Non-binary finery
A new type of identity is emerging from the shadows, and demanding respect. They are non-binary people, whose gender identity exists beyond simply male and female. Felix Desmarais reports.
Light and dark, life and death, left and right, boy and girl. Binaries, dualities and pairs. Binaries help us make sense of things. Computers are based on them, as with a lot of other aspects of our culture.
But we also know that between light and dark are shades of grey. Things are often more complex than at first glance.
The binary of male and female, however, persists, in everything from filling in forms to using public toilets.
Now a ‘‘new’’ group is challenging that idea, and they are called ‘‘non-binary’’ people – those whose gender is not aligned simply to man or woman.
Ethan Thompson is 21 years old, elegant and fine-boned, with striking eyes that are simultaneously blue and green. They – Thompson – use they/ them/theirs gender-neutral pronouns. They are not a boy, and not a girl; not a man, not a woman. Just Ethan.
Ethan Thompson is nonbinary – ‘‘if you want to simplify it’’, they say.
‘‘In 2015 I started to query and question for myself.
‘‘By the end of the year I was sure ‘man, boy’ – all that – wasn’t a good fit. Society has this binary, this idea of black and white, blue and pink. There’s definitely a struggle when you don’t sit in those.’’
Part of the catalyst was meeting other people at university who were trans or non-binary. ‘‘I think I met four or five trans friends in that first trimester, and they’re still all good friends now. That first trimester was pretty big in my life.
‘‘Seeing gender inside of a neat little box went from the periphery to the person I sat next to in my class. It became a part of my everyday dialogue.’’
In Thompson’s experience, there are many challenges to being non-binary, from microaggressions to violence.
‘‘There’s so much of ‘I’m not imagining that, am I?’ People treating you just a little bit ‘off’. You think, oh maybe they’re having a bad day.
‘‘There’s usually a little niggle in your mind that, oh, maybe I’m too sensitive, or maybe I’m imagining something, maybe that look wasn’t a ‘What the hell is that?’ ’’
Simply filling out forms is an invalidating task. ‘‘The census earlier in the year was a mess. I wrote more notes on the census than answered questions.
‘‘It said male or female [at the beginning], then all through the document it was like ‘if you’re a male go here, if you’re a female, go here’.
‘‘That is a pretty big thing, that is a census of the entire population of New Zealand. It was so unaware. I’m frustrated about it.’’
The emergence of visible nonbinary gender identities is already having an impact on government policy.
In August, Parliament’s governance and administration select committee issued its final report on a bill that would amend the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Act, last revised in 1995.
The bill, which will now progress to its second reading, would amend the process of changing gender on birth certificates from a Family Court process, to a simply selfdeclaration, bringing birth certificates in line with the
process of changing gender on drivers’ licences and passports.
The bill would also introduce the option of an X gender marker as well as M and F, and the option of ‘‘parent’’ on a child’s birth certificate, rather than just mother or father.
Thompson says the changes would make the act less discriminatory to transgender and non-binary New Zealanders. They say the wording is currently ‘‘ridiculously awful’’. ‘‘It’s dehumanising for trans people.’’
The bill is sponsored by NZ First MP Tracey Martin, who voted against marriage equality legislation in 2013. She was not available for comment.
Official documents are not the only arena that proves exclusive to non-binary identities. Thompson says just needing to spend a penny can be a source of anxiety.
‘‘Bathrooms are a big thing. It’s not only that I’m more likely to be attacked or hurt, it’s the anxiety of, if I go into this bathroom, someone’s going to say something to me. It’s the sitting in the stall waiting for everyone else to leave.’’
It was using the bathroom at a snooker hall on Courtenay Place in Wellington a couple of years ago that stuck out to Thompson as one of their worst experiences of transphobia.
‘‘I’d been playing for about half an hour and I went to the bathroom. I use the women’s bathroom because I feel most comfortable there. I’ll use a gender-neutral bathroom if there is one.
‘Iwas washing my hands and [the barman] slammed the door open. I jumped out of my skin. ‘‘I thought someone must have really needed to go to the bathroom, but no, it was 100 per cent physical aggression.
‘‘I don’t remember the words exactly but he said something like, ‘Oi c..., stop using the women’s bathroom’. I was so frightened and shocked.
‘‘It has quite a bit of distance now, but for a while afterwards it would catch in my throat when I tried to talk about it. I was in shock that first day. I felt physically unsafe and shaken.
‘‘I said something along the lines of ‘I’ll keep using whichever bathroom I feel most comfortable in’. I tried to keep playing for a little bit, because I went there to play snooker and I wanted to play snooker.
‘‘I went over to him before I left and I said, ‘Are you going to apologise for what you did to me?’ He said something like, ‘Women don’t want men in the women’s bathroom’.
‘‘This is the point I was breaking down. I said some halfformed sentence, and he said, ‘Well, I’m from a different era’.
‘‘I was like, ‘It’s 2016’.’’
Ahi Wi-Hongi, national co-ordinator of support and advocacy organisation Gender Minorities Aotearoa, says nonbinary people are not trying to be special, they’re just trying to be recognised as themselves. WiHongi also uses they/them pronouns.
‘‘Sometimes people think it’s new because suddenly we’re seeing a lot of people who are using words like non-binary that haven’t had much visibility in the past.
‘‘It’s starting to become more socially acceptable.’’
Wi-Hongi says earlier generations of trans and nonbinary people often waited until later life to come out.
‘‘Now we’re seeing more support for people to come out while they’re younger. So it may seem like there are suddenly lots of non-binary teenagers, or lots of trans teenagers, but in truth, it’s just that they’re coming out as teenagers instead of waiting.’’
Asked what non-binary people want, Wi-Hongi, who is a non-binary trans masculine takata¯ pui person, jokes: ‘‘A foot rub and hot chips.
‘‘I think most non-binary people, just like everyone else, would like to have the same human rights as everybody else, the same access to identification that reflects who they are.
‘‘To be able to see themselves meaningfully is really important. Work, housing, healthcare, participating fully in society and to live a full life and be happy.’’
An important part of that is using the correct pronouns and names. ‘‘When you meet somebody’s dog and you say, ‘What’s her name?’ and they say, ‘His name’ and you go, ‘Oh my gosh, sorry!’ – it’s as simple as that. We like to be referred to as who we are.
‘‘It would be quite strange to meet someone and you say, ‘My name’s Sam’ and they go, ‘Hi Jim’. It would be odd, we want to refer to someone as who they actually are.
‘‘It’s just basic respect.’’ People should not be nervous about making mistakes with pronouns, they say – it’s the effort that counts.
‘‘The little things people do to make an effort to acknowledge that they understand that you’re a person and you deserve basic respect as well, it goes a really long way.’’
University of Auckland social anthropology expert Susanna Trnka says the idea of sex as a social construction is reflected in her field of study.
‘‘For a long time anthropologists have recognised that gender is fluid and multiple. Looking across history, and perhaps even more strikingly, across different cultures, it is pretty clear that gender is not always binary and that other cultures recognise three, four, or more genders.
‘‘In other words, gender is socially constructed, and how we perceive gender, and who is seen as belonging to a particular gender, is socially determined.
‘‘This does not, however, mean that there is not a physiological component to how we view gender, as societies tend to link some physical characteristics with some forms of gender identification – but there is malleability in this, and certainly there isn’t a rigid structure of gender binaries.’’