In Transit

Being Non-Binary in a World of Dichotomies

Dianna E. Anderson

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506479248
• eBook ISBN: 9781506479255
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

For decades, our cultural discourse around trans and gender-diverse people has been viewed through a medical lens, through diagnoses and symptoms set down in books by cisgender doctors, or through a political lens, through dangerous caricatures invented by politicians clinging to power. But those who claim non-binary gender identity deserve their own discourse, born out of the work of the transsexual movement, absorbed into the idea of transgender, and now, finally, emerging as its own category.

In tracing the history and theory of non-binary identity, and telling of their own coming out, non-binary writer Dianna E. Anderson answers questions about what being non-binary might mean, but also where non-binary people fit in the trans and queer communities. They offer a space for people to know, explore, and understand themselves in the context of a centuries-old understanding of gender nonconformity and to see beyond the strict roles our society has for men and women.

In Transit looks forward to a world where being who we are, whatever that looks like, isn't met with tension and long-winded explanations, but rather with acceptance and love. Being non-binary is about finding home in the in-between places.

1

FINDING THE RIGHT WORDS

O Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice!

O harvest of my lands! O boundless summer growths!

O lavish, brown, parturient earth! O infinite, teeming womb!

A verse to seek, to see, to narrate thee.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Before I was born, my parents had two boys. They expected—unscientifically, but as every parent does—that their third would be no different. Mom was prepared to remain a minority in the house no matter what, and my brothers were ready for a little brother they could play with.

To everyone’s surprise, I was pulled out of my mother via C-section, a screaming, crying, seven-pound baby girl. My dad was so thrilled he immediately drove to the local department store and bought two extremely frilly baby dresses for me. I cannot emphasize just how frilly and lacy these dresses were. In my baby pictures, I am a head sticking out of a sea of white lace. It was the ’80s.

And thus my life began, pulled from my mother only to be shoved into a pile of frills.

Despite my mother’s best efforts, I was not a child who embraced the more delicate and frilly aspects of life. I fell out of the car playing with my brothers and got a concussion at five. Over the next few years, I slammed my head into a door, requiring stitches, and then slammed my head into the bathroom counter, requiring yet another set of stitches. My favorite color was blue, despite clear attempts to steer me toward pink. I refused to let my parents brush my long, wavy hair, necessitating a bowl cut from Grandma Darlene—who at least was a professional hairdresser and kept the short haircut from being a complete disaster. I found myself bonding most easily with the boys at school, playing in the dirt, being king of the mountain, and handling the unfortunate garter snake that wandered into the playground, while the girls played house, built snowmen, and screamed when we came at them with the snake.

When I learned what the word “tomboy” meant, I declared that was me.

I grew up already knowing that “being a girl” was something you shaped and formed for yourself. My parents didn’t try to force me into any one role—they let me be as wild and playful as I wanted to be. Little bits of gender roles crept in with moments like my brother being taught how to mow the lawn while my job was to dust the furniture. But looking back, I’m not so sure that was a gender thing so much as a “Dianna is so clumsy she’ll probably lose a limb” thing (as mentioned, by the time I was eight, I’d already ended up in urgent care twice for stitches).

Having such freedom meant that when I arrived at graduate school in my early twenties, I was primed to take on feminist studies, though I didn’t admit it at the time. In college, I’d embraced a far more traditional role for myself, delving deeply into evangelical Christian culture and accepting but chafing at the idea that because I was a woman, my job was forever meant as a support role to the men in my life. Because evangelical culture told me marriage was the ultimate expression of G-d’s love, I longed to be married. Once, I frustratedly turned to a male friend of mine and asked him what was wrong with me—why don’t guys show any interest or ask me out?

“You’re intimidating,” came the response. “You’re super smart and outmatch a lot of us.”

So there was another tick on the list of “things a Good Christian Woman shouldn’t be”: smart. It was this moment when I think a part of me broke. I was the daughter of two teachers, brought up in a home where I learned to read and write before I even hit kindergarten. I was an A student, devoured books, and wrote essays for fun. For me, a good night in college wasn’t staying up until 3:00 a.m. talking about boys—it was staying up until three talking about predestination and child baptism. I used words like “salvific” in everyday conversation.

And apparently intimidated men.

This criticism hit me in the place that hurt the most. I could take whatever comments people felt like hurling about my awkward gangly frame, about my choice of haircut—by then, back to a pixie cut—or my inability to do makeup. I could take criticisms about me being annoying, even. By then I’d accepted that some personalities and mine just don’t get along.

But to say that men found me intimidating because I was smart hit a new low, right at the center of my own construction of selfhood. I was being pressured to diminish a fundamental part of myself for the sake of finding a person to love me, and I could not bring myself to do it. At that point, a baby feminist was born. I discovered a boundary within myself that balked at the idea that I should give up parts of who I am simply because men found them scary.

A year later, I was in a graduate literary theory class at Baylor University, looking at the course assignments and staring at my name next to the words “Queer Theory.” Being a Christian at a “distinctly Baptist” university, I was a little surprised that we were covering queer theory at all. But more than that, I wanted to take on the theory my friend had been assigned: feminist theory. By then, I’d begun to call myself a feminist and was developing an understanding of the world under this new lens. But thanks to the ordering of the alphabet, I would have to present a conference paper on queer theory and essentially teach the concept to the rest of my class.

I wasn’t ready for what happened to me once I did the work.

I chose to write on and analyze the movie Mulan (then only existing in animated form). I wrote about how the story plays with gender presentation, accepting that everything is largely a performance, and Mulan’s ability is not diminished by coming into her girlhood as a fully realized human. She is both made into a man and becomes a girl worth fighting for. The central song, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” is also a deeply trans turning point: Mulan, as Ping, learns to imitate and perform manhood as well as, if not better than, the cisgender men around her.

My world sprang open with this one study. Gender as a socially constructed performance would inform everything I did over the next decade: coming out, cutting off all my hair, choosing to eschew or adopt femininity as I saw fit, embracing my own queerness.

This eye-opening experience is why I always start out with theory. Theory gave me the language to understand myself, define my space within the world, and consider the ways in which we think about the self and the other, in all the queerest ways.

Let’s start with the feminists. The primary text with which to engage when talking about defining gender is French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s epic tome in multiple parts: The Second Sex. A member of France’s philosopher class that arose in the early nineteenth century, de Beauvoir was steeped in the emerging thought of French existentialism—the questions of what man is, what man does, and who man grows to be. A longtime partner of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, both in sparring debate over philosophy and in matters of the heart, de Beauvoir couldn’t help but notice that the philosophy world was something of a boys’ club.

And, she noticed, this boys’ club mentality left gaps in their knowledge, especially as they assumed “man” to be a stand-in for the everyday human. A “man” could be assumed to be the default across the board in philosophy, while women constantly stood as Other. She takes the argument in two parts, first examining the station of woman as it is created through the biological reality of pregnancy and labor. A woman’s reproductive utility and role as the bearer of the human species, she contends, is part and parcel of why men see “woman” as the Other. Men evince disgust at the everyday reality of women, contending that menstruating women are “unclean.” Because of this Othering and disgust, men have created myths about women to explain their subjugation as deserved, a necessary protection of their femininity, casting men as the heroes and women as the unknowable, uncharted territory that must be conquered.

Jumping off from the point of biological understandings, de Beauvoir devotes the latter volume of The Second Sex to exploring what makes a woman a woman. In philosophical terms, she is examining female ontology—or beingness—and creating a knowledge base, or epistemics, around it. You may well be familiar with her most famous phrase: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”1 She opens the second volume with this declaration, starting from how womanhood is viewed and shaped throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Here we are introduced to the idea that a gender is not inherent at birth but rather made through the collective action of response to outward and inward stimuli. De Beauvoir essentially proposes that a woman’s life lived in service of a man’s ideal—becoming a wife, a mother, or a housekeeper and forever being tasked with menial chores—is what informs and gives voice to this idea of “womanhood” as a thing outside the person itself. We are socially conditioned in what makes us “woman,” from the moment our parents put us in frilly lace dresses to our first sexual encounters with men who take for themselves without thought for our pleasure.

This unfettering of “womanhood”—and, subsequently, “manhood”—from an innate, biological physiology was the start of gender theory as we know it. It was this unlinking that spawned a thousand articles and books about what it means to be a woman and how we come to those conclusions. Much of philosophical thought, to this point, imagined one’s status as a man or a woman as a given—that how you are perceived meant you carried with you innate characteristics of that identity. Women were subservient because it was a biological reality that they were.

But de Beauvoir broke all of that apart, proposing instead that women are forced into subservience because of the habitual way men are taught to view them. It is the gaze of men upon women that creates the (mis)conception of womanhood as a specific thing in itself rather than a set of cultural cues that are conditioned into us from birth.

For me, this was a revelation. I’d always vaguely known stuff about how gender is perceived and built, but here was a woman arguing it in black and white: that what we know of womanhood and manhood is the result of culturally conditioned thought and therefore bound by the same.

Around the same time I was reading de Beauvoir for literary theory, I was also being introduced to another Simone—French philosopher Simone Weil. A Christian who rejected Judaism and the Old Testament,2 Weil was a modern Christian mystic philosopher. Weil’s theory of creation stemmed from the idea of absence: G-d must withdraw from the world in order to create. G-d, as all perfect, cannot create that which is imperfect, so for humanity to be free, G-d withdrew from the world and deliberately limited G-dself so that creation could occur.3 In working to embody G-d in the world, then, it is a Christian’s duty to likewise empty themselves and love their neighbor so fully that the self disappears. Weil was also deeply entranced by the idea that the self is made, not innate, and that our sense of “I” only comes from circumstances of birth. People could make choices to change themselves, but the influence of those choices was a matter of circumstance.

For instance, I, a white person born to white parents in South Dakota, am only who I am because of the circumstances of my birth. There is no ethereal Dianna toward which I may grasp; rather, that “I,” which has been formed and developed by my circumstances, is the only “I” to which I have access.

It was in seeing this idea of the “I” as grounded in conditioning, circumstances, and lived experience that meant the most to me. Reading all these philosophers at the same time was a pure coincidence of my class schedule, but the impact it had was not. My conception of what it meant to be me was exploding and reforming. By the time I landed at Judith Butler,4 it felt like I was arriving at home base. Here was this new understanding that spoke to how I was beginning to see the world.

Butler is a tough nut to crack for people who are unaccustomed to academic speak—much of Butler’s formal language reads as obtuse and impenetrable, full of allusions to previous works. It’s clear that the reader would be familiar enough with the ongoing conversation that speaking to the layperson was not on Butler’s mind. And I believe you readers are smart enough to grasp their meaning but may not have the context from which to do so.

Butler’s most famous book (and rightly so) is 1990’s Gender Trouble. In it, they offer the final puzzle pieces of an argument about gender, pulling on what was already by then a large cadre of feminist philosophers, including Wittig, Lévi-Strauss (not the jeans company), Irigaray, hooks, and French postmodernists Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan. Speaking from their position as a lesbian theoretician, Butler positions de Beauvoir’s ideas of womanhood in conversation with homosexuality, seeking to elucidate how gender is constructed alongside assumed heterosexuality. But to go there, we need to step back into the discussion of language itself, which is the primary discussion being had by Butler and which will be undertaken throughout the rest of this book.

Something happened in the twentieth century where numerous philosophers began to undertake the problems of how we think about and describe reality. Starting largely with Ludwig Wittgenstein, continental philosophy began to turn inward, to look at the very words we use to describe the world and to communicate. Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who studied under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge and later held his own professorship there. He was continually plagued by the question of how a person conveys meaning: language is itself defined by its usage. In asking what a word means, then, a person—a speaker—must use the word, rendering circular the question of asking for meaning.

What he proposes is a short thought exercise: think in your head for the moment and define the word “game.”

Then think about this: how can the word “game” both mean children playing tag in the park and the men sitting still at a table puzzling over chess?5

This tension is the central one that Wittgenstein explores: that language we have becomes itself as we use it. We must, as humans, grapple with the meaning of words as we use them, determining resemblances between ideas as represented by words, and, finally, decide whether to abide by the rules as constructed by language or reject them—decisions we make each time we speak.

Wittgenstein also proposed that language is fundamentally a communal act, which is perhaps his most important argument. Because language develops its meaning within its use, it is impossible to have a private language, or one that is only relevant to the individual, because such language would be impossible to understand by any other human. The lack of communal meaning applied to a language renders the language inert and unusable—and an unusable language is no language at all. It is this fundamental aspect of communal understanding from which all of life must flow.6

To use a modern example, money is fake. There is no intrinsic or inherent value in a dollar bill. I can set it on fire, and nothing significant will happen besides some funny-colored smoke. But we, collectively, as a community, have agreed to give it value by believing in money and a market as a concept. We have collectively developed and agreed to a shared delusion that tiny metal coins and slips of paper—or, in contemporary settings, series of zeroes and ones on an electronic record—constitute “currency,” and with this currency we can “purchase” t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Glossary
• Chapter 1: Finding the Right Words
• Chapter 2: We Have Always Been Here
• Chapter 3: The Theory of Us
• Chapter 4: Finding a Home
• Chapter 5: Born and Becoming
• Chapter 6: Queer Possibilities, Queer Joy
• Chapter 7: Fat, Redistributed
• Chapter 8: The Expanse
• Chapter 9: Sisterhood, Not Cisterhood
• Chapter 10: Who Tells Your Story?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes