Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I've interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation about the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. To join me in the future, then, please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk that's S-E-E Change Happen dot co dot uk. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on itunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today it's Episode 85 with the title Mirrors and Doorways, and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Nonir Amicitia. Nonir describes themselves as the bottom half of a trench coat double act, and I can't wait to find out what that means.

When I asked Nonir to describe their superpower, they said juggling. They are able to keep a ridiculous number of balls in the air. I have it on good authority that's more than ten, so definitely a ridiculous amount. Hello, Nonia. Welcome to the show.

Joanne, thank you so much for having me today.

Absolute pleasure. And you've intrigued me and I really can't wait to find out some of the well, what is the tunic of double act? So I can't wait to find out about that. So, mirrors and doorways. What's that about?

Yeah, as part of the trench coat double act, I co write under the author name, O E Tierman, and we write a book series that is a hopeful queer dystopian. And one of our goals with this series is Mirrors, to show people who aren't generally represented in fiction that they can exist in fun, interesting fiction stories that don't centre around a marginalised identity as their main plot point. Because as queer, mentally ill people, we don't see ourselves in fiction a lot, in stories that aren't coming out stories or, oh, my gosh, overcoming depression stories or things of that nature. So we really wanted to provide that mirror for marginalised folks to see themselves in their communities, in new and different lights. And along those lines is the doorways of we wanted to open the door to conversation and open the door to non marginalised people, to see what it's like to live with a marginalised identity, and also to open those doors to conversations of, how can we make the world a better place? And doing all of that through fiction and through discussions like these.

Fabulous. Because as a queer person myself, there's a lot of queer joy and we get associated with queer negativity rather than euphoria and empowerment we feel as well, don't we?

Yeah, I have been kind of following queer publishing for quite a while and we're starting to get away from coming out stories and tragic stories, but there's still this overwhelming number of when queer people are represented in books. It's a book about their queerness and not about them being a person experiencing things, and their queerness is just part of that. And so we wanted to write stories where that was the case where Aiden, our main character, is a gay trans man inspired by some of my own experiences. And that's a very important part of his identity. And part of the story does revolve around him transitioning and dealing with people who don't respect him, et cetera. But that's not the main storyline. The main storyline is he's leading this group of misfits to try and bring democracy back to a corporate owned America. And it was really important to both Olivia, my co writer, and I, that we present these people as real people and they're going on adventures and they're finding love and they're making found family.

And the fact that they're queer or have various neurodivergencies is an important part of who they are, but it's not the entirety of who they are.

I've seen that. I've observed that in the media. When I talk about the media, I mean films, TV, netflix. I think I was watching Alice in don't know if you've seen that. It's a bit kind of was it Korean kind of Death games for a better way of describing it. And one of the characters in that just so happened to be a queer trans woman, but you didn't realise that until she needed to tell you that. But it wasn't her reason for existing. It added an extra dimension and depth to her character as a by the way.

And I thought, wow, of course you are. Of course you are. Why wouldn't you be? It was amazing. My wife and I just finished watching a short series on Netflix called Glamorous. It's all about the beauty industry. And one of the characters there, Marco, yes, it is centred around queerness because all the main characters are queer in a beauty industry. So being queer is part of that culture. But in the last 30 seconds of episode ten, the main character, Marco, you see him or her outside of a clinic with transgender services under the title, and that was signified the journey this person went on as a femme, identifying, if you like, queer man, to going through that journey of discovery, to say, I've now understand who I am.

I'm trans, and I want to do something about this. And my wife and I were in tears at this point here, because this evolution of character where trans became this wonderful evolution of this character. And we thought, wow, that is so powerful. And you look back at the episode and you think, of course they are. Of course they are. But they didn't realise. They didn't dimit it themselves. I think what you're saying there about someone's transiness, someone's queerness, it enriches their character rather than being the whole purpose of their character.

And I think we've seen that too much. You look at Niverne Cox and her disclosure documentary on Netflix around how queer people, trans people, have been portrayed in the media for years. We're always the butt of the joke, we're always the exception, we're always the baddie, always the person, corrupting men, or whatever it may be, however you describe it. And I think what you're saying there is it's extremely important for the evolution of queer culture to be see as a person first, and their queerness is just part of their identity.

It is. I mean, I'm a little biassed because I'm a fiction writer, obviously, but I firmly believe that change begins in media. And whether that's storytelling or movies or video games or music, whatever media you prefer, the more representation and the more openness that we can provide in our media, the easier it is to affect real change in real life. Because A, you've empowered the people who need to see themselves, and B, you've given the other people things to think about, of, oh, hey, maybe that trans lady I saw on the street isn't there just to corrupt men like the media has portrayed. Maybe she's just living her life like a normal human being and maybe she deserves rights like everybody else. I know. Mind blowing, right? Yeah.

We even had a trans Barbie, didn't we? And the trans Barbie was not transitions were not centred on it wasn't even marked upon. Yeah, it was only if you had a bit of a trans radar sort of tuned in, you go, yeah, wow, fair play. You snuck her in there without making a big deal of it. Absolutely amazing. Thank you.

The Barbie movie did a lot of yeah, a plus movie, not going to lie, but, yeah, just showing marginalised people existing in media is so incredibly important and I feel like it gets, I don't want to say ignored, but kind of downplayed a lot. And I know that traditional publishing is still kind of trying to find its place with that because there's a lot of pushback of if we have diverse characters, especially as a protagonist, then we're going to turn off this other group of people who, for some reason, don't want to read about people other than themselves. Which I could go on a rant about how stupid that is for quite some time, but, yeah, my train of thought just completely derailed. Sorry.

Yeah, well, the media that the movies, that kind of entertainment media, they've created these stereotypes over the years about to define what good is and what bad is and what sinister is. And I always use James Bond as a franchise. It portrays the white guy, the British white guy, as the hero. Perfectly formed, fit, attractive, all these kind of things. And the baddie often has a foreign accent or a non British accent, often has a disability, a facial disfigurement or something strange about them, exploding eye or big golfing teeth or something. So we're trying to demonise people based on their physical characteristics. And queer people, outside of some Marvel and some other forward thinking franchises, have always tended to be portrayed as the outliers, as the people who are not the good guys. And I think we got to start showing queer people in their own space for queer people exemplifying that we're just heroes as well.

We are heroes.

Yeah. And we deserve to be heroes. I think everybody deserves to be a hero of their own story, regardless of identity or attraction or disability status or race or religion or anything. Everybody deserves the dignity of being the hero of their own story.

Yeah. Amen. Amen. Definitely. For sure. It's the old adage, isn't it? You can't be what you can't see. So if you don't see the representation, we're going to talk a bit in a minute about mental health dysphoria, presumably feeling lost, feeling unseen, those sort of things. So it's really, really important to amplify and to show people an aspiration a possibility, a belief that they can succeed, isn't it?

It is. And just acknowledging that people exist in all shapes and sizes and differences. Because, again, the media tends towards very specific storytelling tropes and very specific coding for villains. Oftentimes it's queer coding and Jewish coding. And as a queer person of Jewish descent, I'm just like, why? I mean, don't get me wrong, being a villain can be empowering in certain circumstances, but when that's all you see, it's really hard not to internalise that message of, well, society is always going to see me as a bad guy, so what's the point? And I hope that our books as OE Tierman can provide at least a slightly different well, not slightly, a radically different point of view of, no, you're okay, you're fine, because our main group of characters are incredibly diverse between physical ability and mental illnesses and gender identities and racial identities, ethnic identities. We have so many different types of characters, all in this organisation of the good guys.

What sort of genre do you write about, you say is fiction? Is it modern Romance? Sci-fi.

Well, this particular series is a hopeful queer dystopian. It's, see, 100 and 5200 years ish in the future and America has been taken over by seven corporations that now run everything. I often have to joke that we didn't intend this to be prophetic because we started writing in like 2015, 2016.

As a response to Google Musk and his cohorts Oracle Allison. Yeah, we now have some pretty powerful organisations running the world, almost.

Yeah. So we have to joke that we promise we didn't write this expecting this to happen. But the series follows this group of outcasts and this found family that are fighting to bring democracy and general human decency back and fighting to make the world a better place.

See, I'm curious now in this dystopian future, tell me this is true, that straight people have to start coming out now. Is this really good. If this dystopian future, if straight people had to come out and people had to come out.

We didn't want to get too far away from reality. So depending on which corporation area you're in, kind of depends on the moral or not. Depends on creates the morals and social attitudes. So some corporations don't care at all and some are very CIS, het, normative enforcing prescriptive.

Yeah.

Because we did want to express the reality that queer people are currently living. We just didn't want it to be the hopeless version of that, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Is it as bad as you see in the media from the UK side, looking in at the US? Is queer rights, queer oppression, trans rights? I mean, we see many states winding back protection even, obviously, Roe versus Wade, abortion rights, but don't say gay. Is it really that mean as a.

Queer versus where you're at in the States? But, yeah, it's honestly freaking terrifying if I think about it too much.

Yeah. Sorry for the listeners. We have our cameras on, so I can see your expression. So yeah, I can see that was a real intake of breath there. Okay, gather your thoughts.

One of those things that I both have to be aware of because I'm in the community and all of my friends are, but also have to ignore for my own mental health. And it's a really weird line to walk.

Yeah, we see a bit of it emerging in the UK. We're seeing a real anti trans rhetoric, a transcritical, trans hostile movement developing. It's a minority with a loud voice, well funded, well organised, with the ear of politicians. And it's worrying that trans people, mainly trans people, mainly trans women, are being used as political pawns, as footballs, as wedge issues to gain votes. And it's frightening and that you watch or read Handmaid's Tale and you suddenly realise that yes, all of a sudden, you could wake up in the morning and someone can suddenly nullify your existence, your rights, your marriage, your property ownership. And you think you see it. As you talk about your dystopian view of the world when one of your previous presidents was in place, you suddenly believe that The Handmaid's Tale could be a reality. And if this person is reelected, it could still be a reality, couldn't it?

Even if he's not, it could still be a reality, just based on the way that the conservative American contingent thinks. Yeah. So basically, with the books, we took all of our own personal fear as queer folks who were born female or assigned female at birth. We took all of that fear and put it into the books and said, okay, this is where we're at. How can we make ourselves feel better? How can we change this fictional world to be better and less terrifying for people who are outside of the quote unquote norm? And then maybe if we put it in fiction, we can kind of help nudge the real world in that direction as well, is kind of the hope, because, yeah, the world we're living in is terrifying if you are not a straight, cisgender white guy with quite a bit of money.

Yeah. For my own mental health here. I think one of the problems I find is that and I don't want to use the word or the phrase trans community, meaning that we are organised into some sort of power structure, the trans communities, if you like, are agreement people trying to get over their lives or the grave communities. We are sometimes our own worst enemy. We reshare and amplify hate sometimes by going, have you seen this? Have you seen that? I go onto Facebook, I see more anti trans rhetoric from trans people sharing the antitrans rhetoric than I do if I just turned on the news. And I think sometimes we've got to be careful around our own mental health, that we get a bit obsessed with the danger and we keep wanting to be like mere cancer danger, danger, danger, danger, and tell everybody about it.

It's that weird line of we have to be aware and so we want to make sure that everyone we know and love is aware, but also we can't just keep focusing on the danger and the terror because that's not good for any of us. And the queer community. Communities in general have generally higher incidences of depression and anxiety and varying other mental illnesses, disorders, nerd emergencies and just flooding social media and our discussions with oh, my God, did you hear? So and so is now on the anti gay train. And this is what they said and this is what we have to rally against. I understand where it comes from. We're trying to protect each other, but it doesn't serve us. It just kind of keeps us stuck in that reactive terror loop and I'm not really sure how to get out of it, but I think that we need to work on as a whole, and actually, this isn't just queer folk, but as a whole, marginalised communities. We need to work on finding that balance between keeping each other informed and safe and also celebrating each other and celebrating the fact that we exist and our lives are all sorts of varied and beautiful, even when it's hard.

Yeah. My kind of take on it, I suppose, is I just sing my own song, play my own tune, to quote that song, which I think Paloma Faith did a version. I keep amplifying who I am. I think if I was to engage in those negative conversations, there's no, no, nothing happens. You talk about being a person with a Jewish history and background. What's going on in the Middle East is completely abhorrent to everybody, but it doesn't help to get into a discussion about who's right or wrong. I don't want to care if you've got anti trans viewpoints or you want to debate the supremacy of sex and biology over identity. I don't care if you want to have that conversation, I'm just going to keep doing what I want to do.

I can be the best me, have the best conversations about me, exemplify what I can do as a person. And then if you want to go and do that in your little space, that's fine. I don't need to engage with you. And I think the more I attenuate and turn the volume down on this other stuff makes my life easier and makes my life more hassle free, that's a privilege. I can do that. I'm quite robust. I have good support network around me. But what we're saying before we went online and live was that you mentioned just now about mental health concerns around people in the queer community, whether it's dysphoria, whether it's the feeling of being under, attacked, erased, marginalised even further.

So how can we, or you, through your media, through your books, through your writing, how can we create spaces for people to know they're loved for one of the better way of putting it?

At risk of sounding like a broken record? Representation helps a lot, especially when we're talking about mental illness and neurodivergency. There is still such an incredible stigma around it, around asking for help, around having a diagnosis of anything and showing characters struggling with anxiety and depression and dysphoria. And I feel like we have more that I'm just not remembering, but showing that and showing that they're still human, they're still okay. Again, it's not the entirety of their identity and it's okay that they ask for help and there are people around them who love them and who care for them and will help them through a depressive episode or an anxiety attack. And in my own life, being in the writing community has actually been incredibly helpful for that, because writers also tend to be neurodivergent in various ways. And that's one of the ways that Olivia and I really connected, both as friends and co writers, because we both have struggles with anxiety and depression and I have dysphoria and she has other biological and mental illnesses, my illnesses, issues that make her anxiety really bad. And so just kind of bonding of society thinks we're broken, but we're not. And discussing that and creating those safe spaces both for us as individuals and for our readers, I think that that's kind of where we need to start.

And I think when we're talking about acceptance of mental health issues, we're still just starting. Partially because psychology itself is a relatively young field, all things considered, and partially because a lot of it is still influenced by Nazism and various other bigotry, bigoted thoughts that a lot of people don't recognise are so ingrained in the studies. So just starting with representation and acceptance and saying, hey, we exist and we're not all going to turn out to be serial killers.

We know the stats. There are more CIS serial killers than there'll ever be. Queer serial killers.

Like most neurodivergent people, like queer people. We just want to survive, we just want to get by. Most of the time, like in America when we're talking about mass shootings and things, they're cishit white guys generally who have no history of mental illness, but the media will almost always spin it somehow to point to mental illness because of that stigma.

Well, they need to they need to label them as divergent in some way. Otherwise if they're a normal person, how can a normal person be rationalised to do this? Heinous acts so they have to assign a label to them to take them out of the normal box, say, well look, they weren't normal, it's okay. Normal people are okay. This person has a mental health. This person has a history of this he's neurodivergent, wherever it may be, dramatically.

Harms the neurodivergent community and also sweeps under the rug that quote unquote normal people are just as messed up as anybody else.

Do you think as queer people ourselves, once you've kind of owned that label, that identity, it's very easy to own other things about yourself. I don't need to hide my I don't know, I wouldn't class myself as neurodivergent but I have obsessive behaviours around certain things and I have heavy disinterest in other things so I can be very polarised. Doesn't make me neurodivergent necessarily, just makes me try to understand. But I can now admit to myself about a whole load of things that maybe I tried to mask or cover in my old life, if you want to call it that way. Now I just go it's almost like this channel is supposed to be safe for children and not explicit but the fuck, it switch hits, doesn't it? And sometimes you just go, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. I don't need to hold that baggage in anymore.

Yeah, I think once you realise that some part of you is marginalised, the other marginalised parts of you are just like, hey, I'm here too. And at some point it's just like, well, society already hates me for that thing, so I might as well embrace this other thing.

My lived experience is when I announced to the world my transiness and told my mum and other people it was kind of if I could share that secret that I've held at me for 40 52 years of my life at the time, I can share it. I don't need to have a secret anymore. There's nothing more scary. I mean, you try and blackmail me. What have you got on me that I'm worried about? I think it's important. One thing you mentioned earlier was society sees us as broken in some way, whether we're neurodivergent queer. And the issue with that is that I internalise that. We internalise that.

We're told we're broken therefore we are, therefore we believe. And sometimes that's the root cause of a lot of dysphoria. You must conform to a social construct. You must conform to the norms of society. You don't look track or woman enough, you don't look man enough. And WTF what does nonbinary enough mean, exactly? Yes, you look absolutely fabulous and nonbinary enough to me on the camera.

That's one of the struggles that I have, too. It's just like, to a quote unquote normal assist person, I come across as very feminine presenting because I haven't done any sort of active masculinization. Also side note, the fact that we associate non binary with masculine appearance is really dumb. But there's still that masculine as default. Ergo, trying to get more looking masculine ish means you're trying to be more central. It doesn't make sense.

Yes, androgyny is inherently more masculine, isn't it?

It is, yeah.

Small bum, no breasts, very straight looking, cropped hair, whatever. It's a very masculine.

Generally super thin. If you just Google androgynous or something along those lines, you'll come up with a bunch of really skinny, really white people. And as someone who is not very skinny and has a large chest, people don't look at me and think, oh, you can be Androgynous. But I am non binary. I don't identify with being male or female. Some days I'm more one, sometimes I'm more another. And there's not a good way to present that in current society, because literally everything is gendered in a really stupid way. Yeah.

We're even telling bits of porcelain that their toilets are gendered in some way. It's just a toilet. Who's assigned the agenda?

And, like, clothing? I've started wearing, quote unquote, men's jeans, because they're so much easier to fit, because women's fashion is so insanely ridiculous. But again, they're just clothes, there's no need to label them.

You just want the pockets, don't you? That's what it is. You want deep pockets.

They don't want to have to try on 20 different pairs of jeans that are supposedly the same size to find one that fits.

The one thing I like about women's jeans is the Lycra and the stretch. I know men's jeans can have Lycra and stretch as well, but I tend to find that they fit a little bit better. But, yeah, I know what you mean. It's definitely the pockets. That's fine, we could switch jeans, but it's definitely the pockets. I miss pockets. I do miss pockets.

Again, women's fashion. WTF why not?

I often wear dresses. I got one on today that has pockets in it. I'm out at a function or something and I put my hand in my pocket and pull out a tissue or something and everyone around me goes, oh, you got pockets in your dress. Oh, fantastic. Everyone got pockets in it. I just want someone to put my lippy and my tissues.

I don't want to have to carry a bag.

I stuff everything in my bra. That's the other problem. You got your mobile phone in there, you got your room key without having.

A big chest, is that I've got built in pocket. But, yeah, I don't know. The way that society just genders things in general makes no sense to me and it never has. Even before I recognised that I was non binary, and non binary was even a thing I could be even as a kid. I was a very sheltered kid and I wasn't even exposed to the concept of queerness until high school, until I was in my teens. But even as a kid, I knew I didn't fit in as a girl or a boy. I was a very tomboy girl or a very girly boy, and I didn't have words to express that. And I think that that's a really important part of where we're at as a society now, is we're starting to have words.

And I think it's important that we allow kids access to those words and those concepts, because not to sound overdramatic, but it could literally save their lives to be able to say, I'm not the only one who feels this way. There's a whole term for people who feel this way. And that's one of the things that really irritates me about the whole we can't expose kids to trans people or to queer people rhetoric. Again. We're all just trying to live our lives. We're not trying to, quote, unquote, convert anybody or anything. We're just trying to tell kids that, hey, we exist and maybe you're one of us and maybe you're not. But if they grow up knowing that we exist, they're more likely to respect us and to respect our communities and to be more open minded.

Or it is an old thought, or see a role model and see themselves represented in somebody and realise what's going on in their head isn't broken. They are not broken, they are real, they are valid. And that's what straight people are worried about because they're probably internalising their own feelings. That's generalisation. But, yeah, there are many people out there that are repressing their own thoughts and sexuality and identity.

A lot of that is internalised from society and people don't really realise how much we internalise from those external sources, from the media, from our parents, from our education, and how dangerous and debilitating that can be to everybody, whether or not you are marginalised. The fact that CIS, het white people are so afraid of the queer community partially because of all of those internalised fears of if I'm queer, what happens if I'm queer? What happens if I'm not who I think I am? And to that I say, well, then jump on the train with us, friends, because we all went through that at some point and we're all still here.

But there are some people out there that just like or love or feel the need to police people back into their. Lane or back into their box. You see it with driving a car. You get certain people who insist that you drive your car the way they want to have their car driven, and they'll try and police you or point out to you or shout at you at a traffic light or something like that. There are people who have this real adherence to rules. That's a neurodiversity or personality trait. But people want to put you back in their box, and if you don't fit in their box, they get really freaked out by and I think that happens a lot of time, I think when you come out as queer with a I'm going to say the word again, a fuck it attitude to the world. I don't need to live by your BS anymore.

It frightens people because how do they put you in their box again? You're being too anarchic for them.

And if they see other people doing that, I feel like there's generally a piece of them that's going, well, why am I not doing that? Why am I still stuck in this box? And there's that resentment of they're living their lives authentically. Why am I not living my life authentically? And society doesn't make it easy for anyone to live authentically, regardless of identity or anything, because it's all very conformist for everybody. And I don't think that people who aren't marginalised realise how much harming marginalised communities also harms them, if that makes sense.

Yeah, it's repressing people, which means you're only one step away from being repressed yourself for something. It's policing you into your lane, into your box. If you've got poor mental health, you've got financial difficulties, you've got relationship difficulties, it means that you don't feel open to talk about that and share that, which we were talking about before we jump on air about suicide, about mental health, around feeling alone and not able to share that. I think what we end up doing is policing people in such a way that nobody's prepared to open up and talk.

Yeah. Which is a problem for everybody, because everybody has periods where you're depressed, everybody has times when you're struggling financially or you just need someone to say, hey, it's okay, I see you. I don't care who you are. Everybody has those moments and not acknowledging that or making that seem like a weakness or brokenness or an otherwise bad thing harms everybody.

So you're the bottom half of a trench coat double act, and both yourself the bottom half and the top half. Olivia, you're both awesome jugglers. So how did you manage to learn how to juggle? Well, two balls, three balls to start with, but how did you get the ridiculous number? Was that just constant Practise or did you go to a club or something? How did you learn to juggle?

Well, it's more metaphorical juggling. It's juggling projects and businesses and all of those things. And so, yeah, a lot of it is just practise, and a lot of it is passion. I'm passionate about all of these things, so I'm going to do all of them at the same time.

So there was me thinking it was actual balls in the air.

Not going to lie, I wish I could double like three for 30 seconds.

Back in the early 90s, that sounds like a lifetime ago for many people. In fact, it was. My daughter's only 31, so back in the early 90s, she was about two or three. I used to work late in projects. I was in It at the time, and my manager at the time was a member of the Magic Circle. I don't know if you have the Magic Circle in the States Magicians Club. Basically. And he used to have some juggling balls in his desk, and he used to sit there in the evenings while we're waiting for servers to reboot and things like this.

He always got his balls out and juggled around, and he taught me how to juggle. And I could do three balls for about 30 or 40 seconds. I think the golden rule is it's not about the throwing it's all around the catching. So as long as you can catch it, you can throw it wherever you like, as long as it's about the catching and the rhythm. And so I got three quite successfully, and I've still got some juggling beanbags in my desk because I keep her in a go. But I've lost the technique. I think I need to have a weekend of getting back into I got the theory, I just need to practise. But, yeah, those skills, everything theory, but.

Putting the theory into practise, whole other ballgame.

Yeah, lots of desire. I hyper focus on things. If I can hyper focus on learn to juggle one weekend, I won't stop until I could do four balls. I will be there. When I was 15, I think again, I was 15 in the late 70s, probably. That's a while ago, isn't it? And I learned to do the Rubik's Cube, and I wouldn't stop until I could do the cube in less than a minute. In those days, that was quite a good thing. I know people do it now with five or 6 seconds and I really can't figure out how they do that.

But, yeah, 55 seconds was my record on the Rubik's Cube. And I really hyper focused on this, obsessed with it. I bought all these books and I could learn strings of letters, because I used to use U and D and R and L in combinations of those to mean up or down on top of this. So I could memorise 30 or 40 letters sequences, and I'd be able to flick those in and I'd be able to adapt and pull out that combination almost like instant. Now I look at it and go, I can't remember a phone number these days. I can't remember a two factor authentication when it comes up with six digits. And I've got a key into Facebook. I can't remember that number without looking at old age or trauma.

Say again?

Trauma.

Trauma, yeah.

There have been several studies about trauma, even small traumas, affecting members, and we as a world have gone through quite a few traumas lately, with the pandemic and everything. So, as a society, no one I have talked to recently has a good memory anymore.

I put it down to the smartphone evolution. I don't need to know anyone's phone number anymore. In the past, I would know 1520 people's phone number, and in the early days of mobile phones, I knew their home number, their mobile number and their office number for about 20 people. Now I know my wife's number, I know my number, I don't know my daughter's number, I don't know my son's.

Number, my sister's number.

Just hit the button. Yeah. I don't calculate things. I didn't do mental arithmetic anymore and I've even stopped googling things. I asked Chat GPT or being AI now, I want it spoon fed to me. I don't even bother looking at search results. Sometimes I just say, I'm wondering about this. I've even used Chat GPT image techniques now, and I took a picture of some food and said, Describe that for me and give me a recipe.

There it was. So you can go to restaurants now and get the recipe for food. Wonderful. Well, the ones I've used have been pretty good because we went pumpkin picking the other week and we got some spaghetti squashes, the white ones, and it was a broccoli feta and cheddar grated cheddar. You scoop out the squash, you mix it all together and you put it down. Then you put the oven, you grill it and bake it, and I put it in front of it, in front of me, and I took a photograph and said to Chat GPT, image, please describe this. And he got it perfect. He got the recipe, you got the description, you got everything spot on just for a photo.

And it's like, yes, it's scary accurate. If you haven't tried it I know we're completely off topic here. If you haven't tried it, try a bit of Chat GPT four image. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. I was in a seminar the other week and someone put a slide up with some useful information on it. I took a picture of it, fed the slides into Chat GPT and said, can you just summarise that and give me some details? Produced a little Google Sheet table with all the information on this slide with some takeaways on it.

It's like, yeah, it's so easy now to use technology, which I'm not saying it's dumbing us down, it's making us differently intelligent, I guess, is probably a way of describing it. But I think I put that down to why my memory is not good because my brain knows it doesn't need to remember anymore. So it doesn't bother. It does other things with that bit of brain power. Not sure what those things are, but it must be doing different things.

I've unlearned podcasts and talking to people about making the world a better place.

That's what it is. That's definitely what it is.

So technology has automatically made the world a better place because it's allowed you the brain power to do this?

It has, yeah. And what I will do, I'll share my secret with the listeners here is I will feed the transcript of this through AI and it will generate show notes, it will generate everything else. So I haven't even got to sit here for 4 hours now rewriting show notes and producing summaries of the episode because products out there will do it for me in a better than I ever can. And it allows me to just tweak it and adjust it to have my tone of voice and I can turn it around in an hour what used to take me a half a day. So yeah, productivity from my perspective as a solopreneur, if you like. It's amazing. Yeah, absolutely fantastic. Completely off topic, but hey, why not? I often wonder to myself, let me sort of segue into this.

People ask me how difficult it was, it coming out and I always say the hardest person to come out to was myself. Rationalising who I am, what I am, how I am. How did you find that process of discovery? Because you said from an early age you didn't fit into the boxes. You didn't know if you're, as I say, a femme man or a booked woman or a feminine woman. Where do you fit on that? So how did you kind of evolve that sense of self?

I feel like it's kind of a constant process because I'm always finding new things about myself just based on being in a situation that I haven't experienced before or talking to someone new. But I think in general, a lot of it was honestly reading fan fiction because that's how I got exposed to a lot of new ideas and identities and things that I hadn't been exposed to as a kid. And going back to all my earlier discussions about the importance of seeing ourselves in media, it really gave me terminology and things to think about between, I think, reading fan fiction and being in theatre and being able to kind of try on these personas and try on okay, today I'm playing a male role. What does it feel like to embody that on the stage and being able to take that off the stage and think about it and think about that process and how it feels in my body and how it felt in my brain, for lack of a better term. Really kind of gave me that context and that ability to say, you know what, I don't think I fit on either end of the spectrum. I fit somewhere in the middle.

Yeah, that's quite powerful, isn't it? You're trying on an outfit and you realise it doesn't quite fit. It's a bit tight here or a bit tight there, or restrictive. And you think, Actually, no, that's not me. And then you put this one on and go, actually, that's good. That feels good, doesn't it? You know, don't you?

Yeah. I went through probably six or seven different names before I found Nonir and that felt right. Like my poor friends. I don't know what name you're using today, I'm so sorry.

Does it have a history? Does that name mean something? Is it from anywhere? Or is it something you just kind of made up?

It's inspired by the Icelandic and Norse mythology. I like to say it means strength, because Amicidia means friendship in Latin. So my name then means strong friendship or strong friend, because that's an important part of who I am, being there for my friends, building that community. Yeah. It's okay to make up your own name.

Yeah, I've got a good story about how I got my name. I basically pinched it off of my first crush at school at 13. Not only did I nick her first name, I nicked her surname as well, because I didn't like my surname, so I stole both of her names. Which is quite ironic for my wife, knowing that I'm named after my first crush. But that's a whole nother story. But, yeah, we name our cats, we name our boats, we name our dogs. But how do we get to name ourselves? What name will we choose? And again, that's a huge decision that people don't realise because, again, you have to try it on. You have to see if it fits.

You have to imagine it being said out loud. And will I respond to that? It's a huge pressure, isn't it?

Yeah. And being able to find a safe community and a safe group of friends to help you try on new names and new facades and new pronouns, new connected ways to dress. Just having that safe space to experiment is incredibly invaluable.

So what you're trying to say there is escape the judgement of the BS of social construct. That's what we're doing. We have to find a safe space where societal pressure and judgement is not allowed in. That's what we're doing. And that's the sad thing, isn't it? We're being repressed indirectly, often not directly, but indirectly by societal norms.

Yeah, it gets really weird and wonky if you think about it too far.

It does. Well, we've been going an hour. I can't believe that already. We were chatting away for 20 minutes before that. Nonir, it's been it's been fantastic. I really love talking to you and I wish we could carry on all day. And if we lived a bit closer, rather than 4000 miles apart, whatever it is, I'm sure we'd pop her out of a Starbucks for a coffee sometime or hang out more.

Well, I mean, someday we'll have to get Olivia on, so I'm sure we'll chat with you again.

Yes, that'd be great. I'd love to have you both on the show at once and be my first double act, if you like. And I get to see both halves of the trench coat, the top hand, bottom, and maybe we'll explore that more for those who can't imagine. Imagine two children, one standing on the other person's shoulders for the trench coat and trying to sneak into the cinema. Pretend they're 18. That's the image we want you to have there. So not it. How do we get hold of you? What's your website, what's your books called? What's your publication?

Yeah. The books are called the Aces High Jokers Wild series. You can find the books, all our social media and how to get in touch with us on the website, which is O E Tearmann. T-E-A-R-M-A-N-N dot com

Thanks for those of you who want to hunt you down in other ways. So Nonir is nonir and amacitya.

How do we spell that for the A-M-I-C-I-T-I-A.

Fabulous.

You can also find my own solo published books, which are all queer, queer fantasy, romance, mostly short stories under E S Argentum, A-R-G-E-N-T-U-M. Because again, I have too many names. But yeah, worst case scenario, find us on OE Tearmann, send us a note and say, hey, I'm interested in talking to Nonir or finding their books and we can shoot you the links.

I'll make sure all of that's on your profile on the hosting platform for this podcast. If anyone wants to look you up. Just follow the links through to your profile and they'll all be there. I'll make sure they're all tagged and put that so thank you so much. I can't believe that Bites flow so quickly and I really appreciate you joining me today, it's been a fabulous conversation.

It has. Hopefully having me.

Yes, pleasure. And for you, the listeners, I thank you for tuning in and staying to the end. I really appreciate that. I'm sure you'll all agree there's much to take inspiration from that, especially if you're in or out of the Cure community, struggling to be heard, struggling with your own identity, struggling with your own poor mental health or whatever it may be, or just want someone to be able to listen to you. So there's a lot in there. Please do subscribe I value your subscriptions to keep updated on future episodes of the Inclusion Bites podcast. That's B-I-T-E-S. Tell your friends and tell your colleagues and please share the links.

I have a number of other exciting and passionate guests lined up over the next few weeks and months. I'm sure you'll be equally as inspired by them as well. Of course, if you're listening in and like to be a guest yourself or have any comments or suggestions on how we can improve, if you think we can, then please send those to myself, jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk. And finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood, and it's been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye.