when i say i want to “end the gender binary,” i am not saying that i want everyone in the world to be nonbinary nor that being a woman or a man is a problem. what i want is for “man” and “woman” to be understood as only two of millions of potential ways of being. i want all gendered & agendered ways of being to have access to the same legitimacy, safety, compassion & beauty, i want the category “woman” to exist without an oppositional relationship to that of “man” (and vice verse), i want “man” to not be regarded as mutually exclusive with “woman,” i want “woman” & “man” to contain multitudes & not be homogenized & flattened. identifying as a man or a woman isn’t about “reinforcing the gender binary.” the way that we perpetuate the gender binary is more about the systems of value we uphold & how we treat each other than the particular words that we affix to our experiences. this is why i believe that all of us — regardless of how we identify & navigate the world — have a stake in ending the gender binary! it’s a system of power that values its reproduction over our realities, its supremacy over our stories, its universality over our uniqueness. i want a world where gender is respected as a story, not just a word. one where we understand that it means a fundamentally different thing for one person to be a woman than another, where we recognize that there is no one way to be a man. when nonbinary & gender non-conforming people challenge the gender binary it is not because we want to police or restrict others, rather it is because we want to create a world that values difference, complexity, and infinite transformation.
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