SARAH BEHARRY (THEY/THEM)
"I'm a software engineering manager working for a well-known company founded in Bristol. When I'm not helping folks sling code and fight (metaphorical, software-based) fires, I can be found curled up on the sofa watching my favourite YouTubers (current faves include Khadija Mbowe, Folding Ideas and The Financial Diet), researching something for my next baking experiment or singing - either with a local chamber choir or just loudly at home (possibly about Bruno, as everyone is right now!)."
Instagram: @sarahsemicolon
"I'm quite newly out - after thirty years of wearing the "female" gender like a poorly fitting pair of shoes, I've enjoyed being barefoot and exploring myself afresh. Being involved with projects like this helps me feel like I'm becoming more of a part of the community, and remind me that there's no one correct way to be non-binary - I don't need to "pass" as non-binary to be valid."
"I'm out at work, and have been ever since I became a manager. It all started when I saw the "they/them/she/her" pronouns of a couple other engineering colleagues in Slack profiles. I was very new out to myself as "probably not a girl", and I'd been finding it hard to muster up the courage to start telling people about myself. Seeing others put their non-binary pronouns in their profiles emboldened me, and since then it feels like I've been coming out about once a month since then - pretty much every time a new colleague joins my team, I'll send them a DM to say "oh, by the way, I'm non-binary, please use they/them when you refer to me".
The visibility of my colleagues enabled me to start to share more about my true self with my colleagues; from there, I've been able to start to share with others my general discomfort with how unnecessarily gendered things are made, and how we have so much more in common based on what we've chosen for ourselves - our livelihoods, our relationships, our hobbies - than the roles we were given before we even took breath for ourselves."
"Outside of work, I do struggle more with visibility. I find it tougher to come out, especially without the helping hand of technology giving me the equivalent of a they/them badge on my clothes. I think if I felt more confident that there was more wide-spread awareness of non-binary identities, I'd feel less awkward about correcting folks who make assumptions and misgender me."
