“I have always felt this way about gender pronouns, that ‘she’ pinches a little and ‘he’ slips off me too easily. I’m often asked by well-intentioned people which pronoun I prefer, and I always say the same thing: that I don’t really have a preference, that neither pronoun really fits, but thank you for asking, all the same. … I know it would be easier if I just picked a pronoun and stuck with it, but that would be a compromise made for the comfort of everyone else but me. …

Perfect strangers have been asking me if I am a boy or a girl as far back as I can remember. Not all of them are polite about it. Some are just curious, others ask me like they have every right to know, as if my ambiguity is a personal insult to their otherwise completely understandable reality. … In my braver days, when someone asked if I was a boy or a girl, I would say something flip and witty, like ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘makes you wonder, doesn’t it?,’ but I found that this type of tactic greatly increased the chances I would get the living shit kicked out of me. …”

in: Ivan E. Coyote: The Slow Fix

(Also check out this short film of one of Ivan Coyote’s stories: No Bikini)