Understanding the intersection of gay and non-binary identities
This essay aims as a starting point to explore this topic and ignite conversation on the topic of non-binary gender. Over the past few weeks, I have been searching online on questions such as “why some non-binary people still identify as gay” but found no satisfactory answers.
As a disclaimer, I am not non-binary but simply interested in this group. I am a trans woman and am still trying to understand and learn about non-binary people. I am not attempting to explain something I never experience.
As a background, I begin to be curious about this question when someone I met during a meetup for trans people introduced themselves as genderfluid and gay. Even though I am trans, this was my first-time meeting someone who identifies as genderfluid. This person was assigned male at birth and are mainly attracted to men (these are relevant later on in this story). They described their experience with gender as some days feeling manly while other days more womanly (whatever that means).
As a trans woman, I don’t relate with this experience. I don’t even relate with the popular narrative of “feeling like a woman”. I don’t know what feeling like a certain gender feels like. I only know what it feels like to be me. I transitioned to alleviate gender dysphoria, and it just so happens that I have very little to no dysphoria the further I transitioned into what society deemed as woman.
Due to my inability to relate to the genderfluid person’s explanation of how they experience gender, I questioned them about transitioning to which they said that they have no desire to transition medically. At this point it comes across to me that this person is just a feminine gay man. I then asked them if they would ever date a trans guy (FTM) to which they said no. They later explained that they are solely attracted to penis on masculine-bodied men.
The fact that they identify as gay made me more confused as my understanding of the word gay is a man who is attracted to other men (same gender attraction) — if one is genderfluid and gay, they would have been attracted to other genderfluid or enby people.
I have only experienced this interaction with one genderfluid person. Genderfluid is considered a form of non-binary gender. I am aware that there are other variations within the non-binary umbrella and not everyone experiences the same thing as the genderfluid person I met did.
I began to do more research and interact with other non-binary people to resolve this confusion. The points I have gathered here mostly came from a private group on Facebook. I posted the question “how can someone be non-binary and still identify as gay”. The answers I got are eye-opening. I learnt a lot of nuances on how people relate to gender and sexual orientation labels.
1. Formation of self-identity
The concept of non-binary gender identity is relatively recent in the mainstream consciousness. Previously this group is known as genderqueer. Google analytics show that searches for the term genderqueer and non-binary started to increase dramatically post-2015. This pattern of increased curiosity in topics of gender is also reflected in search term such as transgender which peaked around a similar time frame. It shows that more people are curious about the concept of gender. This in contrast with the term gay which has been pretty similar in search trend since 2004.
Non-binary gender means that someone does not identify within the framework of binary gender. A lot of the narratives non-binary people use is that they are neither exclusively man nor woman.
Just because they are fairly recent, it does not mean that non-binary people did not exist in the past. They simply did not have the language to describe what they are experiencing and therefore uses approximation in language to describe themselves (I’ll explain more on this later in this essay).
Many non-binary people are socialised and raised as the gender they were assigned at birth. When they developed sexual attraction, they understand their sexual orientation in relation to their assigned gender.
Since the language available describing homosexuality is more available and mainstream, many non-binary people first developed a gay identity. Many years afterwards (when the language of non-binary identity is more available), they begin to relate more with being non-binary and started adopting that label.
All the years coming out as gay and therefore socialised as such, some people will develop a strong self-identity of being gay. Discovering that they are also non-binary which usually happens afterwards may be the reason why the prior self-identity of being gay may still carry over.
This may also be the reason why non-binary people are rarely straight. LGBT people often have more incentive and curiosity to further explore about these topics compared to cisgender straight people. There may be cishet people out there who are non-binary, but they just have not discovered the language to describe themselves more accurately yet.
2. Usage of convenient approximation in language
The nature of society is that language evolves. One word can carry different meanings to different people. Therefore, we need to agree on the definition of terms to reach an effective communication. During my informal research exploring this question, this is the biggest limitation to why the concept of non-binary gender seems to be contradictory at times.
We need to understand what gender is. What is a man? What is a woman? Different people use different definitions to these questions. I take a pragmatic approach and therefore often use operational definitions.
For instance, some people will insist that I am a man because of my chromosomes. I don’t really care about the chromosomes and molecular details of biology in my day-to-day life. Social interaction works in a way that makes us socialised and actively socialising each other based on social cues. My biology only matters when I am in my doctor’s office. The social cues I give lead people to read me as female regardless of what my biology is.
I am lucky to be able to blend in as cisgender. I give out all the social cues of what society considers stereotypically a woman. People interact with me as a woman and see me as such without having to declare my trans status nor pronouns.
We rarely change our social interaction with someone based on something non-observable and non-identifiable. This would be the reason why people with non-observable disabilities are often assumed to be able-bodied and thus people treat them as able-bodied without considerations to their special needs. The same reason we may treat a prince as a pauper if they present themselves in torn and shoddy clothes.
This snap judgment is not wrong, it is just not 100% accurate. Guessing is just a matter of probabilities. More than 99% of the human population are cisgender. Therefore, assuming someone gender to be either man or woman will work 99% of the time. It is not perfectly accurate, but it is an approximation and an effective tool society uses. This is also why I don’t quite agree on the sentiment trans activists put out that we should not assume someone’s gender and always having to declare your gender. They may be helpful to trans and non-binary people but impractical for the majority of people.
On a similar note, non-binary people may still identify as gay due to approximation and convenience. If they present stereotypically man and date and sleep with people who look like a man, it may be easier to tell people that they’re gay. Gay is an approximation of what they truly are. It might not be 100% accurate but it is an operational approximation that is good enough.
I suspect the genderfluid person I met during the meetup have been asked the intrusive questions I asked so many times. Therefore, it is more convenient for some people to just identify as being gay as more people already understand what that means. In this case, some non-binary people also situationally alter their self-identification. For instance, in trans and queer spaces they may identify as non-binary but in everyday life they’ll just describe themselves as something more known (in this case as being gay).
3. Origin of terms
We need to remember that for a long time in queer history, gender and sexual orientation are indistinguishable. It is only after the advancement of modern science that transsexuals are separated from LGB people. Further discourses and researches give birth to the concept of gender identity as being separate and independent from sexual orientation. We have known about the variants of sexual orientation for a much longer time than the variants of gender identities.
Terms like gay and lesbian were coined during a time when consciousness about gender identity was different. Traditionally and culturally (even in a lot of places in the world), being gay and trans is considered the same thing. Social changes take time and hopefully education and awareness will resolve society’s conflation between gender identity and sexual orientation.
There have been terms such as androphilia (attracted to men) and gynephilia (attracted to women). These terms are not describing the gender of the person. They only describe the gender of the people they are attracted to. However, these terms are not popular (yet) in our common language. I myself have used the term femmesexual to describe myself in the past because I am primarily attracted to feminine-presenting people regardless of gender.
Other than that, many people also use the word gay to mean ‘not straight’. Some also weaponise the term gay as a slur to uphold gendered stereotypes of what a man or woman should be. LGBT people often find these societal and cultural systems difficult to navigate. Even for someone who is gay, they may find that gendered stereotypes still permeate within gay culture and spaces.
For instance, the butch-femme dichotomy is inherently gendered within lesbian community. Sometimes, it comes across that lesbians and gays are mimicking heteronormativity. Self-expression and preferences are still heavily gendered within homosexual circles. Gays and lesbians (and trans people like me) are not exempt from the socialisation of gender binary that is systemic in language, laws and formation of worldview.
Some people who rebel against this binary system, or are gender non-conforming, or reject gender roles may identify as non-binary. If you are a man and society tells you that a man must be x, y and z, — but you are only y and z, you may feel and think that you are not a man (or not man enough). Then, you discover the term non-binary and it is more inclusive and expansive compared to the term and understanding of man that you grow up in. Therefore, you adopt that label as its definition suits you better than your assigned gender.
This example is more of a rebellion of gender norms and non-conformity to which some but not all non-binary people experienced and later discovered their non-binary identity. Some non-binary people I met have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria (aka gender incongruence) like myself and concluded that they are non-binary because they experience dysphoria from both ends of the gender spectrum. Social and medical transition are very tricky for these people.
Last notes
Someone in the Facebook group provided an analogy that cis people can experience gender dysphoria too (but not to the same clinical extent that transsexuals do). I shall use the term distress instead of dysphoria to avoid confusion here.
Cis people can experience distress of their gender when their self-identity does not match the expectations of their gender. For instance, men feeling they are not big and muscular enough. This distress is resolved by going to the gym and bulking up as a gender affirmative solution. For some people, the gendered distress can be mistaken as being trans when it is simply a rejection of gender roles.
A fascinating metaphor someone told me is that labels are like Netflix genres. For instance, the movie Titanic (which is not on Netflix I think) may be classified as history, historical fiction, drama, and romance. Does this mean that the movie is not historical fiction if it is listed under the romance genre? Of course not.
Throughout researching and writing this, I learnt that non-binary people CAN be gay (as well). These things are not mutually exclusive.
