Today is International Non-Binary Peoples’ Day, an occasion observed every July 14th since the day was first called for by author Katje van Loon in 2012. This particular date was chosen because it marks the half-way point between International Women’s Day (observed on March 8th) and International Men’s Day (observed on November 19th). While the day itself marks the important practice of centering and celebrating the vast range of non-binary identities and the persons who claim them, the symbolism behind the decision to situate the day as a midpoint between already existing celebrations of women and men is, unfortunately…unfortunate.
Speaking of 2012, though: that’s the first year I really identified myself with the idea of being non-binary—that is, of existing without regard for the myth of the so-called “gender binary.” I wouldn’t have described it that way at the time, however, as my understanding of non-binary identity was heavily informed by decades of growing up surrounded by social and cultural signals reinforcing to me (and everyone) that gender categories—all two of them—were exclusive, exhaustive, strict, and inviolable. The thought of actually stepping out of one of those categories and into the resulting unknown was existentially jarring, coming with a type of fear that I wasn’t ready to face yet. To get by, then, I simply convinced myself that I wasn’t really non-binary but was instead just another privileged cishet white person facing the temptation of co-opting queer (and other marginalized) spaces. While I could hear my own sincere, internal testimony telling me otherwise, things would be easier for me if I just decided to not listen to it.
It wasn’t until years later that I finally gave myself permission to take off my awkward boy suit and stop engaging in my uncomfortable and unreflective cis-het cosplay. As I did, I searched everywhere for guidance: how do I do this? How do I be non-binary? In session after session talking at my therapist, I’d wonder aloud about the names, pronouns, clothing and other adornments I would have available to me. The struggle wasn’t with the newfound and wide array of options, to be clear, but instead with what seemed like a very narrow and prescribed set of choices.
The trap I was falling into was the same trap I had just tried to escape from: in stepping outside of a system consisting of two exclusive, exhaustive, strict, and inviolable gender categories, I was seeking a familiar sense of comfort by stepping into a system consisting of…well, three exclusive, exhaustive, strict, and inviolable gender categories. As if it were mandatory, I was continuously striving to be the exact middle ground between man and woman: if woman is March 8th and man is November 19th, I had to be July 14th.
My performance of non-binary identity was, at this time, very conservative: rather than letting myself experience genuine liberation from compulsory gender norms (to the degree possible within a rigidly gendered society), I was simply contributing to the misguided project of turning the gender binary into the gender ternary. The problem with the binary, though, isn’t that there are two rather than three (or more), but instead that those two are, again, taken to be exclusive, exhaustive, strict, and inviolable—and that they are taken to determine so much of how we should be and how others should treat us.
Insofar as they do not experience themselves in a manner congruent with their gender assigned at birth, persons with non-binary identities are typically taken to fall under the broader transgender umbrella. (Not all choose to use the term “transgender” as a personal identifier, of course.) That transgender umbrella is itself situated under the even broader queer umbrella, which includes all of us who exist outside of the narrow sliver of experience offered to us in a cisheternormative society. Queer, however, is more than just an identity or a descriptor. It’s also a verb: to queer some subject or topic is to critically investigate and interrogate the binaries and other norms assumed or enforced within that subject or topic, highlighting and exploring the spaces between and beyond in an attempt to push forward toward a transformative liberation.
Whereas non-binary identities go some way toward queering the binary, we can also go further and queer the binary/non-binary distinction, as well. One first step we can take in the process is to note that the term non-binary itself unfortunately centers the binary: in defining itself negatively, in terms of what it is not and what it stands against, non-binary becomes conceptually dependent on the very system that it rejects. In its opposition to the binary, then, non-binary relies on binaries: with no binary in place, calling myself non-binary would make no sense.
Since we currently live in a world of compulsory binaries, we might see and approach this as a temporary measure alongside a temporary conundrum. At the heart of the queer non-binary project is the erosion of oppressive binary gender norms and the simultaneous reinvention of the world, and the more we lean into the non-binary, the more those oppressive norms evaporate. In time, the thinking goes, the binary/non-binary distinction will no longer be needed: in rendering the binary obsolete, non-binary delivers itself into obsolescence as well.
Black queer feminist poet Audre Lorde famously wrote that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” Instead, Lorde continues, they “ may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” These are powerful and important words, reminding us that true liberation from an oppressive system will never come from within that oppressive system. Such systems instead survive by assimilating resistance, defanging protest, and rendering opposition into a mere aesthetic that ultimately serves to (often unwittingly) reinforce the very target of opposition. In culturally constructing the “non-binary” package into the same framework as binary genders (“man” and woman”)—a package often thought to include prescribed they/them pronouns, an idealization of androgynous (re: typically thin, white, able-bodied, masc-presenting femme) expression, and associated communal aesthetics and symbols such as frogs or bees—we are simply codifying a new gender in line with the rules of the old. A prison with one more cell is still a prison.
To find individual and collective liberation, the prison of compulsory gender must be abolished completely, no matter how many cells it has within its walls. We must recognize that non-binary is a concept with utility only when spoken in the language of an oppressive system, and that our pleas and demands in that language will never convince its native speakers. To truly move forward, we need new tools, new movements, new concepts and ideas—a new language not as a mere improvement on the old, but as a full and total replacement.
What does that language look and sound like?
Let’s find out.
Today, we can celebrate International Non-Binary Peoples’ Day while also acknowledging that doing so—and doing so on this date in particular—defines us only in reaction to that which we reject while also centering the binary by averaging-out of International Men’s Day and International Women’s Day. And it is only binarist thinking that tells us that we cannot do both. In the spirit of breaking that binary, let our celebration inform our acknowledgement and our acknowledgement inform our celebration as we move forward toward a world beyond binaries—a world better suited for all of us.
Ley David Elliette Cray, PhD, CSC, ABS (she/they) is LGBTQIA+ Curriculum Coordinator for the Sexual Health Alliance and founder of Transentience Coaching.