Michelle Avenant
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Hi Phil Evans, thanks for writing such a thought-provoking response!

I read in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble this morning that “genders can be neither true nor false”. The gender binary is not the “natural” reality that cisheteropatriarchy would have us believe it is, and yet we cannot escape the very real effect it has on our lives. Gender is not real in the same way that gravity is real, but it is real in the way that social constructs — like money or language — are real.

My point with this article wasn’t to be prescriptivist about terminology, and I’m supportive of people choosing their own terms and descriptions for their relationship with gender — I’m sure there are as many of these descriptions as there are people; not just two!

For me, “non binary” as a “negative descriptor” isn’t a major semantic concern. I want a society in which people have more choices and freedom, and to me this is a positive cause, but it’s difficult to sum this idea up in one term that wouldn’t be too long or too vague for practicality, so I’m okay with “non-binary”. I guess without referring to the gender binary in the negative, it’s difficult to say what I mean when I say “freedom”. Freedom from what? Freedom from the gender binary. Hence, “non-binary”.

Perhaps I could say “gender-free”, but to be honest I don’t feel free from gender, and so this doesn’t sit right with me. “Non-binary” sounds more confrontational, and this feels appropriate because I have to confront the gender binary every day of my life.

While I understand your reasoning for choosing the term “genderfluid”, it doesn’t feel like the right term for me because I don’t feel that my gender is fluid or changing; I simple don’t want to gender myself myself at all.

“Agender” is probably an accurate way to describe myself, but I’m quite fond of the political undertone that “non-binary” seems to carry.

When I think of negative language and describing myself as “non-binary”, I think of a child in a crowd shouting “the emperor has no clothes!”

And if a cis person identifies as non-binary, then are they cis? Surely not. And if all the purportedly-cis people in the world suddenly piped up and said they were non-binary, surely this would mean the end of cisnormativity, and the gender binary myth, and wouldn’t this be a good thing?

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    Michelle Avenant

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    MSc Gender, Media and Culture student at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Writes about queer stuff.