Chrissplains Nonbinary Advocacy to Cisgender People, Topic: We’re here. We’re natural. We’re nonbinary. And we’re not going anywhere.

By Chris Talbot, communications professional and educomics creator

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CW: This post deals with trauma, childhood sexual assault, transphobia, conversion therapy, homelessness, and suicidal ideation and may be triggering to some readers. Please proceed with caution. If you need immediate assistance, please follow this link to International Suicide Hotlines. If you need help specific to your identity, there is Trans Lifeline (877-565-8860 for trans folks), The Trevor Project (866-488-7386 for LGBTQ youth ages 13-24).

Introduction

There’s a screenshot from one of Trump’s Executive Orders from his inauguration day (January 20, 2025). The title is “Defending Women from gender ideology and Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Text in the next comic panel says, On Trump’s first day in office, he decided it was urgent to put forth an executive order that erased my gender entirely and declared that every American was female. For real. He got the science so wrong that he wrote, “’female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” which means we’re all female since fetuses all begin as phenotypically female until about the 6 or 7th week of gestation. But ignoring his incompetency when it comes to science, the EO declared gender be replaced with “biological sex” while ignoring the natural variation of that (sex isn’t binary either), allowing only for males and females. Shortly thereafter, Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, ordered the State Department to suspend passport applications for people with an “x” gender marker or those changing their names or genders and to hold all of their documents in those applications, essentially trapping all trans people and removing paperwork necessary for other processes.

First Section

Text says, So often, even when I’m speaking to people who are onside and allies, they believe that transgender identity is new and tell us to be patient. There’s an illustration of a white woman. She is a saying “Well, it’s such a new concept… I’m sure folks will be on board when it’s older.” Text beneath that says, (Even if it was “new,” this level of cruelty and attempts to erase us should be terrifying to our “allies,” not something they encourage us to somehow wait out.)

In the next panel it says, They don’t know about Christine Jorgensen (the first woman in the U.S. to undergo gender-affirming surgery in the 1950s) or Lili Ilse Elvenes (who received the first successful ovarian transplant in 1930). There are photographs of both Christine Jorgensen and Lili Ilse Elvenes.

Beneath that, it says, They don’t know about the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology), which was the first target of the Nazi party’s book-burning campaign in 1933. There’s a photograph of a bunch of folks dressed up in elaborate dresses and suits. Text describes the photograph as a costume party at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin before the Nazis closed it and burned the research. Unknown photographer or date, courtesy of Scientific American.

Beneath that, it says, They don’t know about Catholic missionary texts that describe Indigenous Two-Spirit individuals and that were used as a reason that Indigenous people on Turtle Island needed to be colonized and converted for their own good. There are photographs of Indigenous Two-Spirit individuals. Text describes them as Osh-tisch (left), a Crow Two-Spirit person sits with a Crow woman. Unknown photographer or date, courtesy of Harper-Hugo Darling, Crow Nation. And portrait of We-wha, a Zuni Two-Spirit person, by John K. Hillers, 1894, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute.

Text says, They don’t know about hijras in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; il femminiello in Italy; māhū in Hawai’i and Polynesia; calalai, calabai, and bissu in South Sulawesi and Indonesia; waria in Indonesia; kathoey in Thailand; acault in Myanmar; khuntha, mukhannathun, and khuntha in the SWANA region (which became pejorative terms, but are now being reclaimed); androgynos, tumtum, aylonit hamah, aylonit adam, saris hamah, and saris adam in the Jewish culture; bakla in the Philippines; sistergirls and brotherboys for Indigenous Australians; kwolu-aatmwol in Papua New Guinea; chuckchi in Siberia; guevedoche in the Dominican Republic; muxe or muxhe among the Zapotec of Oaxaca; quariwarmi in Peru; travesti in South America; ashtime in Ethiopia; mashoga in Kenya and Tanzania; sekrata in Madagascar; wakashu in Japan; burnesha in Albania.

Second Section

There’s a screenshot of a world map with dozens of location markers. Text says, Two-Spirit map courtesy of PBS, Independent Lens. Text beneath it says, These traditions were wiped out during colonization or westernization (depending on the country or ethnicity). Truly, it’s the gender binary that is new. we’ve always existed, but we were a threat to the Christian hegemony and were systematically removed from public view. Basically, the same thing they’re trying to do right now under the Trump administration. The thing is, we popped up even when we didn’t have a term, even when we didn’t know what transgender meant. I said when I was five that my name was Chris. I didn’t know what that meant, only that it was true. And that’s because it’s natural, normal, and inevitable that we exist.

In the next panel, there are illustrations of a baby, child, and adult. The baby is a newborn with an off-white onesie. The child is wearing a pink shirt, baby blue bottle cap glasses, and a mullet. The adult is bald with heavy purple makeup covering their head with a flat chest, wearing a black vest. They are opening the vest up to show a chest tattoo of a cat and an anatomical heart with plants growing out of the heart valves. The illustrations are labeled Born trans, baby Chris; struggling child Chris*; survived to be adult Chris*. *still trans.

The next panel says, So why am I telling you all of this? Why am I sharing the history of our transcestors? Why do I want you to know that we’re natural? Why am I about to launch, unprompted, into my own traumatic story? Because if we’re natural (and we are), then there are children you know right now who are navigating this hatred and erasure of an integral part of themselves. And I want you to know that if I didn’t sometimes get motivated by pure spite during pivotal moments in my life, I wouldn’t have survived the hatred and erasure that I experienced in my childhood and early adulthood. When I came out for the first time to my parents in 1996 and told them “I like girls. I like like girls.” my mother cried and told me I would die alone and go to hell. I believed her. I was raised Roman Catholic, so of course, I believed her. Two years later, I needed therapy for my extreme anxiety and depression, but my father took me to a conversion therapist — I don’t think it was intentional at first, but he didn’t find a different one once he knew. This therapist blamed all of my issues, including the childhood sexual assault I had survived, on my queerness, and tried to therapize me not to be queer. There’s an illustration of a therapist sitting in a chair with a notebook and pen. She’s saying, “This anxiety that you’re feeling could be because you think you’re a lesbian. You would be a lot happier, have a real childhood, and lead a better life if you stopped believing that.*” Beneath that it says, *Not what she actually said, but I can’t remember the words, just the gist.”

Third Section

Text says, Those sessions, which my father attended, taught me that no one was going to support or care for me. I began having suicidal ideation. But something in me kept me alive, and that was spite. I don’t know where it came from; I seem to have been born with it. A friend of mine told me that maybe it was my ancestors giving me the necessary tool to stay alive. But spite kept me alive. I kept thinking…

There’s an illustration of teenager Chris with a green star tattoo on their neck, a buzzed head, and wearing a brown hoodie. A thought bubble says, “They’d rather see me dead than happy? Then I’m going to live the gayest, happiest life I can. F*ck ‘em! I’m going to live to spite them!”

Text says. When I was 19, I came out again, as trans. My parents disowned me and pulled all support, and I quickly found myself unhoused during winter in Wisconsin. I was sexually assaulted by someone who took me in and thought I owed them for their support. I tried to report my assault, and while the doctor who saw the damage and took the samples for the kit fully believed me, the university services person designated for these kinds of attacks didn’t believe that a woman could sexually assault another person who was assigned female at birth. I was, once again, reminded that the powers that be would not support or care for me. And I had to continue to see my attacker at school every day. That time, I created a plan for my suicide and began to follow through before that spite started bubbling up again.

Text in the next panel says, I decided to live again, out of spite, and joined a sexual assault victim services group therapy session (since I still didn’t trust individual therapists not to try conversion therapy on me), and I later joined the volunteer Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence/Sexual Assault LGBT Planning Committee which was tasked with teaching emergency services how to help queer folks who were victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. My spite turned into not just something that kept me alive, but something that would make the most horrible and vulnerable times for others just a little more bearable. In case spite didn’t help them get through. My story isn’t special. LGBT youth report higher rates of sexual violence than the general population (39% according to the Trevor Project), and queer youth are 120% more likely to experience homelessness (according to a study from the University of Chicago). And when we’re rejected and not protected, more traumatic things can happen to us, increasing our risk.

Beneath that is a screenshot of a graph showing stats of traumatic events for queer vs. non-queer youth, from the Chapin Hall Study at the University of Chicago. It shows that 15% of non-LGBTQ and 25% of LGBTQ youth have harmed themselves; 47% of non-LGBTQ and 62% of LGBTQ youth have been physically harmed by others; 15% of non-LGBTQ and 38% of LGBTQ youth have been “forced to have sex”; 9% of non-LGBTQ and 27% of LGBTQ youth have “exchanged sex for basic needs”; 37% of non-LGBTQ and 60% of LGBTQ youth have been “exposed to discrimination or stigma outside of the family”; and 37% of non-LGBTQ and 64% of LGBTQ youth have been “exposed to discrimination or stigma within the family.”

Fourth Section

Text says, Trying to remove us from the public eye isn’t going to change the fact that we exist. And it’ll be nearly impossible to scrub us from history this time around. (It’s not like you can just burn all the books at the one Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. We have the internet and global connection.) But it will make it so that not all of us survive until this onslaught of attacks end. Some of us don’t have spite to keep us going in the meantime. So if you want to truly be an ally, or better yet, an accomplice, you need to get in the mucky muck with us and make as much of a ruckus as we are making rather than make excuses or tell us to be patient. There’s an illustration of a white woman saying “But this… but that… but patience…”

Beneath that, there is a post from Trevor Project which says “Anti-transgender laws caused up to a 72% increase in suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth.” The citation says “Lee et al. (2024). State-Level Anti-Transgender Laws Increase Past-Year Suicide Attempts among Transgender and Nonbinary Young People in the United States. Nature Human Behavior.

Text in the next panel says Our children don’t have time for us to sit back and be patient! We need to show that we care and we have the numbers and strength so they can survive today. Even at my big age, I heard that nagging voice in my head telling me that folks would rather see me dead than thriving. Our kids can’t wait. Now is the time to decide what you are willing to do and what you’re going to do. Because we’re here. We’re natural. We’re Trans. We’ve always existed. We always will exist. we’re not going anywhere (IRL or from public memory this time around). But it’s up to what we do collectively how many of us survive this attempt at extermination. And this is an attempt at extermination. We don’t sing loudly “death before detransition” at punk shows because it’s fun, but because for a lot of us, it is true. Ensure we survive. Join us in this fight.

There’s a screenshot of a Bluesky post from Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg which says “Your regular reminder that the first known clinic to offer gender-affirming surgeries was… destroyed by Nazis. In 1933. (Magnus Hirschfield’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.) They always come for trans people first.

Text says, And if all of this doesn’t spur you to action, remember the poem by Martin Niemöller, “then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” AS Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg pointed out, “they always come for trans people first.” They come for the trans people first, but we are not the only targets. Don’t let them get to you.

Please share this widely to help others know how to best advocate for their nonbinary friends and family. If you like this comic or learned something, consider becoming a patron: patreon.com/c/mxchristalbot