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.

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.

They tell us to “be ourselves,” but if you listen closely, there’s more to that sentence: “. . . until you make them uncomfortable.”

I have learned that the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.

Bias and discrimination are not just being endorsed, they are given the green light. This gives many people permission to harass us in public everywhere we go.

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.

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.

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.

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

It took me fifteen more years to embrace my femininity and regain the strength to wear the clothes that I wanted to and not that society told me to. When I started wearing what I wanted to again, it didn’t feel like something new, it felt like reclaiming something that I had lost. It felt like coming home.

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.

What I have learned is that creativity lives in the unfamiliar spaces in our minds. We do not make art from following the rules. We make art precisely from imagining beyond them.

We are both too much and never enough. We are always made out to be the problem. But maybe we aren’t the problem; maybe the whole gender system is. Whose definitions are we prioritizing, anyway?

Repression breeds insecurity breeds violence.

Gender non-conformity causes such a huge reaction because we’re consistently taught that there are only two fixed and universal genders. Seeing other people defy this mandate brings the entire system into question.

So often we mistake likability with acceptance.

True acceptance doesn’t look like having to change who you are in order to be embraced. Conditional acceptance is not freedom—we shouldn’t have to erase our differences in order to be respected.

In fact, our bodies are trained to respond to certain things over others. Learned behaviors can also be unlearned: it’s possible to develop more kind and just ways of relating to ourselves and one another. What we look like isn’t gross; what is truly disgusting is how we shame one another for our physical appearances.

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. Control is how power maintains itself; anyone who expresses another perspective is punished.

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.

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.

What is regarded as masculine and feminine is not set in stone but actually shifts across time, culture, and space. Even in the Western world, pink was once considered a masculine color and heels were actually first worn by men!

It’s important to understand the difference between being “normal” and being “normative.” Being normal means that a numerically significant amount of something is found in a group. For example, if you select a random group of students, chances are a large percentage will be wearing sneakers. This is normal. Being normative is about what gets elevated by society to a position of power. Normativity looks like a specific sneaker brand being upheld as the best. Normativity, then, is about value judgment and shouldn’t be used interchangeably with normal.

Pain does not have to be visible to be real, and violence does not have to be physical to be serious.

“You are making everything about gender. Stop bringing it up if you want it to go away.” This is ironic because we are actually trying to make gender less relevant.

Not talking about it won’t make gender inequality go away; in fact, that’s precisely how this injustice persists.

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.

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

There is absolutely no biological basis for why boys should not paint their nails or be sensitive and girls should not play football or be taken seriously for their ideas. This is not about science, it’s about power.

They say that we are erasing them as they actively erase the long history of cultures outside the Western gender binary. They say that we are making things up as they invent hundreds of new laws to legislate us out of existence. They say that we are pretending as they recite the scripts about gender they have been taught. They say that we are attacking them as hate crimes against trans and gender non-conforming people increase.

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?”

We should not hold ourselves back for the sake of convention. Instead, we should embrace ongoing transformation as a necessary part of what it means to be alive.