Beyond the Gender Binary

by Alok Vaid-Menon

“If we allow people to self-determine their genders, then anyone can say that they are a man or a woman!” 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. No individual woman experiences all the issues that every woman can go through. A wealthy white woman has a fundamentally different experience of womanhood than a working-class woman of color. A man born in Paris, France, has a different experience than one born in Paris, Texas. There is as much (if not more) difference within the category of woman than there is between men and women. Man and woman don’t lose their meaning when we recognize the diversity and difference within them; rather, they invite us to be more specific.

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.

We want a world where boys can feel, girls can lead, and the rest of us can not only exist but thrive. This is not about erasing men and women but rather acknowledging that man and woman are two of many—stars in a constellation that do not compete but amplify one another’s shine.

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. This complexity is not chaos, it just is. We do not need to be universal to be valid.

Sometimes when I am facilitating creative-writing workshops, I give a prompt to my participants: “What part of yourself did you have to destroy in order to survive in this world?”