Beyond the Gender Binary

by Alok Vaid-Menon

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.

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.

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.

The gender binary is like a party guest who shows up before you get the chance to set the table. 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.

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.

In 2018, in response to pervasive anti-trans legislation, over 2,500 distinguished scientists released a statement noting that the idea of the gender binary has no biological basis.

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.

Trans and gender non-conforming rights are women’s rights because many trans and gender non-conforming people are also women. The irony is, then, that people are misusing the language of women’s rights specifically to harm women.

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.

I often think about how much time and work it takes to sustain the gender binary. How much we have to repress—all the feelings and dreams we have to sacrifice on account of proving that we are real.

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