Winning the title of “Mr. or Miss [insert competition name here]” has long been considered the pinnacle of a competitive career. For decades, whether dancers actually identified with those gendered accolades—or the many other gender-based features of competition and convention weekends—was hardly ever questioned. Slowly, that’s beginning to change.

“People think being nonbinary is like this third gender, but it’s anything but. My nonbinary identity is an outright rejection of the concept of gender as a whole.”