On the binaries of a non-binary identity
Engaging with communities with a large influx of freshly out of the closet transgender people often makes me exhausted very quickly. Not because they have done anything wrong, but because the mainstream understanding of trans identity fails to include certain very basic truths about transition.
By the time I found out what non-binary meant, I had been around two years out of the closet as a transgender man. It was the mid-2010s, and there was a certain approach to non-binary identities in fashion back then that we’re still fighting now post-2020. Online was a curious space to be, and teenagers isolated from real-life trans communities had no idea how to recreate ourselves as adults and almost-adults; despite the existence of countless non-binary adults during and before our time, for many of us it was like there were no footsteps to follow in. I live in an insignificant, extremely Catholic country in the middle of Europe — I had never met an out transgender person outside of the Internet.
The infantilization of transmasculine and non-binary individuals was at the core of mid-2010s Internet, and if you open Tik Tok or any large social media app, you will see that this still persists in spaces occupied mostly by young teens. But what was also perplexing, and continues to be as the Internet takes its time to evolve, is this idea that non-binary identities stand as a contrast to the binary, and that people who do not identify with them, particularly transgender people, somehow belong to a different “camp” than those who do.
As a seventeen year old deep into this culture of infantilization, after coming out as non-binary I had exited my hypermasculine overcompensating phase of early transition, and created a somewhat cutesy online persona. The spaces I left had been toxic, and the spaces I entered aimed not to be, but proceeded to be eaten through by the over-eagerness of teenagers who had just discovered social justice. The overwhelming focus of these communities was to feel seen and valid, and never to be questioned; the term “mogai” had taken root and was not to be weeded out any time soon. This kind of thing is, of course, a natural result of the society young LGBT people grow up in. Unchecked and unquestioned, it can get ugly real quick — nothing is more vicious than a person told, for the first time, that they are right about a fundamental part of their identity.
Some time that summer I had an opportunity to ask Laura Jane Grace a question about her genderqueer identity, which she had previously talked about in another interview, and what it meant to her. While it has been years and I do not recall her answer word for word, she brought up that in her life as a trans woman, she also recognized and valued this identity that reflected who she was when alone with herself. It is funny to admit this now, but as a kid I did not understand what she meant. You were either non-binary or not, right? Why squash that inside and be alone with it? In my perception back then, there was no distinction between who I was on my own and what role I played to others; if I was going to present to someone as a man or a woman, it was an omission to protect myself.
Support groups for transgender people are full of questioning newcomers — usually teenagers, sometimes a bit older — pouring their souls out to strangers and asking desperately, am I even trans? Does it sound like I’m a woman or not? I thought I was a man, but sometimes I doubt it. What am I supposed to do about this? At some point, although I still feel like an amateur at gender, I used to go and answer those queries with the love and care these people deserve, and I gave likes to replies by other trans people who had completed their “internship”. Eventually, it all became too overwhelming, and I left those groups altogether. Among the helpful comments from transgender people who had gone through that questioning phase before, there were also lots of label guesses and attempts to diagnose the poster with one or another specific identity that only they would ever be entitled to choose. Something, somewhere, continues to go terribly wrong — I don’t know who and where is giving the trans 101 to the frantically googling newly-cisn’t, but their goal seems to be building boxes and printing labels instead of doing any kind of productive work.
Despite all the progress made as the transgender community — if there has ever been one — many who have not spent a lot of time going deep into the intricacies of gender identity still hold the perception that there is a meaningful distinction between trans men and women and non-binary people. The rise and fall and rise and fall of various influential truscum personalities does not help that one bit; teenagers put up wired fences around their gender identities, and even those so strongly opposed to this rhetoric are sneakily affected by it. “Binary” transness is propped up as synonymous with the regressive ideals spread by, largely, white boys and men, and their push to separate themselves from the “fake” transgender people reflects on the entire community. Their focus on invalidating non-binary people, who they perceive as cis women lite, is so intense that they are seemingly unaware of the harm they cause to transfeminine people — not to mention the refusal to acknowledge the racism of erasing gender identities beyond the binary. The communities that push back against this rhetoric are great, and rarely have any intention to create a contrast between those who are non-binary and who are not. However, the caveat of responding to this kind of thing is that it seeps into our language — “binary” people are no better than non-binary people, non-binary people need medical transition just as much as “binary” trans people — and with these well-intentioned arguments, this false dichotomy unintentionally extends beyond the truscum area of influence.
Although Laura Jane Grace’s answer didn’t initially make sense to me as a teenager, it has, in the end, been formative to me. As I’ve proceeded through my transition and shaped my identity as a non-binary transmasculine person, I began to understand that my identity was just as full and realized when I appeared to others as a gender non-conforming man, as when I discussed feeling estranged from gender entirely with my close trans friends. In online polls, I answer questions directed at non-binary people as well as “binary” transgender men, because my experience directly mirrors both.
While many trans people find comfort in living life in a way that can only be defined as being a man or a woman and no other terms, the intricacies of their identity can’t be put behind a boundary like that between us and cisgender people. Treating all those who do not wish to align with the gender binary as a third group specifically antithetical to the first two does nothing to free anyone from this system, and is particularly harmful to people whose cultures had the gender binary forced upon them. As a white European, I don’t think I have the appropriate perspective to elaborate on this topic, but it seems to me that many white trans people think of gender identity as something translated as easily as words in a dictionary.
While the existence of the term non-binary as descriptive of a person does imply the existence of one who is binary, there are many words in language that could lead to the same fallacy which we nevertheless choose not to fall for. Non-binary identities, identities that could not be called male or female, have always been present, and yet modern online culture has reframed them to have reemerged as if they were a coherent new species, neatly fitting in-between — or entirely opposite, but within the same framework of — the established norms we grew up with. As some people attempt to leverage this recent history to invalidate non-binary identities, it is important to take a moment to push back not just against this invalidation, but also the language and attitudes that allow for such a divide in the first place. To quote a really great Twitter thread by Chess, whose insights have definitely helped shape how I view gender, the existence of non-binary people does not need an antithesis. There is nothing “binary” about transness, and the view that there is is what prompts lots of people to spend their valuable time questioning their own identity and validity instead of taking pride in their newfound sense of self. While cis people may think they understand trans men and women as our expression often resembles their own, they do not have a single clue about the connection each of us holds to our gender. It is only my hope that we as trans people stop viewing each other through their lens.
