Planning My Wedding as a Nonbinary Bride

I couldn’t even pick a pronoun. How was I supposed to decide what to wear on the most important day of my life?

Illustration by Maddie Edgar | Edited by Lilly Dancyger

I never wanted to be a princess in white. I wasn’t one of those little girls who dreams of her wedding day – I wasn’t a girl at all. I saw myself as grubby, an animal. I was happiest in overalls and didn’t mind when other people asked me if I was a boy or a girl. I liked being difficult to nail down.

When I was young, there was no word for what I was – or what I was not. Even now, the words we have are incomplete. I struggle to describe myself. “Not a girl” is usually as far as I get. The closest our language has so far for a person like me is “nonbinary,” meaning I exist outside the “masculine” and “feminine” gender norms. It means that, walking down the block, I will get called both “sir” and “ma’am” before I even cross the street – and neither will be right.

When I met my first husband, I was in boys’ clothes. He said I looked like Ramona Quimby, the scruffy, mischievous girl from Beverly Cleary’s iconic children’s books. We rode…