'I am a 46,XY person': Aging out of binaries

Centering a first-person narrative of discovering one was intersex at 56 years of age, this paper examines how assumptions that gender is binary and that male is superior to female led to a childhood of reproductive injustices, family secrets, and psychosocial pain. Placed in the context of identity destruction, the narrative engages nonbinary experiences of aging, including vis a vis gender, sexuality and chronological age, that generated a unique bodily lived experience and social reality of being in limbo or "betwixt and between" for over half a century. Drawing on Sandberg & Marshall's, 2017 call for "queering ageing futures" to disrupt normative notions that celebrate some bodies and subjectivities while silencing others, this narrative begins to answer the call for sociocultural gerontology's "revisioning ageing futures" (Jones et al., 2022) that is attuned to a spectrum of aging experiences. The path to realizing more diverse and inclusive understandings of aging within our social imaginations is far overdue and starts one story at a time. Andrea's testimonial, one such story, is followed by a question and answer between the first and third authors. Insofar as aging begins the day we are born, this is as much a story about aging as it is further support for reframing gender as a continuum and a reminder of the potential complicity in mistreating intersex people that we must all fight to resist.