Pink News: Richard O'Brien Interview - Nonbinary visibility »

[Warning: Interview uses an outdated term considered offensive by many intersex people]

practicalandrogyny:

Richard O’Brien’s, creator of the Rocky Horror Show is back in the gay press talking about the experience of being nonbinary and turning 70:

“As a child I loved stories of wonderment,” he tells me. “Knights in shining armour, princes in tights, fairy princesses, that sort of thing. My elder brother says I used to scare myself silly with monsters, skeletons and graveyards. I lived in my imagination because I knew deep down I should really have been born a girl. I couldn’t say that out loud so I pulled the shutters down and lived inside my head.”

I ask if he’s ever considered gender reassignment. He says no. He describes his gender identification and bisexuality in the following way:

“My feeling is that there are hormonal triggers in the womb. For me, hermaphrodites are proof that things don’t always go according to plan. I keep arguing we’re all on some kind of continuum. Some are hard-wired male or female and others are somewhere in between. After a period feeling schizoid I decided I’d just be me. I’m more male than female, but if I want to go out in a frock I will.”

Read the full interview at Pink News

O’Brien previously talked to Pink News about being nonbinary transgender in August 2009, saying:

“All my life, I’ve been fighting never belonging, never being male or female, and it got to the stage where I couldn’t deal with it any longer. To feel you don’t belong … to feel insane … to feel perverted and disgusting … you go f***ing nuts.

“If society allowed you to grow up feeling it was normal to be what you are, there wouldn’t be a problem. I don’t think the term ‘transvestite’ or ‘transsexual’ would exist: you’d just be another human being.”

“I’d been fighting, going to therapy, treating what I was as though it were some kind of illness to be cured. But actually, no, I was basically transgender, and just unhappy.”

O’Brien, who uses transgender to describe feeling “in between” being a man or a woman, added: “There is a continuum between male and female. Some are hard-wired one way or another, I’m in between. Or a third sex, I could see myself as quite easily.”

On plucking up the courage to tell his children about being trans, O’Brien said their reaction was: “Dad, and your point is?”

Read the 2009 story at Pink News