07/15/2026
My 87-year-old grandpa asked me a question I never expected.
Last summer, he turned to me and said, "What's that term I keep hearing when someone says they're not a man or a woman?" Looking to my grandma for help remembering the word, I already knew what he meant: nonbinary.
A million things raced through my mind at once, but worry was the primary one. I wasn't sure if I should just answer his question or share a bit about myself too. I had come out to them as q***r a few years ago, a feat I never thought possible, and now this. Uncharted territory with my beloved grandparents.
My grandpa is a retired IRS agent, Army veteran, staunch Catholic, and my weekly Euchre partner with a gluttonous sweet tooth that rivals my own. My grandma is the matriarch who lets my grandpa believe he's in charge. She grew up in a farming family and still remembers when they got indoor plumbing. She's sassy, resourceful, and wildly independent. She loves Nascar, line dancing, and a stiff rum and coke. We grew up next door to them, running over the hill and through the woods… you know the drill.
Like many other neuroq***r kids in the 90's, I repressed and masked, A LOT. While I've always been close with my family, it has been hard to continually reintroduce myself to them, peeling off layers at a time. Many times, I'm just now meeting these parts of myself I had subconsciously hidden away for survival as a kid.
Understandably, they've met me with confusion and questions, but luckily, a lot of love too.
With this in mind, I turned back to my grandpa. "I think the term you're looking for is nonbinary." (My grandpa nods in agreement.) "Before we dive into that, I want to make sure we're on the same page."
"How do you identify?" He looked at me like I was joking. "I'm a man."
"And how do you know that?" He didn't have an answer, so I pivoted. "Well, how do you define men and women?"
After a few minutes of pondering, he started to list physical characteristics, strength, height, hair length, but for each one, I could tell he was also thinking of someone who broke that trend, rendering it unreliable. (My grandma and I have short hair. My ex-girlfriend was over 6ft and his mom was as strong as an ox.)
He finally responded, awkward and hesitant to say the words out loud, "Men have a p***s and women have a va**na and breasts."
Then I asked him about his friends. "Are they mostly men or women?"
"Men," he responded.
"How do you know?" I asked.
He paused again, looking at me incredulously.
"Well, have your friends shown you their genitalia?" I asked him with a serious face.
He laughed. "No, no. That's just how they introduced themselves to me."
"Ah, ok, so they tell you their identity and you just believe them." He nodded in agreement.
I explained that s*x and gender aren't the same thing, even though people use them interchangeably all the time. S*x is the biological stuff, chromosomes, hormones, anatomy, usually assigned at birth. But even that's not as clear-cut as "male or female." Some people's traits, like ambiguous genitalia or chromosome combinations outside the typical XX/XY, don't fit neatly into either category. It's more of a spectrum than two boxes.
Gender, on the other hand, is about the roles, behaviors, and expectations society attaches to being "masculine" or "feminine." It's less about biology and more about culture, and it's not binary, it's fluid. People can be cisgender (their s*x assigned at birth matches their gender identity), genderfluid (gender fluctuates over time), or transgender (someone whose gender identity is different from the s*x assigned at birth).
When I got to the term transgender, his ears perked up. "That's one I know!" he chimed in.
"Transgender is often an umbrella term for many different identities, one of which is nonbinary, how I identify." (Big breath in.)
We started chatting about the ways I didn't feel "girly enough" and how I used femininity as a mask for acceptance. My grandma chimed in, "I never liked wearing dresses," and to this day I have never seen my grandmother in a dress or heels.
The conversation lasted over an hour. I left in tears because I never thought I'd be able to have this type of conversation with my family, much less my aging grandparents.
This week as we celebrate Non-Binary People's Day, I wanted to share a story about q***r joy that can hopefully give someone else the courage to chat with their loved ones about their own identities, and for those who don't quite understand all the letters in LGBTQIA+, an invitation to do a bit of learning and growing themselves.
Have you had a conversation like this with an older relative? I'd love to hear about it.
***rJoy
