Yes, and millions of people do. Gender is not a binary switch with only two positions; it never has been. Some people are men, some are women, and some are neither, both, or something else entirely. The idea that everyone must be one or the other is a social convention, not a biological law, and for a great many people it simply does not fit.
I want to tell you about Ro.
I first heard about Ro through a mutual friend, someone who had been trying quietly to help them for months. Ro was in their late twenties, working in a bookshop in a mid-sized town, the kind of place where the staff know the regulars by first name and everyone has an opinion about the new display tables. They were funny, well-read, and by almost every visible measure, doing fine. But they were exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the job.
"I've been playing a part for so long," Ro told me, "that I genuinely forgot there was a different option."
Ro had grown up being told, in the gentle but absolute way that family life tends to communicate these things, that they were a girl. Not cruelly. Not consciously. Just constantly. The clothes, the pronouns, the assumptions about who they would become. And Ro had accommodated all of it, the way you accommodate a chair that is slightly the wrong height: not painful exactly, just never quite right, and quietly wearing.
It was a customer who first said the word out loud. A regular, a retired teacher who came in every Thursday for a large-print novel and stayed to chat. One afternoon he looked at Ro and said, conversationally, "You know, my granddaughter says she's non-binary. Says it's like being neither, or both, depending on the day. She seems much happier for knowing that about herself." And he paid for his book and left.
Ro stood at the counter for a long time after he had gone.
"It wasn't a revelation," Ro told me. "It was more like someone handing you back something you'd put down years ago and forgotten you were carrying. I didn't feel suddenly transformed. I just felt, oh. Oh, there it is."
What strikes me most, in all the conversations I have had with non-binary people over the years, is how ordinary that moment of recognition tends to be. It is rarely a dramatic crisis. It is often a Thursday afternoon in a bookshop.
Non-binary is not a new identity invented by the internet. It is not confusion, or fence-sitting, or a refusal to commit. Across cultures and across recorded history, people have described themselves in ways that do not fit the male-female binary: two-spirit identities in many Indigenous North American cultures, hijra in South Asia, fa'afafine in Samoa, and many others besides. The binary framework is one particular cultural arrangement, and it has never captured the full range of human experience.
For Ro, the change that followed recognition was quiet and practical. They asked the people closest to them to use they/them pronouns. Most managed it with a bit of practice; one or two found it harder but tried. Ro changed the name they used socially, from a name that had always felt borrowed to something that felt like theirs. They did not change anything about the way they dressed, because actually they had always dressed the way they liked. The change was in language, and in the strange lightness that comes when the words other people use for you finally match something real.
"My mum cried," Ro said. "Not badly. Just, she sat in my kitchen and cried a bit, and then she said, 'I just want to get it right.' And I thought, that's enough. That's completely enough."
I have enormous respect for parents who respond that way: not with instant perfect understanding, but with the willingness to try. Getting the pronouns wrong sometimes is not the problem. The problem is not caring enough to try.
There were harder moments too. A GP appointment where Ro was referred to as "she" throughout, despite having asked at the start. A family Christmas where an uncle decided the whole thing was a phase and said so, loudly, over the roast potatoes. The low-level friction of a world that still largely runs on two boxes, and the energy it takes to exist outside them with any degree of grace.
But Ro also described something I hear again and again: the relief of no longer performing. "I used to spend so much energy trying to be feminine enough that nobody would ask questions," they said. "Now I just... am. And that turns out to take almost no energy at all."
Non-binary people do not need anyone's permission to exist. They do not need to explain their identity to a sceptic, pass a test of authenticity, or prove that their experience is real. What they do need, and what they deserve, is the same thing everyone needs: to be called by the right name, referred to correctly, and treated as a full human being.
If you are reading this and wondering whether your own sense of yourself fits anywhere in the space beyond the binary, the answer is: it can. There is no requirement to resolve it quickly, label it definitively, or announce anything to anyone before you are ready. Take it slowly, choose safer people first, and be as kind to yourself as you would be to Ro standing at that bookshop counter on a Thursday afternoon, quietly putting something back in place.
If there is a topic that you would like me to cover, just let Sammy know.
Dr Helen Webberley, Gender Specialist and Medical Educator.
helenwebberley.com