If Non-Binary is the Goal, Why Fight So Hard for Binary Labels?
Asia Kate Dillon (Billions, John Wick III) has a suggestion for the bloated motion picture awards season: do away with gendered categories.
"Separating people based on their assigned sex, and/or their gender identity, is not only irrelevant when it comes to how an acting performance should be judged, it is also a form of discrimination."
I love this idea. After all, the rest of the goddamned Oscars aren’t separated by gender—there is no Best Female Film Editing or Best Male Director—why should there be this random binary created for actors? It’ll also make the damn thing half as long.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t a binary present. Male and Female. Men and Women. These labels exist and can be biologically demonstrated.
Recently, J.K. Rowling (she of the Harry Potter books) has been under attack for stating that simple fact. That there is, in fact, a biological Man and a biological Woman and the push for TransCitizens to co-opt those binary labels is, in her opinion, harmful to the issue of Women’s Rights. You can agree with her, you can disagree with her, but the attacks have been a blanket shrill cry of transphobia.
Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter–never, ever expect a nuanced conversation–and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.
It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags–because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter–scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”
TransWomen seem to be lobbying to be simply referred to as Women without the Trans and it pisses the most strident of activists to have that stance questioned. This without a pause when considering the bizarre and almost abusive practice of encouraging eight-year-old children to undergo hormone therapy and TransWomen (biologically imbued with denser muscle and thicker bone structure) dominating Women’s Sports at the expense of biological Women.
The argument is that the binary mode is more societal than natural and that we are hung up on the Men/Women thing far too much to be inclusive of those who do not fit that restrictive model. I (and it seems J.K. Rowling) agree. I suspect most TransCitizens just want to be left alone to be themselves without a lot of puritanical bullshit. Likewise, I suspect most biological Women want to hang onto the thin thread of gains they have fought so hard for.
What confuses me is the insistence, after so successfully arguing against binary labels, that TransWomen are Women and TransMen are Men. If non-binary is the goal, why fight so hard to keep these binary labels?
The journey toward gender-neutral pronouns has been a rough one—I’m still of the mind that if I don’t know your preference upon meeting you, and you don’t let me know right off the bat whether you are a him/her/they/it/symbol, then your offense at my misgendering is entirely on you. If I’m told and I ignore your preference, I’m a dickhead.
The pronoun thing is all about rejecting the binary. It’s a clean, unambiguous argument and, in my opinion, if you are that threatened by pronouns, perhaps you need to pull your head out of your ass. Or at least practice a bit. I find the need for preferences like that to be a bit precious but I’m an old man—I find most things when it comes to Gen Z to be a bit precious. Like trigger warnings, safe spaces, and TikTok.
No one is surprised at my confusion. So I rely on the stories presented to me by artists because activists are loud, generally one-note, and prefer I shut up and listen. I’m too old to obey the orders of a twenty-two year old unless she’s my manager and I’m working in the fast food industry. Artists have that way of telling a story that resonates with me that polemics do not.
Have you seen DC’s Doom Patrol yet?
Season One, Episode Eight is entitled Danny Patrol and features a sentient, queer-gender transporting street block known as Danny the Street. Effectively a floating haven for those whom society has deemed outcast, the place is filled with queers, queens, and so many of those who have been told they do not fit in with the Normals.
The show is pretty out there but one of the main characters is a sixties era Right Stuff sort of pilot. Married, kids, secretly gay. He is inhabited by a radiation creature that he does not communicate with because he has been trained since childhood to deny himself from being, well, himself.
In Danny the Street, he is slowly pried open by the existence of this special place/creation and there is a moment where he allows himself to sing on a karaoke stage. It is a moving and beautiful thing to behold and reminded me that while I and Rowling and all of these angry trans activists are abstractly intellectualizing these questions of who gets to own the binary and whether or not the binary is the point, the people we are talking around are... people. Some hurt, some frightened, some enraged, some just wanting go about their lives away from judgment and misunderstanding.
Speaking strictly as a straight, white, cisgendered dude in his fifties, when I see a TransWoman or TransMan, I do not see Male and Female biologies. I see people. I see people who are striving to carve out acceptance in a harsh and hateful world and are not some monolithic group of like-minded zealots. I also see someone different and unique. A new category of interesting and exciting. When they’re trolling someone on Twitter, I just see the petulant rage so well-learned from the Huckster-in-Chief.
Does questioning the logic of lobbying for the non-binary while craving the binary equal disrespect or harm to them? Only for the most troubled and wounded. Asking the questions and discussing the parameters of demanded social change should be encouraged. If the only answer one has to questions and counterpoints is to troll and threaten, the counterpoint gains merit. Some can’t handle that. The rest understand that questions, discussions, and dialogues about these exact issues is how we all find ways to progress.
As people.