Beyond the Gender Binary

by Alok Vaid-Menon

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.

This is ironic because we are actually trying to make gender less relevant. It’s curious where society locates the blame. What about the gender-reveal parties, the birth certificates, the gendered sections at clothing stores, the driver’s licenses, all the ways that society imposes gender on us all?

Critiquing gender is not the same thing as creating gender.

What’s behind this fear is an assumption that there is one stable and shared experience of manhood or womanhood and that if we move beyond this one definition, man and woman will stop having meaning. But the fact of the matter is that there are many experiences of manhood and womanhood.

Gender is a story, not just a word. There are as many ways to be a woman as there are women. There are as many ways to be a man as there are men. There are as many ways to be nonbinary as there are nonbinary people.