Non-Binary as a Liberatory Practice, Not a Third Gender
Identifying non-binary as a liberatory practice, not as a third gender. Popular dialogue surrounding non-binary and trans identity– is not immune to western essentialist thinking.
When I came out as non-binary publicly amongst my immediate community in 2019, it was a direct response to colonial trauma and an aversion to the violence that are inherent in binaries. Over time, I found myself engaging in my identity further in community building with other trans folks, unconsciously having those around me act as a sounding board in the process of personal identity formation. As is the nature of first-world western thought, no matter how progressive one believes themselves to be, the majority of everyday people find themselves prey to essentialism in one way or another– and I was no exception.
At the very foundation of white supremacy and the western world, essentialism globally lies comfortably and without wide-scale or urgent rebut. Even though I had begun to deconstruct and then reassemble my ideas on gender–constructivism through conversation with other queer folks and in beginning to study latin american history more seriously, I still found myself living through my queerness with remnants of essentialist thought, like many people are trained to value through academia in the United States. Using terms such as ‘AFAB’ or ‘AMAB’ when referring to people I barely knew, was still more publicly, loudly and specifically tying them and their identities to their genitalia– no matter how much I claimed to have ‘decolonized’ my world view on gender. Even though I was actively deconstructing my views on gender and beginning to specifically identify the ways in gender-based oppression interlocks with other systems of oppression, true ideological transformation did not profoundly take place until I started to more critically understand how I engaged with essentialism as a concept– and more specifically binaries, in my day-to-day life. When we critically engage with the root of why our worldviews are so staunchly shaped by beliefs in oppositions, reactions and binaries– we will be more available and ready to engage with how environments of oppression become fostered. Just as European colonizing forces constructed racial hierarchies and extremes through caste-systems based on bio-essentialism to uphold the Transatlantic Slave Trade, there will always be motivations of power behind the creation of binary opposites that will repeatedly be ill-equipped to deal with the realities of our complicated existences. As the culture theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall points out in the book Representation:
Jacques Derrida has argued, there are very few neutral binary oppositions. One pole of the binary, he argues, is usually the dominant one, the one which includes the other within its field of operations. There is always a relation of power between the poles of a binary opposition (Derrida, 1972). We should really write, white/black, men/women, masculine/feminine, upper class/lower class, British/alien.
Representation, Stuart Hall, Evans & Nixon pg. 225
While I believe it is essential (all pun intended) to critically engage with these binaries, interrogate their origins, and recognize how they affect the world’s access to resources and drive political change, I believe that it is equally as important to personally interrogate how essentialism affects your thought processes on every front. Critically engage with how these binary oppositions negatively or positively affect your life and the lives of your peers. Then validate the intersecting levels of oppression or privilege you are experiencing as a result of existing in an essentialist first-world society. Only then can you step back, and begin to imagine what the divesting from the expectation of essentialist labeling would look like with more clarity. This is where I find myself at this moment in my journey in queerness, not identifying as non-binary in a sense that this is a sort-of ‘neutral’ third gender, but non-binary and transgender in the manner that recognizes the violence inherent in binary as a concept. A spectrum provides that there be two oppositions and a continuation in between, but I argue that the term non-binary may offer us a respite from colonial essentialism. A concept that was lost in cultures across many processes of colonization, it especially gives us global-majority folks living in a largely western, white and essentialist society a chance to engage with practices robbed from our daily lives and cultural inheritance. We have a beautiful opportunity to return to a clearer idea of what it must feel like to exist without restraint in our gender identity with the concept of being non-binary and trans, and I encourage everyone to really interrogate what it means for them to identify.
with love and light, A~