By Jaxx Davis
As a disabled person, aging doesn’t particularly faze me. Being disabled basically means speed running aging and I already have random aches and pains everywhere. Instead, I enjoy seeing the changes in me. I am starting to look more like my mother now and I love it. In the grip of my mental illness, I never thought I would get to my forties, so I am in constant awe of my body. I also have never been more confidently bisexual than I am now.
I came out as bisexual at the tender age of 15. Despite growing up in an unsafe environment because of who my father was, I never felt that was something I couldn’t do. Although my coming out wasn’t entirely unproblematic, it was easy. And then it just was. No great changes. I existed. Bisexually, but also not.
My environment was very straight and I had no queer friends. Nothing prepared me for the “what now” after coming out. Instead of going through with unpacking what all of this meant, compulsory heterosexuality and bi prejudices put me back into the closet. I was allowed to be bisexual, but in name only. With the exception of a few people, who went out of their way to remind me it was OK if I brought a girl home, being bisexual meant I had to choose men. I fully admit I internalized and chased the living hell out of the expectations that I needed to end up with a man. Looking back at my past, I was definitely with some ex-partners just to be in a relationship with a man.
The thing is, I like women A LOT. Women and other queer people, people who are nonbinary like me, people who move outside of social expectations, people with the same lived experiences, who understand queerness, are all within my preferences, but I am really not that keen on cishet men. My feelings are an almost exact flip of what people expected of me. I was allowed to like women occasionally, but only from a distance. But my attraction to men is occasional and I don’t like extreme masculinity.
A few things helped me figure myself out and those things just fit into each other like it was meant to be. It all started with my partner. I have been with my current partner for 15 years now. We met at a time when we both had a lot of figuring out to do. Neither of us were out yet as trans. From the start, our relationship was different. I liked and loved her differently and more intensely than I did all my other partners, who had all been men. It was the first time I didn’t just love someone, but also adored them fiercely. It wasn’t until later that I understood that I liked her that way because she’s a woman. What I did know was that she was easy to love, and for the first time I felt like I was too.
I have always been disabled and made to feel like shit for it, but she never did. She got my access needs and my limitations immediately and acted accordingly. Our relationship has something called access intimacy. It’s a term first coined by Mia Mingus, a queer disabled woman of color, and it describes that intimate feeling that occurs when someone truly gets your access needs. A few years in, I became more disabled and suddenly bedridden, and because we had that intimacy, she made sure I never felt like I was too much.
Around that same time, I found out my gender had a name. I never understood why my feelings about gender were so different until I heard about the word nonbinary. As a child I used to hate not being able to be one of the boys and one of the girls. I once cut my hair because I didn’t want to be seen as a girly-girl, but I hated it when someone accidentally called me a boy. I always felt like neither gender or all in one.
When I came out as nonbinary this time around, a new queer journey started. I didn’t just unpack all I knew about my gender, I also started unpacking everything else. What if my sexuality isn’t completely what I thought it was? What if those beliefs I thought I needed to hold were incorrect and definitely not for me?
When I met my queercrip community, I started to realize how my internalized queerhate and my internalized ableism were the same thing: I wasn’t allowed to be myself so I got in my own way. Like my partner, my queercrip community saved me. I was loved. I wasn’t alone. And most of all, I was allowed to be myself. This sense of security made the pieces click in my head.
My growth made me be a better partner to my partner when she came out. Only she can say whether who I was was good enough, but I know I had more to offer than I did before. I mentioned earlier that I learned that I have always loved her like a woman and her coming out was the moment I understood. It was that moment that I realized what my bisexuality meant for me.
But it took me hitting my late thirties and then forties to make me fully stop caring about other people’s opinions on my identities. People just assumed I was comfortable being myself before, but being unable to hide myself didn’t mean I was comfortable in my skin. I used to be read as queer because I didn’t fit into the norm, but now I exist as queer because I want to. Age made me stop giving a fuck.
I think aging can be queer, depending on how you look at aging. Which is a weird thing to say, because we all age. But just because aging is normal, doesn’t mean it’s accepted. You’re expected to hate it. In part it’s because of ableism. Live long enough and eventually you’ll become disabled and you will be judged for that. However, ageism is also its own thing, tied to capitalism, tied to misogyny, tied to losing your worth because your role in society changes. Queering age means relinquishing the idea that aging is something you should hate, that aging makes you no longer important in life.
I am going through perimenopause at the moment and I am losing the ability to play the role expected of me. It’s an unexpected relief. The older I get, the more I am leaning into falling out of the norm. I find that I don’t want to fit in and I have been exploring what I want to do with that feeling. At 43, I am reshooting the piercings I took out because I thought I had to, and I am planning on getting more. I recently got a shirt that says “Eat your girl out or I will” and I am sure that me, a disabled person, wearing something that queer will lead to nondisabled cishet pearl-clutching, but I don’t care. My new self is becoming unapologetically queer.
I think that is what I hope people take away from this piece: aging can be queer as hell if you want it to be. Societal expectations do not matter, but your happiness does.
Jaxx Davis (they/them) is a queer and disabled activist, artist, and writer from the Netherlands. Bedridden with severe ME, they write and create from their bed, creating simple but raw works about their life and the world.
Jaxx Davis shared two images about themself and aging. The first is a photo of Jaxx during their 40th year when they buzzed off all of their hair (plus the amazing Magic Wand earrings). And the second is their artwork, an ode to hormone replacement therapy (notice the patch on their thigh) which Jaxx is taking to treat their perimenopause symptoms.