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 | Story 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 our bikes everywhere through Portland, as though every day was summer vacation. But as the relationship progressed, I could tell that he needed me to be feminine. He craved it. If I ever looked or acted like a girl, it owned him, totally.

Me wearing my usual overalls with my ex-husband in 2006. (Photos courtesy of the author)