“The whole point is that we're not supposed to look like anything”: non-binary (un)intelligibility and carving out space in gender's border-zones

Abstract

Non-binary people exist in a world in which the conditions for their existence are foreclosed by the dominant cultural frames, a world in which the human can only be understood through membership of one of the two binary gender categories of male and female. This article explores the ways that non-binary participants articulated their experiences of non-binary gender identification through Butler's concept of (un)intelligibility and Hale's idea of gender's borderzones. The participants exist within the discursive frame in which adhering to the binary gender system is a necessary condition for a liveable life. This article explores how those non-binary people who live within gender's border-zones are forced to develop new discursive tools to carve out space for their inclusion within the realm of the intelligible. Drawing on interviews conducted with self-identified non-binary participants, this article explores the way that participants negotiated their non-binary gender, by exploring the ways they are both included and excluded from discursive spaces due to their non-binary gender. This article explores the way that gender unintelligibility opens up space for the multiplicities, contradictions, and ambiguities of nonbinary experience, as well as how this same unintelligibility renders non-binary people vulnerable to violence. The violence articulated by the participants was specifically to do with their experiences of erasure-being included into the existing binary gender categories that do not adequately describe their experience-and physical or verbal abuse due to their exclusion from the binary gender system. This article argues that non-binary can be understood as a distinct gender category that has permeable borders, and that inclusion in this category through selfidentification has material consequences for non-binary people.

Behind Closed Doors: The Untold Challenges of Transgender and Nonbinary Graduate Students in Chemistry

“…52 As Nicolazzo has described, trans people may feel "compelled" to partially or fully cover their transness in response to "perceived or real threat" in an environment, responding to trans oppression with self-censorship. 1 Eris wanted to authentically express their identity through varying usage of she and they pronouns, but because the nature of nonbinary identity is unintelligible to many cisgender people, 53,54 she felt obligated to compromise on using one set of gendered pronouns against her wishes. Others chose to cover their trans identities entirely, including Kayden, who said they "talked about things other than being trans" in their personal statements because "they were just safer topics" to disclose.…”