Soapboxing: F*ck Your Gender Dichotomy
What it really means to be non-binary — and how gender got divided in the first place. #GenderNation
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Hi! My name is Alok and I’m non-binary, which means I don’t identify as a man or a woman. What is that? That’s a gender nonconforming person who's making me uncomfortable because of my own insecurities. It’s okay. Let’s call it names so we feel better about our own repressed desires. Look at it! Even though society encourages individuality, non-binary people like me are punished for daring to defy conventions and be ourselves. Each one of these is what we call a dichotomy and they are everywhere. So how did we get here? Once upon a time in a land far, far away there were white dudes messing up again, LOL. So there was this guy named Rene Dis-car-tes. It’s Descartes. Well this guy was widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy. Right now I’m really into the idea of dualisms, which will one day become dichotomies. My favorite has to be the mind-body divide. It’s great. Descartes… Day-cart. Who lived in the Netherlands, just happened to come on the scene as the Dutch empire started to expand its colonies across the entire world. Good timing René. Convenient that a philosophy of the mind-body divide emerged at a time when Descartes's enlightenment developed on the backs of exploited black and brown people in the global south. Because people of color just have bodies and not minds. Let’s call this one Syria. I like that. It’s got a nice ring to it. This is going to be Egypt. Algeria. Hey excuse me. That’s my world. What? No! Listen, the world is far too complicated and nuanced to fit into two oppositional categories only. We live in a culture that measure people’s worth, not by who they are, but rather who they are not. It’s always bad until proven good. This was because our individualistic society is really egocentric. The problem is we tend to associate things that are similar to us as good and things that are different from us as bad. This teaches us that difference is something that’s morally wrong, not just another expression of the infinite diversity of the world. In our patriarchal society, women and femmes are taught from a young age that we have to be beautiful otherwise we are just regarded as disposable and ugly. We learn from an early age that our survival and happiness is linked to how desirable we are to men. Women and femmes don’t have the privilege to be evaluated by our ideas or personality because people are too busy commenting on our appearances. The beautiful ugly dichotomy is so powerful and so insidious, it finds its way into the minds of many people, no matter how they identify. Take for example recently Caitlyn Jenner, a trans advocate, told transwomen that they should care about beauty because society is just so uncomfortable with men in dresses to which I say, “Why should trans people have to look like cisgender people in order to be worthy of respect?” The only thing we should have to pass as is ourselves but sometimes they make it seem like we have to go through a security pat down just to pee. It’s no secret that humans used to think some things that are actually very wrong are totally right like… What is right and what is wrong? The essential soundtrack to human progress. Now on one compact disk. The thing is, as time goes on, we learn more about science and about ourselves and that gives us a greater respect for the wild complexity of everything. Identify the dichotomies in your life and commit to working through them. Don’t be afraid to be confused or to not have all the answers. Difference is strength. Soon you’ll find that the world is super textured and layered and there’s actually enough room to respect how weird we actually all are.














