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Moving beyond the gender binary is not
the same thing as requiring everyone
to identify as non-binary.
I think that we're in this moment right now where people
receive this language of gender neutrality as erasing
their right to be a woman or a man or a kind of new era
of political correctness-- and I do that in scare quotes--
where people are not allowed to preserve
their right, their God-given right, to be a man or woman.
And that's not what moving beyond the gender binary is.
You can still be a man if you're a man.
You can still be a woman if you're a woman.
But what we're saying is that manhood and womanhood should
not be defined in opposition, and that actually man is
so much more tremendous than just not woman and woman is
so much more expansive than just not man and that man and woman,
rather than being the only two options,
are rather two of an infinity of options.
Think of it like two stars in a galaxy.
We wouldn't say that there's only two stars.
We would acknowledge that there's the galaxy.
There's this phrase that people here, men are from Mars,
women are from Venus.
I think that's it.
I don't really remember if that's the planets
that they assigned them to.
And I always love that phrase because then
that means all the other planets are reserved for us,
we non-binary people.
There's an acknowledgment there that there
are multiple genders.
So moving beyond the gender binary
is just about moving towards an acknowledgment of multiplicity
when it comes to gender and recognizing
that trying to filter people into one of two categories
doesn't actually work.
I think that when I was younger, I
learned that I didn't have the luxury to just exist.
And when you're told that you're wrong simply for existing,
there is one of two directions you can go.
The first is you believe other people,
and you spend your entire life trying to disappear yourself.
And the second is that you say that's messed up,
and actually I deserve to exist.
And some people want to call that activism,
but I just call that existence.
I live as myself unapologetically,
and I'm trying and striving for a world
where we can manifest the kind of life
that we want for ourselves without experiencing
persecution.
And I think that for me often what
we call activism is just empathy for other people
that when I see other people struggling, it's not like, wow,
I'm going to be an ally to those other people
because I understand that at a fundamental level
if I live in a world where other people are suffering,
then I too am suffering and that until everyone is free,
I'm not free.
And I think that it's just about basic decency, isn't it?
It's not just about saying these people
over there, the activists.
It's about saying all of us have an obligation to one another,
and all of us have to actually join arms with one another
and recognize that we're stronger together.
I don't believe in singularity.
I don't want to be pinned down.
There's not one book.
It's all the books.
I'm such a nerd that in school when they would ask us
what magical power do you want, I
would say the ability to touch a book
and to have imbibed its knowledge.
And I would have these fantasies of just walking down
the library just going like this and then being ha, ha, ha,
I'm smart.
And I still to this day read more than anyone.
I literally just on my iPad will have six books
that I'm reading concurrently.
So I love books, so it's hard to pin down one.
But I would say one of the books that has really
shaped me today is Susan Stryker's book of Transgender
History.
And that book for me is so important
because I feel like so often people mistake me as new.
They're constantly like where did you
come from, this new millennial fad of non-binary?
And I'm like you just don't know your history because actually
there have been people like me on Earth for thousands
of years, and that recognition was
what I got from that book of I'm actually
part of a legacy that's greater than myself.
And through history there's a kind of intimacy
where you begin to feel less lonely because there might not
be people who look like or think like
or acting like you in that moment,
but they were there before.
And that thing that you feel most deeply insecure about,
someone else felt deeply insecure
about that a while ago.
And I think that that gave me possibility.
And so I think when I'm feeling impossible,
which is a feeling that I often have or are made to feel,
I return to history and in particular that book.
I just have it on my bookshelf, and I touch it
like a magical power.
And I remember that there are people before me
who have resisted so that I could be here today.
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