What does "non-binary" mean?
What does "non-binary" mean?
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.
Non binary means someone's experience of gender doesn't align with the societally mandated binary genders.
That's it. What that alignment looks like, and what more it may mean varies from person to person.
The way I look at it, is that if a particular label is helping you navigate the world and your relationship with your own sense of self, then it's the right term, and other people's opinions on the "right" label don't come in to it.
So helpful, thanks Ada!
I think your definition of non-binary is similar to what I was trying to capture with my first account of non-binary as a third gender category (or in a "beyond the binary" model, as the only gender category).
What is interesting to me is that this account of non-binary relies on someone's experience of gender and on their relation to a socially imposed gender. This raises questions about all the variation, which you have brought up, and maybe this could result in different accounts of non-binary that still all fit under one umbrella concept.
The way I look at it, is that if a particular label is helping you navigate the world and your relationship with your own sense of self, then it’s the right term, and other people’s opinions on the “right” label don’t come in to it.
Yes, of course - I think the history of medical gatekeeping (like the Benjamin Rules) and the fact that trans folks are essentially gender outlaws, constantly under the threat of enforcement of a politically dominant gender hegemony, puts us on the defensive about our labels and identities.
In the context of our societies our identities are automatically questioned and doubted, considered fictional or unreal, and considered "wrong" or suspicious. In that context it makes sense to prioritize the authority of the individual to self-identify, and this is a smart move relative to our particular form of political hegemony, which is dominated by an ideology of liberalism which has a rich history of individualism to appeal to. We are able to weave our trans individual autonomy into the broader strands of individualism already present in our society.
To that point, I guess I will speak for myself and to my experience - I have watched myself take and let go of many labels, and it is interesting that the thing that changed was not so much me as much as my understanding, or more to the point, the meanings I had for words. I would have identified with a label like non-binary years ago, where I took that label to mean I did not perfectly conform with the gender I was assigned. The definition sounds very much like your definition, and yet I do not understand it now the same way I would have then. Living as a man then I was unusually soft and failed to conform to my gender in many ways, I would even wear a purse and refused to call it a hand-bag (as perhaps the example of my biggest and most persistent form of gender resistance, which most people found easy to ignore, asserting the binary role of man onto me with ease). Yet for all intents and purposes I lived as a man still and being non-binary was like a technicality for me, something that was true but irrelevant as I was living as a man. There is some amount of shame I experience now in telling this, as I feel I was living as a cis-gendered and cis-sexual person then. Now I have a much richer understanding of non-binary identities, and I know that the in-congruence I experienced before was likely a sign of being trans more than being non-binary (though they are often one in the same). And now as someone who has socially transitioned and would now be described as belonging to trans-gender and trans-sexual (i.e. medically transitioning) categories, I have come to see myself as potentially non-binary in a different sense. Rather than non-binary as a way to describe my incongruence with my assigned sex, now non-binary is a way to describe my incongruence with my chosen gender. I am probably in the ambiguous boundary between binary and non-binary space, and while for practical intents and purposes identify publicly as a binary trans woman, I think of myself as technically non-binary still. All these changes can be unsettling to one's sense of reality, and I have lost confidence in my ability to know my gender, so everything is left a bit open and ambiguous.
Even now I feel like I am still learning, hence why I'm here asking for new ways of seeing.
maybe this could result in different accounts of non-binary that still all fit under one umbrella concept.
That's already how it works!
The term non binary by itself only tells you who someone isn't. It doesn't tell you who they are.
We have demi gendered folk, trans fem, trans masc, agender, xenogender etc. There are 8 genders in the Talmud, and many extant and historical societies acknowledge more than two binary genders.
In that context it makes sense to prioritize the authority of the individual to self-identify, and this is a smart move relative to our particular form of political hegemony, which is dominated by an ideology of liberalism which has a rich history of individualism to appeal to. We are able to weave our trans individual autonomy into the broader strands of individualism already present in our society.
Yes and no. I'm binary. And strictly speaking, that is a form of self identity, as it's the label I choose to use when talking about my own experience, and in that context, I am the best authority to speak to my own experience. However, aligning as I do with a binary gender, it means that my experience of gender isn't a particularly individual experience. My experience of gender is broadly similar to nearly half of the population. So my empowered self chosen identity label leans right in to the hegemonic presentation of gender, and is ultimately, a shared experience.
For me, I struggled to claim ownership of the term "woman". I struggled to tell the world my gender, but I always felt it. Now though, as you have said, my perspectives have changed from my pre transition self. I often think to myself that if I were 20 years younger, and had grown up with more nuanced representations of gender, I wouldn't identity so strongly with the binary. I feel the differences between myself and other, predominantly cis women, not in the physical sense, but in terms of our relationships with our own gender experience. Yet despite that difference, I still feel that a binary is the most accurate way of describing my experience, and so that's how I identity.
Ultimately though, the terms we use aren't authoritive, and they're not prescriptive. They're subjective and descriptive, which means they are at best, an imperfect "shortcut" to describe our experience of gender, both in our own minds, and to others. It's why there are an infinite number of genders, because there are infinite ways of describing experiences with an entities sense of self.
Non-binary is an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of experiences.
Within the umbrella there's more specific identities and language people might use if they want.
Many don't want. Umbrella terms, like the very broad meaning of "Queer" are very useful for people that don't feel like explaining or justifying who they are is needed.
Makes sense, I think being an umbrella term makes it a rich environment for a wide variety of meanings. I guess it's not surprising then that we would end up with radically different accounts of what it means to be non-binary.
Sometimes it seems to me that "non-binary" as the broadest umbrella term might technically fit everyone, since there are always ways that people diverge from a strict set of gender norms.
Perhaps it's too simple, but I thought non binary people just don't ascribe to the idea that there is only a binary state of gender.
Ah interesting, I think that might be like the political meaning of non-binary, someone who rejects the gender binary, but maybe for other reasons besides political reasons? The only reason I can think of is maybe someone just doesn't believe anyone can be binary, like that there is some kind of empirical fact of people's gender identities and none of them are binary.
“otherwise cis-gendered” is a pretty ridiculous way to describe a trans person lol. Other than what, the fact that they are trans?
Categorizing non-binary “Butch women”, as you put it, separately from non-binary “femme cis-sexual women” is also just…ick, dude. Besides your, again, ridiculous way of phrasing your point…what if I told you non-binary people are not beholden to your gender expectations?
I am a non-binary person as are many of my friends, and neither we nor our other trans (or even cis) friends have any issues whatsoever communicating the “overlapping and different meanings” of our identity lol…if you are actually curious about why we identify the way we do why not just ask instead of trying to preemptively categorize “women” as either being in a legitimate third category or making a political statement?
That's exactly what OP did. No attempt to shove people in a box was made. There's no need to fly off the handle.
Not every inaccurate statement about nonbinary people is made in bad faith.
Hey, thank you! It sounds like you understood where I was coming from better. I'm not sure how to better communicate to avoid the hostility (I thought I was clear, but I must be wrong), but I appreciate your support.
Not every inaccurate statement about nonbinary people is made in bad faith.
The meanings of non-binary I have encountered may be "inaccurate" according to some other meaning, but I'm not sure we should be so quick to dismiss them as inaccurate. This is sort of what I was explicitly trying to avoid. I understand the impulse to deny another definition or meaning of non-binary that doesn't match our own definition or meaning, but I think we have to set aside some of that judgement so we can be open to the variance that people are reporting.
I have my own biases about what non-binary should mean, even just on pragmatic grounds, but I am explicitly suspending judgement and inviting openness and tolerance.
No attempt to shove people in a box was made
Unless they didn’t look trans enough for OP, you mean? In which case they get an entirely separate box from the more authentic looking enbies?
There's no need to fly off the handle
I can’t help but notice I am the only one at this time who has addressed the actual content of OPs post. Why don’t you take a stab at it so I can see exactly what is necessary.
Not every inaccurate statement about nonbinary people is made in bad faith.
Notice how you phrase it as “statement” instead of “question” lol. As I said I think OP would be better served by simply asking the question instead of guessing (in a weirdly very AFAB fixated manner).
hey, it seems like I've really caused some upset here.
First, I should reiterate what I said in my OP, this isn't about debating non-binary people as whether they are trans or not, whether they are legitimate or not, etc. I think it's sufficient to just take seriously how people identify.
Not all non-binary people identify as trans, so your assumption that they are inherently trans may be reasonable but I want to point out that this is not the only way to think of being non-binary. (This isn't just theoretical, I know multiple people who identify as non-binary but not trans.) Personally I would say anyone who is non-binary is typically trans by definition (and this gets into definitions of trans, which is its own post), but again I let people tell me how they identify and I listen and take that seriously.
As for why I used a butch woman as the edge case, it's not some AFAB fixation, I was just thinking about the various scenes in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues where trans and butch identities collided. Feinberg's book is a powerful work, so it has rightly anchored itself in my mind when thinking about non-binary identities. Feinberg after all is one of the primary foundational figures in developing the "beyond the binary" model of gender (along with Kate Bornstein).
A lot of this thinking and the reason for my post comes from recently reading Talia Mae Bettcher's paper "Trapped in the Wrong Theory" (here's a PDF). I'm essentially digesting the way she introduces a kind of pluralism through the "multiple worlds of sense":
Worlds are all lived and they organize the social as heterogeneous, multiple. I think of the social as intersubjectively constructed in a variety of tense ways, forces at odds, impinging differently in the construction of any world. Any world is tense, not just in tense inner turmoil but also in tense acknowledged or unacknowledged contestation with other worlds. I think that there are many worlds, not autonomous, but intertwined semantically and materially, with a logic that is sufficiently self-coherent and sufficiently in contradiction with others to constitute an alternative construction of the social. Whether or not a particular world ceases to be is a matter of political contestation. No world is either atomic or autonomous. Many worlds stand in relations of power to other worlds, which include a second order of meaning. (Lugones 2003, 21)
It is also coming off some experiences where I was challenged in my assumptions about what non-binary could mean. Just a week or two ago I met two people who identify as non-binary but who, as I said in the OP, have cis-gender expressions are cis-sexual. Their understanding of what it means to be non-binary was new for me, and did not seem to involve a gender identity as I had previously thought of it (such as a phenomenology of your gender, or having a sense of gendered self that is incongruent with one's assigned sex, etc.).
OK, with some hopefully helpful background, let me respond to your comments.
Categorizing non-binary “Butch women”, as you put it, separately from non-binary “femme cis-sexual women” is also just…ick, dude.
Hmm, I can understand what you mean, but I'm not attempting to impose a categorization for the sake of separation. What is relevant is not that a butch enby is different than a femme enby, but the reasons those people have for identify as non-binary in the context of the meanings I have. The examples are there to help me think through how a similar person from an internal sense of gender and external expression of gender might have radically different ways of identifying, just as I am seeing in real life and is being discussed in the literature.
This is somewhat a separate issue, but I would prefer you not use masculine gendered language when communicating disgust with me. I get the disgust and why you are communicating it, but in that context of no-trust a label like "dude" is not familiar or warm but feels like you are intentionally misgendering me, which feels a bit degrading. It's the internet, I get it, but in case you didn't mean to do that I'm giving you feedback that this didn't feel right to me.
... if you are actually curious about why we identify the way we do why not just ask instead of trying to preemptively categorize “women” as either being in a legitimate third category or making a political statement?
I am essentially asking, that's what my post is about, but I'm not merely asking why people identify as non-binary, I am trying to understand the underlying "world" of meaning. So in that sense I don't so much care why someone identifies as non-binary as much as I care about the underlying meanings or theories that might emerge from those discussions. This is why my post is titled "What does 'non-binary' mean?" and not "Why do you identify as non-binary?". I don't take these to be the same.
Also, I wasn't "pre-emptively categorizing" as much as I was sharing the meanings I had already encountered. The fact that different meanings of non-binary can be used to categorize is somewhat irrelevant, since that's not their purpose in this post.
The example of the butch woman who may or may not be non-binary is to function as a concrete example and an intuition pump within each meaning, to understand the different ways something may or may not apply. None of this is objective or meant to function as a way of categorizing people, though I understand how it might feel that way. Instead there are multiple ways of looking at things. The theorizing and categories are descriptive and a means to understanding the way people think of themselves and others. Sure, people can try to use a particular meaning to then categorize others, but that's not the point.
I acknowledge your response without agreeing with you. Your journey of having your preconceptions challenged is admittedly fascinating in its own right, but my opinion remains that you are not in a position to be teaching people about this stuff. I think you have the makings of a skilled lecturer but you must imagine how it feels to have a lecture delivered about you and your friends from someone who doesn’t quite seem to understand you. Under the pretense of asking, no less.
That being said I also do not believe your strategy of trying to uncover the deeper underlying meaning of the word “non-nonbinary” without regard for “why people identify” as such will be fruitful for you in the long term, but I would remain interested in your perspective as time goes on if perhaps presented in a different context.
To address the separate issue, you have my apologies for the use of the word dude. My intention when employing the word was not related to gendered connotations. I am immersed in a a local trans community that has completely neutered the term, but I should be more cognizant of how it can read outside of that context.
I used to think of nonbinary as just a third box, but the more I've been exposed to nonbinary identities and just thinking a lot about it, it seems like falling for the binary trap again. I guess technically it's ternary, but the point is that discretizes gender again.
Imagine a survey asking for people's favorite color:
- Blue
- Green
- Other
"Nonbinary" is akin to saying "Other", which isn't very descriptive. In a world where 95% of people pick blue or green, I suppose it is useful to say "I'm not one of those", but that serves mostly to preempt expectations, it doesn't actually say much about the person.
More complicated: what if my favorite color is a purplish blue? Is that blue? Is that other? People get confused when I flip flop between those two answers because they're thinking purely about the 3 answer choices rather than the entire color spectrum. My favorite color is actually quite clear and consistent, it's just the mapping to the limited answer choices that's confusing.
The 3 answer choices generally work for most people (even " other" is good as a very quick summary), but people frame their entire understanding of color through those answers rather than understanding the actual color science it's based on, that's the problem. Even among blue people, they prefer different shades.
So about the contradictory definitions: yeah, red is not the same as yellow, but they're both "other".
Anyone who doesn't conform to the binary gender system of male and female. Maybe they're both, maybe they're neither. Maybe they're something in between.
I've always thought it's a metaphor for the binary language of computer code, 1s and 0s, male and female. The old model of sexuality and gender looked like this, binary. You'd be male or female, and be into men or women, or in case of bisexuals both. The flaws of this system was that there were people who did not fit into this system, not just by gender but also by their biological sex (genetic intersexuality).
So a non-binary system would be turning the binary system into a spectrum instead. I see it going from "masculine" to "feminine", and all its ranges in between. So a non-binary person that was born male, but identifies as female and is also very much passing as one, but does not want to move to a post-OP state like what we usually think about for trans women, could be very far but not fully placed onto the feminine side of this spectrum, being neither classically male or female.
Likewise, I think it makes sense if sexual attraction works the same way. You're not so much straight, bi, or gay - but rather attracted to a range of feminine to masculine features, with classically bisexuals being in the middle of that spectrum. Someone who's classically straight or gay would be on either of the ends of that spectrum, and people who don't mind for example the sexual organs to be different to their classical gender identity could lean strongly towards one of those sides but would also be more aligned towards the middle of the spectrum, since they're more flexible towards non-binary people.
That being said, I think the science is still so early that people should be careful with being too judgemental about specific terminologies, as long as we're respectful towards each other. With each study and more research done those things can change pretty drastically over short amounts of time, and not everyone is super into the topic to the point where they're always perfectly well informed.
Interesting, so there is this notion of non-binary as applying a spectrum to previously binomial things, like sex, gender, and sexuality.
It's also interesting that you position non-binary less as a label or identity but more as a fact about someone (that they may or may not know, or identify with). For example, a trans woman who does not want bottom surgery is considered less feminine, then, on the spectrum.
See, I wonder if you couldn't take the same distinction and apply it to even more refined categories. I think of Helen Daly's paper "Modelling Sex/Gender" (PDF), in which Daly proposes a "many strands" model of sex and gender, whereby sex or gender is not thought of as a set of categories whether binary (as man or woman) or ternary (as man, woman, or non-binary) nor as a spectrum between two extremes (man on one end, woman on the other, and "non-binary" being anything in-between), but rather as a set of characteristics that may be spectral or not.
This is suggested as a way to help policy makers navigate the complexity of sex/gender, for example when deciding whether someone qualifies to compete in men's or women's sports.
Personally it seems this thinking ignores the potential for policy makers to have a transphobic bias when choosing relevant characteristics to include in defining someone's sex or gender for the sake of a given decision, but what I do like is that it does give a helpful model for approaching contextually different notions of sex and gender.
So in a medical context a doctor could use the many-strands model to approach better care for their patients. Rather than focusing on whether a patient is a man or woman, they can focus on facts like whether a patient has a prostate or not, whether they have a uterus or not, etc.
So the question comes back that in what context would an otherwise binary trans woman need to be labelled non-binary for being no-op or pre-op?
The label can function various ways, but there seems to be something wrong with labeling an intersex or trans woman as somehow less feminine or less of a woman due to having the "wrong" genitalia.
I think this intuition probably comes from the weight we give to someone's internal sense of themselves, and that the brain and mind are the ultimate authority of who someone is and what their authentic identity is.
Anyway, I know you weren't attempting to foist the non-binary label onto binary-identifying trans women, but I'm thinking about the theoretical limitations of a model like that, which seems to impose that kind of meaning onto them regardless of how they experience gender.
I could also be wrong about my assumptions, I admit there might be an empirical aspect to these questions that is being left out (as dangerous or politically unsavory as that kind of biological determinism can be).
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.
I don’t think it has any solid, narrow definition, hence why it seems to broaden as it catches some more unique experiences of gender, and the political label a cis person might adopt. The more people talk about how their experiences don’t conform to a binary, the more points on the spectrum might get grouped up as non-binary, partially due to the rigidity of the binary gendered norms.
I’m considering calling myself a non-binary man, as I don’t feel that I fit firmly in the standard gendered masculine group, but I don’t feel awful being nominally gendered male by others most the time.
I want to present more androgynous most times, feminine at other times, masculine otherwise.
Even at the end of the day, I still feel more comfortable with he/him or they/them, or he/they pronouns. Though I sometimes feel a bit dysphoric when I’m wanting to present less masculine and look in the mirror and see my beard growing back 🙃
To me, it is more about non-conformance and the desire to queer gender norms and experiences, but I’ve met people who see it more as a third gendered option both in the sense that both genders are present, and in the sense that none are present. And I’ve seen people who use it more as a non-gendered option.
I’ve also seen people use it in a similar way to what I do, calling themselves a non-binary trans-woman/trans-man/trans-person, often as a way to add more nuance to how they experience gender.
While I’m queer, I didn’t spend a lot of time in LGBTQ+ spaces growing up due to a lasting consequence of my conservative christian upbringing leading to a mild queer-phobia. Even when I was happy calling myself a socialist (aka being a leftist who says “just don’t shove it in my face”). I’ve probably fudged some terminology. I’ve had some catching up to do lmao.
That being said, I do think my ideology has been shaped, to a degree, from my experiences going through that, being closeted, and what exploration I let myself do then and now.
Interesting notions, it sounds like a lot of your notion of "non-binary" is similar to the second meaning I had in mind, basically the idea of being genderqueer or gender non-conforming.
I can really relate to some of what you are saying about not feeling awful being nominally gendered male by others, I had a sort of indifference to gender and felt like if people wanted to call me he/him that it was on them, not me. They were gendering me, so I didn't have to take it that seriously.
When I watched the Transition Channel videos, especially the Common Excuses to Transitioning video, I realized I might be more trans than I had previously considered (I thought of myself as nominally non-binary and "gender non-conforming" before, not really thinking of those terms as being trans per se), and most importantly that I might have been suppressing myself and ignoring dysphoria. It was a good coping strategy while growing up since transitioning was never going to be an option then, and it was unsafe not to conform to the assigned masculine gender.
Like Natalie Wynn and Mia Violet describe, I too found living as a boy not too bad. I didn't really have thoughts that I was a girl before puberty hit. Even living as a man wasn't that distressing as I could just ignore gender and dissociate to cope.
Anyway, your description of your gender reminds me a lot of myself before I transitioned (not that this means you will be like me, I just can relate to what you are describing). It's hard for me because transitioning is so difficult, there is still such a strong desire in me to ignore this problem and not prioritize it. I feel selfish for prioritizing it, and I also feel like it's a huge risk for something that I have been able to live without for so long.
That said, HRT changed the balance - I'm not transitioning so I can live as a woman primarily, I'm transitioning because repressing and having androgen dominance turned out to be impacting my mental health in ways I didn't know until I tried HRT.
Could non-binary be someone is cis gendered in person but trans gendered online, or is that something else?
Firstly, "transgendered" isn't a thing.
In the same way that tall people aren't "talled", trans people aren't "transgendered". It's not something that happens to us, it's who we are...
As for your question though, what you're describing is being closeted. A queer person who isn't able to live authentically in their daily life, who has to hide a part of who they are, is closeted, and that's what you're describing in your question. It has nothing to do with gender. Unfortunately, every part of the LGBTQ community has members that have to be closeted, even today...
My bad. Go tell Oxford doctionary.
Depends on why the disconnect between online and "in person"
Are you "cis" in real life because you aren't comfortable coming out to family/friends/work yet?
How do you internally identify? Why the difference between online and real life?
For example, I am transgender is all facets of life. Even at work where I'm not out to anyone yet. I'm just "presenting" cis
I think the term might be "cis-passing" in that context, if the person feels they are actually trans and are not able to transition socially or medically for various reasons. Generally "non-binary" is under the trans umbrella as well, so that would mean that person is no longer cis-gendered by definition.
Non-Binary is just an umbrella term; it's not very specific to my mind but someone else's identity isn't mine to specify. It's theirs, and they may very much have a different conception of the word to the one that I have or identify strongly with it anyway. It's still useful in a binary world.
I make sure to ask everyone -- binary or not, trans or not -- what terms they would like to be understood in and what those terms mean to them. That's the only important part, how they wish to be understood. If one of those terms is "Non-Binary" I will accept that and aim to make them feel safe.