The purpose of this brief meditation, which is acting as a bit of a seed text, as it were, of my book Nonbinary Life: An Autotheory (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), is quite singular: to offer the provocation that “nonbinary” is not a kind of gender—it is gender’s abolition.
Often, it is believed and assumed that nonbinary falls under the oft-named trans umbrella, a subsection of a somewhat nebulous blob of gender-benders of differently angled bends. Nonbinary serves as another name for a specific identity in the “alphabet soup” of queerness, perhaps the latest, most faddish version, replete with a sartorial code, appropriate pronouns, and some neon colored hair. But perhaps there ought to be an altogether different valence through which nonbinary is understood. I would like to think that a different theorization of nonbinary is both more apt and more apropos to how nonbinary subjectivates the social life of those who enact its work.
Thus, nonbinary—and nonbinary life, as argued in Nonbinary Life: An Autotheory—indexes something much more. Nonbinary is so much more than just how someone identifies, or how someone dresses, or the cool, edgy non-gendered name someone uses, like “Z” or something. (Though, come to think of it, Z would be a cool name.) But to write, to think, to imagine, to agitate, to tremor through relationality and spatiality without regard for gender is what might be called a nonbinary way of life. Rather than possessed (“third”) gender identity, nonbinary is articulated here as much closer to a vitiation of gender as an apparatus and regime that demands proper adherence to protocols of behavior, ideology, belief, relation, and sense of self. Nonbinary, then, marks a dissent from gender, such that it is decidedly not a gender identity and, instead, a mode of being and worldly inhabitation that insists on the dissolution of regulation and policing, which gender—as a carceral mechanism of imposed personhood, about which I’ll say more momentarily—epitomizes. This is the nonbinary of which we speak here.
But let us be clear: nonbinary life is paltry and uninteresting if it is only not-man, not-woman; that is, if nonbinary life is only an echo of the binary, a shadow cast by its terms rather than a world unmoored from them. I wonder what kind of “life” that is, one that merely negates without overflowing into other possible modes of being. What, then, fills that chasm with something else, something unanticipated, something that cannot be captured by existing logics? Do not let them say to you, incorrectly and misguidedly, that nonbinary is “just” rejecting gender for some faddish reason, as if what we are suggesting is simply and straightforwardly the opposite of the binary, or a third category to be slotted into the existing framework. Nonbinary life is a refusal of the very logic that underpins gender, a gesture of fixity and categorization, itself. It is a refusal to accept that gender is inevitable, natural, or necessary. And when it is not inevitable, think of the pantheon of relations, embodiments, and unfixed intimacies that we can now move through, be held by, revel in.
To say nonbinariness is a life is to affirm its weight—it is not merely an identity among others or a footnote to transness. It is a critical insistence that the category of gender itself is suspect. Nonbinary life as we’ve thought through it here asserts that nonbinariness is not just a refusal of man or woman, but a dismantling of the grammar that makes those positions intelligible, a dismantling of gender as such. It aims at the unworking of gender as a schema that has long been tethered to regimes of legibility, violence, and governance. Nonbinary life is thus not an identity to be respected but a politics to be pursued—a politics that seeks to abolish the conditions under which “gender” becomes necessary, desirable, here in any capacity.
What aids in arriving at this definition of nonbinary is, of course, a reconceptualized definition of gender itself. Surely on the political right there is the well-worn biological and binary definition of gender, that gender is simply and linearly a social expression of sex, deviation from which is an affront to whatever deified entity has been given the authority to adjudicate such matters. This is the definition of 47’s order to “restore biological truth” to the government and, by extension, the nation. This also bears similarities to the logics of TERFs, who attempt to locate a real Real of women in a classificatory subject who “produces large gametes.” But even outside of those in political opposition to those on the left and who generally support and advocate for gender expansivity take a route that is not quite taken here. Some, even many, of my comrades think about gender in expansive ways yet nevertheless define it as an internal identity—or a specific, classifiable identity more generally—with the assumption that there is a stable “something” inside that precedes the world’s hail: a gender one discovers, names, and then asks the world to honor. The ethical demand, then, becomes recognition: to be seen correctly, to be addressed with the proper pronouns, to have institutions “catch up” to the truth of the self. Gender, in this account, is treated as a kind of interior sovereignty—self‑owned, self‑authenticated—whose politics is largely a politics of respect, visibility, and inclusion. On this front, gender is something that is simply true about a person (or, unfortunately, nonhuman animals, monstrous otherworldly entities, even inanimate objects too, to my deep chagrin) and needs to be respected. While this isn’t bad, per se, it nevertheless leaves gender intact as the very grammar of personhood, reinscribing the apparatus that harms by asking only that it be kinder or more correctly applied. It risks mistaking better management for liberation, and taking administrative legibility (the checkbox, the marker, the sanctioned category) as the horizon of freedom.
It is more accurate to say that gender is not primarily what one is but what one is forced to be legibly: a routing protocol, a sorting practice, a compulsory social paperwork that precedes you, catches you, and assigns you a place. Put differently, gender is less an inner truth than an outer technique, less essence than logistics (though it also must be noted that the goal is not to make gender more essence and inner truth; this comes with its own pitfalls and essentialist failings). This is why “gender” functions less as an interior identity than as administrative infrastructure—an everyday technology of governance that sorts, surveils, and manages people through forms, IDs, institutional protocols, and the banal coercions of legibility. And it comes from a history of coloniality, white supremacy, and cisnormativity.
Gender’s administrative life—its checkboxes, its forced declarations, its protocols of legibility—is not an unfortunate add‑on to an otherwise neutral social order; it is a colonial technique of world‑making, a way modernity learned to sort bodies into governable units and then pretend that sorting is nature. As María Lugones puts it with the kind of bluntness that should make us shudder: “As Eurocentered, global capitalism was constituted through colonization, gender differentials were introduced where there were none”—which is to say that “gender” does not arrive as description but as imposition, an export of rule that retrofits worlds into the colonial archive’s preferred binaries. And because coloniality is not merely historical but ongoing, gender’s “truth” is continually re-secured by the classificatory appetite that empire trained into the mundane: the demand that people be locatable, nameable, administrable—so that governance can proceed smoothly and violence can be filed under procedure.
Gender is also, inseparably, white supremacist. This is the case not simply because white people do gender “badly” or harmfully, but because whiteness has historically required gender as part of its civilizational sorting, its way of deciding who counts as properly human and who must be rendered aberrant, fungible, or ungenderable. The binary is neither universal nor inevitable but a racial technology—one that must be enforced precisely because it is not “naturally” there. And this is why whiteness panics at nonbinary, because it is more than this “new identity”; perhaps it emerges as methodological sabotage: to refuse gender is to refuse a pillar of the racial order’s common sense, the very “natural law” look that whiteness depends on to keep its categories from looking like what they are—statecraft, not truth. If nonbinary life is gender’s abolition, it is also (and must be) an abolitionist disturbance of the white supremacist fantasy that the world has always already been neatly divided this way.
Gender, at base, is not the hero we want or need. It is, in so many ways, the villain who has convinced us that it carries our best interest in mind.
On these grounds, nonbinary is decidedly not another kind of gender or a muted place in the middle of binaristic genders. Nonbinary as a kind of gritty consciousness and way of life, as it were, asks us to think of it as a mode of non-prescriptive coalition. This consciousness is more than merely being knowledgeable about the purported class that one is or occupies. Such a position is always arbitrary and developed, regulated, and imbued with meaning by a capitalist system, so we are not to end there, venerating a position that supposedly makes us like one another. A radical consciousness, in this iteration of its relation to nonbinary, might not be that we are all nonbinary, identifying with it and possessing similar sartorial styles; for nonbinary to be a kind of coalitional, radical disaffection from gender comes not from this identification with one another as nonbinary but from a disaffection from, desire for the vitiation of, and irreverence toward gender that nonbinary, in this arrangement of the world, names. In other words, one need not be or look the same as other enbies, nor feel one’s (non)gender in the same way; one need only to move and move and move away from gender as the grounds on which you move toward others.
