Today I played a card game with strangers. One person referred to me as ‘she;’ another person said ‘he.’ I said, “Actually, I use they.” A third person piped up, and said: “Ah, because you’re a millennial.”

“No?” I said. “It’s because I’m trans.”

The world we live in is binary.

In a week—giving me a little bit of time before the semester starts—I’ll have to send an e-mail, worded the same but with slight alterations, to somewhere between four and five different people, depending on the result of my registration process. It will start out something like this:

Hi Professor [name],

My name is Chain, and I will be joining your class [title] this upcoming semester. I am writing to let you know that I am a transgender student, and the name that is listed on your roster for me is not what I am called. Because I am nonbinary, I would be grateful if you would take care to refer to me with only gender-neutral pronouns, such as...

I have written a dozen versions of this letter and sent them to countless teachers before; it’s taken years to cultivate the perfect wording. Funnily, I almost always get the same response—supportive, ‘I understand,’ ‘Thanks for letting me know,’ ‘No problem!’

They are more optimistic than I am. Or rather, less experienced. I have been through this before; I know it will be a problem. Not because they are lying. They mean well, but the fact is this: the world we live in is binary.

Here is what it is like to be a student who doesn’t fit into that binary.

Like your fellow population of trans students who don’t use their legal name, you will arrive to your first day of class for the semester with a knot in your stomach. Eight times out of ten, your professors will have already read your name/pronouns e-mail and responded. Regardless of whether they read it, you have about a ten percent chance that they will read your name wrong off the roster. When this happens, you will be faced with a choice – respond to the incorrectly gendered misnomer, or wait until they’re done with reading and awkwardly claim they didn’t call your name, which is half true. You will always pick the second. They’ll furrow their brow, scan the list, confused, before they find you again on the second try and realize. “Oh, right, Chain. My mistake.” You will hope no one notices the same last name. You’ll know they aren’t listening like you are, but every pause, every glance of the eyes, will feel like a spotlight.

Later, your class will play an “introduce yourselves” type game, the type you wish had died in high school. If it is a public rounds, you will encounter another choice – will you stop the teacher before they start and ask that the introductions include personal pronouns? It’s a coin flip, weighted on how much energy you have in the moment. It’s exhausting to be the one to call it out. But most days, nobody else will.

If you do ask, the professor will never say no. Anywhere from one-quarter to three-quarters of the class will forget to include pronouns anyway; at least one person will give a half-answer, confused by the idea of having to declare how they will be called. (You will be envious.) The exercise will, of course, be fairly futile in the end. No one ever actually bothers to remember anyone’s pronouns, and later in the semester, when someone gets it wrong, you will again have to make a choice between saying something or keeping quiet, between maintaining peace and making yourself unliked. Heads, or tails? The world we live in is binary.

You won’t leave the classroom for the bathroom. You’ll wait until after, and walk away from the direction your car is because that’s where one of the only gender neutral restrooms on campus is. It’ll be a waste of time and energy, but you won’t be able to bring yourself to enter the sex-divided stalls, ducking quickly past the mirrors not to be seen, lingering until the sinks stop running, stepping too far out into the hall so the passersby won’t notice what door you’re walking out of. It will be easier, in the end, to make the walk. The single-stalled unisex bathrooms are more strictly enclosed, but they will be easier to breathe in. In them, you won’t feel claustrophobic.

Here is what it is like to be a student who doesn’t fit into the binary.

Your student e-mail account is littered with messages from automated databases within the school. Eighty percent of them address you by your legal name. You don’t open them, pretending they're not there. Only on very rare occasions are you able to click the reply button, informing the sender that the registrar should reflect both your “preferred name” and “alternate name” fields as Not That and requesting, please, that they update accordingly.

Your professor takes you out to dinner with the poet whose work you’ve been reading this semester. You are eager to have the chance to engage with him, to share your thoughts, to hear his ideas. But your professor keeps introducing you as “she,” so you withdraw, letting someone else grab the writer’s eyes and ears. You can’t answer to that word, it’s not within your capabilities.

You’d rather not be known at all than be known as what you’re not.

You join a Greek organization, something you never thought you’d do. It’s professional, not social, so it’s not stratified between single-gender housing; it’s open to all. But when you tell your parents you have to use the word ‘fraternity,’ because that’s what the campus calls it. Your family questions why you’re in a masculine-gendered group. You mutter something about the Greek and Latin origins of terminology and later in the month listen to the stumbling words as someone reading has to change, on the fly, the phrase “brothers and sisters” from the oath, as you are neither.

On a whim, you sign up for the Spring Break trip, joining some friends that you already know are going. The application says you will be placed in a room with occupants of the same gender. You stare at the submit button, wondering if you’ll be excluded on a technicality or just be herded into the closest approximation of a suitable gender assignment. In the end you click, signing on for whatever fate may await you. To make it work, you ultimately meet with someone in the student life division personally, making special accommodations. It’s exhausting to have to be accommodated for; all you want is just to exist peaceably as what you are.

Someone asks you, “Is Chain like, your real name? Like the one your parents gave you?” You tell them it is your given name, which is only half true. You wish they’d stop asking.

In between classes, you take your car off campus and get fast food at the nearest restaurant with a drive-thru. You are wearing sunglasses and projecting a lower register of voice but when they take your order, they still call you ma’am. Niceties have never felt so much like a heavy splinter in your chest, refusing to leave the skin without breaking off smaller and sharper.

At the end of the day you are thinking of the work you have to do, toying with staying at the library. But you know you can’t. It is too many hours being visible; you have to go home and take off your binder so that you can breathe again where you won’t be seen.

Friends visit each other and host movie nights in their dormitories or school-provided suites. You like living alone, but even if you didn’t, this had never really been an option. Undergraduate housing does not have gender neutral rooms available except in exceedingly particular circumstances.

Your teachers misgender you in class. Your peers misgender you in class. Your group members misgender you in class. You wonder if there’s a way to just avoid being spoken about in the third person.

Someone wants to know – if they’re attracted to you, does that mean they have to stop defining themselves as gay/straight/whatever? You do not see why it is your job to define their sexuality for them.

You will get up. You will go to school. You will come home. You will rinse, you will repeat.

Every day, I get to watch other people do the same things I do – eat, chat, socialize, pee, shop, flirt, debate – without thinking. We go through the same motions, and with every step I control how I present myself, what I respond to, what words to use to explain my identity. Every choice is weighted between relaxation and passing. Is it worth it to try? The thing about falling outside of the binary is, there’s nothing to “pass” as; there is no way to be read correctly. All presumptions are wrong, and people just keep making presumptions.

The world we live in is binary.

The truth is, I am fine with the way I am. I do not feel tortured or maligned for my gender identity. I like who I am and I will do whatever it takes to live honestly. But just because I am not preoccupied with the implications of my identity every moment of every day does not mean that it’s not my reality hour by hour, seven days a week. I don’t have to do a thing to be reminded or to trigger a mechanism of self-defense– everything I encounter will do that for me. And each different thing I have to do to be my most natural self is nothing less than tiring. This is what it’s like to to be a student who doesn’t fit into the binary.

Now, for just a moment, I’d like you to think about all the things you don’t have to think about every day. Every time someone calls you by the right name and the correct pronouns, do you feel a rush of joy? Is a single stall toilet a solace, do you silently exhale in relief when nobody stutters around you in the third person?

Being nonbinary has compelled me to appreciate every tiny modicum of respect, every inch of effort made, and every ounce of recognition I can get. By writing about my experiences, I hope that I can instill that same sense of appreciation in others as well, not just for me, but for themselves.

After all, the world that we live in is binary, but that doesn’t mean we have to keep it that way. Sometimes it’s the thoughtless words and actions that make the most impact, and the best way to combat the damages done is to stop being careless and start just thinking– outside the binary, and outside the box.