Spotlight: Non-Binary Awareness Week

Jasmin Ali and Catt Mott

11th August 2023

Non-Binary Awareness Week, a crucial annual event. I say crucial because even some non-binary people aren’t aware of it. The importance of spotlighting offers a beacon of hope for countless individuals who identify beyond the traditional confines of gender. This week-long celebration is more than just a mark on the calendar; it represents a profound cultural shift towards understanding and acceptance.

This month I’m back with a topic a lot of people quiz me on, but few rarely know the experience. Even I have so much to educate myself on, and I do this by speaking with the community and learning about their experiences. Which leads me to King’s very own Catt Mott. They have given me the gift of their time! We’ll be discussing gender exploration and Catt’s realization they are non-binary; we’ll also be discussing ways we can support non-binary people day to day. You might even be wondering, what exactly does it mean to identify as non-binary? I hope you learn a little and appreciate how much Catt shared about their journey.

Question 1: How did you get into games?

Answer: I’ve always loved playing video games but I'm very, very new to the industry. I got here in a series of small steps. I started working as a copywriter and a UX writer for a software company. Then I moved to Sweden and started working at an esports company which was very fast-paced and exciting. I was learning a lot and getting to meet lots of really interesting people. That was kind of where I started thinking, maybe I could make a career in this video game thing. Then a colleague of mine moved to King and just wouldn't stop talking about how great it was. I'd never written or done any work directly for a game before and had no experience working on a really big product like Candy Crush, but she kept saying, “you’ll love it here. It's such a nice environment. The people are so great. I really think you should apply.” So, I did. I was absolutely shocked when they said, yes. I’ve been here for a year and a week now, and I am still amazed that I get to come to work every day. It's fantastic! In terms of the gender aspect of my career, I’m not sure. When I was a kid, I was relatively, I would say, computer savvy-ish for the time. I taught myself things so that I could cheat and beat my brothers at playing Worms or design silly HTML things for people on forums and I was quite good at IT in school. But my passion was always arts and storytelling and I guess at a certain point I thought, well, I'm not as smart as the boys in the IT classes. So, decided to drop IT entirely and instead focused on arts. I regret that sometimes, but I loved it and I do think that it gave me a lot of what people would call “soft skills” that have been extremely beneficial for working in tech. So, there you go, hire more theater students.

Question 2: What’s your experience with Gender Exploration?

Answer: My gender exploration started quite late as in, I actually didn't know that I was non-binary until I was almost 30. Not that I wasn’t before that time but that’s when I finally had the vocabulary for it. For a decade I'd been trying to explain this feeling, which I vaguely chalked up to being part of the bisexual experience: sometimes I’d feel more like a man, sometimes I’d feel more like a woman. It was actually my partner who told me “You know, you might be non-binary.” I was like, what does that mean? What's this? I've never heard of this before. Then I began looking it up online and was like, oh, this explains so much. This makes perfect sense. It’s funny, looking back on it. Coming from a theater and performance research background, writing about the kinds of topics I did (transhumanism, re-enactment, queer and queering theater) the idea of gender and identity as performative was not at all new to me. I must have read Judith Butler half a dozen times. It just took that one word to connect it all together. The way language can shape your world view is fascinating. At the time I was working for the software company which was very small but very open and accommodating and even happy to change things so that I could use they/them pronouns instead of she/her on my paperwork. When I moved into esports it was a bit more of a complicated environment. It wasn't as easy to be open about it. Some people I was open with and others I wasn’t. When I joined King, I applied using they/them on all my paperwork and one of the UX Directors reached out to me and said, “hey, do you know we've got a trans and non-binary Slack space? Do you want to come and hang out with the other trans and non-binary people?” It’s so nice to have a community that I can hang out with and have these shared experiences with. That was a big shift from what it's like in esports, where it can be hard even being a woman, let alone non-binary.

Question 3: What's been your experience with people you know personally like your friends and family?

Answer: I’m extremely lucky, I would say. My parents are very cool. We have a very close relationship and there's no drama or anything there, but we don’t really talk about personal things. That's always been the case. Even discussing my sexuality didn’t really happen until I was in my 20s. Not that it was a problem, it's just that it's kind of an awkward thing. Despite figuring out the non-binary thing several years ago, I only came out to my mom a few weeks ago. She was very cool about it and so was everyone else. With my friends, that's actually been easier. Most people very accepting. There's a couple of people I haven't told just because I'm a bit worried that it might change their view of me in a way that I don't like. But yeah, generally speaking, it's pretty good. I reason I haven’t told certain people is because I think there is a perception of it being trendy, or attention-seeking, or made up, a phase, all this kind of stuff. I think there are still some people who would have that viewpoint. People who, in all other regards, I generally respect and care about. I’m scared to lose those friends because they might react badly. On social media especially we're seeing a lot of negative attitudes toward trans and non-binary people being amplified and that makes things difficult. It's hard to say to someone, I haven't just become non-binary today.

Question 4: What is day to day life like for you being non-binary?

Answer: I should start by saying that I’m incredibly privileged. I have a community around me. I don’t face any safety issues or outward aggression because of my gender. I’m not battling a hostile healthcare or legal system. I was able to get a passport with my correct gender on it. That’s not the case for a lot of other people. Most of my problems come from invisibility, rather than being a target. Inclusive language is a basic thing to use but I’m still misgendered quite often. The place where I talk to people the most is work so, I suppose that’s where it happens the most. To some extent it's a bit of a battle because you don't want to be the person who's always correcting people. I have a t-shirt and badges with my pronouns which I wear to meetings sometimes to help people remember. I also have my pronouns on all my Zoom and Slack settings. I know it’s not done maliciously, luckily, I've never had anyone who I felt was misgendering me on purpose at work. It's generally just a lack of awareness or not remembering. But that has its own issues because you know that that person simply does not perceive you as non-binary, they perceive you as a woman. That can be a bit of a gut punch because what can I do? How can I say it louder than a t-shirt without people feeling like I’m berating them? It's one of those things where it's such a relief when someone else makes the correction for me. So that I don't have worry that I’m nagging all the time or causing problems. I do sometimes feel that I have to wear masculine styles 24/7 to be seen as non-binary. Otherwise, people just see me as woman in women's clothes. Luckily, my go-to is usually jeans and a tank top, so I'm very happy that’s coming back into style. Thanks ‘90s fashion. Sometimes I like to wear dresses but, again, I worry someone will think, oh, you know, that person's not really non-binary because why would they wear feminine clothes? It's not wrong to wear clothes marketed to women if you're AFAB (assigned female at birth) and nonbinary. There is no correct way to dress any gender. Clothes don’t have a gender! But I still struggle with feeling like I need to dress in a certain way in order to be perceived correctly and/or taken seriously. That can be tiring. If someone does misgender me I try to let them know, if I can. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and I think it can be unfair to someone to feel annoyed that they're getting it wrong without ever actually educating them. Most people, generally speaking, spend their entire lives making an unconscious assumption about someone's gender on sight. Even I do, despite working hard to unlearn it. So, I do try to reach out. It’s also a good opportunity to ask someone their pronouns and not make assumptions yourself. To my overwhelming joy, I am not at all the only non-binary person even in the Candy team. Because, societally, there’s still not really a culture of everyone introducing themselves with their pronouns (at least outside of queer spaces) there are plenty of people whose pronouns I’ve only learned from using Slack and Zoom.

Question 5: What are your thoughts on in-game representation for non-binary people?

Answer: I’m definitely glad that we're starting to see more of it. At my previous job, we wrote a lot about APEX Legends which has at least one non-binary character in it, which was great. I didn't even play the game but was so excited because they were such a cool character. We have a non-binary character in Candy too, which is awesome. I see some other AAA games starting to include non-binary representation. For me, it's important for a couple of reasons. If you already identify as non-binary, it's so rewarding and validating to see someone in a game that you can relate to. A character who has a similar experience to you. But I think maybe it's more important for people who don't have the vocabulary yet, who might discover something that they didn't know. Like I did when with that sudden revelation. As a pre-teen, when I first realized that I wanted a girl to be my boyfriend, it was earth shattering. I didn't know how to cope with that kind of thought. I feel like if in the books that I was reading, the cartoons I was watching, the games that I was playing, if there was some representation of what queer relationships were like, it would have probably saved me a lot of heartache. If there was more non-binary representation, perhaps it wouldn't have taken me until I was nearly 30 to understand that this is who I am. So, I think it's very important and I'm glad to see that it's improving. I hope that it just becomes as normal as having—I was going to say as normal as having women characters in games, but that's a struggle sometimes as well.

Question 6: What do you think could be improved within our industry to alleviate some of the pressures?

Answer: Not grouping women and non-binary people together. That’s a complicated conversation because in some instances, from some points of view, it makes perfect sense to group women in nonbinary people because you're often grouping them in respect to statistics or shared issues in maledominated spaces. So, for example, there are women in tech groups online that are also open to nonbinary people because the idea is to create this safe space where you can talk about things that maybe would be more difficult to address in a male-dominated industry space. So that makes sense. Grouping us for things like International Women's Day, that’s weird. I know it’s often done with the best intentions, but it does feel invalidating to be included in the women group. Because a celebration of women's day…that celebration is not for me. We have a non-binary celebration day, why not take the time to celebrate that instead? In fact, we actually have a week. Non-Binary People’s Day is the Friday of Non-Binary Awareness Week but, ironically, very few people are aware of it. Beyond that, it’s one thing for me as someone who is AFAB, to be lumped into the women in non-binary category but what about non-binary folks who were assigned male at birth? That’s already a very marginalized community and grouping us all together with women makes them practically invisible.

Question 7: Are there any common misconceptions or stereotypes about non-binary individuals that you'd like to debunk?

Answer: As I think I said before, people have been trained their entire life to look at someone and assume what their gender is. It is hard programming to break out of. So, I want to stress that it’s always worth checking. Making allowances for personal safety, of course. I very rarely come across someone who I've asked about their pronouns who's been offended. It's happened, but it's rare. So, I think meeting someone, even if you might perceive them as being “extremely masculine” or “extremely feminine,” don’t assume. You could also start the conversation by giving your own pronouns and opening a space for the other person to share theirs. That would be one thing. Next, I’d say being an ally is one of the best thing that people can do, it’s the thing that makes me the happiest. Especially when people use my pronouns correctly when I'm not there or correct someone in a conversation that I’m not present at. I know that some people feel awkward like they're speaking for me if they do that, but it makes things easier for me and is extremely validating. Just generally, stand up for people when you see things happening that shouldn’t or at least reach out to the person and ask if you can help. Lastly, remember that non-binary is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide variety of experiences. I’m genderqueer, but some people are specifically non-binary, or they’re gender-fluid, bigender, agender, etc. Then layer other intersectional experiences on top of that. There is no correct way to be non-binary. I would recommend taking the time to read about different people’s experiences.

My Thoughts:

Being a good person usually means being understanding, respectful, and inclusive in every interaction with your friends, family and colleagues. I feel having a non-binary person in your life or meeting a new one is just extending those values you use anyways into these interactions. If you find it confusing at first, well so did they. But having inclusive open conversations is always good grounds to build a relationship on. It’s good to remember that being a supportive friend doesn't require you to fully understand every aspect of their experience. The key is to show empathy, respect, and acceptance. As long as you approach your friend with love and a willingness to learn, you will be a positive force in their life and a good example to others. As always, I end with some educational pieces and some tips/tricks to help you on your way:

• Catt went above and beyond to write a small piece on support groups, it’s a great read! Highlighting esports and even some LGBTQ+ scholarships: https://stryda.gg/news/6- organizations-fighting-for-lgbtq-inclusivity-in-gaming

• Here’s a brief overview of gender identities but a great starter for those wanting to learn more without having to read a chunk of text: https://www.hrc.org/resources/lgbtq-pride-flags

• This last tip was one I had to keep reminding my self of constantly because it felt ingrained at some point. But use language that is inclusive of all genders. For example, instead of saying "ladies and gentlemen or Hey Guys" use "everyone" or "folks."