Georgia Flipo, better known as G Flip, is a Melbourne-born indie pop musician. She sings, she plays multiple instruments, including drums, guitar, and piano, and she won two ARIA Awards in 2023, one for best video and another for best Australian live act. In the same year, she married Chrishell Stause, star of the high-end real-estate reality TV show Selling Sunset—the pair are delightfully in love all over social media. In 2021, Flipo ‘came out’ as nonbinary, via an Instagram post.

According to some influential progressive commentators, that means that I’ve just been ‘misgendering’ her. I should have said ‘they won two ARIA awards’ and ‘they married.’ On this view, pronouns like ‘she’ and ‘her,’ as well as words like ‘woman’ and ‘wife,’ track a person’s gender identity, not her sex. And Flipo’s gender identity is nonbinary, which means not woman (and not man either).

In a music video released on International Non-Binary People’s Day in 2022, Flipo earnestly proclaims that nonbinary people are not a “waste of space.” Speaking to Alicia Vrajlal for Refinery29, Flipo said of the video’s all non-binary/gender fluid cast: “We all came from that same spot in our lives where we felt like a waste of space because we felt like we didn’t belong and we may have been ostracized or teased.” The lyrics include the lines

I grew up uncomfortable
Eleven years old & I wanted to die
I don’t feel like I’m a girl
Nor a boy so where do I lie

and

Look myself in the mirror
I say what the fuck are you?
Hit myself in the head now
Said it’s time to choose
They say I’m confused.

So, is Flipo confused? Presumably, she is not confused about her experience: she felt she was different from other children and that made her uncomfortable; because she wasn’t like other girls, she didn’t feel like a girl. Vrajlal reports that Flipo “would wear the boys’ uniform to school but be rejected by the other boys for being a ‘girl,’ and then isolated by the girls who said they were a ‘boy’ because of what they wore.” To be ostracized is painful. If there’s confusion here, it’s in Flipo’s interpretation of what her difference from the other children was and what it means.

It’s perfectly reasonable for Flipo to have taken things at face value. When she looked around her at school, it is likely that the girls all appeared happy with being girls, the boys all appeared happy with being boys, and then there was Flipo, stuck in the middle. She was different from everyone else. She needed a template that would help her make sense of her difference and the label ‘nonbinary’ seems, in retrospect, to provide a solution.