Who I Am, Pronouns They/Them

I recently outed myself as an IV drug user in one of my university lectures. The teacher was explaining the sexualisation of needles – crossing boundaries, being penetrated, and surrendering one’s power. When she said, “shooting alone is like masturbating,” I raised my hand to speak, feeling the need to be validated. I told the lecture hall about my relationship with needles – that it is intimate, it is sexual. I’d never had that affirmed before. 

I came out as queer when I was 14 and feel like my gender and sexuality have shifted endlessly since. By age 20, my gender expression had become quite specific - I’d started using meth and discovered that it felt good to sexualise myself through hyper-femininity. My ex and I made up characters, with their own traits and storylines, and together we would get high and act out elaborate sexual fantasies. 

Sitting in the marble bath of a hotel room while flirting, sharing details about our made-up pasts, passing the pipe between us. Gender had always felt like play for me, and using meth felt like my way to indulge in the drama of the performance. I got off on how binary my expressions were – in a way it was kind of like drag.

For a long time, how I understood my gender was linked to the type of sex I was having. And the type of sex I was having always closely related to the types of drugs I was using. When I started shooting opioids, it wasn’t long before needles became a central part of my sex life, and my bodily experiences of sex became more and more the same. With this, gender became a more abstract part of my identity – using opioids was the most important thing in my life and became the primary thing I identified with. 

My relationship with opioids was deeply intimate and taught me a lot about who I am. With my dependence came a certain psychological safety in the gender roles my partner and I performed. He was distinctly chivalrous - when we’d use together, he would always mix up for me and shoot me before himself. 

It was an intimate domestic arrangement that often just asked me to simply receive. When he'd come home in the middle of the night, he’d wake me up so I could shoot with him. When we were rationing or desperate, he'd always set aside enough for me. When everything else in our world became spiky and ugly, somehow this chivalry around shooting remained until the end.

After a swirling end to my affair with opioids, I toe-dipped into the club community to explore my gay-masc experiences. I began to see the way boundaries around inclusion were drawn – what parts of me were and were not granted access. I’ve had moments of blissful acceptance in gay clubs, but I’ve also experienced cis gay men acting as gatekeepers to queer masculinity. After a night out, some friends and I ended up outside a bathhouse at 8AM, rejected with money in hand. The doorman told us: “boys only.” My friend replied without a beat, “we are boys!” 

“Sorry, dicks only.”

When I started going to festivals, I remember immediately feeling torn between the freedom of expression and the anxiety of visibility. In this new community, I felt able to experience and express my body in an environment removed from many of society’s rigid constructs. While self-expression through nudity became a powerful space for play and deconditioning, it also meant public sexualisation and having strangers code me as feminine. 

The first festival I attended as an adult was for mainstream electronic music, and my memories from those three days are all tainted by how my body was objectified. I was told by event organisers that my nipples had to be covered, while my partners did not, and all weekend I faced a non-stop barrage of “Nice tits!” and other sexual comments from male punters. At another dance music festival, my sister and I took psilocybin mushrooms, and I imagined myself becoming a genderless troll. In that moment, I had fully rejected the human idea of “gender” and all its suffocating rules – I felt free to experience myself purely, as I was, as a creature. Yet, in a community with its basis in respect and self-expression, my sister and I were both groped by men while tripping! It’s moments like these, when you’re forced to interact with other people’s projections of gender and sexuality, that gender norms become so visible. 

As I’ve grown and carried the knowledge from my past selves, I’ve carved my own space in this world. I’ve learned to articulate myself and understand my experiences. I’ve created my own community. To deny the intersection between gender and drug use is to erase how these experiences can grant and deny access to different places and social groups. 

Drug use and gender nonconformity have isolated me from belonging to wider social validity in many ways – but both experiences have also led me to find the most important people in my life. These identities have shaped my chosen family, fostered loving connections and understanding, and taught me deeply about who I am. I am a nonbinary trans-masc person who uses drugs, and these things are inseparably linked.