By now, I’ve lived in Australia for roughly half the time I’ve lived at all. Three decades is significant. Three is the number of sides in a triangle, a shape that, for millennia, has so fascinated our species. Three is a holy number—the Christian Trinity, the Hindu Trimurti, Wicca’s Triple Goddesses. Halves have always been significant, too—binaries more so. Man, woman. Human, world. Soul, body. Right, wrong. In his Symposium, Plato imagines proto-humans as Franken-beings with two faces, eight limbs and two sets of genitals, bisected by wrathful gods and doomed forever to search for their ‘other half’.

Some months ago an acquaintance asked me why I hadn’t come out as non-binary yet. Yet, as though it were inevitable, and with the implication that the public had more of a premium on my preferred gender label than I do. The fact that this person is an acquaintance is salient: I barely interact with them, so it’s clear their question had arisen from scraps of my personality they’d gathered from what I’d made visible in public contexts. ‘Plus you’re functionally non-binary, anyway!’ It bothered me then, as now, that to this person my only choices were to ‘come out’ or stay stealthy. Never mind all our talk about gender and sexuality being fluid; it seemed the trajectory ostensibly ahead of me was a linear, discrete transition towards making it ‘official’.