Non-binary thinking.

I had a sudden insight regarding the label, “non-binary.” I’ve been irritated by it for years, didn’t really get how people were using it, I thought it was an unnecessary, and ugly, word. Some people identifying themselves as non-binary are outwardly, visibly, gender nonconforming in dress and speech, body, affect, what we used to call butch lesbians or nellie queens, bulldykes, sissies. Since to me “gay” and “lesbian” have always included a vast range of gender presentation, most of it nonconforming, I felt like “non-binary” was sort of implied. But others using the label appear conventionally male or female, sometimes even heterosexual. The latter phenomenon is still baffling to me.

I also resisted the word because it has an off-putting scientific, computery smell about it. Some people have the same issue with “homosexual” — they find it antique, clinical — but I like it. Meaning accumulates on words over time, and I think homosexual after a couple centuries has acquired a more complex resonance, warmer than it was when it first appeared in scientific literature. 

First I was gay, then for many years I preferred “queer.” I liked the broader brush of “queer,” the way it included trans and bisexual, men and women. I liked how blunt and confrontational it was. I liked the way it felt to steal the power of a slur. But recently queer has come to be used in a way I don’t, to be honest, really grasp, and yet feel specifically excluded, as a homosexual man, from whatever its umbrella is meant to cover, so I mostly avoid it. I strongly dislike being called “cis.” I think originally cis had a simple technical meaning — a person whose sense of their own gender matched their biological gender — which I guess more or less describes me now, but lately I see the word used to mean something more like a person whose sense of their gender and their presentation of it in the world conform to a stereotypical, essentialist view of gender. Which doesn’t describe me. (And “cis white male” now seems to mean no more than “culprit.” It’s lazy politics and lazy thinking. It’s also snobbery, looking down on people with conventional taste and aspirations, judging certain people to be not queer enough.  My first thought when I hear or see “cis white male” is “yeah fuck you.”)

So, as a person whose life and personality gender- and sexuality-wise are a very mixed bag and more often than not misaligned with society’s expectations of how male-bodied people act, look, and behave, I am non-binary. I don’t mean that in a “this is me!” way. I’m not coming out. Maybe it’s the writer in me, but I don’t see any of these words in terms of some deep characteristic of identity. They’re descriptive words. What’s immutable is my sexual attraction to men. My identity as a gay man is cultural, it’s political. We come together and assert a common identity because it gives us political power. I see non-binary as a broader category, comprising anything that rejects or confounds or debunks or flies in the face of the idea that male and female are separate and opposite, literally “not binary,” and that describes me, so I’ll embrace it. I am gay, I am biologically male, and I am non-binary.

I know that most young people, with their endless appetite for taxonomy and moral certainty, will probably disagree with a lot of this, and that’s okay. I won’t say they’re wrong. But I’m not a young person.