I often look to the leadership of the LGBTQ community — a community that, in the name of love, has been courageously paving the way for humanity to break free. Break free to love who we love, to be who we are. Break free from rigid gender norms, or any "norms" in fact. Break free into a fuller expression of self.

Many years ago, I was listening to a podcast — most likely On Being with Krista Tippett. I cannot remember the exact episode. What I do remember is Krista interviewing a soft-spoken transgender human, may have been a priest or a rabbi. Their voice was calm, tender, vulnerable. They said something that landed in my body like truth:

“I felt like I was in the wrong body.”

That line hit me like a brick.

My journey has not centered around gender in the same way. My battle has been about belonging — about culture, borders, and the suffocating labels that never fit my lived experience as a cross-border person.

As a Korean-bodied, Saudi- Austria-raised human shaped by an American education system, I’ve spent a lifetime being mis-seen. I’ve been flattened into whatever someone thought they recognized on the surface.

“Oh my god! You’re Korean. I love that actor Park Min Ho — do you like him too?”
Meanwhile, my eyes glaze over because I have zero connection to Korean pop culture past the 90s.

In that moment, listening to the podcast, it clicked:

Yes. That’s exactly it.
I feel like I’m in the wrong body, too.

Not the wrong gendered body —
but the wrong bordered body.

Why “Third Culture Kid” Never Fully Fit Me Either

I’ve never been fully satisfied with the label “Adult Third Culture Kid.” It was better than not having anything -- but I caught myself translating white-led lens into one that helped me feel seen. Yes, it was coined from the perspective of a white researcher. It requires reading quite an academic book to understand it. It has only a few experts who can define it. It needs to create other labels to help other "types" of crossing cultures feel included. That requires a level of educational, language, "white" privilege that excludes the very people it claims to name — especially those looking for cross-cultural belonging without needing a passport to academia.

The term never truly held my lived truth fully, though for about a decade, it was the only term I could hold onto. 

Poet Alok V. Menon and the Homecoming I Didn’t Expect

One day,...more like one month, I found myself listening to Alok V. Menon, over and over.
“Listening” is an understatement.
I was consuming their words, poems, stories like medicine.

For those who don't know Alok, they are a master of words, self-expression, and art to teach love and embodiment of living one's purpose fully, especially beyond gender binaries. 

Every line made me feel a belonging I had never experienced before.

And something curious started happening in my brain:

Every time Alok said “gender,”
my mind replaced it with “border.”

Suddenly, their words became my words.
Their liberation became my liberation.
Their truth cracked something open in me.

As I read their book Beyond the Gender Binary, my heart wrote its own book:

Beyond the Border Binary.

Border Is a Binary

Borders create a false split:
local vs. foreigner, insider vs. outsider.

Borders were drawn with the intention of dividing families, languages, and cultures — to make people easier to govern, categorize, and control.

Whether we argue for or against the existence of borders, one truth remains:

Borders are a binary.
And binaries are too small for human beings.

Claiming “Transborder”

Claiming the word Transborder — and embodying it — has been one of the most empowering experiences of my life.

It freed me from the tight box of national identity.
It helped me feel seen as someone who exists beyond borders:

I am this country.
I am that country.
I am the in-between.
I am the crossing.

Transborder is not a label. It’s a liberation.
A homecoming.
A reclamation.

It is the language my soul had been waiting for.