Beyond the Gender Binary

by Alok Vaid-Menon

“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.