What does it mean for me to be nonbinary?

I recently read Kadji Amin’s article “We Are All Nonbinary: A History of Accidents,” published in Representations in 2022. I liked many parts of it. I liked that it brought Judith Butler into conversation with contemporary trans identity, which is something I am also interested in doing in my writing. I enjoyed in particular the questioning of normative oppositional categories that define sexuality and gender through exclusion. Amin pays strong attention to the reality that identity labels often do not constitute truths about lived experiences with regards to what they describe; he references Jane Ward’s work in this vein. I think this is true, and I have engaged the young people I work with in this type of thinking in workshop settings: for example, an “agree/disagree line” activity where participants debate statements like “There should be a label for every identity,” or “Finding the right words for my identity is my goal to feel comfortable with myself.”

Indeed, I am interested in similar topics to Amin, such as on the inscription of identity to an inside upon which the body is made to passively either align or not align (language of one’s gender identity “matching” one’s sex assigned at birth) as opposed to actively materializing through the very inscription of gender (what I think of as “materialism,” though I assume Amin is using the term differently in his monograph). Amin doesn’t use Bodies that Matter here, which was disappointing, simply because that’s the Butler text I think best explicates this very paradox.

Amin argues persuasively that the retroactive adoption of terms like “heterosexual,” “cisgender,” and even ‘binary’ reinscribe an idealized and normalized opposite, a binary terrain upon which sexuality and ‘gender identity’ come to be reincorporated into the self. This has led to, according to him, “the history of the burial of gender deeper and deeper within the private recesses of the self, where it increasingly disavows any relation to the social.” “Today,” he continues, “‘gender identity’ references a core selfhood that requires no expression, no embodiment, and no commonality—in the case of some of the microidentities spreading on the internet—with genders as they are lived by others in the world” (116).

Let me pause here to question a bit what Amin means by “no embodiment.” On the one hand, I do see what he means about nonbinary people not needing to share an essential commonality besides their self-articulation as nonbinary. On the other, I do not agree with the implicit mechanism of “embodiment” present in Amin’s logic here. Embodiment is the very materialization of subjecthood into and through the body, right? And all nonbinary people have bodies. Therein, nonbinary people embody themselves in space. The “matter” of bodies, as is the concern of Butler’s Bodies that Matter, is always-already itself being demarcated and excluded; in a contemporary Western discursive context, this demarcation happens along the axis of “bodily sex” and must be reiteratively expressed through what we call gender (though, as Butler says, the differentiation of “gender” and “sex” is already the effect of this process, so really this is all just too many words for the same mechanism: of gender-sexing the body). So, nonbinary people enact and articulate themselves in ways illegible to the gender-sex system.

(One may respond: but what do nonbinary people embody themselves in reference to, as opposed to for instance a man embodying or not embodying manhood? To which I would reply: Is there a unitary mechanism that joins all manhood into a coherence of embodiment? If the answer is yes, I would point out that such a view is gender essentialism [albeit not necessarily the same particular essentialism of TERF and anti-trans politics, which ground a man’s embodiment in a contradictory yet compulsive repertoire or genital shape, muscle proportions, facial hair, theoretically but rarely practically chromosomes, etc.]. )

I believe trans people can relate and find solidarity in articulating and enacting lives that reveal—sometimes willfully, sometimes as an effect—the narrow and violent demarcation of life’s complexity into the binary sex-gender system. There is no better or worse, no more or less radical way for a trans person to do that. Notably, the entire framework of “trans” is specific to contemporary Western contexts where a binarized sex-gender system dominates, and therein through its particular demarcation relies on some bodies being illegible. The Western sex-gender system is not the only nor the standard system in our world. Therein, “trans” and “nonbinary” are localized and not innocent or inherently applicable across geographies, history, and racial/colonial axes. Indeed, Amin does great work teasing out these limits in his article.

So, overall, despite how much I enjoyed Amin’s extension of Butler to challenge re-binarizing tendencies of “gender identity,” including the “binary/nonbinary” split, I think a major obstacle for me was how Amin thinks about nonbinary trans lives. Because of this divergence, I found myself disagreeing with some of his provocations of how we go beyond “gender identity.”

Here are two more passages from Amin, both on page 115, that gave me pause:

"[N]on-binary identity costs very little. All that is required to be nonbinary is to identify as such, and nobody will be attacked, imprisoned, thrown out of their home, or discriminated against merely for identifying as nonbinary….Like language, gender categories— including trans, cis, nonbinary, and binary—are social and interpersonal, not individual; this is what makes them meaningful in the first place. If they were not, trans and nonbinary people would not feel the need to announce our genders to the world any more than we feel the need to announce our favorite colors. What is socially relevant is transition—a shift in social gender categories, whatever they may be—not identification—a personal, felt, and thereby highly phantasmic and labile relation to these categories.
....

"While gender politics are socially relevant, it is only the neoliberal universalization of identity as the basis of all politics that has made it appear necessary to announce one’s gender politics as an identity—nonbinary— rather than simply enacting them. What is therefore necessary is to repair the historical wound opened by the cis/trans binary by creating one or more socially legible gender categories—based on presentation and behavior, not self-identification alone—for those who want to transition from men or women to something else, something with positive social content rather than something devoid of it, as nonbinary currently is.”

I do not think everything in these passages is wrong and harmful. I simply have some real questions that I don’t think this article answers.

What does it mean to simply identify as opposed to transition? Does the line come at medical transition—hormone therapy, gender affirming surgery? What if one legally transitions without those medical procedures (difficult due to the discriminatory laws that gate-keep such possibility)? How about interpersonal social transition, such as “coming out” in the workplace or family, and changing name and/or pronouns? Could one count appearance change outside expected binaristic gender norms—haircuts, clothing, tucking, binding—as transition? 

Who is to say at which moment transition is in motion and when it has stopped? What if someone cannot transition due to monetary or familial reasons, but feels constant dysphoria and posts about it anonymously on r/egg_irl? Is a stealth trans man always in a state of transition, or is that state relegated to when grandma calls and misgenders him? What defines “individual” identification as opposed to transition, besides simply speaking the words “I am nonbinary” and doing no more—and, indeed, what are the parameters of “no more?”

I have to admit that I write here out of self interest. I am a nonbinary trans person; I have memories into early childhood “feeling” this way. What is that “feeling?” I don’t know. It was a sense of dissonance in relation to gendered language and impulsive gendered demands. I don’t think it’s an ontological or genetic “trans” feeling. (I am experimenting with complicating the language of “essence,” so I’m choosing to avoid “essential” here *wink*). I had it before I had language around gender—though I did get access to that language early, in the means Amin describes, through the internet. I had the language of nonbinary at the same time I found language of categories considered “older” like lesbian and bisexual and genderqueer and trans man, as well as alongside “neo,” niche, and arguably datable labels like demiboy, agender, genderfuck. I grew up in the midst of the Genderbread Person moment (as well as the Attraction Layer Cake, which got integrated into the updated Gender Unicorn), so we on Tumblr were sliding ourselves along axes of feeling to determine our daily sense of gender, sex, presentation, attraction, and such.  

(I find this era extremely liberating and utopian to think back on, which may be what finds me opposed to Amin’s conclusions; such language was not re-binaristic but self-aware of its imperfections and allowed a level of freedom and experimentation in self-affirmation outside dominant vocabularies. Indeed, I think there is a difference between the sexologists creating language around “homosexuality” and “transgender” and Tumblr teenagers theorizing about “demiboy” or romantic vs. sexual vs. platonic attraction. I’m not saying they are opposed—much of the 2010s label discourse is built upon and expands on the dark foundations of gender/sexuality vocabulary. I am saying that the actions taking place in reorganizing language for one’s embodiment are different.)

I am not a man and I am not a woman. I do not think of my body as a woman’s body or a man’s body. I have changed my body medically in some ways and not others, and I don’t like thinking about those changes as reflecting on a reality of what gender I am. I do not ascribe to seeing some bodily forms and not others as inherently one sex/gender or another. I think structures of knowledge compulsively force us to interpret them as such—but I refuse that. It is not simply reducible to a political project, a belief that seeing the body in such a way is “radical” (I simply think it is true and right, and therein part of a liberatory human project, not instrumentally but in its grounds). 

For me, it is an existential matter. I was born into this body, whatever it is. I have been given the gift of this one life, by chance or by a divine force I don’t believe in or by a grand simulation or by something else. I don’t believe the universe cares about me or has a plan for me; I am not a determinist and I am not a teleologist and I am not spiritual. I think I will one day die and this will all go away. I believe all other human beings have the same fundamental experience of life—call it ego, consciousness, embodiment, existence—that I do, albeit determined, shaped, and subjectivized (what Butler calls “materialized”) through structures of power and circumstance and experience. I think we all relate to the world and inhabit it. And I don’t believe particularized sex/gender structures are fundamental to existence. I only have this life, this opportunity to be and express and present myself. I am forced to do that inside the parameters of subjectification in the ways I have been incorporated by it and not in the ways I am “constitutive[ly] outside” of it—and I do not get to choose which are which. So, I live a gender non-conforming life in the ways that I do—they/them pronouns, varied presentation through hair and clothing, queer and trans community, and others—because I cannot imagine an alternative way to be.

Therein, I think of nonbinary as an adjective more than a noun. When I say “I am nonbinary,” I would rather think of it as a description of my positionality in relation to binary gender labels rather than a “community” to which I belong (which I think rather as the trans community). I have also used the term “gender fluid,” again as a descriptor more than an “identity,” as it denotes my movement through different gender “presentations” in relatively short spans of time. 

I don’t know why I present how I do. I don’t know if I choose it or not. And perhaps I have been “nurtured” into the incorporable neoliberal Western Identity Machine, as Amin aptly describes it. 

[EDIT: As if by fate, I plucked off my bookshelf today Marquis Bey’s Cistem Failure and found the exact articulation of nonbinary experience in their words, calling it a “politicized gender irreverence.” Bey writes through Black feminist and trans epistemologies in a beautiful and generous way.

“Nonbinariness, then, indexed in they/them pronouns (for now), is what [Emi] Koyama explains as not identify[ing] with any particular gender, but, Koyama is keen to make clear, nonbinariness does not so strongly identify with the state of having no gender to claim that as an identity either. Nonbinariness is the rejection of gender as an organizing apparatus for one’s subjectivity. It is the refusal to be required to show up in the world on gendered grounds in order to show up at all. Nonbinariness is not itself a gender identity. Do not bring that mess to me, to us. It does not want your cookies, your pamphlets, or anything else you’re selling, gendered world; it does not wish to hear your ‘Good’ Word. It is too preoccupied with living in the world that this world cannot yet bear, living abolished (un)gendered life here and now, to your chagrin” (13).

Check out their book if you can.]

Let me restate: I agree with Amin’s reading of Butler, his indictment of “heterosexual” and “cisgender” as indicative of Western neoliberal need to “manage categorical instability,” and his general indictment of how identity formations “kick the bucket further down the road” in terms of both unanswered tensions in gender/sexual theory and political liberation. I just question—genuinely and reciprocally, not rhetorically— 1) the premise that nonbinary as a mode of trans embodiment is particularly empty, noncomprehensive, and “the fruit of” Western Cartesian thinking that “gender is psychic rather than social” (117), and 2) what a politics of transition may look like in practice, where transition is itself a variegated, highly policed, and constrained in relation to hegemonic sex/gender categories just as much as “nonbinary.” I appreciate the work Amin’s article had me do in my reflections, and so thank you to him for his work, even if we disagree at points. I look forward to his book Trans Materialism very much.

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In reflecting on what I consider to be both the superstructural factors that precipitate my ability to articulate myself as nonbinary, as well as what I think nonbinary has to offer as a theoretical mode in trans studies, I found myself returning to an old favorite song. 

“Eagle Scout” is a song off the album Several Other Friends by Eugene-based musical act Pegasissy. (I have to admit I never actually looked up the artist behind Pegasissy, Russell Melia, until writing this blog post, and therefore never knew that he is himself trans). This album was released on Bandcamp and nowhere else, so it made the rounds among my friends on CDs and zip-file playlists, back before music streaming’s ubiquity made that even less thinkable.

Anyway, here’s a link to the song, and here are some lyrics:

I'm from a generation raised on irony, 

or at least on thrift store clothes, 

so disjointedness should feel like Christmas, 

the mismatched and wry should feel like home.

As a kid, I listened to those lyrics over and over. Sure, the meaning of the line is obvious; the link between “irony” and “thrift store clothes” is immediately identified as “disjointedness,” “mismatched,” and “wry.” In the song, Pegasissy is fucking a bunch of disjointed and ironized stereotypes of boring suburban mediocre casual gay hookups: the eagle scout, the comics nerd, the metal head. I related to that part, sure. But the confluence of images began to overlap in my head: the quasi-anonymized queer sex; the thrift store outfit and its imperfectly fitting, pre-owned, quasi-anonymous style; the ironic and edgy “ennui.” But also, the lo-fi electric guitar, drum machine, and trumpet my friends and I would imitate in our own shitty Garageband recordings; the downloaded .mp3 from Bandcamp mixed into individualized playlists and distributed among our queer/trans milieu in Rockland. I even related it to the collages I would make back then, mixing old magazine clippings into affirming and expressive collections of nothing-in-particular. My carefully curated “aesthetic” Tumblr pages, for which I would write short stories and my penpal would write songs. Collecting unique old and rare books from used book stores. Dyeing my hair.

Perhaps this was just me leaning into the condition of my maturation in an age of neoliberal acceleration. NatGeo collages and used books are the natural conclusion of divestment from and vintage-ization of public and accessible art; the void of sociality of suburban life is primed for ambivalent and messy poly-adjacent hookup culture; deindustrialization and cheapening of mass consumer commodities makes thrift store clothes quite appealing; and, of course, it was the technological reorganization of human productions into decontextualized data points—the internet and social media—that brought me Pegasissy via a playlist from my first Tumblr girlfriend. Yes, yes. But perhaps my way of making sense of all of that—of embodying it—was to lean into and curate my own sense of aesthetic euphoria from a limited set of options: a hypertextual approach to analog relations. And maybe nonbinary comes from a similar set of social conditions, as well as a similar response of mine to/within those conditions. All while “my heart isn’t in this shit, yeah, I want a little something more.”