I am in a classroom, or perhaps at a party, but it doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that I am speaking, and maybe what I’m saying is funny or profound but even meaningless words will bring eyes and thoughts around to the body producing them. After I am done speaking, another voice starts. “As HE said…” The “HE” rings loudly in only my ears though, and to everyone else in the room my passing and my failing go by so quietly as to be unnoticed.

The concept of “passing privilege” refers to the ability of a trans person to be read as cis by those who don’t know their trans status. Given the danger that being clocked as trans presents in social situations, the ability to pass as cis, and especially the ability to pass as a cis man, presents a layer of safety that all trans people desperately wish we didn’t need. But what does passing as a cis man mean for a person who is non-binary?

I am a non-binary person who passes as a man. In public, my silence is safety; I do not broadcast that I am trans and to those around me I may as well not be. This safety, however, is conditional on my waving of a white flag and agreeing to the following terms of surrender:

1. You shall grin and accept every wayward he, him, himself thrown your way. This clause may also cover, but not be limited to, references to you being a man, boy, or any other such distinctly male identifier.
2. In situations involving official and/or legal documentation, you shall be referred to by your birth name to avoid causing your school, banks, or government the unnecessary fuss or confusion that comes with validating your identity.
3. Any violation of these terms, through your objection or correction to any perceived misgendering or slight, or any other way you can conceive of saying “Look at me! Know me as well as you think you know me!” will constitute an immediate revocation of your social safety and exposure to whatever dangers lie beyond the bounds of failing to pass. These dangers may be large, small, anywhere in between, or maybe even non-existent! So go ahead, take the risk, but just ask yourself, how lucky do you feel?

MAYBE this surrender metaphor is melodramatic, but CERTAINLY it is indicative of my accumulation of an experience that is both common and painful. I am so grateful for my safety but I am so sad that the price I pay is

I must fail myself.

Or my body must fail me.

Or I must fail society, or society must fail me

or it doesn’t matter or it does matter or it doesn’t or it does or it doesn’t or-it-does-and-on-and-on-back-and-forth but

I. don’t. fucking. care.

I don’t care because the theoretical direction of my failure in passing does not tell the things I really want to know; what I really want to know is the way I can contort my arms and legs, the way my lips can say my name to a stranger, the way I can just EXIST that would let me pass and I mean REALLY pass. Because a part of the true privilege of passing that is often ignored is the privilege of not just safety, but of comfort- the comfort of not having to explain or ignore something so fundamental that spelling it out is painful (not unlike having to remind an old friend of your birthday).

And I know there is nothing I can do, and no body I could be that would make people intuit who I am. We are trained to see men and women, and so despite the fact of my body being a trans, non-binary body, man is what people will see. This doesn’t drag me down every day of my life, but some days- days like today- it hurts. My lament about my situation, and the unfairness that all trans people – passing, “passing”, and not passing – face does not have an answer. But I hope with this I have not just released steam on a subject I’m very emotional about, but also given a nuanced look at how passing privilege can look different for different trans people. Our discussions of trans liberation should not and cannot just stop at safety, but must also look at how the very nature of the gender binary challenges our humanity and ability to live fully as ourselves.