Beyond the Gender Binary

by Alok Vaid-Menon

Be yourself until you make them uncomfortable. There is always a limit. A breaking point. Once you cross the line, then you are “too much” and are put back in your place.

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

There are some questions that have no answers. How do you express pain when you can’t even locate the wound? It’s like when you let a balloon loose into the sky. You don’t know where it goes, but you know it went somewhere. Far away.

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.

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.

I learned about gender through shame. In so many ways, they became inseparable for me.

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 couldn’t listen to recordings of myself without feeling embarrassed, and I hated looking at photos of me. I spent so much time and energy analyzing everything, trying to become as invisible as possible.

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

That’s the thing about being an LGBTQIA+ kid—you often don’t have the luxury to come into yourself on your own terms because other people have made up their minds for you.

The gender binary is set up for us to fail. For us all to fail.

People judge gender non-conformity because they are insecure about their identities. If they weren’t, then gender variance wouldn’t be so heavily policed.

But 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.

Why couldn’t I just say who I was without the caveat? Why did there have to be that tension? 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. This was my internalized self-hatred on display. At a basic level, I thought that being attracted to men was wrong because it was “feminine,” so I had to prove that I was somehow right. Conforming to the gender binary was about wanting to hold on to power.

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.

It’s important to understand the difference between being “normal” and being “normative.”

Science and biology are still products of human culture and do not exist outside of it.

Trans people are diverse and complex. Our experiences of our genders and bodies do not need to be universal to be valid. Being real is not a scarce resource, and it is possible to hold a diversity of experiences without creating hierarchies.

This is a deliberate strategy of using feminist rhetoric as a smokescreen to cover up anti-trans bigotry. 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.

We spend so much time trying to make other people comfortable that oftentimes we don’t even know what makes us happy. It’s exhausting.

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?”