On Non-Binary Identification
“You and I are also fictions, and we live in this collective dream.” — Paul Preciado, Pornotopia
The first result of my search for the origin of the term “non-binary” as a mode of gender identification was an article published by Healthline. Following the reminder that non-binary-ness has existed “for as long as civilization has,” Healthline informs the reader that “nonbinary gender has been recorded as far back as 400 B.C. to 200 A.D.” in the form of “Hijras — people in India who identified as beyond male or female.” Cursory research reveals that hijras were criminalized by British colonial forces before recently receiving legal recognition as a “third gender” that’s self-selected by individuals typically assigned male at birth. This certainly sounds like non-binary-ness, at least to some degree — neither male nor female, inhabiting a third space external to the gender binary. Yet, the discursive trick of liberalism and its desire to homogenize queer identities and experiences under an umbrella like “LGBT+” lies in this conflation of hijra and non-binary identity. Healthline artificially entangles the two, tying hijra experience to what we now understand to be non-binary gender identity. The linguistic difference between the terms offers the first disruption of that connection, demonstrating at least one difference between the two terms. Perhaps more importantly, hijras are typically assigned male at birth and often identify as “beyond” male and female gender, traits not captured by “non-binary” gender. The existence of myriad terms across languages to describe hijra or non-binary people demonstrates the inability of one term to be cleanly transplanted to another context.
This reveals the larger anachronistic truth underpinning non-binary gender. Like non-binary-ness can’t accurately describe the modes of life embodied by hijras in 400 B.C., it also delimits a mode of embodying gender contrary to what hijras might experience today. Non-binary gender acts as an incorporation machine that seeks to assimilate modes of gender embodiment that lie outside of a male/female binary to itself, establishing itself as a third gendered category that does less to subvert the binary than reinforce it. To establish itself as natural and substantive, non-binary gender must seek to incorporate all forms of gender non-conformity; otherwise, non-binary-ness becomes gender’s Wizard of Oz — the curtain is pulled back, revealing a fantastical lack of substance. I argue that this fate also belongs to gender within the male/female binary, and that, by pulling the curtain back, we might discover that gender identity is an empty anachronism that establishes itself as natural while lacking meaningful substance.
The recognition of novel forms of gender embodiment prompts the development of a new grammar with which to describe gender. As Paul Preciado writes in Can the Monster Speak, “You can no longer continue to assert the universality of sex and gender difference and the immutability of heterosexual and homosexual identities in a society where it is legal to change gender or to identify as gender non-binary.” In a Foucauldian sense, what prompts the progressive expansion of gender is not an interpersonal revolution that transforms gender but the necessary institutional creation of and recognition of these roles as named by Preciado. The term hijra was weaponized as a discursive tool of British colonialism so that its empire could more effectively criminalize non-normative modes of gender embodiment; similarly, terms like non-binary are created by medical and political institutions to allow the incorporation of more modes of being into liberalism’s grasp like California’s non-binary option for state identification documents. New terms like non-binary are part of a larger grammar that mutates to categorize and include modes of gender embodiment where, as Preciado writes in Testo Junkie, gender’s grammar is part of “a superimposition of strata in which different techniques of producing and managing life are interlacing and overlapping,” producing the conditions that enable occurrences like transgender people getting clocked before they self-identify as trans, perhaps because they’re already performing that grammar of trans-ness.
Yet, this fluid grammar isn’t as revolutionary as it might initially appear. The weaponization of hijra identity serves as a cautionary tale, revealing that the mutation of gender’s grammar remains wedded to gender essentialism grounded in a male/female binary. Non-binary finds its place outside the binary but within this binary schema, taking the outside position and acting as the third category that contains hijra identity. In this way, non-binary as a third category provides the backing for the conceptual coherence of binary gender; we can understand what it means to identify with gender inside the binary because we enjoy the stability of non-binary-ness as a repository for everything else. This allows the experience of a hijra in 400 B.C. to become equivalent to that of a white, middle-class, non-binary person in the United States in 2022, homogenizing all nonconforming gender identity under the label “non-binary.”
This brings us, first, to the conclusion that there is no constitutive element of non-binary identity. Non-binary-ness becomes equivalent to everything that doesn’t sit neatly within a male/female binary, lacking substance itself. This further elucidates why non-binary must exist as a creatively expansive third category rather than a discrete, self-contained set of characteristics. For this third category to gain substance, it must shift and mutate to include different modes of embodiment over time. As such, the growth of non-binary identification in recent years isn’t a natural phenomenon but one artificially induced as a metastasizing of non-binary-ness that makes possible gender’s incorporatory regime in the face of growing gender nonconformity. Second, this demonstrates the disappointing nature of a politics grounded in such nonconformity. Preciado writes in Testo Junkie regarding “queerness” that “it has lost a large part of its subversive energy and can no longer […] describe the proliferation of strategies of resistance to categories of gender.” Acting as another victim of liberalism’s discursive commodification, non-binary gender’s expansion equates it to nonconformity; non-binary-ness loses its status as a revolutionary and disruptive mode of gender embodiment, becoming expected, anticipated, and committed to a regime of binary gender. As a repository for everything not singularly masculine or feminine, it delimits what gender is legitimate — and what nonconformity conforms just enough to be legitimate — expanding the violence of binary gender to account for even that which attempts to exist outside this space of identification.
Meaningfully, non-binary gender does not exist; it is not a real set of characteristics, and there’s nothing constitutive to, unchanging about, or liberatory contained within non-binary identity on a collective scale. But, just as the slippage between hijra embodiment and modern non-binary identity denotes the lack of substance present in non-binary-ness, does that same slippage not exist in what “woman” denoted two thousand years ago versus today? In what “man” represents as a constant term for a set of characteristics that have shifted over time? What non-binary reveals is that the embodied distance between a hijra and me, between Don Quixote and Freud, or between Lady Macbeth and bell hooks is not representative of the reconstitution of femininity and masculinity but evidence of their internal fragility. There is nothing intrinsic to masculinity or constitutive to femininity; instead, these discursive terms act as signifiers with no signified, referencing some immutable, eternal truth about gender that doesn’t exist. Gender, thus, describes a regime whose origins are elusive but whose nature is fundamentally non-existent. Preciado writes in Testo Junkie that “There is no ontological difference between these embodiments of gender and mine. All of them are performative products to which different frames of cultural intelligibility confer various degrees of legitimacy.” Understanding non-binary identity as gender metastasizing, then, is crucial — gender is a decaying identarian regime, and yet it expands its reach through the unnatural growth of all forms of gender embodiment, not just non-binary identity.
Amidst all this gender trouble, “gender identity disorder” was replaced by “gender dysphoria” in 2013’s DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association’s widely-accepted standardized set of mental disorders. The APA describes this change as an attempt to focus “the diagnosis on the gender identity-related distress that some transgender people experience […] rather than on transgender individuals or identities themselves.” Far from distancing this pathology from transgender individuals, this instead engenders the immediate question of why gender dysphoria remains an exclusively transgender experience. The liberal view of gender as a social construct neatly answers this question, as there exist natural notions of masculinity and femininity that gender imitates in different forms, and dysphoria is the consequence of rejecting those truths. But this requires gender to retain a true and natural referent, and, if gender is a signifier without such a referent, then why doesn’t everyone experience these feelings? We might argue alongside Judith Butler that everyone does, but the APA hasn’t gotten it wrong in stating that transgender individuals are the most likely to seek treatment for dysphoria and the only ones to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria. This distinction allows gender dysphoria to take on the form of pathology by limiting it to a treatable, resolvable condition rather than recognizing it as a fundamental condition of being a speaking subject made recognizable through the epistemology of gender.
Whether being assigned a gender at birth or inhabiting the social role of gender that’s imposed as natural, the recognition of oneself through the paradigm of gender offers comfort for many. Just as trans-ness is uncomfortable, dysphoric, and pathological, the pathological nature of cisgender masculinity and femininity is naturalized and obscured by the rhetoric of nature and biology. Couched in the language of objectivity, gender lacks “ontological density” but maintains itself because “there is no other way of being a body” (Preciado). Past the personal comfortability of gender, this binary regime intersects with other modes of control, allowing structures of domination to operationalize themselves in instances like the masculinization of Black women that engenders and sustains anti-Blackness. Gender is often on the side of anti-Blackness, capitalism, etc., providing it staying power at the cost of individual lives. Even so, gender’s predictability is comfortable because the alternative is unknowable, monstrous. We buy into gender, performing its scripts for the sake of our sanity. When we can’t do it anymore, the American Psychiatric Association has determined that we might be able to resolve this frustrating condition anyways. And when our dissatisfaction exceeds both the comfortable borders of binary gender and pathology, non-binary gender offers us the option to escape, the option to travel to a destination outside of those borders, a third mode of gender embodiment with limitless possibilities, so long as we submit to its delimited, constrained, and pathological nature. It’s difficult to leave these comfortable gendered subject positions, and it’s understandable why one might not want to escape from this essentialist utopia, especially when the condition of becoming ‘free’ is becoming ill, becoming a pathology, becoming non-binary, all of which is to say: becoming gendered once more. Hoping to find a way out of gender’s strict limitations grants power to a discursive ebb and flow that confers truth upon terms like non-binary as “an umbrella term, encompassing many gender identities that don’t fit into the male-female binary” (Healthline), and the grammar that heralds the arrival of non-binary identification is one of conformity.
And yet, might we imagine a way out of gender normativity and its insidious agent, non-binary-ness? For Preciado, the “unease you feel” at these words, the “urgent desire to explain away what I am saying” is representative of our desire to maintain the system of binary gender that seems to work so well. Because of this, “The crisis is vital; it is constructive” (Preciado). Emily McAvan, reading queer theory in conversation with the notion of monstrosity, describes the monster as a figure that “challenges ideas of fixity” in favor of a semiotically constructed sexuality and gender identity. She references Can the Monster Speak’s notion of the monster as “one who lives in transition,” proposing a subjectivity defined not by its pathologization but its ever-transitional nature. Body modification, gender nonconformity, countersexuality (to borrow Preciado’s terminology), and the personal construction of the self are modes of being that we already experience, and weaponizing them toward a deconstruction of binary gender offers a way out of normativity. It is true, again, that we run into the fundamental problem of discursive revolutions — after all, what happens when “monstrosity” is listed below gender dysphoria in the DSM-6? Even still, the figure of the monster provides a subject position without borders, without characteristics, and without relationship to binary gender to be inhabited by those who truly wish to escape gender, enabling us to exceed even the American Psychiatric Association’s assimilatory power. Non-binary-ness is the precise opposite of monstrosity — gender, and one that reveals the fantastical nature of masculinity and femininity along with its own lack of substance. To quote Preciado one final time, perhaps embracing monstrosity as a hermeneutic of transition might allow us to “see beauty beyond gender” as we continue “running to escape the serfdom of the binary system of sexual difference.” It is only in the transition away from gender normativity and its incorporatory regime that we might seek an authentic escape, perhaps finding that we’ve been monsters all along.
Works Cited
Abrams, Mere, and Siam Ferguson. “Understanding What It Means to Be Nonbinary.” Healthline, 3 Feb. 2022, https://www.healthline.com/health/transgender/nonbinary
Drescher, Jack. “Gender Dysphoria Diagnosis.” American Psychiatric Association, https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/cultural-competency/education/transgender-and-gender-nonconforming-patients/gender-dysphoria-diagnosis#:~:text=With%20the%20publication%20of%20DSM%E2%80%935%20in%202013%2C%20%E2%80%9Cgender,%2C%20medical%2C%20and%20surgical%20treatments)
McAvan, Emily. “Frankenstein Redux: Posthuman monsters in Jeannette Winterson’s Frankisstein.” M/C Journal, 24(5), 2021, https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2843
Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, New York, 2013.
— . Countersexual Manifesto, Columbia University Press, New York, 2018.
— . Can the Monster Speak? , Fitzcarraldo Editions, United Kingdom, 2020.
