300 Reviews

For those who feel comfortable in one of two available boxes, the gender binary makes life easier. If you know who you are and who lights your fire, then you always know whether the person you’re interacting with at any given moment has firelighting potential. Each role is prescribed, waiting to be enacted again as it has been countless times before. The alternative is a world of constantly figuring people out—of entering situations that could mean anything and determining their meaning from within.

Sadly, the biggest problem with the gender binary is also the most ignored: it doesn’t exist. The notion of a pink/blue dichotomy is just an agreed-upon myth—a convenient fiction. The world is full of people who don’t fit: Women born male. Men born female. Androgynes who feel no allegiance, regardless of physicality. People born with ambiguous bodies, who must decide what role to inhabit. Even these categories are insufficient in the face of the diversity of human experience, which is rendered invisible and unacceptable by the insistence that only two valid roles exist.

The problem’s bigger than that, however. Those people who are comfortable living in one of the boxes? They’re still people living in boxes. They may not feel constrained by the roles they’ve been handed, but what if they hadn’t been handed roles? The unremarkable football player might have excelled at ballet. Your grandmother the quilter could have been an architect. That senator loves his wife, but enjoys being anally penetrated—just every once in a while.

For those of us who don’t fit into the binary, it just makes life harder, while even those who do fit are limited by it. The task of dismantling gender may seem insurmountable, but it’s worth working toward—not just for the misfits, but for everyone.

-Dustin L. Collins

Tags: an agreed-upon myth, boxes, draper, Dustin L. Collins, gender, gender binary, role, sex