Beyond the Gender Binary

by Alok Vaid-Menon

How are you supposed to be believed about the harm that you experience when people don’t even believe that you exist?

The scrutiny on our bodies distracts us from what’s really going on here: control. The emphasis on our appearance distracts us from the real focus: power.

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.

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.

The gender binary is set up for us to fail. For us all to fail. The gender binary is more concerned with gender norms than it is with us. We are led to believe that there are only two genders, “man” and “woman,” and these genders are narrow, separate, and opposite. We are taught from a very young age that this is how things have always been and this is the only way to live. We are taught that masculinity belongs to men, femininity belongs to women, and that these are the only two options for self-expression. Not true.

People judge gender non-conformity because they are insecure about their identities.

Before a baby is even born, well-meaning well-wishers will often ask, “Is it a boy or a girl?” The baby only becomes real to most people once they know the gender. But there are so many more important questions to be asked when a child is born, such as: “How’s your baby doing?” or “How can I support you during this time?” or “Why is it so expensive to raise kids?” Or maybe even “Where can I donate to help?”

Depending on whether we call them a boy or a girl, we assign each a narrative—we tell some children that they are strong, and we tell others that they are weak. We tell some children that they can express themselves, and we tell others that they should not have feelings. We tell some children that their worth comes from doing harm, and we tell others that their worth comes from accepting it.

At the time, I thought conforming would make me happier, but instead it just made me more lonely. This is how bullying works: We are afraid of being bullied, so we bully other people. We mistake hurting other people with healing ourselves. We repress ourselves and in turn repress one another, hurting everyone involved.

Jealousy, even when disguised with big language, is still jealousy—an emotion that makes both you and me small. Others will project their insecurity on you because it is easier than dealing with their internal pain.

Power can be defined as the ability to make a particular perspective seem universal.

Just because an opinion is widely held does not make it right.

“Why use the pronoun they when it’s plural? It’s not grammatically correct.” Despite the fact that in 2019 Merriam-Webster added the gender-neutral they pronoun to the dictionary, people are still upset about the use of a singular they. People’s fixation on “proper” grammar or “new terms” often hides a more sinister motive, even if it’s not conscious. They are okay with language shifting as long as it’s the people in power doing it, not us. They say that gender non-conforming people, in particular, are caught up on some new fad: that we are inventing language, identities, pronouns, and genders. But language and grammar have always been developed to meet the needs of society. Consider words like selfie and welp, which have recently been added to the dictionary. This is actually the purpose of language— to give meaning to concepts as they evolve. They is not exclusively plural and actually does have a history of being used as a singular pronoun in the English language. In fact, many people still use it unconsciously today. For example, when you find a lost phone and have no idea who it belongs to, you might say, “Did somebody leave their phone behind?” The selective outcry over new words to describe gender and sexuality—amidst the thousands of words that are added to the dictionary every year—is about prejudice, not principle. If these people are so averse to change, why aren’t they outlawing the use of bingeable or taking more public stances on the use of the Oxford comma?

“You want to be different to draw attention to yourselves. Hurt feelings aren’t real discrimination.” This outright ignores the disproportionately high rates of murder, physical violence, job discrimination, homelessness, and health gaps among gender non-conforming people. According to the 2015 US Transgender Survey, 30 percent of trans and gender non-conforming people reported workplace discrimination resulting in an unemployment rate of three times more than the general population; 23 percent of respondents experienced housing discrimination; and 77 percent of respondents experienced mistreatment in school. Gender non-conforming people are not opportunisitic; we are oppressed. Pain does not have to be visible to be real, and violence does not have to be physical to be serious. Imagine everyone you encounter all day long telling you that you are not real and that there is something fundamentally wrong with you. Being constantly invalidated takes a toll: 40 percent of trans and gender non-conforming people have attempted suicide. Emotional and physical violence are not in competition with each other. It is possible to acknowledge one without invalidating the other.

Critiquing gender is not the same thing as creating gender. Not talking about it won’t make gender inequality go away; in fact, that’s precisely how this injustice persists.

Two people can look similar and be completely different genders. 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. Oftentimes we associate “scientific knowledge” with knowledge itself, dismissing everything else as just opinion. This science-opinion binary is oversimplified, especially when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality. One of the ways in which our society produces the gender binary is by exaggerating findings based on shaky evidence that has been widely condemned by professionals. In 2018, in response to pervasive anti-trans legislation, over 2,500 distinguished scientists released a statement noting that the idea of the gender binary has no biological basis. Everyday people without adequate training pretend to be scientific experts. This doesn’t reveal much about gender, but it does demonstrate the lengths that people go to in order to distort reality to serve their purposes.