Going Beyond the Gender Binary

This book is a deconstruction, demystification, and reimagining of how we think about gender in the West. I am deeply impressed with the amount of substance and depth the author is able to reach in such a short book while also remaining accessible to the folks for whom thinking about gender beyond the binary, or even at all, is brand new.

Alok Vaid-Menon is gender non-conforming and transfeminine and writes from a place of both knowledge and love. They make it clear that gender non-conforming people are not the issue and that the real issue, which is indeed political, is the criteria used to define and evaluate gender. Throughout the book, they weave in anecdotes of their own experiences of gender and moving through the world as a gender non-conforming person with larger discussions of society, power, and discrimination.

The rules of gender and the gender binary are arbitrary and do not serve us as whole people. The author talks about how these rules are meant to control and how gender conformity is rewarded while gender creativity is punished. They dare to proclaim time and time again that just because things are the way they are that doesn’t mean that is the way they should be.

Alok posits that the variety of arguments against gender non-conforming people can be grouped into four categories: dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope. They wade through each category, easily unraveling the usually bad-faith arguments that people make against treating gender non-conforming people as people. These arguments range from “Singular they pronouns are not grammatically correct” to “this is just a new fad” to “gender is cultural but sex is biological” and more.

As I mentioned, this book is quite short but it contains multitudes.