Binary states
My work colleague is getting gender affirming surgery. I listen to them talk about how they plan to have the operation and then watch three and a half weeks of Netflix.
I ask them if they will continue using the neutral pronouns they/them, or whether they are transitioning to male pronouns.
“No, no change”, they say, with comfort in their voice. “I have never felt particularly binary”.
I am so relieved to hear this from a colleague of, well, not my generation, but – still. Telling them that is how I feel, I say how I have the impression there are not many of us.
“Well, there hasn’t been the language”.
There hasn’t.
They tell me how their wife is pregnant and the baby is due soon. They had to push the surgery forward to make sure things were done and the decks clear for the big journey ahead: parenthood.
I ask about family. Theirs is quite conservative. Finding a way to come out to them “was a case of putting my toe in the water, then taking it out. For several months. Then putting it in again.” Nevertheless, the family have made a metaphorical journey. And now a literal one: they are coming to visit from inter-state, post-surgery. “Which will be weird”, my friend says good-naturedly.
Then they say, “you know, sometimes I wish everything from my thighs up to my neck could just be pixelated, that would suit me. But as my wife said, ‘you know it doesn’t work like that’. They laugh, pointing out that surgery is about to make that absolutely clear.
“There are easier and cheaper ways to achieve weight loss”, they add. “But there it is”.
Afterwards, I experience a lightness I seldom feel around conversations like this. The liberation of possibility; this person may not know it, but for me they are marking a trail. I don’t imagine having surgery, but the possibility of asserting gender transition in order to live a non-binary life awakens hope in me; a kind of unfamiliar comfort.
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Transition is in some ways conceptually simple – it is the simplicity that comes from a binary concept.
The technology enabling the letters on this screen just now exemplifies the binary: computing code made entirely of ones and zeroes. However, the device on which you are reading is also driven by another equally fundamental technology. And, in contrast, it exemplifies the non-binary. It is the semiconductor. Semiconductors not only lie between binary chemical states of conductors and insulators, but they exhibit diversity, in their chemistry, their stability, and their behaviour.
So it is with gender. A simple binary characterises not only the primary classification we use for animals – including ourselves – from birth, but also the transition that may occur between those categories. The binary puts the trans in transgender. Yet within our community, we recognise another state of being. In the US 2015 transgender survey, over a third of the respondents identified as non-binary. Twenty percent of participants in an Australian survey of young people, Writing Themselves In 4, identified as non-binary.
The question in my mind is: if we were to break down our culture’s entrenched and aggressive enforcement of binary gender, what could this liberate in our broader community, not just among those of us sheltering under the rainbow?
