The earliest understanding I ever had of gender was that people were confused by mine.

I was five the first time I saw someone asking my mother what I was. It turned out that people had been occasionally asking this since I was born. I would argue that all babies look pretty much the same — like babies — but, apparently, I was a particularly androgynous baby.

At that age, this had very little impact on my life. These were all of the things I knew about gender:

• My best friend’s mom had bought us two stuffed rabbits, and hers was pink and mine was blue, so she said mine was a boy rabbit. I asked if Blue from Blue’s Clues was a boy and she wasn’t sure. Just to be contrarian, I insisted Blue’s pink dog friend Magenta was a boy.
• Bees/ants/termites have matriarchal social structures and in many of them males are nomadic or nearly absent. This is not how humans do it.
• In cartoons, the way you tell if someone is a boy or a girl is eyelash length. This didn’t seem to work anywhere else. (At one point I cut my eyelashes off with scissors to see if that makes you more androgynous. It turns out it makes your mom yell at you.)

Things changed when I left my relaxed Montessori-style kindergarten and started going to the regular school a few blocks from home. I immediately started to play with a group of boys who had all of my hobbies: climbing objects, falling off of objects, fighting, looking for bugs, trying to throw things onto the roof of the school, etc. Except… suddenly most of these activities were off-limits, and they didn’t want to do them with me, because I was Not A Boy.

My best friend had made friends at this school, too. While I was giving myself as many concussions as possible during the 45-minute free period after lunch, she and the other girls in my year would sit together on the benches and do… something. I think they would just talk, but it was a Great and Tantalizing Mystery to me, because when I came over to join in, I was told that I was not allowed to hear what they were talking about, or participate, because I was Not A Girl.

I still don’t completely know how this happened. It was many more years before I even heard the word “transgender”, but it was as if everyone else had already gotten the memo. Kids didn’t have access to the standard suite of slurs that adults seem to keep in their back pocket, but they called me a “he-she” or a freak. A sign was floating over my head, completely invisible to me, that blithely informed everyone else that I didn’t belong in the pack structure with everyone else.

The sign never went away. I was invited to a women’s group in middle school, and the one time I went, we were all so uncomfortable that I left again. I didn’t stay in high school long, but for the months that I was there, it was a regular occurrence for someone I didn’t recognize to ask if I was a boy or a girl and then run away, laughing. The only time I was able to staunchly present myself as either completely male or completely female was online, and I discovered, soon enough, that both had irritating side effects.

I came to New Zealand. New Zealand, everyone told me, was very laid-back. For the most part, this was true. A man stopped on the street in the small town of Pinehaven and interrogated me about my gender for half an hour while I waited to be picked up. He decided I was transitioning from female to male. Two years later, the same man did it again on the train. This time, he decided I was transitioning from male to female. He didn’t recognize me, and he didn’t get the joke when I told him I had a strange feeling of deja vu. Whatever direction I tried to lean, I was doing it wrong.

The language people used changed. Now, well-meaning as they were, when people couldn’t tell, they would no longer ask are you a boy or a girl but what are your preferred pronouns? I have no answer. Anything is fine! Everything is equally not-fine! None of this feels real!

There is a point to all this. In 2022, the United States of America added an option to change your gender on your passport to an X. I thought about the pros and cons. With an X gender marker, I could never again travel through certain sex-segregated airports. In theory, it could paint a target on me. But… the target was already painted. The sign above my head had never gone away. There was a twisted relief in being able to warn people that I was coming. I couldn’t fail at being a man or a woman if I was not trying to be either.

I applied and received my passport, complete with X, in 2023. Overall, it was a positive change. Some older systems had problems with it, but I had been right; when an X gender marker preceded me, everyone knew what to expect, and they were markedly more comfortable and less confused. This passport — X and all — is my only form of identification.

On Monday, in the United States, a new executive order was signed into law that invalidates it. It’s called “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT” because of course it is. The order mandates that all passports “accurately reflect the holder’s sex,” in this case the one assigned at birth, which is now legally considered immutable. My passport is now incorrect and outdated, not because anything about me has changed, but because my gender does not exist. What happens now?

I don’t know. Nobody else knows, either, though a legal expert quoted by NBC thinks that anyone traveling with an X passport is likely to be detained. No one has any idea how passports will be invalidated and reissued. If my application for NZ citizenship is accepted — which may take another 18 months — then, at least for now, I will be allowed to have an X again. The world is getting stranger every day, though, and there is always the risk it will be walked back here, too.

I know how it goes. I’ve heard it a million times. You are either a man or you are a woman. My gender does not exist. So why can everyone else see it?