Beyond the Gender Binary

by Alok Vaid-Menon

The gender binary is a cultural belief that there are only two distinct and opposite genders: man and woman. This belief is upheld by a system of power that exists to create conflict and division, not to celebrate creativity and diversity.

This false choice of boy or girl, man or woman, male or female is not natural—it is political.

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

As we face heightened prejudice and harassment on the ground, more policies and public statements deriding us continue to be made. This disconnect is not a coincidence; it is a calculation.

Be yourself until you make them uncomfortable.

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.

have learned that the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye.

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. The only reason people can fathom why we would look this way is because we want to draw attention to ourselves. They can’t even consider that maybe we look like this for ourselves, and not for other people.

A lot more airtime is given to other peoples’ views of us rather than our own experiences.

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

At a fundamental level, we are still having to argue for the very ability to exist.

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.

It’s a surreal experience to have your personhood be reduced to a prop.

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 couldn’t understand why something that gave me so much joy could be met with so much judgment.

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.

I wasn’t really sure what I was, but I knew that I didn’t want to be hated.

This is what happens when fear becomes stronger than need: The body becomes its own closet.

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.

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.

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

Rather than celebrating people who express themselves on their own terms, we repress them.

Repression breeds insecurity breeds violence.

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

there are no such things as gender non-conforming issues; there are just the issues that other people have with themselves, or rather, the issues that they have with themselves that they take out on us.

People have been so conditioned into believing the status quo that any slight attempt to break free from it brings panic and rage. They think that we are selfish when actually we are imagining a more kind and just world for everyone.

I needed to put other people down in order to bring myself up. To make myself real, I had to invalidate other people; to make myself right, I had to say other people were wrong.

So often we mistake likability with acceptance. Just because something is more relatable doesn’t mean it’s better. When the basis of your connection is putting down other people, that connection is going to be weak.

This is how shame works: It recruits you into doing its work for you.

Reclaiming my body, my identity, and my worth back from other people’s shame has showed me that transformation is possible, no matter how impossible it may seem.

The thing about disgust is that it makes prejudice physical.

Rather than naming them and acknowledging when we are operating from them, we repress them and pretend they aren’t there.

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

Arguments against gender non-conforming people are about maintaining power and control.

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.

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.

It’s not that gender non-conforming people aren’t normal, it’s that we aren’t considered normative. Gender diversity is a natural attribute of human expression, not an illness that needs to be fixed.

Gender non-conforming people face considerable distress not because we have a disorder, but because of stigma and discrimination.

Being constantly invalidated takes a toll:

“Why be nonbinary? Why can’t you just be feminine men or masculine women? Things are just getting unnecessarily complicated with all these options.” Some gender non-conforming people are nonbinary, and some are men and women. It depends on each person’s experience. 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. Rather than considering the existence of multiple genders as a bad thing or even a good thing, why do we need moral judgment of it altogether? There are many ways that people can exist and describe themselves. Why is that a problem? 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.

Scientific definitions of sex are not a given; they shift drastically over time. The idea that humans have a binary sex is a relatively recent phenomenon from the 1700s. Before then, it was a widely held belief by experts that humans were inherently both male and female. In the nineteenth century, scientists believed that binary sex was only possible in white people, who were seen as more “advanced” than other races. Today, conversations about binary sex erase intersex people who are born outside the binaries of male or female altogether. The fact that doctors still perform non-consensual and non-medically necessary surgeries on intersex people just because they are different shows how binary sex—like binary gender—is a political construction. These people are not accidents or malfunctions; this is how human diversity works.