reading room
To anyone confused
I am not undecided. I am uninterested in your maps. You say male, female, non-binary, as though I must plant a flag— as though the terrain of my being were yours to label.
You hold your compass to my hair, my tone, the way I lift or soften a hand, and tell me where North lives. But the needle points to you.
I am not an experiment in your taxonomy. I am not an exception to the categories you love to name. I am the silence between your definitions— the pause after he, the question before she, the unspoken in they.
I don't reject the bodies we're born in; I reject the way you think they should move. I reject your quiet mathematics of softness and steel, of what laughter belongs to whom, of how a sentence wear its clothes.
Call it Gender-Non-Participating. It isn't absence; it's authorship. It's the refusal to be written by every passerby with a pen. It's not that I lack a role; it's that I am tired of auditions for plays I never agreed to join.
So to anyone confused: you can keep your categories. I'll keep my autonomy. And maybe one day, we'll both stop needing to be understood to be real.
— Lilith