The gender binary is a publicist who never stops working. It would have you believe that gender non-conformity poses a bigger threat than actual emergencies like climate change. That nonbinary people have access to massive power, even though the majority of us can’t go outside without being attacked. That it’s our fault for being attacked.
That this is about our bodies, not their bigotry. Our presentations, not their policies. That our attackers are just “ignorant,” not “intentional.” That we are new, even though we have always been here.
There is a staggering disconnect between how we are represented and the reality of our lives. This is calculated. They manufacture tropes about us to sanction our disappearance.
Mainstream discourse would have you believe that we are hyper-sensitive “snowflakes” who want attention. The enormity of our struggle is reduced to a single-issue: pronouns. The diversity of our community is collapsed to whiteness. The severity and ubiquity of harassment we experience is completely ignored. The goal has always been our elimination.
They won’t tell you about the colonists who attempted genocide on gender variant communities across the world. About the cross-dressing laws that threw us in prison for existing in public. About the doctors who tortured us to “fix” us into the fabricated gender binary. Incarcerated us in psych wards claiming that we were “delusional” for saying we were neither man nor woman.
Isn’t it ironic that they accuse us of making up our identities when they have had slurs for us for hundreds of years? This has never been about language, it’s always been about who gets to exist. Nonbinary people are only allowed to be spoken, not speak. We are objectified, reduced to metaphor, debate, thing. They make us things, so that you forget to grieve our lives. In order to maintain the colonial fairytale that there are only two genders, non-binary people cannot exist.
And yet, here I am. And yet, here we are. Everyday miracles. In our survival is a viable alternative to a world structured by coercion and conformity. Another way to love, another way to live. Nonbinary life is sacred. Fight for it.
