What Qualifies Me To Talk About This?
Hello! I am numberers, a 30 year old non-binary nerd from Austria. I have a very strained relationship with the gender binary. Truth is, I believe it is one of the biggest evils we have ever constructed as a society.
A little bit about my background: I am what they call "amab", assigned male at birth. This means the sum of my biological markers falls into a preconceived category that humans tend to call "male". While my upbringing was very progressive and relatively "gender neutral", people saw me as a boy. I was always allowed to play with toys that were typically assigned to the female gender. I grew up in a household where typical gender roles were broken. My mom works in IT! She's got a STEM job! I never had any reason to assume gender had any say in what a person can achieve or do. I was allowed to play with dolls and cars the same. My parents were equally much nerds. Both were into Tolkien. Growing up, nerdiness was never gatekept to a gender in front of my eyes. My parents loved the acclaimed gender non conforming media "The Rocky Horror Show". As a kid, gender had no meaning. And it was good.
I am seriously and deeply thankful for my parents giving me a gender neutral upbringing. I think it laid the foundation of the way I see gender now, namely that it doesn't matter much at all, beyond your own identity, but I'll get to that in a bit!
When I got to the Austrian equivalent of elementary school, I made friends with a diverse group, across gender and heritage. Some of my peers were immigrants, some were girls, some were boys. The environment I grew up in reinforced the fact that where and as what you were born does not determine your potential. Heck, even your intelligence does not matter as much as people say it does. As long as your heart is in the right place, as long as you are willing to educate yourself on the world, you have potential to be a great gosh darn human. Your genitals do not matter in that. Your actions and your openness to the world are what make you great.
The first time I ever really felt the pressure of the gender binary was in the Austrian equivalent of middle school. Suddenly nerdniness was gatekept to being for the boys only. Suddenly friend groups were girls-only and boys-only. Suddenly it was weird and unwanted to be gay. I had to perform an act of fitting in. I had to play masculinity, or whatever someone elses idea of masculinity was. Suddenly there was a notion of which things are girly and which things are boyish. And frankly it makes no fucking sense.
This is where I have to adress: of the two options that society presented to me at that point in time, I was in the privileged group. It was always the boys who gatekept the girls out of their hobbies. But I kind of never knew what to do with this nonsensical rift through society. I kind of always knew that I wanted to break whatever boundary there was, but I didn't know what to do with it yet. In my mind I was just a normal boy because frankly it never had any meaning to me and I didn't think I would need to challenge it. But I do distinctly remember that I once in middle school in class said "I would wear anything, I would wear a mini skirt, I don't care" not giving it much thought at all. But clearly that was a SUUUUPER QUEER THING TO SAY. An insane thing to say for a preteen in class in sexist queerphobic gender binary enarmored society! And to me, idk, it just was the truth for me and I wouldn't consider the consequence and importance of what I just said.
After school I tried to get into university for psychology! I was always interested in the human psyche, and a lot of it concerns itself with the matter of identity among other things. Historically, a lot of queerness was seen as mental illness. Thankfully, we moved on from that to a more progessive state of the art in science. Unfortunately they didn't accept me into psychology. I passed the test but there were simply too many applicants. Oh well.
Instead I went on to study computer science. As a wee child my parents already let me toy around with the computers of the time and age. I played around with WinWord and MsPaint and what not. I was a computer kid, much like Lain from Serial Experiments Lain, the dark scifi cyber anime, surrounded by the tech from back in the day. I eventually taught myself basic programming skills. One of my clearest childhood memories is someone teaching my how to use telnet in the windows command prompt. And yeah. Me ending up in computer science, it just makes sense like a jigsaw piece falling into place seamlessly.
The problem is, the field of computer science is incredibly sexist. Or more accurately, STEM as a whole is incredibly sexist. Which is super dumb, considering that some of the greatest achievements in computer science were done by women. But yeah, unfortunately our university was not free of this sexism. We had a programming professor who openly told girls they were unfit for computer science and made them cry. A grown ass man taking joy in making women cry. Ugh.
The worse betrayal came from the supposedly progressive side at the university. We had a pretty cool professor who taught us about human computer interaction and design basics and humanistic principles and all that. And at one point he tackled the issue of sexism. I do not remember the exact words but I remember that what I heard pissed me off. I didn't know why, back then, as I was what we now call an "egg".
"I know that there are more than just the two genders male and female, but we will be talking about sexism from this binary perspective. Everything else just makes it too complicated"
That hurt. I didn't know I was non binary yet but somehow this felt wrong. Now I know that I have been reduced to a complication. Something that doesn't fit the bigger picture. I knew that I wanted to help women too, but I also knew that betraying the people who didn't fit was not the right path. In fact I would later find out, that this very neglegience toward non binary people IS the same evil that degrades and disempowers women. In fact, by excluding nonbinary people, you are engaging with a system that only offers opression towards women.
Cars are for [REDACTED], Dolls are for [REDACTED]
Ok so that was a lengthy intro about myself, let's take a step back and look at society as a whole. If we tackle sexism from the perspective of women being oppressed, we can ask ourselves, where does it all start. And unfortunately the oppression of women starts right from the first breaths of them. Welcome to the world of pink and blue, of cars and dolls, of robots and cooking play sets. Wake up small baby child, it's the gender binary. You don't have the capacity to form much of a thought at this point, but you are already put in a jumper that is pink if you are a girl, or blue if you are a boy. Dear intersex people reading this, I do not forget about you, I will talk about you in a bit, don't worry, I love and respect you. Unfortunately, right as you are born, the doctor receiving you from your moms exit door is making the biggest decision of your life for you. He looks at your vague biological markers and say, yup thats a boy, yup thats a girl. Now as we have established earlier this should have zero influence over you, and yet, your parents buy into it. A boy? Better give em all the boy things. Robot toys, car toys, spaceships, you name it. Better put "him" into a beanie that says "ladies man" or "I will impregnate 4738281 women some day" because, turns out, when you are a baby, everyone is OBSESSED with your genitals. Oh you get a daughter? Better get the dolls and the kitchen playsets because she will need to cook meals for her husband one day! Right from the get go humans are put into a disgusting machine of gender roles. And the kid is not immune to this. Of COURSE the kid learns from their environment and parents. I don't blame the kids, I blame the parents. Parents immediately heap a bunch of sexist crap on their kids that indoctrinates them to become either successful boys who have power or perfect wives who need to serve.
Content warning: sexual abuse for this section.
These years are incredibly formative for a kid. Boys learn that they have to perform masculinity in order to prove their worth. They learn that their emotions should not be expressed, and that it is supposedly disgusting and a sign of weakness to even have emotions in the first place. They learn that violence is an inherently male thing. In this environment, it does not really surprise me that most rapists are men. That's literally what the gender binary teaches them to do. To never express themselves, but to view women as inferior. And in the same way, girls are told from the beginning that their role is to keep up the household and satisfy their husband. Note how the gender binary as a whole intertwines with the similarly evil problem of heteronormativity. I am not saying that boys are not to blame for their own actions when they rape girls. Not at all! They shall be held accountable! What I'm saying is, the system enforces that men become rapists.
Biological Markers As A Determinant For The Rest Of Your Life
Actually, we can take it one moment further back: Yes, the parents almost immediately enforce the gender binary on their kids. But first, theres the aforementioned doctor.
Often, people argue, that what the doctor determines at your birth is supposed to be your "biological sex", and that it is always completely binary. Well there are multiple problems with this assumption. Frankly, there are cases where even the doctor will say "uh i don't know what genitals those are... congratulations you are intersex". Sometimes people are only identified as intersex waaayy later because the doctor was completely wrong to begin with! Just recently in my Instagram feed I came across a lovely person who was assumed to be a girl until they turned 16, at which point they discovered testicles in the inside of her body during an ultrasound. Turns out, doctors are wrong about this really impactful decision all the time. And it sucks, because of how much weight it has, and because bigots always try to claim there are only two "biological sexes".
Yeah, well let's talk about "biological sex" then. Bigots often frame it as a definitive thing that always sticks around with you and you can never change it. Guess what, it's entirely made up. It is a concept you can choose not to engage with (and I encourage you to leave every semblance of the gender binary behind you). Even if "biological sex" were real, how are you going to define it? I know of at least three different axes often associated with "biological sex", and I can name them right here:
Your chromosomes
Your hormone levels
Each of your different external genital and sexual organs
These three can be completely different! Each of them is a different axis, they do not need to match! It happens SO often that people with "female chromosomes" have estrogen and testosterone levels "typical for a man". Some people have a penis AND boobs. There is no meaningful singular distinction of "biological sex", and even if there was, it really would NOT be binary!!! So please, the next time a bigot comes at you with "you cannot deny your biology" inform them that their notion of biology is way outdated and not up to the scientific standards anymore, and in fact that they are so so stupid and don't know shit. Ok you don't need to confront your bigots but you can at least arm yourself with the knowledge and don't let them get to you. Turns out "biological sex" is not real AND not binary.
Seems very silly to let the doctor decide over your career choices now, does it?
Trans Bans In Sport
This very much ties into the next issue I will talk about, and it currently has been skyrocketing in notoriety. Trans people by all means should NOT be an issue at all. Turns out, people have been running studies and found out that trans women do not have an advantage over cis women in sport. This proves that trans sport bans don't make sports more fair. And really, every trans sport ban should immediately be retracted and overturned forever.
Ok let's entertain the thought of enforced fairness in sport by segregation into disparate disjoint groups of people. It would make much more sense if, say, for sports where speed matters, people were grouped by their average speed. Or for fighting sports, based on their weight and muscle strength. Surely in this day and age of science we have more meaningful ways of ensuring a fair competition. But this dumb segregation into men and women has to fucking stop. Do better! Instead of dumb flying cars that noone needs, invent fair unbiased discriminators for sports. You can do it!
Girl Things and Boy Things
Even in our adult age, society still pressures us to act according to our assumed gender. And yes, this is a big problem for women as a whole, but again I argue we should not be leaving nonbinary or androgynous or gender nonconforming people out of the equation. Often it is said, that if men did more girl things, girls could do more men things. I mean - I guess? I guess someone has to break the vicious cycle, but to be honest I don't care who does it; it is increasingly clear to me every day that the gender binary must be abolished. For the good of women and for the good of enbies, and frankly also for the good of men who are trapped in toxic masculinity.
Other Effects
Let us look at some examples where the gender binary is at its most tangible:
The fashion industry: as an enby I have such a hate for the binary in fashion. The first thing you see on every clothing store website is ARE YOU MAN? ARE YOU WOMAN? So if you are non-binary first of all you are entirely unwelcome. And if you are a man, you only get access to boring plain clothes with nothing. And if you are a woman you get nothing in actual human sizes. Cool. Entirely pointless binary
At the doctor: many people argue it is medically reasonable to segregate into men and women for the efficiency of the system. Ok so again what about intersex people? And actually doctors should rethink their questions. If they wanna ask because of the breast cancer risk the question should not be "male or female", it should be "do you have boobs". If they wanna know your hormone levels, asking you about your sex does not answer that. You see where I'm going with this? Medical questions should, if anything, be more specific and cannot be answered by notions of sex or gender most of the time.
I believe I have made my point clear. The gender binary is bad and we need to get rid of it. What I'm not saying is that you cannot identify as one of the extremes on the spectrum between male and female, but it MUST be acknowledged and reflected that there are infinite possible gender expressions between and outside those extremes. The gender binary is harmful to society and brings you nothing good. Ever.