is only identifying
man or woman sometimes. So, when I was younger, I was on the verge of thinking
I was a demi-man but when I got a little older, I thought: “Nah”.
What was it like for you coming out?
I had to come out twice. Sometime around the age of 12/13 I
came out as gay while I was still identifying as a girl. That was quite a
disaster because I had a crush on a girl in an all-girls Christian school and
the rumour just spread like wildfire.
She wasn’t happy about it, she ended up crying in class and
the head of year got involved. That was the only bad thing. Apart from that it
was like “Alex is gay, whatever.”. I think I put more pressure on myself than
anyone else. It was never too much of a problem. Eventually I cut my hair short
and started riding motorcycle and I started wearing pants and everyone was like
“yeah okay. This makes sense now.”.
Hollywood has such a way of romanticising coming out. You
come out and it’s got to be this big spectacle and that’s just completely fake.
It's not this big parade. The truth is your probably going to come out quickly
and out of nowhere. You never coming out stop because every person you meet you
have to come out too. There’s a lot of explaining whenever I come out as non-binary,
and I have to sort of rattle through it every time. I usually come out this way
to friends because if it's just some dummy on the street they don’t matter.
I guess coming out was complicated and it stays complicated
for a lot of people because you don’t know how people will react or what they
might say. But I’ve managed to field a lot of weird questions in my life – I
came out at such an early age, and you can’t ask stupider questions than
teenage girls with nothing better to do. I've sort of accepted my role as the
village elder of LGBT. I’m happier if someone sits me down and asks me hours'
worth of questions than if they just carry on their lives in ignorance.
Have you experienced gender dysphoria?
One of the reasons it took so long to come out as non-binary
is because it’s strange to have gender dysphoria with no gender. Because
obviously if I were a trans man, I would look down at my myself and I’d want to
look masculine because I have the idea of a man in my head. There's no
precedent for non-binary person. There are things that I do and don’t like
about myself: I don’t like my voice. or my height. My brain’s thinks “How
should I look?” but then my body says, “Well I don’t know” and I think, “thanks
for that”.
What do you want older people to know about being nonbinary?
It's confusing. It's weird. I know, like I understand
completely. My gender identity is a whole new concept for a lot of people. But
I'm just a person and it's just the way my brain is wired. I appreciate it's a
lot for people to take in, like even homosexuality or drag Queens is a lot for
people of a certain generation. We're not going to bite you. We're just here.
We’re queer. I'm sorry that you’ve had to learn so much. It's confusing for us
too, imagine how we feel, I didn’t know what nonbinary was until I was 16 or
so, and I have to know what it is.
The internet has done so much to help; now we can get our
hands on more education and better wording and better vocabulary, we can share
it with each other. More and more people have access to this information that
wasn't there yet. Not even 10 years ago, it just wasn't there.
I understand it must be terrifying. You see just a bunch of
random genders and sexualities just come out of the ether, but we’ve always
been there. It’s not strange, it’s not new. It’s just not been talked about
before.
How do you think non-binary people will influence society in
the future?
The same way as everyone else but we will be nonbinary about
it. One day in the future there won't be any sort of transgender celebrities or
nonbinary celebrities. Celebrities will just be celebrities. And we won't mind,
we won't care. If a kid is going to come out and be non-binary and be a rocket
scientist, they’ll just be a rocket scientist. We're nothing special. We're
just genderless.
How's life different for you now?
I'm 23 now I came out as non-binary when I was 17 so life
has just been the same for like a while. I have now changed all my documents -
that took ages. Every now and then I’ll get a letter from the opticians with the
wrong name on.
When I was younger, I was very, very angry as a person for
no reason. And as I'm getting older and older and finding out more things about
myself, I think "No wonder I was getting so angry. I wasn’t getting the
help I needed.”. When I was 12, I didn't know I was gay, I didn’t know I was
non-binary, I didn’t know I was autistic. I was trying to process something I
didn’t understand completely... it was like there was no forwards for me. But
now I understand myself and who Alex is and it feels refreshing, it feels
freer.
You have more confidence in being the real you?
Yeah. I’m less angry. I think I had this mindset of “why
can't I do this? Why can't I be there? Why can’t I play football for lads and
do make up with the girls.” And it's like - hang on, it's because I'm neither
of those things and I don't want to be.
What are you looking forward to most in the future?
Jet packs.
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