Non-binary seems like it could have several non-compatible meanings, so I wanted to list some of those meanings and see if there are any others out there I don’t know.
One way I could think of non-binary is as being a kind of third gender category, like there are men, women, and non-binary people. In this sense of non-binary a butch woman who considers themselves a woman would not be non-binary because they are a woman.
Sometimes non-binary is used like “genderqueer” is sometimes used, as a generic description of anyone who doesn’t fit perfectly in the narrow confines of the binary genders (i.e. men and women). In this sense a butch woman could see themselves as a woman, but also as genderqueer and non-binary, as they do not conform to binary gender norms for women.
Another way non-binary seems to be used (related to genderqueer in its historical context) is as a political term, an identity taken up by otherwise cis-sexual and even cis-gendered people who wish to resist binary gender norms and policing. In this sense even a femme cis-sexual woman might identify as non-binary. Sometimes this political identity label might come with a gender expression that cuts against the gender expectations for the assigned sex at birth, but it doesn’t have to. (I recently met two people whose gender expressions matched their assigned sex at birth but who identified as non-binary in this political sense.)
I was wondering what other meanings of non-binary are out there, and how they are commonly used.
Note: gatekeeping what is “really” non-binary seems pointless to me, since I agree with Wittgenstein that “language is use”.
I know people get heated about policing what a word means (and I am guilty of this myself), but in the interest of inclusion, pluralism, and general cooperation in our community I think we can find a way to communicate with overlapping and different meanings of a shared term.
I think the whole benefit of a non-binary system like this would be that we see people less as labels such as man or woman, which many struggle to fit into, and more just as a person. Everyone has their own sexuality and who they’re attracted to anyway and that won’t change based on this. The only difficulty I could see here is that the question of genitals would obviously be blurry since we don’t present them openly, but I’m sure that can also be solved in an elegant way without giving anyone a bad surprise.
Medically when it comes to the biological sex & identification I think we could just as well use XY chromosomes in identifying documents like passports, IDs, etc. That does the same job and is generally more neutral.
yeah, I think people who experience “gender trauma” (as I’ve seen it called), but who in general are oppressed by gender norms or who suffer as a result of those gender norms (this includes cis women) have an incentive to attack gender and those categories themselves.
So let’s imagine a world without gender oppression. (Hard maybe to do, but pause and really try.)
I think in that world I would still have a gender, and I think others would still have a gender. It’s not all social, there seems to be a biological basis for a lot of what makes up gender experiences. I guess then the (utopian) question is how should we as a society relate to these impulses and urges.
In Ursula K. LeGuin’s book The Dispossessed she explores anarchist utopian ideals. The moon Anarres is inhabited by a utopian anarcho-syndicalist society. There is description of how having a child and how property works on Anarres, and in those cases there is a tension between the main character’s desires to grow attached to their child and lover and the social pressure to let the child and lover be autonomous. In this sense marriage or a certain kind of fixed monogamy is discouraged in that imagined world. Similar depictions in the book occur about impulses by characters to own things, and the way people are encouraged to not hold onto any possessions or not even relate to items as theirs.
I’m not even sure this depiction of anarcho-syndicalism is an accurate depiction of that ideology, since anarchism typically borrows distinctions from Marxism like private and personal property, and even in that system there can be notions of people owning homes, cars, etc. let alone the small personal possessions in Anarres which people are encouraged not to have. That is, no anarchist should be arguing people can’t own books or possessions in general, the issue with private property is about the idea of owning commons: whole factories, entire apartment buildings, large tracts of land, lakes, air, etc.
Just like in The Dispossessed, we should think about what a gender utopia might look like. Should we discourage gender experiences in the name of egalitarianism? Or can we find new ways to relate to gender expressions that spring from us that don’t lead to oppression?
All this aside, there is also the question of what to do in the meantime. Simone de Beauvoir in Second Sex suggestions woman is a social class imposed on some people, that it is not biological or innate. This is a position that clearly resists the oppression that comes along with being put into the class of woman. From Talia Mae Bettcher’s “Trapped in the Wrong Theory”:
In this context, an account of transsexualism, as someone who transitions from one sex to another and who becomes a binary woman in the end, appeals to an idea of innate or biological sex that conflicts with the feminist project of resisting oppressive gender.
Clearly as a victim of gender oppression myself, and someone who takes a stance of solidarity with oppressed cis women (and women of all kinds, really), I am invested in undermining and resisting that oppression. Yet my experiences with HRT and gender give me a sense that my gender and sexuality do at least relate to my biology. This doesn’t require a bio-essentialism but it also denies social construction as a theory of gender.
There are some theories that gender presentation represents genital status, I think Bettcher communicates this idea in “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers”. This makes a lot of sense, I could see an argument that the organisms that survive have traits that orient themselves for reproduction, and in humans that means being able to identify potential mates and to successfully mate with them. That’s not to say we should draw normative conclusions from the way things are or were, but it seems like a potential reason as to why gender presentation has to do with genitals in the first place.
In a utopian project I’m not convinced genitals should matter as much as people say. I don’t want to override the idea that some people have strong genital preferences or that you’re just transphobic if a woman’s penis is a problem, but it does seem like that is at least a reasonable place to start when explaining why it might be a problem for most people. We have such rooted and persistent beliefs about a penis being masculine that I think most people have a hard time seeing how a woman’s penis could be unmasculine.
Either way, like you are saying perhaps there are ways to negotiate those tensions without the rigidly enforced gender expressions we have now.
Why do we need to know someone’s medical or biological sex? I can think of a few cases, but sex in those cases still seem like a stand-in for a set of assumptions which could be false. I am reminded of that video on TikTok of a woman who went to the ER because of pain in her abdomen and doctors told her it was probably just an ovarian cyst. She didn’t have any ovaries. They assumed because she was a woman that she was female, and that because she was female she had ovaries.
What doctors really need to know are the specifics: does this person have a uterus, do they have a prostate, do they have gonads and what kind, etc. Maybe medical sex is reasonable shorthand for these sets of attributes, but there should be best practices to verify assumptions when relevant (like in the case of the woman who was ignored when she told her doctors she didn’t have ovaries; because they ignored her, she went untreated for a case of appendicitis, which can be fatal).
To that end, the same problem exists with chromosomes. Chromosomes are not sex. Plenty of people have intersex conditions (like, as many people as there are with red hair). It would be a logistical nightmare to accurately account for the insane amount of chromosomal diversity on IDs, and it is potentially endangering to the minority of people who diverge from the norm.
For example, putting XY on Alicia Weigel’s passsports would be not only misleading because people will assume she’s a man (she looks more femenine than many cis women, and was raised as a cis woman), but it would also be wrong as it exposes private medical information (like her androgen insensitivity condition) to the TSA agent or whoever is looking at her passport.
Another question is why we need gender markers on documents like passports, drivers licenses, birth certificates, etc.
Why regulate or have a gender marker at all? Since medical sex is relevant with the doctor, why isn’t it just something you find in your medical record? We don’t put other medical conditions, like whether someone is diabetic, on their passports, birth certificates, or other forms of ID.