Being Non-Binary: What Doctor Strange Taught Literary Agent Naomi Davis

How do you transition? Study and practice, years of it.

This one owes just about every inch of gratitude I can spare to the phenomenal non-binary agent and author combo Naomi Davis. Along with being a leading agent for BookEnds Literary Agency, Naomi is represented by Tricia Skinner of Fuse Literary Agency.

Join me below for Naomi’s paradigm-shifting insight on gender, Doctor Strange, and the MCU. — Stephenie Magister

We Don’t Get To Choose Our Time

Hello hello, folks, it’s Naomi. Thank you to Stephenie and everyone who supports Transgender Soapbox for this space to share with you the superhero who helped me define my own weird, murky gender identity… and who inspired my deep appreciation for a really good cape.

One Marvel superhero I envision as nonbinary is Doctor Strange. To me, he’s always been a character in-between.

Prior to his career-ending accident, Doctor Strange gauged his value by how many lives he could save through surgery. He had the luxury of choosing which surgeries he should perform, and which were “beneath” his skill level (and, I’m sure at least partially, which would feed his ego enough to be worth his time). Not even the chance to save James Rhodes/War Machine after the brutal events of Civil War tempted him. Why bother? No prestige in something fifty other surgeons could fix, he reasoned.

Doctor Strange craved validation. He needed to be the best. Why? What drove him to be sure his exterior was so polished and pristine no one might look close enough to see the cracks in his armor?

He is one of the world’s leading surgeons, but while he can turn medicine into magic, when it comes to himself? Medicine fails him.

Medicine fails to sustain him. To fill him. To heal him. To fix him.

What he needs is something else. Something more. And maybe… he doesn’t need the fixing he yearns for.

And yet his endless study only offers him redemption when he opens his eyes to the one possibility he ran from his entire life: he has never needed fixing, and what he discovers beneath his mask when his labeled identity as a surgeon is stripped away, is more powerful than anything he could have imagined.

Who are you in this vast multiverse?

Before his accident, Doctor Strange put on the facade of the man who has it all. If he could never achieve that in reality, he would achieve it in the very perception of himself. The world would believe he was the greatest.

And then, he was crushed — figuratively and literally — and forced to reckon with his humanity.

How do I get from there to here?

Doctor Strange had given up on his body. All he had left was his mind — and yet it seemed even that meant to betray him. And when he finally found a teacher, ready to give him a lesson he’d thought beneath him, his ego fractured.

What emerged from within him was the epitome of greatness, but to tap into it, he would have to leave behind all of his expectations, cast aside his False Self and all the measures of status placed upon him by society to unleash his True Self.

Doctor Strange embraced the teacher, learned the lesson, and became more.

SEE ALSO: Naomi Davis and the Manuscript Wishlist of Madness

It was more than letting go of more than a series of bad habits or lofty goals. He’d paid every possible price to continue to uphold his mask, his image, and yet…

Only in losing everything did he realize the cost of his obsession. Manifesting his True Self — one not bound by the constraints of identity and metrics imposed by society — meant he had to discard his false image, explore himself from scratch, and embrace the person within.

Someone not only magical or tangible. Someone with access to the spaces between.

They.

But though Doctor Strange always felt alone, even when they weren’t , the first hint of their True Self brought forward unexpected allies.

Allies who, in some sense, had been waiting all along.

Have you ever seen that before in a giftshop?

With their magnificent cape faithfully draped on their shoulders, suddenly they had the potential to be more than what they thought they had to be…if only they would stop fighting against the union of their two selves.

You cannot beat a river into submission

Once Doctor Strange surrendered to the beauty of living in-between the binary, finally, their intellect became paired with their passion, their desire to save the world. They no longer had to be the “man” who had it all. They were neither man nor woman, a combination of magical and human… a person, a wizard, a being.

What was once two became one — and an identity almost unrecognizable from how they were previously known.

A person in between the spiritual world and the material.

In between hero and antihero.

In between the heartbeats of past, present, future.

So they abandoned their search for a return to their old life. They proudly wore their cape, proudly cast their magic, and when challenged — even by gods, and the deceptively seductive pansexual and gender fluid Loki — Doctor Strange was finally untouchable.

All I need is possible

And with every moment of practice, they cultivated the power to transform the memories and experiences that had once caused them confusion and shame. What once felt broken and frail became sturdy and proud.

What does it matter if only a few understand what this means to Doctor Strange? Those who do are their kind. Their community. Their family.

They are…strange. And proud to be.

Like me.

-Naomi

The end (of the article)

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