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I’m neither man nor woman, but I must pretend
For those who feel the gender binary of male or female doesn’t reflect who they really are, then you should be reassured by the number of people coming out to the media as non-binary.
This article by Yves Rees in the Sydney Morning Herald Sunday life is worth a read.
The bathroom dilemma is one of countless moments each day when non-binary people like me come into conflict with a binary world. No matter where we turn, the binary is near impossible to avoid. Clothing stores are divided into menswear and womenswear. MCs welcome “ladies and gentlemen”. When I sign up for the local Parkrun, I must declare myself man or woman. There is no third option. If I contract COVID-19, I’ll be reported as a “woman in her 30s”.
Out in the world, non-binary people are erased, wiped off the domain of the possible. We know ourselves to be neither men nor women, but the world refuses to acknowledge that people like us can even exist. Our self-knowledge is dismissed. Through the architecture of everyday life, we are made inconceivable. There’s literally no space for us.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. We could acknowledge that gender is more varied than a crude binary. Alok Vaid-Menon, author of Beyond the Gender Binary, explains that “the real crisis is not that gender non-conforming people exist, it’s that we’ve been taught to believe in only two genders in the first place”. If the true crisis is the false belief in binary gender, the solution is to expand our imagination of what gender can be. In truth, people who are not men and women are not deluded or sick or dangerous; we’re part of the glorious variation of humanity.
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