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.

The issue is not that we are failing to be men or women. It’s that the criteria used to evaluate us to begin with is the problem.

In this way, acceptance of self-expression becomes conditional. 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.

Our existence is made into a matter of opinion, as if our genders are debatable and not just who we are.

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.

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.

We do remarkable things with jealousy and fear. Rather than naming them and acknowledging when we are operating from them, we repress them and pretend they aren’t there. 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.

“It’s common sense that everyone is a man or a woman.” Common sense is what happens when a particular point of view is regarded as the status quo because it’s held by the people in power, not necessarily because it is right. These perspectives are told so often that we begin to see them as universal truths. We accept the fact that this is the way things are and have always been. For large periods of history, it was “common sense” that Black people and people of color were inferior and that this supposed inferiority justified discrimination, genocide, and slavery. Just because an opinion is widely held does not make it right.

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.

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