Beyond the Gender Binary

by Alok Vaid-Menon

The real crisis is not that gender non-conforming people exist, it’s that we have been taught to believe in only two genders in the first place.

Express yourself using this template under these constraints with this time limit. Go! It’s like being handed over a Scantron sheet and demanded to paint a self-portrait on it. It’s possible, of course, but why even bother when a canvas is within our reach?

What I like about colors is that when you mix them together, they become greater than the sum of their parts, something different altogether. No one goes around asking, “But are you really more blue or more green?” Teal is not blue-green, it is teal.

This is a disconnect I have come to know well: between what people see and who I actually am.

The thing about being visibly gender non-conforming is that we are rarely, if ever, defended by other people in public. Everyone thinks that since we “made a choice” to “look like that,” we are bringing it upon ourselves.

There are some questions that have no answers. How do you express pain when you can’t even locate the wound? It’s like when you let a balloon loose into the sky. You don’t know where it goes, but you know it went somewhere. Far away.

I do not have the luxury of being. I am only seen as doing. As if my gender is something that is being done to them and not something that belongs to me.

I learned about gender through shame. In so many ways, they became inseparable for me. As I grew older, people told me to stop being so feminine and grow up. Gender non-conformity is seen as something immature, something we have to grow out of to become adults.

The thing about shame is that it eats at you until it fully consumes you. Then you cannot tell the difference between their shame and your own— between a body and an apology. It’s not just that you internalize the shame; rather, it becomes you. You no longer need the people at school telling you not to dress like that; you already do it to yourself. You no longer need your family telling you to be quiet; you already do it to yourself. You edit yourself, and at some point, it becomes so normal that you can’t even tell that you’re doing it. And the worst part is that you no longer have anyone else to blame.

Truth be told, I don’t remember much of my childhood because I spent so much of it separated from my body. My body was where the shame lived, so I retreated into my mind.

That’s the thing about being an LGBTQIA+ kid—you often don’t have the luxury to come into yourself on your own terms because other people have made up their minds for you.

There’s magic in being seen by people who understand—it gives you permission to keep going. Self-expression sometimes requires other people. Becoming ourselves is a collective journey.

Society’s inability to place us in boxes makes them uncomfortable; the unfamiliar becomes a threat and not an opportunity.

At its heart, discrimination against gender non-conforming people happens because of a system that rewards conformity and not creativity.

This is how shame works: It recruits you into doing its work for you. It’s a chain reaction. Our parents shamed us because their parents shamed them because theirs shamed them, and so on. A cycle of violence.

In order to even get a seat at the table, people have to believe that you exist.

There is nothing wrong with us, what is wrong is a world that punishes us for not being normatively masculine or feminine.

Gender is not what people look like to other people; it is what we know ourselves to be. No one else should be able to tell you who you are; that’s for you to decide.

We don’t consider remembering everyone’s individual name a burden; we just accept that as the way things work. Gender should be the same way.

Using gender-neutral language isn’t about being politically correct, it’s just about being correct.

Scientific knowledge is not fixed—it shifts as cultural prejudice is revealed and challenged.

This is how power works: It makes the actual people experiencing violence seem like a threat. Moving from a place of fear leads us to make harmful assumptions about one another. In our fear, we treat other people’s identities as if they are something that they are doing to us and not something that just exists.

This is not about erasing men and women but rather acknowledging that man and woman are two of many—stars in a constellation that do not compete but amplify one another’s shine.

“What part of yourself did you have to destroy in order to survive in this world?”