The Color of Nonbinary

Photo by Memento Media on Unsplash

A young person in my family has been cycling through identities for the past several years. I logged onto Facebook yesterday to see if she's outgrown this habit. No word on her pronouns, but her profile picture says it all: Pasty, pudgy, pouty, lipstick in a garish shade, Crayola-colored hair. This is what “nonbinary” looks like.

Male-to-female trans people want to be (or feel like they already are) something that exists in nature: females. Female-to-male trans people, likewise, aspire to be males—a known entity. Nonbinary people, however, want to be something wholly invented. A not-male, not-female being—some sexless lifeform that, while presumably human, does not exist in nature. The aspirations of the nonbinary rival those of “otherkin,” members of an Internet subculture who see themselves as “a dragon, a lion, a fox” or an elf—even if schools and clinics take the former marginally more seriously. Yet the nonbinary aesthetic arguably strays further into fantasy than even these.

Nonbinary, we’re told, is neither female nor male. Not pink. Not blue. No vagina. No penis. No Barbies. No trucks. No thankless domestic labor. No grunting and banging on things with a wrench. How, then, to signal one’s membership in this mythical class? There’s no point in being trans, after all, unless you tell the world. Wear unisex t-shirts? Have medium-length hair?

No. Nonbinary, it seems, is more than sexlessness, or if you prefer, “genderlessness.” It is something colorful and faddish, something made possible by Manic Panic, Hot Topic, titanium and ink. It is electric blue, Divine Wine, a jaded pout, an undercut, a septum ring, a face tattoo. It is a product of capitalism, of affluence, of modernity. It is a product of its time.

The nonbinary person’s arbitrary but highly specific look calls into question the entire trans project. It reveals, more plainly than any cross-gender identity, the inherent contradictions in the transgender movement.

Trans people are “born in the wrong body.” But where are these sexless, blue-haired bodies some were meant to inhabit? Indeed, how are brains assigned to bodies, ordinarily, and how does that process go awry?

“Trans people have existed forever.” But who was the nonbinary person, historically? You know, before she became the college-educated, “neurodivergent” progressive of five years ago, the one with predictable positions on racial equity, vaccines and Ukraine? Queer theory admits its own “political valence.” As my friend Corinna asks, what nonbinary person is “right of center?”

Trans identity is physical. It’s mapped on the brain, a medical condition that requires “life-saving” treatment. Or is it a form of “self-expression?” A “[deconstruction]” of “gender stereotypes?” An “intentional rebellion” designed to “disrupt cisheteronormativity?”

If classic transsexualism appealed to skeptics with its similarity to homosexuality—its appeal to endocrine anomalies, its aspiration to love and live well, its call for tolerance of natural difference—queer theory, and the bespoke genders it birthed, burn all that to the ground. Identity becomes not innate, but “performative.” Not a glitch in sex development, but a way to “problematize” sex itself. Not an internal experience, but “self-expression.” Not a way to live one’s best life unperturbed, but a way to perturb. Something “subversive,” a call to “[tear] down the totems of established thought,” a political position.

If it is any of these, it is a choice—not a class membership, not a frontier for civil rights, not a medical condition requiring state-funded “life saving care.”

The trans movement needs to get its story straight. Nonbinary people are pulling back the curtain.