Duane A. Scott - Nonbinary: memoirs of gender and identity

NONBINARY

NONBINARY

Memoirs of Gender and Identity

EDITED BY MICAH RAJUNOV AND SCOTT DUANE

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New YorkChichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2019 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-54610-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rajunov, Micah, editor. | Duane, A. Scott, editor.

Title: Nonbinary : memoirs of gender and identity / edited by Micah Rajunov and A. Scott Duane.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018033719 (print) | LCCN 2018036460 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231185325 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231185332 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Gender nonconformity. | Gender nonconforming people. | Sexual minoritiesIdentity. | Gender identity.

Classification: LCC HQ77.9 (ebook) | LCC HQ77.9 .N645 2018 (print) | DDC 305.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033719

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Contents

Riki Wilchins

Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane

CHAPTER ONE
War Smoke Catharsis

Alex Stitt

CHAPTER TWO
Deconstructing My Self

Levi S. Govoni

CHAPTER THREE
Coatlicue

fi hernandez

CHAPTER FOUR
Namesake

michal mj jones

CHAPTER FIVE
My Genderqueer Backpack

Melissa L. Welter

CHAPTER SIX
Scrimshaw

Rae Theodore

CHAPTER SEVEN
Being Genderqueer Before It Was a Thing

Genny Beemyn

CHAPTER EIGHT
Token Act

Sand C. Chang

CHAPTER NINE
Hypervisible

Haven Wilvich

CHAPTER TEN
Making Waves in an Unforgiving Maze

Kameron Ackerman

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Life Threats

Jeffrey Marsh

CHAPTER TWELVE
Just Genderqueer, Not a Threat

Jace Valcore

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
What Am I?

CK Combs

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Questions of Faith

Jaye Ware

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Coming Out as Your Nibling: What Happened When I Told Everyone I Know That Im Genderqueer

Sinclair Sexsmith

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Purple Nail Polish

Jamie Price

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Uncharted Path: Parenting My Agender Teen

Abigail

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Name Remains the Same

Katy Koonce

CHAPTER NINETEEN
Lowercase Q

Cal Sparrow

CHAPTER TWENTY
Not Content on the Sidelines

Suzi Chase

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
You See Me

Brian Jay Eley

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Clothes Make the Gender/Queer

Aubri Drake

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Flight of the Magpie

Adam PicaPica Stevenson

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
An Outsider in My Own Landscape

s. e. smith

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Not-Two

Avery Erickson

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Kitchen Sink Gender

Nino Cipri

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
What Growing Up Punk Taught Me About Being Gender Nonconforming

Christopher Soto

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Rock a Bye Binary

Jules De La Cruz

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
To Gender and Back

Kory Martin-Damon

CHAPTER THIRTY
Rethinking Non/Binary

Eli Erlick

RIKI WILCHINS

Back in the 1990 s, I started using the term genderqueer in an effort to glue together two nouns which seemed to me to describe an excluded middle: those of us who were not just trans, but also queer: the kind of gendertrash that transgressed the natural boundaries of transgender, those whom society couldnt digest. A prominent gay columnist promptly attacked me for ruining a perfectly good word like queer.

Then Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and I used the word for the title of our anthology of emerging young writers. And there it sat. I dont recall anyone actually picking it up or using it. Eight years later at Creating Changean LGBTQ leadership conferenceI saw a sticker someone has posted that read, A Genderqueer Was Here! I thought, Well thats interesting. Someone is actually using it. And so it begins.

Fast forward about ten years and I was reading Matt Bernsteins anthology Nobody Passes . In it writer Rocko Bulldagger bemoans the terms very existence, declaring, I am sick to death of hearing it. Such is the arc of new ideas.

I suspect the same thing is about to happen with nonbinary.

For the public, that arc probably began in a town hall in London, when a twenty-year-old student came out to President Obama as nonbinary: Im about to do something terrifying, which is Im coming out to you as a nonbinary person. In the UK we dont recognize nonbinary people under the Equality Act, so we literally have no rights, Maria Munir said. Obama, one of our most hip and cosmopolitan presidents ever, still had no idea what Munir was talking about. Befuddled, if well intentioned, he relapsed into his LGBTQ talking points, which really had very little to do with it.

He is not alone in his confusion. As nonbinary comes to the fore, it will challenge everything we currently think about bodies, sexual orientation, and gender, almost all of which depends implicitly or explicitly on the binary. One can only hope almost none of it survives. If I am nonbinary, can feminismthe politics of womenstill represent me? Can I enter women-only spaces, or men-only meetings? Can I be gay, straight, or bisexual? Here language fails, the entire discourse on gayness and sexual orientation collapses.

The same thing is going to happen with transgender. The trans in transsexual was always about moving from one thing to another. A person was going from male to female, or vice versa. This conception was more or less grafted onto the newer term transgender.

Its an overused truism that transgender was intended as a broad umbrella term for all those who are gender nonconforming. Yet there are limits: transgender itself is interpreted by some in terms of two binary genders that one is traveling between or else not conforming to. For others (especially transsexuals), being transgender implies a sense of conflict between ones inner gender identity and birth sex as male or female. In this way, transgender often unintentionally reinforced and reified the same binary of sexes and genders that makes outcasts of transpeople in the first place.

But what if one is not traveling anywhere? Or is entirely off the map of intelligible binary genders?

Familiar transgender concerns get scrambled quickly. For instance, we now accept that transgender women are women and can use the womens bathroom. But what bathroom do we want nonbinary people to have the right to use: Both? Neither? And what sex marker do we want them to be able to put on their ID? Both? Neither? A new one?