Nonbinary Non-Defined
Look, I know it’s confusing. How could it not be? People are openly talking about one of the most taboo subjects in human history.
Everyone’s got an opinion. Whether they see it as complex or in simple black-and-white terms, they all adamantly believe they’re right because, well damn, it’s so obvious.
So lemme tell ya from a true insider’s perspective: most of y’all are equally right and equally wrong. Because most of y’all are talking about grapes and marbles as if they’re interchangeable.
Tell that to anyone who’s ever chomped down on a piece of sand-and-scrap-glass thinking it was a squishy fruit.
Let’s take it down to the bare bones.
Before we can discuss nonbinary and transgender, we must needs define “binary.” As is zeros and ones. Yes or no. Right or wrong. Up or down. No other facets may intercede, no gray area can exist.
Mankind loves the binary model. Humans will fold, spindle, and mutilate anything they come across that does not fit neatly into this or that, full stop. Tomatoes have to be fruit because somebody who-knows-how-long-ago unilaterally decided that all edibles grown on vines must needs to be called fruit. A binary decision that resulted in hundreds of millions of people slathering squished processed fruit on their hamburgers without realizing it. I guess that’s not such a bad thing after all; at least ketchup paved the way for guacamole. I do like avocado on my burgers.
Still, it does illustrate one of those facts that make people uncomfortable. Tomatoes look, taste, and act like veggies but are assigned as fruit at birth. An AFAB variation.
Peanuts have an even worse problem, don’t they? They grow like nuts and crunch like nuts and even have “nuts” in their name, but they’re legumes. Why? Because somebody a few thousand years ago unilaterally decided that laboratorially speaking, they’re closer to alfalfa than almonds.
Don’t break your brain on that, okay? Just let it go as a “because, onaccounta, due-to-the-fact” binarism. Someone obsessed with minutia decided at some point in history that a particular set of specifications must needs be the final word on crunchy classifications, and there you go. End of discussion. It need not make sense to us lowly munchers. We don’t get to make the rules.
And that, my friends, is what binary is really all about. Rules. Regulations. Conventions, rubrics, dictums, set in stone by anonymous ancestors. Various somebody or somebodies decreed a vegetable is a fruit onaccounta that’s what some other rule said, and rules are sacrosanct. Hallowed. Inviolable, unchallengeable. Onaccounta… they are. Case closed.
Which makes binary-ness bureaucracy, doesn’t it? For as Thomas Sowell once said, “You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that to a bureaucrat procedure is everything and outcome is nothing.” (emphasis added).
So let’s extend that to people.
The vast majority of homosapiens function with a bureaucratic, binary perspective. Whether they play by the rules or not, they know the rules. Case closed, discussion over, gavel pounded, proofs not in evidence adjudged immaterial. Ergo, youse is either a boy or a girl according to the rule of genitalia, which is a good rule. A fair rule. Like the wag who protested learning a new code during WWII—"What’s wrong with our old code? We’ve been using it for twenty years!”—everybody knows and is perfectly comfortable with the genitalia rule.
Except, alas, one-size-fits-all doth not—cannot possibly or logically—fit all. As disturbing as it may be, one size may fit many, even most, but not some, even though those somes are an integral part of the all.
Non-torturedly put: some people are not either a boy or a girl. Some people look, act, and taste like vegetables, yet are tomatoes. Some grow and crunch like a nut but are actually the fruit or seed of a dicotyledonous plant.
To a bureaucrat, those persons require special handling, classification, documentation. And yet they’re really just another form (or breed, as my mind sees it) of human being.
I won’t try to stretch those analogies any further. You get the idea. The fact that all of nature does not fit neatly into the limited categories of long-past limited intellects doth not render them invalid.
I am nonbinary. To many—perhaps most… mayhaps even other nonbinary folk—that means I want to dress and/or present myself as either both or neither boy nor girl. But being nonbinary, I kinda see that as a bureaucratic attempt to binarify my reality.
Sure, I’ve always longed for my outside to somehow match my inside. It’s been a seven-decade irritation to look girl and sense, respond, think boy. Not feel, mind you—I don’t feel girl or boy. That would make me transgender, according to the rules. Which we all know are irrefutable.
Appearance and physical comfort aside, my life has always revolved more around my inside than out. I see spectrums of choices rather than black and white, possibilities and circumstances where others see right and wrong. I twinge with dual sensibilities and wield the kind of arrogance that only manifests from using both male and female thought processes, whether successively or in tandem. Bitch/bastard as one; mensch on the other side of that coin as tomato-peanut paste.
That’s nonbinary.