Beyond the Gender Binary

by Alok Vaid-Menon

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 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.

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.

I was too feminine to be a boy and then too masculine to be a girl. It’s almost as if they move their definitions precisely to exclude us. We are both too much and never enough.

Gender is not what people look like to other people; it is what we know ourselves to be.

While we are beginning to recognize a plurality of ways to be a man or a woman, we still have such limited understandings of what it means to be transgender.

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