Beyond the Gender Binary

by Alok Vaid-Menon

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.

At its heart, discrimination against gender non-conforming people happens because of a system that rewards conformity and not creativity. Rather than celebrating people who express themselves on their own terms, we repress them. This repression is something we first did to ourselves. We know how to do it so well to other people because we were the first testing grounds. We silenced our own differences, subdued our creativity, and toned down our own gender non-conformity in order to fit in. We thought fitting in would give us security—but is it security when someone else living their life differently unsettles us to our very core?

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. Arguments against gender non-conforming people are about maintaining power and control. Most can be grouped into four categories: dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope. These are strategies that people use to make the gender binary seem like a given, not a decision. It’s important to understand how they work in order to imagine otherwise.

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.

There is absolutely no biological basis for why boys should not paint their nails or be sensitive and girls should not play football or be taken seriously for their ideas. This is not about science, it’s about power.

Science and biology are still products of human culture and do not exist outside of it. It used to be common medical practice in the United States to measure skull size to determine intelligence, along with a whole host of procedures that have since been debunked. Societal beliefs about sex affect what questions scientists ask and the knowledge they gain. Scientific knowledge is not fixed—it shifts as cultural prejudice is revealed and challenged. Oftentimes we associate “scientific knowledge” with knowledge itself, dismissing everything else as just opinion. This science-opinion binary is oversimplified, especially when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality.

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.