Ankle Sandwich

Lauren John Joseph for Trans Vegas 2022

Last time I saw my sister I asked her what it was like to be in right in the middle of a family of eight siblings, the majority of whom are incidentally queer, and in which the eldest and the youngest are both non-binary. My sister, had her response ready, said that she thought it was lovely, said that she always told her friends that she was in a non-binary sandwich family, with me and my littlest sibling as the slices of bread, and everyone else as the cheese and piccalilli I suppose. This extremely tasty metaphor got me to musing about just how necessary this is, this kind of expansive, irreverent thinking, when it comes to our contemporary identity politics.

I haven’t always been non-binary, previously I was third-gendered, trans with an asterisk, gender-non-aligned, transdrogynous. There were a good many cumbersome and short-lived appellations on the road to this common understanding of a gender which is neither M nor F, and just as many now largely abandoned pronouns; the unlovely Zir, the distinctly Germanic Sie, Justin Vivian Bond’s much celebrated V. How we came to settle on they/them as the standard I don’t know, I wasn’t invited to the AGM, but it has I supposed proven useful, to have this largely accepted (within the community) alternative to throw our collective weight behind. The majority of the non-binary people I know do now use they/them pronouns, and even though there’s still contention over the grammatical rules this usage tramples, wider society seems to be at least aware of how they/them functions, even if they chose not to respect it. So far so good? Well, maybe.

I first heard about non-binary gender when I was performing in Köln as part of a Liverpool based project called Tr*nny Hotel (this was the early 2010s, language was wild then). When the event’s programmer, Mandy, spoke about non-binary gender she spoke about a gender expression which resisted Yes/No, Male/Female, 0/1, the reductive black and white thinking of bureaucrats and computers. At the time this was a really exciting idea to me because it represented an expansive model of gender, something in line with  my own experiences and understanding, a space full of all the romance and adventure found in the Virgina Woolf character, Orlando, reverberating with the mysticism of Prince’s bold and bawdy lyrical testimony, “I’m not a woman, I’m not a man, I am something that you’ll never understand.” Non-binary felt capacious and full of possibility, accessible, communal, perhaps the first clear definition of a nebulous state of being which so many of us had been trying to communicate for so long, and somehow it took hold, seemingly harmonising with many people’s understanding of themselves pretty quickly.

Today this identity is inescapable, from adverts to stand up comedy sets, non-binary representation, both positive and negative, is entrenched in the cultural quagmire, for better or for worse. So why then am I feeling so disenchanted? Surely it’s a good thing to have a common shelter in language, surely now non-aligned genders are unionised under this particular banner we have greater strength in numbers? I want this to be the case but honestly non-binary is beginning to feel, to this gender non-conformist at least, like a protest vote, like when your Auntie Marge says she can’t bring herself to vote for Starmer’s Labour but would rather die than vote Tory, so she goes with the Animal Welfare Party just to give the system two fingers.

Non-binary was supposed to be an opting out, or at the very least a complication of gender, but as with all things that make it to the mainstream, it has solidified in the popular consciousness and has come to represent everything and nothing now, a problem which isn’t at all helped by the conventional framing of an Enby as a white middle-class teen. (No shade to white middle-class teen enbies, some of my favourite TikTokers self-identify as so). But the non-binary identity can’t be defined by what it is not, to be relevant and powerful it has to exemplify something bigger, some brave new possibility that is not just C to the existing A and B.

  Maybe I’m being ungrateful, after all non-binary recognition has gifted us several faintly amusing Etsy t-shirt designs, and provided many of the countries finest weekly columnists with something other to ruminate on besides the return to fashion of bootleg jeans, it’s just that I can’t help feeling such a placement isn’t the win we think it is. We’ve managed to force the wider public to accept that there’s more than simply M and F, but simply brokering a deal to include a third option and calling that a victory is never going to be enough. Am I asking for something more? Yes. Am I asking for too much? Probably.

  The world has been so good as to say that there are not one, not two but THREE choices available to me, and I’m being so flat out thankless as to tell them to stick that an’ all? Well maybe. I suppose I’m an eternal troublemaker, I always want to push it, I always want more room to play.

  Luckily I have been afforded a family of eight siblings and three niblings who are an absolute shower of jokers. My youngest sibling is also non-binary™ so I turn to them for a hit of the divine wisdom of youth, specifically when it comes to our niblings and what they might call us, since we are neither really Aunties or Uncles. What were the alternatives, I wondered? I pictured greetings cards inscribed, “Dearest sibling-of-my-birth parent, thank your the lovely Christmas gift, it was just what I wanted” and “Happy birthday non-aligned member of my extended family”, realising with sudden woe that my imaginative failures had more than a hint of a GB News gammon rant to them. Thankfully my sibling had a better idea, “I just call myself their Ankle,” they said, “Auntie and Uncle at once.” That was pretty fab I thought, both concise and complex, legible and most importantly funny.

  Yes, I believe that an ankle sandwich is just what the energy healer ordered, and I dare say it’s exactly what we need if we are to rescue the they/them marker from becoming just another complacent, static cognomen thrown up by the capitalist urge to liberate through merchandise, in short to to save non-binary from the sad fate of becoming the new flexitarian. I’m not going to jettison the Enby just yet, though I think there needs to be some radical housekeeping to keep them in the game. In brief my demands are as follows: I want expansive meaning and I want both/neither/all and I want an identity which contains its apparent opposites, I want a language capable of acknowledging its limits and of over running them, I want all of this and more, but before any of it, before I can manifest a single new mode of existence or its attendant linguistic marker into being, before I write another word dammit, I want, no I need, lunch.