Why not to say trans and non-binary and what to say instead

CW: mentions suicidal thoughts, misgendering, transphobia, mental health, exclusion, dysphoria, trans healthcare

Not the blog post I’ve been promising, but one that’s been requested by a couple of people.

This blog isn’t about correcting individual people’s language or labels. What it’s about is how we organise ourselves, and the words we use when we come together in visible groups, the messages we collectively give to cis people about who belongs where, and why it matters.

Nothing is ever as simple as a longer-than-i-wanted-it-to-be blog post can describe. I’m going to argue, though, that trans or trans+ are good enough umbrella terms, and, more, to the point, even if they’re not, “trans and non-binary” is not useful, and there’s a reason why many of us have been fighting against this terminology tooth and nail for many years and feel frustrated by its resurgence. It’s also why I used “trans and gender diverse” in my book title, even though I’m not entirely wedded to that term either, and “divergent” would probably have been more accurate.

Words rewrite history

Recently, I was delivering some LGBT+ competency training and I was asked two familiar questions: the first – why were trans people “added on” to LGBT+ when being gay is about sex? And the second, “wait, are you saying non-binary people are trans? I didn’t know!”

Cue me patiently explaining the history – that the word “gay” was once more inclusive, and being queer is a many-faceted thing that for many people, not just trans people, is about gender as well as sex. A butch lesbian once told me “butch is my gender, lesbian my sexuality” – you cannot separate the two when so many of us have a queer relationship with both.

We were always a part of this community, so the addition of the letters B&T as an act of “inclusion” created a false story – that bi and trans people were a late addition to an existing gay movement, erasing the fact that bi and trans people were integral (and often foundational) to the movement right from the start, and “gay” at one time meant us too.

And the same thing is happening with trans.

The history of trans labels

When Leslie Feinberg popularised the word “transgender” in the 90s its meaning was close to what non-binary means now, only perhaps even wider and more inclusive than non-binary has become. Feinberg was in no way a “binary” trans person, and zie used the term to include a very wide group of people. But over time, transgender became narrowed to mean trans men and women, or rather non-binary people got forgotten and excluded, and we needed a new word to include ourselves again.

For the record, many of us wanted that word to be genderqueer, not non-binary. I don’t like the word non-binary at all and for many reasons don’t want it as my label. But I accept this is what the majority settled on. Just like, back in the 90s a lot of WLW didn’t like the word lesbian and did not identify as lesbian, but we didn’t replace the L in LGBT for them.

When I came out as non-binary a decade ago, we were fighting for the right to access trans healthcare and be included in trans spaces. We were fighting to drop the godawful trans asterisk popularised by Sam Killerman, the cis guy who plagiarised the Genderbread person from trans people and talked over our community time and time again, becoming cis people’s go-to resources on learning about gender diversity. We needed not to be seen as a footnote, something separate. We needed people to understand that misgendering us mattered just as much as misgendering any trans person. That those of us who needed healthcare needed it as much as any trans person. That we weren’t something different and separate – that we were the trans community as much as anybody.

Meanwhile TERFs back then were telling the world that “true transsexuals” were okay (as long as they saw themselves as mentally ill and biologically the sex they were assigned as) but the rest of us – the transgenders – were the real problem, and sure enough we were getting backlash from some quarters within the community that we didn’t belong and were spoiling things for the real trans people with real needs and real gender dysphoria. We were the special snowflakes identifying as attack helicopters, and so on.

This us and them splitting of a movement into the “good ones” and the “unacceptable riff-raff” is of course a classic divide-and-conquer tactic.

No specific detriment

Then in 2015 the UK government stated:

The Equality Act 2010 protects people from discrimination if it arises from their being perceived as either male or female. We recognise that a very small number of people consider themselves to be of neither gender. We are not aware that that results in any specific detriment…

Trans men and women needed to be trans, but we were just doing it for kicks, was the underlying message. We didn’t need protection or inclusion like the real trans people. Although since then we’ve had one legal case that set a precedent to the contrary, let’s be clear that “non-binary is separate/different from trans” has legal implications for inclusion, healthcare and civil rights.

One real-world consequence of this was me going without a passport for a decade, with all the difficulties that entailed, and finally succumbing to one that misidentifies me.

Back in 2015, I was in a long-term relationship with a trans man. The reactions to us both coming out were starkly different. He was correctly gendered by our queer friends quickly, I was not. His trans man friends almost never got my pronouns right, and saw me either as a trans man in denial or a cis woman – many trans men still do. In other words, refusing to see me at all. Queer friends thought I was just jumping on my partner’s bandwagon, even though I was the one who’d been involved in trans activism and talking about my complicated gender for years and we came out within weeks of one another. He got support, I got pushback, it was that blatant a divide.

In seeing non-binary genders as different, more trivial, less in need of support or as suffering less difficulty than trans men and women, non-binary people get excluded from safety and care. The exact same thing happened to bi+ people, incidentally, which is why it transpires that bi+ people suffer worse health outcomes than lesbian and gay people. Exclusion harms. Stories about groups being less oppressed and therefore less in need of inclusion harm. When we internalise those stories, we can harm ourselves and each other too.

The psychological impact of your needs being dismissed

I really hear the non-transitioning non-binary people who exclude themselves from the word trans because they feel like they’re not as oppressed, or don’t suffer enough.

But here’s the thing. People did such a comprehensive job of making me feel like an inconvenience to the “real” trans community that I started to think the world would be better off without me even existing. I began to believe I was inconvenient to the cause of trans rights in exactly the same way bi and trans people had been made to feel inconvenient to the cause of gay rights, and edged out. In having my needs trivialised, I trivialised myself and that meant it became harder and harder to ask for what I needed, or even accept my needs were real and valid.

But none of that changed what I needed or the pain I felt in trying to make my needs smaller, e.g by not coming out to my partner’s wider family, by accepting “he” pronouns for a while at work when I decided to medically transition.

It took a long time for me to understand it’s important to all trans people to realise we have the right to exist as ourselves without assimilation, neat little boxes, and medicalisation. Non-binary people being fully part of this community gives everyone breathing space because nothing about trans experiences is binary. It dismantles the tyranny of “trans enough” that can leave everyone with a sense of imposter syndrome.

The last thing this community needs is more gates and gatekeepers.

But also, understanding non-binary people’s stated needs, whether for correct pronouns, somewhere safe to pee, or healthcare, are every bit as important and necessary as for trans men and women’s is a matter of life and death for many of us. I could so easily not still be here thanks to that belief that I was taking space I had no right to chipping away at my sense that I had could ask for things that I nevertheless profoundly needed.

If I don’t get to call myself trans, does the trans man who doesn’t want lower surgery? What about the one who doesn’t mind what pronouns he gets? The one who transitioned quietly and easily thanks to private health insurance and never experienced transphobia? The one who didn’t experience anything he could have called dysphoria, only euphoria?

If trans is a term only permissible for those who have it the toughest we are going backwards to the days when you only got to transition if you would not survive otherwise. We become defined by our suffering.

Newsflash: we should have the right to transition in any way we need if it will make our lives happier or more meaningful. We don’t owe anyone a narrative of suffering in order to get what we need to thrive.

The move from transsexual to transgender to trans* to trans to trans+

There was a reason the community had gone towards “transgender” and away from “transsexual” – the community as a whole were realising we weren’t all about surgery, that not all of us, even the most “binary” among us had identical needs and profiles that could neatly be spelled out by a medical pathway and underlined with a GRC. That it wasn’t for cis clinicians to make us into who we knew ourselves to be, but for us to self-determine who we were.  Transness is a mixed and complicated experience and each of our transitions is different, tailor made for us alone. But all of us probably do share the need to change something – clothes, pronouns, names, identity labels, documents, hair, bodies etc – in order to thrive.

And this is why people distancing themselves from the word trans can be so problematic if it goes beyond personal preference and into dictating umbrella terms. Not because everyone doesn’t have the right to determine their own personal labels, of course they do, but because “I’m not trans because…” so often misdefines and misunderstands the breadth and complexity of what “trans” is. It narrows the definition of trans in order to leave people outside of it, which can have the effect of excluding non-binary people from spaces they need to be included, or to problematise, medicalise or otherwise distance from the trans community.

For instance, every time someone says “I’m not trans because I’m not medically transitioning” I die a little inside, because that person just reduced trans people to a medical process, and it’s only a small step to reinforcing the validity of trans identities only if they have the correct surgeries. Which screws over a lot of disenfranchised people who don’t have access to, or don’t want, trans healthcare.

Trans+ works fine. Or trans and gender diverse/divergent. There are genuine and legitimate reasons for someone not to call themself trans (e.g. intersex, 2 spirit) but that doesn’t mean splitting off non-binary from trans is the answer.

I understand equally that we need to signal that non-binary people are fully included in our spaces because that’s not always a given – we haven’t always been sure of our welcome. At the ICTA Project I worked on through to last year we (most of the trans researchers were non-binary) favoured using “trans (including non-binary)” to be very clear about our inclusivity. But “trans and non-binary” doesn’t signal inclusion, but separation, in the way “men and trans men” wouldn’t be an inclusive phrasing, but “men, including trans men” would, or “cis and trans men” would.

Whose needs are greater here?

I’m prepared to be proved wrong, but I feel like the damage done to non-binary people excluded from the support of trans spaces, not counted in trans healthcare discussions, excluded from trans healthcare itself, and left out of trans legal/civil rights discourse outweighs the impact on non-binary people who don’t consider themselves trans of us vetoing the umbrella term “trans and non-binary”, which we’ve been trying to do relentlessly for a decade.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’ve yet to hear evidence that the same safety/civil rights imperatives are attached to the need for the specific terminology “trans and non-binary” to be used as the default umbrella term.

Someone’s right to choose what labels they want for themselves is essential, but it does not need to dictate what umbrella term should be used more generally, because no umbrella term will be perfect. For example, I choose genderqueer and trans as my personal labels, but I accept non-binary as a term that includes me, even though I dislike the word, and don’t think it’s helpful or fair to conceptualise trans men and women as “binary”.

Likewise, I see no great harm done to people when we accept trans as Leslie Feinberg intended “transgender” – an umbrella term that includes what we now call non-binary.

The growing use of “trans and non-binary” isn’t just about language: it teaches cis people that folks like me aren’t trans when we just spent a decade fighting hard to be recognised as part of this community. The real-world consequences are people taking non-binary identities less seriously and seeing our need for healthcare, accommodations and civil rights as less important. And that impacts our safety, mental health, and wellbeing.

Not cis, not trans, but a secret third thing?

I’m not a fan of binaries or dichotomies. But it’s hard to describe someone non-binary as definitively “not trans” without narrowing the definition of what trans means. People say cis/trans is an unwanted binary, but as cis only means not trans, let’s try saying “I’m neither queer nor not-queer” or “I’m neither bisexual nor not-bisexual” “I’m neither non-binary nor not non-binary” – sounds ridiculous huh?

It’s not a binary to say there are people who are trans and people who aren’t. Even though we can’t accurately measure where one ends and the other begins. We don’t need to – trans can be a land without borders, because if people need to belong here, then they do. It’s not a resource that will run out if too many people claim it, it’s not something that needs to be patrolled and guarded with high fences and “no entry without a permit” signs. It’s not exactly prime property to be located in at this juncture in history.

It is more than okay to not know if you’re cis or trans, or feel you live in the undefined borderlands between the two, but that’s a whole other thing that doesn’t require the drawing of new borders around your identity. The drawing of those borders only reinforces the “trans enough” narrative where people might feel they have to move faster than they want to or towards things they’re not sure of in order to prove their belonging and need of the safety of community. We don’t need anything to feed people’s queer imposter syndrome, which is also in infinitely available supply.

When trans people are one of the most scapegoated groups on the planet right now, I understand the need to disown the trans label, or to deny having the same difficult experiences that some trans people share. But rewriting our history and definitions, and talking over those of us in need of inclusion for our safety and wellbeing is not helpful.

By doing this, “trans” gets turned into the narrow little box it never was.