Nonbinarism as Linguistic Activism
Tags: Nonbinary, Linguistics, Queer, Pronouns, Gender

Nonbinarism as Linguistic Activism

illustration by Ash Fisher-Tannenbaum

In the last few years, much to my delight, I’ve developed the magical power to grow facial hair. For a long time I couldn’t, and for various reasons most of my friends can’t. So it feels like a secret, exclusive skill. A cool trick my body can do.

Different people’s bodies have different abilities. Lots are superficial, like facial hair or the flexibility of being double jointed. Some are much more substantive, like being nearsighted or having the ability to give birth.

People have different needs and wants based on their body and its powers. You wouldn’t give beard-trimmers to someone who can’t grow a beard. But you also wouldn’t give beard-trimmers to someone with a beard who didn’t want to shave. Some people with breasts use bras, some people without breasts use bras, and many people with breasts don’t use bras. The size of your breasts, comfort, preference, and identity all play a role here.

Conversations about the blurriness between the two genders seem to elicit a sense of dystopian fear in some people: What happens if we forced everyone to take birth control pills? What if we forced everyone to pee in urinals? In actuality, no one wants that.

When we talk about “the two genders,” we utilize a powerful linguistic tool: binaries.

Binaries are one of the cornerstones of communicative language. We can only recognize “groups” in comparison to “individuals.” “Heat” only makes sense in the context of a world that also has “cold.” But all binary labels are relative. Seventy degrees is “hot” in the first summer days of New England, but would be a “cool” respite from the near one hundred degree days of Thailand during the same time of year. And even though we use the words “hot” and “cold” to comment on our comfort in a space, temperature is not the only defining quality of climate. Ninety humid degrees in the tropics actually dehydrates our bodies faster than one hundred dry degrees in the desert. But if I say “the desert is hotter than the beach today,” you might fairly assume that it would be more comfortable to exercise on the beach than in the desert. But you’d be wrong, tricked by my words.

While language gives us a way to communicate complex ideas, such as our comfort in a climate, it can also be limiting; once we have a word for something, it’s hard to resist seeing it as fixed and definite. Even though all binaries describe relatives, if I told you to picture a hot place, even without comparing it to a cold or less hot place, you’d probably be able to conjure an image (for me, it’s a desert — with a tumbleweed). Language trips us up when we forget that all words are context specific, and meaning does not exist on high in a vacuum.

There are contexts in which it can be useful to observe that some people have vaginas and others have penises (though it matters far less frequently than our culture brings it up). The problem is, culturally, when we say someone has a vagina, we often make many other assumptions: they can have children, periods, minimal body and facial hair, etc. We have been taught that if you have one of these traits, you should have all of them. I can grow facial hair, and so I am part of the overarching category “man,” and should have all the things that come with it (penis, deep voice, aggression, etc.). When we use the words “man” and “woman,” we are not just observing someone’s current physical traits, but making assumptions — which are often incorrect — about their hidden traits and body’s past and future.

There are groups of people with breasts who menstruate, but also groups without breasts who menstruate, and groups with breasts who don’t menstruate. The members of each of those groups could fall on either side of the boy//girl binary. Many of those people could even be cis (as in they identify and feel comfortable with the gender identity they were assigned at birth). Some cis men have larger breasts than some cis women. And while they might get teased for physically deviating from a norm, no one is kicking them out of their respective category of man/woman. In mainstream America, women with thick leg hair are not told that they aren’t women, just that they could be better women if they shaved their legs. By observing that someone has a “wrong” trait for their gender, we’re able to imagine an ideal, “correct” definition of that gender, through which we define and reinforce the gender binary.

Biological gender, or “sex,” then, is a limited and artificial concept which fails to capture the true shades of grey of the human bodily experience. But, because so many of us believe gender to exist as two rigid camps, we have made it real with the power of language.

In addition to our physical/biological misconceptions about gender/sex, our society has introduced a host of cultural traits: girls like princesses, girls like sewing; boys like soldiers, boys like science. We have raised people in two different worlds to the point where, growing up, I was literally unsure if there was a biological difference in the brains of the two genders because their thought patterns, interests, and social behaviors seemed to differ so starkly (a thoroughly debunked idea called “neurosexism”).

Today, I have a hard time crying because of the culture I grew up in. I have a hard time putting on makeup. Nothing about my body makes those things tricky (even if we’re talking about estrogen levels for crying — which, hey, don’t make assumptions about my estrogen levels). I have the urge to do both, but feel so much cultural shame and judgement around those habits that I have been conditioned, or socialized, to suppress the urge.

Socialization is the often unconscious lessons we learn while growing up that tell us how our culture expects us to behave. “Boys will be boys” is an erroneous idea because it implies a biological justification for people with penises to be cruel and inconsiderate. The idea of “toxic masculinity,” on the other hand, is undoubtably real; it observes that people raised as men are conditioned with certain harmful behaviors that people raised as women largely don’t learn. Once our language cemented the two different camps of “men” and “women,” our society began treating those two camps differently, and so a tangible behavioral difference was enforced between two largely arbitrary groups.

My friends and I often imagine a world where, regardless of our bodies and their special abilities, we were all socialized the same. Some of us could pee standing up, some of us could give birth, but we could all like sports and put on dresses. But we are not there today. We cannot wave a magic wand and ignore socialization. We have to actively work to unpack the toxically masculine and toxically feminine behaviors that we as individuals were raised with. We have to actively acknowledge and give space to those on the “other side” of the binary who have been raised with vastly different norms.

But will that be true for my kids, my grandkids? I honestly hope not, and I think we can move in the direction of a world without gendered socialization. What follows is a celebration of one tool that can help us chart that course.