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None of the above: Moving beyond the gender binary
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Thank you Australia for at least unlocking this binary
gender gate.
Three cheers, uh, perhaps one cheer, for Australia. As this astute piece in Bitch Magazine explains, Australia is considering adding a third option to the gender category on official forms. The option to choose intersex would be added to male and female. Nice, I think. But only a start. While it’s huge to open up the gender options to folks who feel they don’t fit clearly into the male or female “boxes,” there are far more options than just male, female, or intersex. In fact, intersex is a technical term for folks who have biological features of both the male and female sex. So there might only be a tiny group of folks who feel they fit into that intersex category.
Like the article’s author, I think that we need to move towards thinking of gender as a continuum. There are so many different ways that folks label themselves, and ultimately I think that these labels all fall along a broad gender continuum.
Think of our sons who play with dolls. Our daughters who play with trucks. Our female partners who work in law enforcement. Our male partners who work as nurses. Not that one’s play or vocation dictates one’s gender identity. But, were society more able to think of gender as something that falls along a continuum as opposed to a dichotomous variable, I think we’d all be in a better place and perhaps folks wouldn’t be so prone to freak out when the above-mentioned examples occur. There would be so many possible identities for us to inhabit comfortably. A continuum makes space for everyone as opposed to shoving many folks, uncomfortably, into two very narrow boxes.
None of the above, actually (Bitch Magazine), Male, Female, Other,
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