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Fragmentation of the Gender Binary

Within the space of two weeks in 2014, the New York Times published several pieces on multiple genders. One was on the fifty-some choices of gender identity for Facebook users (Ball 2014; Herbenick and Baldwin 2014). The conclusion was that the gender binary was breaking up and that was a good thing. Actually, the idea of using multiple genders to fragment the binary is not new. In 1995, Sandra Bem, a long-time proponent of abolishing gender, proposed that "rather than trying to dismantle the two-and-only-twoness of gender polarization and compulsory heterosexuality by eliminating gender categories, we instead dismantle that two-and-only-twoness by exploding or proliferating gender categories" (1995: 330; italics in original).

The effect is not only to multiply possibilities and recognition of multiple sexes, sexualities, and genders, but to destroy the concept of oppositeness and its implicit designations of normality and deviance.

In addition to multiple gendering, there are other current manifestations of the fragmentation of the gender binary. Other ways the gender binary is being broken up that I will discuss in this chapter are: multi-gender bathrooms, intersex identities and intersex athletes, transgender men (female-to-male) who continue to menstruate and who become pregnant and give birth, non-gendered pronouns and language, and doing research without the binary. I will end with the pros and cons of fragmenting the binary.

Multiple genders

Some of the variant gender identities are bi-gender, agender, gender fluid, questioning, queer, trans man, trans woman, intersex, neutrois, two-spirit, and variations of each. Australia's High Court has allowed someone to register their gender officially as "nonspecific" (Baird 2014). India's Supreme Court recognized transgender as a third gender (Varma and Najar 2014). Germany allows parents of intersexed babies to register them as "indeterminate" (Nandi 2013). "Queer," once a radical identity, has almost become the new normal (Wortham 2016). These are twenty-first-century iterations of going beyond the binary, the strict division of people into two and only two sexes and genders.

The most radical among the gender variations is non-binary, trying to live entirely outside the gender structure. A survey of 27,715 transgender people in the United States reported that non-binary people may account for 25-35 percent of the transgender population; they reside predominantly in metropolitan areas (James et al. 2016). Estimates of the number of people in the general population of the United States and the United Kingdom who define themselves as non-binary fluctuate with the definition of non-binary (Richards et al. 2017).

A non-binary Wiki was created in 2017 with 410 content pages and 1,224 registered users. It has a blog for an annual survey of "humans worldwide whose genders or lack thereof are not fully described by the gender binary." The 2019 gender census had 11,242 responses (Lodge 2019). The most popular answers to the question, "Which of the following best describe(s) in English how you think of yourself?", broke down to: non-binary - 66.6%, queer - 43.0%, trans -36.6%, enby - 31.7%, transgender - 30.4%. (Choices were multiple.) The choices of titles were: no title at all - 33.0%, Mx - 31.3%, Mr - 8.7%, non-gendered prof./acad. - 5.5%, Ms - 4.7%. The choices of pronouns were: singular they/them/their/theirs/themself - 79.5%, he/him/his/himself - 30.8%, she/her/hers/herself - 29.0%, none/avoid pronouns - 10.3%, xe/xem/xyr/xyrs/xemself - 7.2%. It's clear from this survey that there isn't a consensus among those who identify as non-binary for designation, titles, or pronouns with the somewhat contradictory choices of gendered titles and pronouns.

Helena Darwin (2017) found that on the Reddit genderqueer subgroup there were those who identified as "agender, aliagender, androgynous, bi-gender, demigirl/demiguy, genderfluid, genderflux, genderfuck, gender variant, intergender, neutrois, poly-gender, and pangender" (315). Other variations are in the presentation of self - "doing non-binary." In an interview study of 47 non-binary people, Darwin (2020) found much blurring between non-binary and transgender. Darwin concludes that "the non-binary identity category functions as an umbrella for a host of gender identities" (2017: 331). Ironically, if non-binary is thought of as another category of gender, it remains in the gender regime (Barbee and Schrock 2019: 576).

Another variation is people who are asexual and also agender. The two are not automatically linked; asexuality is described as non-chosen, agender as a deliberately adopted identity (Cuthbert 2019). The rationale, according to 12 out of the 21 interviewees in this study, is that sexuality needs opposite genders, and since they were asexual it made sense to them to be agender. It was also a way to stop being identified as a sexual target. The overlap between asexuality and agender is a minority position. In the 2016 Asexual Community Census, 26 percent of asexual respondents (2,420 out of 9,294) identified as non-binary, agender, genderqueer or similar options (Bauer et al. 2018).

On surveys, people tend not to identify as transgender when it is one of several categories. Increasingly, a two-step technique is used: Respondents are asked to identify their sex attribution at birth and their current gender identity (Saperstein and Westbrook 2021). Less used but providing accurate data are to place oneself on a gradient of woman to man with non-binary at the center, and also to identify one's self-presentation and perception by others on a gradient ranging from feminine to masculine.

A recent study of 17 non-binary interviewees found that all reported emotional exhaustion in the battle for acceptance as non-gendered (Barbee and Schrock 2019). Most interviewees were between 18 and 23 years old, three were 29-35 and one was 63. Eleven were white, three identified as Latinx, two as South Asian, and one as "mixed." The interviewers were themselves non-binary. Presenting as non-gendered involved clothing, hair (facial and head), voice pitch and manner of talking, pronoun usage, name change, and choice of romantic partner.

Appearance then becomes activism. When challenged or mis-gendered, non-binary respondents have to explain that genders are constructed and there are more than two, thus constantly educating those they are interacting with. More onerous is the need for vigilance in the face of hostility and potential violence from strangers since gender-mixed appearances often incur open antagonism. As one non-binary respondent said:

People don't know what to make of me when they see me, because they feel my features contradict one another. They see no room for the curve of my hips to coexist with my facial hair; they desperately want me to be someone they can easily categorise. My existence causes people to question everything they have been taught about gender, which in turn inspires them to question what they know about themselves, and that scares them. Strangers are often desperate to figure out what genitalia I have . . . (Ford 2015)

The emotional benefits were feelings of "authenticity and confidence, pride in problematizing the binary, and liberation from the strictures of binarily gendered clothing and behavioral expectations" (Barbee and Schrock 2019: 589).

The description of the struggles of those who don't want to be identified as a man or a woman suggests that it takes all their psychic strength to live in an often hostile binary world (Bergner 2019). It would be hard to negotiate the psychological and interpersonal obstacles and mount a battle with gendered laws and policies at the same time. As a result, non-binary people's potential structural challenge to the binary system disappears.

In many ways, the existence of non-binary and queer identities is in itself revolutionary (Nicholas and Clark 2020). However, the individuality of the adoption of an alternate gender forecloses the possibility of a non-binary movement. Gender goes back to being a personal identity, even though many of the battles have to be fought with bureaucracies and legal policies.

Gender-neutral bathrooms

The "bathroom wars" are a clear case of how multiple gendering clashes with state policies of gender. The demand for gender-neutral bathrooms used to come from feminist women tired of waiting in long lines while men's rooms were empty. It was an integral part of the fight for gender equality (Molotch 1988). The current demand for gender-neutral bathrooms is coming from people who are gender-variant (Brown 2005; Weiner 2015). In the United States, the demands for gender-neutral bathrooms are still seen as so radical as to continue to warrant legal battles (Liptak 2016; Suk Gersen 2016). In the 2015 US Transgender Survey, nearly 60 percent of respondents reported being too afraid to use public restrooms out of fear of a confrontation and 12 percent reported being verbally harassed while accessing a bathroom in the past year (James et al. 2016).

Gender-variant users of multiple-use bathrooms visibly confront the binary gender social order. They violate what is to many people the psychological and biological immutability of their own sex and...