Why Are Nonbinary People Like That?

What we lose when gender deviance goes mainstream

Lately, nonbinary people have been getting the heat. I can’t even say the words “I’m nonbinary” without dying a little inside. Let me tell y’all, the nonbinary closet is a scary place to be – filled with Amazon Basics femboy thigh-highs and EXISTENCE IS RESISTANCE tees. In seriousness, there are a few reasons I’m reticent to rep my nonbinary tea:

1. The flag is ugly,

2. “Doll” has a nicer ring to it,

3. The identity has become associated with social justice warriors who are anti-deodorant, pro-cancellation, and the least fun person at the party. All due respect, but that is not my tribe.

It kinda makes sense that we share a color scheme with Planet Fitness because we are lowkey the budget gym of the LGBTQ+.

Several years ago, I was drunk at a party during a visit to my college town, and a transmasc friend-of-a-friend got mad at me for calling them “queen.” The exchange stuck with me because it felt like a summation of my frustrations with parts of our community – a pedantic, bad-faith, self-involved approach to identity that relies on discursive policing as a form of visibility. Beyond that, since when can nonbinary people not be queens?!? Mind you, I don’t call anyone, of any gender, “king.” You’re a queen or nothing – and some of you hoes are nothing!

There’s a strain of white nonbinary that people love to loathe. They are usually named moss, moth, mud, or some other terrestrial lifeform. To me, these names are less indicative of a gender identity and more a reflection of how they REALLY love frogs.

They are aesthetically, if not actually, from Seattle. Terminally online and vaguely chronically ill, as their Bluesky bio states.

In fact, their social media and dating app profiles are inundated with identitarian categorizations, dicing themselves into neat, bite-sized pieces: nonbinary/neurodivergent/polyamorous/pansexual/marxist/pagan/type 1 bipolar/type 2 diabetic/left-handed-but-jerk-with-my-right. Like, damn bitch, are you going to leave anything to the imagination?!

I find this incessant impulse toward tribal identity affiliation ironic for a group of people who supposedly are looking to escape discrete, black-and-white labels. But I think it’s a symptom of a generation that grew up online, without real community, trying to find their ingroup however they can.

I have been watching And Just Like That lately. Che Diaz and Rock feel like the logical endpoint to this new wave nonbinarism. They are unintentional taxidermies of everyone’s least favorite they/them. Of course, Che is sex positive to a fault and dogmatically woke. Of course, Rock’s idea of formalwear is a tuxedo shirt, and they passed up an Elite modeling contract because it wasn’t gender-affirming. Like… of course. Their existence is a tacit admission that nonbinary people are, at least in the cultural imagination, really annoying.

I don’t mean to imply that cunty nonbinary divas don’t exist (hello, you’re looking at one.) Many of the nonbinary people I have met in New York are ethereal, supernatural beings. If we were in ancient Mesopotamia, they would be heralded as prophets capable of tapping into both the divine feminine and the divine masculine. Even today, we possess a powerful aura of mysticism, levitating in the back of the Ki Room (the space in a warehouse party where the music is quiet enough for you to sit and gab) with a ketamine-induced telekinetic presence.

So, how did nonbinary people become the ugly stepchild of the LGBTQ? I think it started with the pandemic, when more people than ever found space to explore their gender in isolation. You might remember the New York Times reporting that “Everyone Is Gay on TikTok” in 2020, as the pendulum swung toward gender expansivism, and suddenly it was cool for straight men to wear skirts (see my piece on straggots.) As much as I cringed at these Temu transgenders, I prefer that cultural environment to the one we find ourselves in now.

Conservatives hold up nonbinary people as poster children of the LGBTQ+ mafia. We are easy targets because our identities are the least legible in the dominant gender matrix. Binary trans people can rely on a passive defense that they are just trying to live their lives, like anyone else. However, when Tucker Carlson squawks about foot soldiers of the gender abolitionist movement, he’s not too far off with nonbinary people – we are draft evading gender. I am literally in guerilla warfare, napalming my confused grandparents with pronoun bombs.

But as much scrutiny as we face from outsiders, the in-crowd is just as critical. I’ve been in more than one bathroom filled with dolls rolling their eyes at the nonbinary industrial complex and joking about how “his pronouns are they/them.” Honestly, I don’t blame them. Don’t cancel me, y’all, but I’m not sure if I subscribe to “nonbinary people don’t owe you androgyny.” Idk.. I think Sock owes me a little androgyny, and also last month’s rent. To fight one axiom with another: transition is a verb.

To be 100000% clear, I’m not a transmedicalist, and transition does not have to involve hormones. In fact, one of the most exciting parts of nonbinary identity is being able to mix and match gendered expressions to create your own weird ass build-a-bear. That is gender liberation praxis. What doesn’t strike me as praxis is septum-pierced leftist guys who start using he/they pronouns because he/they learned that gender is a social construct in Sociology 101. Like, okay sis, do your big one…

So yes, I dabble in nonbinaryphobia. But truthfully, I’m not in the business of policing genders. I’m just trying to explain the kernel of spite that underlies these jokes. When you identify as nonbinary, which sits under the transgender umbrella, you align yourself with a group of people who have undergone unimaginable suffering to realize their true self. They’ve had to kill relationships with family and friends because of transphobia, and – what I found most difficult – kill off the biggest transphobe, the one who lives inside you.

Transition is a mindfuck. You are blindly stumbling toward a destination that does not exist. All the while, any number of external and subconscious forces tell you that this is the biggest mistake of your life, you are running away from your problems, and you will regret it. In my darker moments, I still have a cryptic voice that whispers to me, once you snap out of the delusion, you will wake up deformed and infertile in a nightmare of your own making.

Beyond my internalized shit, I have a constant tinnitus of anxiety ringing in my ears, ever conscious that I am the only transgender person in most public spaces (outside of Bushwick) and an automatic target for violence. Under that backdrop, I think some trans people bristle a little at how easily accessible our identity has become.

I’m not trying to gatekeep, but rather point out the structural issue with a word that is defined by what it negates. It says a lot about what we aren’t and nothing about what we are, which isn’t very useful when gender is so unique and profoundly individual. It makes sense that our language for gender is so primitive – the term nonbinary only surfaced in the mid-1990s – but the ambiguity leaves everything open to interpretation. The subjectivity is ripe for caricatures.

Even with my qualms, I’m not sure I would want it any other way. Ambiguity can also be a safe house. As much as I have railed against our community’s representation, I might be the fakest nonbinary of them all.

Allow me to explain: most days, I am uncertain about my gender. Gender fluidity, like all liquids, takes the shape of its container. I unconsciously don a more masculine presentation in more traditional settings, like around my work and family, and live my true transsexual fantasy when I’m surrounded by queers. I struggle to define my gender even when I try, so I appreciate that the label allows my essence to speak for itself.

But can that luxury be a crutch? If I were free of my past, my internalized transphobia, and my anxieties about work and family life, would I be a full-blown trans woman? Would I change my name? I think I might, which is a much less fun story than the transcendental, inexplicable genderbending cuntress narrative I’ve bestowed upon myself – that I’m just too sexy and ethereal to be boxed in. What if my box is invisible, like grey matter, the borders defined by a lack thereof? That might be the real gag of being nonbinary: not that we’ve transcended gender, but that we’re haunted by it — forever circling its perimeter like ghosts who can’t quite let go.

These are the nuanced, illegible, complicated parts of gender deviance. As nonbinary identity entered the mainstream, that complexity was flattened into sock-and-septum memes. If I’m being honest, my cheap jokes and caustic sarcasm are not an attempt to define who is nonbinary – they’re a grief response. I’m mourning what we lose when our most private reckonings become public performance art. But maybe that's what happens when the ineffable gets translated for mass consumption. The mystery dies a little, even as more people get to live.