Mi Cerebro Español: Learning a Gendered Language While Non-Binary

I haven’t even started my Spanish classes yet, and I am already faced with my first linguistic conundrum: how to describe myself as non-binary in a dualistic Romance language.   I know enough about Spanish to know that, were I to go down the path of least resistance, my pronoun would be “ella”, and adjectives used to describe me would end in “-a”.  Unfortunately, I know enough about myself to know that the very idea absolutely grates on me, vastly more than being called “she” in English (which I’m still sort of okay with, though I’m also good with “they”, and may end up using it exclusively).  

“Ella es norteamericana”, as applied to me, makes me squirm even more uncomfortably than “sie ist Amerikanerin”, for deeply seated linguistic reasons that probably have to do with my earliest exposure to gendered language being exclusively members of the Romance family.  (I knew practically no German until learning it in college, despite it being the language of over 50% of my ancestors.)  Therefore, I have decided to use the opportunity of my impending Spanish lessons to go full balls-gonads-to-the-wall non-binary.

Of course, the non-binary community and proponents of gender-inclusive language in Spanish-speaking countries are even less in agreement on the subject of how to go about this than their counterparts in anglophone countries.  These include unpronounceable options that would make the late Artist-Formerly-Known-As arch a perfectly shaped brow, such as the “-x” ending in “Latinx”. Other options include using the at sign “@” to represent a cross between the masculine ending “-o” and the feminine ending “-a”, pronounced “ao” (presumably as in the common word ending in Portuguese).

However, as Spanish does have nouns designated as “common gender”, and one of the key signifiers of such a word is that it ends in “-e”, the most commonly-used alternative seems to be writing inclusive nouns and adjectives thusly.  Therefore, I am ready to introduce myself on day one as follows: Me llamo Mickey, y soy no binarie.  Mi pronombre es elle.