Forgotten, Erased, Destroyed: Life Outside the Binary
Binarism is the way Western, colonialist, imperialist philosophy transforms the achingly beautiful breadth of experience into the heartache of rigid, violent divisions. It is a fundamental building block to anti-Indigeneity, to racism, to exorsexism, to transphobia, to ableism, to homophobia, to acephobia .... It is divide and conquer, a tool to fracture us across a dozen fault lines, one group taking resources by subjugating another and destroying the rest. Its patterns repeat again, and again, a fractal thinking which persists even upon the injection of understanding of a given binary as false, because the dominant group can feign acknowledging nuance and maintain power by filtering it through the lens of yet more split understandings. The powerful pay lip service to intersectionality and diversity while deliberately co-opting revolutionary energy into impotent reformism. When presented with the differential harm imposed by binarist thinking, those in power seek to maintain that power by destroying difference, instead of recognizing it, instead of uplifting the long silenced, long hidden. It is the least analysis which suggests the solution to oppression is to ignore or destroy the oppressed.
This history cannot be ignored in any discussion of the impact of living outside the binary, any binary, on those of us who do, even though few if any of us can speak personally to each such impact, each such binary that has been imposed. In this I acknowledge my whiteness, that I am the child of generations of settler colonialism, that as much as I live outside the neat confines the kyriarchy would impose on me with respect to gender, sexuality, religion, ability, my perspective is still that of the child of those who imposed such policy in the first place. All of us suffer, many of us benefit, and those two do not cancel, but they do impact our perspectives and the weight with which they should be held. I do not claim expertise beyond my experience, nor presume to speak on such aspects of oppression except in so much as it feels appropriate or even ethically obligatory to do so. The notion of singular experts is just as much a tool of the oppressive binarist structures as the structures themselves, and my words will focus on my understandings and should be taken within the context I come from and the greater context of many such works, critiques, and discussions. Or more plainly, I will do my best to stick to what I know, and I strongly encourage the reading of words by voices and perspectives beyond my own.
An illustrative example. In 2015, Dana Zzyym filed suit to get a non-binary passport from the US government. In 2021, this passport was issued, but general availability of non-binary (X-marker) passports is still not in place. The delays have been both deliberate in the form of legal whataboutism, financial pressure, and lack of compliance even to organizations’ own stated intentions, but also due to the structural weight of the binary assumptions of sex and gender which have been reified by wording in law, by programming in machine, by physical construction within the apparatus of passport creation. As of the time of this writing, non-binary people in the US who would feel an X marker best describes their gender are not able to have a passport that matches their gender. This may even mean their documents cannot match each other, depending on state. Not that the US is alone in this. Only a dozen or so countries currently allow for options beyond M or F on a passport. The UK is not one of them.
Dana Zzyym has lost enormous opportunities due to an inability to travel, many of which are public record. I recommend looking into just how much this cost them in their own words, rather than take my assessment of the case, or their life, as a comprehensive assessment. Traveling without documents which match someone’s gender or sex can be impossible, or dangerous. Traveling with documents which match someone’s gender or sex can be dangerous as well. They become a marker to every bigot who would harm us, and given the threat we pose to assumptions of gender and sex, that number is not small. And even those who don’t understand what it means might hold it against me. The TERFs who call for the violent death of trans women will see me as one when they realize I am not cis, and now this is a marker for it, because our society doesn’t acknowledge that sex, and not just gender, both are falsely ascribed a binary. I do not desire to be stealth, even if I could. I want to live as who I am, and I have the privilege to be at much less risk than others with that same desire, given the color of my skin and the advantages of financial security, so I do choose that label. But it does not mean I fail to recognize it is a danger, and an unnecessary (in a strict sense) one, at that.
Converting a binary gender understanding into a trinary, where the disparate experiences of non-binary identities are simplified and collapsed into an easily digestible checkbox without uprooting the false understanding built into the inclusion of such markers and checks in the first place is exactly the system by which binarism co-opts and destroys the push for true support for marginalized groups. Instead of the reasonable removal of gender markers, which would reduce barriers for everyone, fight back against the notion that F/M themselves were even particularly useful ways to identify people. They all rely on stereotypes for the illusion of efficacy, when what is really accomplished is a system for punishing those who defy social norms, who defy the binary structures which underpin unjust hierarchies.
Barriers, soft and hard, are established at every turn to those who seek only to live as ourselves. Financial costs of pursuing even legal and social recognition, putting aside medical intervention, are higher. Those who do not conform, or more likely, hyperconform, to the expectations established by those who conveniently patterned those expectations on their own performance, are damned whichever way we turn. We face delays, refusal of services, and very real threats to our health and livelihood if we do not step in just the arbitrary pattern set aside for us, if any pattern is allowed at all. And it takes a treatise on my lived experience to explain but a fraction of the depths to which this falls.
To continue on the concepts of legal documents, an X marker is a reformist step, a positive option to have, certainly, but missing the point. Gender is not sex. Non-binary and binary genders are not mutually exclusive. Non-binary is not a single experience. Cis and trans do not cover the full range of options. Man and woman are not mutually exclusive: one might be both at the same time, or at different times, and perhaps never non-binary in gender but only non-binary in gender identity due to that fluidity. What marker belongs on that passport? What does that marker even tell? Gender is real just like money is real, a social construct we have created to facilitate interaction. But the notion that gender as Western society conceives of it is inherent, that it is easily classifiable, that it exists as a falsifiable metric useful for strict categorization? That is a legal fiction. And it is not even a useful fiction, except in so much as it is useful for punishing deviance from the norm.
Because that’s the point. This binary, as an example of so many, does serve a purpose. It just is not the purpose that it has been sold as serving. They are not, as they are so often claimed, a safety feature. They do not protect people; they protect power. Imposed binaries are distractions. Those who have the easiest perspective on the harms our society does (because we are impacted by those harms) are silenced via attrition, via exhaustion, via delegitimization.
I am a multigender genderfluid genderflux transfeminine person. I have altered my body with piercings, tattoos, hormones, surgical procedures, trying to display some semblance of my selfhood. My very existence frustrates attempts at classification, and I am constantly erased in every community, my complexity flattened to make whatever point someone finds convenient. Even those who often speak to my experience, trans women, forget my existence. They speak of sisters, but am I among that sisterhood? The transphobe sees me as part of it, but does not recognize a sisterhood, certainly. And for many trans women, they too see only a binary, willing to accept me only so far as I fit into their broader, but still so stiflingly narrow views of gender.
I had the opportunity recently to watch Travis Albanza’s Burgerz, well, a dress rehearsal, which was much like my understanding of self - intimately personal and rough at the edges. In it, Travis asked how many trans people had put on ourselves to meet the expectations of the world around us. How many choices were made not to claim our own bodies, but to sell them? Sitting there, bag of ice slowly melting against my still healing surgical site, a surgery I was very fortunate to even have access to, a surgery which was beyond standard expectations, which came with suffering beyond what even was expected, but which was the right choice. Sitting there I thought about my thoughts, I thought about the choices I had made in that change to my body. It was bittersweet, knowing what I had lost and what I had gained. It is bittersweet, knowing that this was the right choice even though it did not bring me a shape that felt fully right. The shapes I want, the body that would tell the world who I am, the rightness in every moment? That body does not exist, cannot exist within the current paradigm. Every aspect, no matter how I fit them together, will be so rigorously gendered to never form a solved puzzle from the pieces. Even if it did, it would only approximate my true self.
Part of that failure is found in the notion of singleness, uniqueness, that all things can be diagnosed, or categorized. My perfect body would not be one thing because I am not one thing. I am many genders, many strengths, and predominances, and presentations, all wrapped together and shifting. Multiplicity beyond the either/or. Fluidity beyond the static. I am so much more and seen as so much less than I am, because binarism has robbed our ability to see with our hearts, seeing only with the words that have been given to us. Man, woman, boy, girl, thing, monster, pity, suffering, safe, pain.
I am seen as pain. Ungendered in my disability, a cane as blessing and curse, signalling disability so loudly it can drown out even gender. Maybe that makes me safer. Maybe I don’t care. Maybe I need to walk, but the cane only is sometimes an aid. It is heavy in my hand, twisting on my back, the pressure in my muscles and joints shifting and twisting. Yet it is a symbol too. Disabled vs abled. Where am I allowed to go? Maybe it would be better to not use the cane, but it would not be better to be seen as abled, as capable of the staircase to the bathroom. It is interesting to watch people sort me, their eyes assessing how to place me as more of me comes into view. Disabled? Trans? (Or the harsher words I hear, even when unsaid, in the energy of the speaker). You can’t be both, can you? There’s normal, and there’s different. There’s only so complex a person can be. You’re only allowed to be one type of strange. You’re only allowed to break the binary so many times.
As I started to recover from surgery, the doctors told me I would not need the cane for too long. This cane that had predated the surgery. This cane which is a sometimes tool. This cane which takes and gives. As I stood, half hidden, asking to use an accessible bathroom in London, the employee directed me to take the stairs to the bathroom, maybe wondering which bathroom to send me to, but then they walked around, saw my cane, opened the door. No need to worry about gender, gender doesn’t exist for the disabled, after all. Gender in the minds of the cis links with sex, and disabled folks are desexed, desexualized in the eyes of the abled. So long as I am disabled I don’t need gender. Am I still disabled on the days I do not use a cane? Do the realities of my self matter more than the perceptions of the world about me?
What is disability? I have glasses too, what makes them different from a cane? Both a physical assistive device. Both a cause of strain on my body if misused. Both an extension of my body. But glasses are not seen as disabled, because disability, like gender, is socially constructed. It is constructed in that same binary system which says some people fit and others do not. Glasses are normalized, and, perhaps tellingly, rarely cost much to accommodate in money or time or energy to anyone but the wearer. Disability becomes defined not by what a person is capable of, but what they cost the people around them. It is, like gender, twisted through colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, into a tool used to separate those who are of use to those who are of ‘none’. Of course, nearsightedness is a disability, when the person can’t afford glasses. Was a body the source of disability in that case, or was class or economic opportunity responsible?
Binarist thinking demands that we have simple answers to complex questions. It demands that we know who is to blame, and how to fix it so we do not have to feel about it. It demands that every expanding set of boxes, not, as one might hope, so that everything has a place to be, but so that the boxes can be closed, never to be considered too deeply again, and certainly never to be related to the boxes around them.
The push for clear definitions, as a tool to organize and solve complex problems, itself becomes a tool for oppression when co-opted into this system. Within the LGBTQ+ communities, exclusionism based on strict prescriptivism becomes another fracture point. Where communities organize around shared experience, where a single definition of an identity is not as important as solidarity, this is injected as a way to crystalize. It becomes a wedge to turn siblings on each other. Lesbian identity in particular is weaponized this way, with at different times and for different reasons multisexual spectrum folks, transmasculine folks, transfeminine folks, non-binary folks, ace folks, and more, being pushed out. The pushback against split attraction model, against genderfluidity, against all these edges is an effort to legitimize a core, at the cost of an increasingly marginalized periphery, but within the context of an illegitimate and harmful binarist system.
I am a bi lesbian; I am attracted to multiple genders, at different times, in different ways. But my core attraction is lesbian in nature, I break the patriarchal expectations on my attraction, and I within my heart resonates the same spirit which resonated in the lesbians of decades and centuries past. Many of our liberation movements’ leaders did not fit so nicely into the boxes now laid out for us by those who would rather assimilate than liberate, to those who would fracture out further the restrictive structures than break barriers. They had husbands; they spoke to bisexuality as a part of the same movement; they lived their truths and the community formed around them. It was not until the opportunity to cast aside bisexuals (and as time progressed, all multisexual spectrum folks), that monosexual lesbians and gays began to push for separation. These reactionary pushes, fed by the lavender scare (itself an offshoot of the red scare), would grow into TERFs, into biphobia, into the notions of the predatory and promiscuous. It was the same tools, wielded by a new generation, in the ever shifting goalposts of binarism gone unchallenged.
I could continue to dissect and break apart these fractional aspects of my identity ad nauseum, speaking of faith, and spiritual upbringing, and how cultural traditions intersect with religious practice in a society with strong assumptions of what the words and trappings of those practices must mean. I could talk about how neurodiververgence is both disability and not, how invisible and hidden interact with stealth and closeted, how all these pieces shift and weigh on each other. But in the end it would just be breaking myself down, ripping myself into bite size pieces for the greater binarist system to consume. It would tear me apart as well, because under that understanding I do not exist as a whole being, just a collection of useful parts. The point is not to understand me, or my life, within the context or in contrast to an untouchable binary. It is to question the assumption of the binary itself, to begin to look for the places where it rips apart people. Living outside the binary is not just inconvenient, it is violent. The binary, the system of binaries, binarism itself is not an ethically neutral construct. Binarism is not an ethically pure analysis; it too is violence.
Written by Archangel | December
Archangel|December is a white, ND, non-binary transfemme, omniromantic, abrosexual, relationship anarch. While faer degree is in neuroscience, fen works in IT for a day job. In their spare time fae tries to help with trans education and activism, runs an intermittent podcast, and plays tabletop games.
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