Binary Gender

I keep thinking about my... relation? to the gender binary and feel like writing a post on it to maybe exorcise the habit (haha yeah right.) Anyway. I don't get it. Not only does it not apply to me, but I have a hard time understanding how it applies to other people. I understand that it does, somehow (otherwise why would we have binary trans people?) That was not always the case, though.

Until I was fifteen or so, I think I basically assumed the separate social classifications of "male" and "female" were devoid of any real, consistent meaning. We just kept them around as relics of a more patriarchal time in our society that we weren't quite comfortable getting rid of yet even if they were useless and divisive. As I got older, I eventually became aware that some people were attracted to people of the same sex (I didn't want to deal with the possibility that my sexual orientation made me part of a minority for awhile, though--thinking about sex by itself was troubling enough.) I also know I learned about trans people at some point, but none of that knowledge ever threatened to radically change my view of the world.

Keep in mind I was (and still am) kind of dense when it comes to societal ugliness that I don't like. I'm pretty good at blocking it out. Even when I started to think maybe there was something more than their bodies that made men and women different from each other, when I checked with my mom nothing she said could convince me (I chalked it all up to different hormones, which were still just part of the body even if they do affect how you think. I still think this way, actually.) But one day my mom brought home a BEM test she'd learned about in one of her classes--normally used to measure traits that were considered masculine or feminine in people to see how well they can relate to others (the closer to the middle, androgynous zone both parties in a couple land, the easier it'd be for them to have a healthy relationship. Or something like that.) So I took it out of curiousity. And I landed right in the androgynous zone, leaning slightly masculine.

It felt validating. It felt right. Perhaps I blocked out the idea that there was any meaning to the distinction between men and women because some part of me knew that the whole thing didn't apply to me, and if I acknowledged that then I would have to acknowledge that I was fundamentally different from everyone I knew of at the time. The test didn't convince me I was gender neutral, it made me feel like it was safe to explore who I really was. That I wasn't just some sort of anomaly.

I didn't settle on the words "gender neutral" right away--I just knew I was nonbinary in some way. But I did some research on gender and found the writing of other nonbinary people and figured myself out eventually. I understand my gender (or perhaps lack thereof) now--but what exactly makes other people male or female still eludes me. I don't understand, nor do I think I'll ever totally understand.

That said, even if I don't understand why people are men or women, I do of course know that it's not my place to question their identities (just like it's not their place to question mine) and that I need to respect them by using the correct pronouns and taking their word for it when they tell me how they identify and what their sexual orientations are. And that both of those things are small parts of who they are--in the end, we're all human. We may have different genders (and have faced radically different formative factors in life based on how people perceive us regarding gender, race, class, ability, and all kinds of other things we can't really help about ourselves), but it's important to focus on the commonalities. I will probably never understand why other people are male or female, but that's perfectly all right, and it won't stop me from loving and respecting them.