Nonbinary People Are Not a Historically Oppressed Group
LGBT is a very useful term that brings together many people with important civil rights claims. Classifying nonbinaries as having similar claims to gays & trans people threatens to dilute the concept
The gay rights movement, which in the form we know it is probably a bit more than 50 years old here in the United States, has come a long way. Obviously it has won major legal victories, such as the Obergefell case holding there is a constitutional right to same sex marriage, the Oncale case holding that same-sex sexual harassment is actionable as workplace discrimination, and most recently Bostock, holding that Title VII prohibits employment discrimination against gay people.
It has also won numerous moral and cultural victories. When I was a kid, the perennial polls of “who would you never vote for President” disclosed that while a huge majority of Americans said they would be willing to vote for a Black President (presaging the rise of Barack Obama), the two categories that were way down at the bottom of the list were “homosexual” (that was the wording back then) and “atheist”. Anti-gay prejudice was accepted. I know it’s fashionable to say that nothing has changed and that even anti-Black prejudice is still accepted, but it’s not the same thing. When I was a kid, saying the n-word would have gotten someone suspended from school. But “sissy” and “gay” and “girl” (used to signify effeminate boys or lack of courage or strength) and “homo” and even the anti-gay slur that starts with the letter f were thrown around school all the time. In the 1980’s, you would be hard pressed to find white comics who said the n-word in their stand-up routines, but straight comedians Eddie Murphy and George Carlin both said that word that describes gay people and starts with f liberally in their routines. (Indeed, I remember when gays had not reclaimed the word “queer” yet and it was routinely used by straight people in a derogatory way. There was even a children’s game called “smear the queer”.)
There’s simply a lot less open prejudice against gay people now, quite apart from the legal victories. Indeed, even a lot of conservatives use very different rhetoric than they used to. We used to have openly homophobic congressmen like Bill Dannemeyer, Pete Knight, and Bob Dornan, who would speak of “sodomites” and “deviants” and “perverts” and some of whom even called for locking up gay men in quarantine to fight the AIDS epidemic. Nowadays, we still have homophobic politicians, but it’s nothing like that. You are much more likely to hear someone say things like that they think its sinful but that all of us are sinners and God loves us all- that’s not ideal, but it’s a lot better than what Dannemeyer used to say. The gay rights movement won that victory.
At the same time, the gay rights movement has recognized that there are other sexual minorities that faced the same sorts of historical struggles that they did. They have also, for what I would characterize as slightly more cynical political reasons, separated certain people out in their branding- but that’s OK, branding is part of the modern approach to activism.
So we no longer say “gays”. It first went to “gays and lesbians”, which I found weird because most lesbians I know freely call themselves “gay”. But OK, as I said, branding. Then we went to GLBT. Bisexuals were kind of implied in “gay”, but not really; it’s a different orientation, and part of the point was to separate orientations from sex acts (a correct move- one can be straight and have a same sex encounter, or gay and have an opposite sex encounter, or bi and be celibate). So they got separated out. And transgender people faced very similar oppression to what gay people did, and were natural allies of gay people, especially since in the subgoup of gay people as the term was traditionally defined included at least some people now referred to as trans: drag queens, for instance, and perhaps androphilic trans women. And then the last change everyone has accepted- for some reason, lesbians had to be placed before gays, so it got switched to LGBT. That’s the term most people use now.
Of course, as with much activist terminology, there’s a tendency to push for new terms and changes every few years, so some of the more activist types have added additional initials. “LGBTQIA” seems to have picked up steam. The “I”, intersex, makes a lot of sense as an addition. Intersex people have faced a lot of historical oppression, especially if they either present as androgynous or appear to be closer to one gender archetype and present as the other. Plus, some trans people are intersex. Queer and Asexual people, the other groups added, present issues that are beyond the scope of this post. But to be clear, it seems to me that adding groups under the LGBT umbrella is not inherently problematic or likely to dilute the concept. Certain conditions have to be in place for that to happen.
I have thought about this some, and the two conditions that create a risk for dilution appear to be as follows: (1) lack of a history of discriminatory treatment; and (2) lack of barriers to entry into the class.
In recent years, the definition of “trans” has grown from what you might call the traditional binary transgender person (assigned male at birth, possesses male biological characteristics, transitions to become a girl or woman at some point in life, or the converse with someone assigned female at birth), and the intersex transgender person (a person born with an intersex condition who at some point changes from presenting as one gender to the other), on the one hand, to the nonbinary transgendered person. The nonbinary transgendered person is not defined by presentation, but merely by expression and belief. If you openly reject that you are a member of one of the binary genders, and insist on different pronouns and forms of address, you are nonbinary.
Now, you might object, “isn’t there more to it than that? Don’t non-binary people present as other than their assigned sex as birth?”. But the answer is, that’s not actually the definition of non-binary, because (1) there are non-binary people who present as pretty darned masculine or feminine, and (2) there are binary people, such as butch girls and effeminate guys, who present in ways that do not conform to gender archetypes but identify within the gender binary.
And that definition is important, because it’s pretty clear that “people who do not conform to gender archetypes” ARE a historically oppressed group. Women have been persecuted for presenting as masculine, and men persecuted for presenting as feminine, throughout human history. But- importantly- none of those people identified as non-binary, and as far as we can tell none of those people really rejected the gender binary. Nor did their persecutors care about how they felt about gender. If a man who looks like Channing Tatum decides that he rejects the gender binary but continues to present as a guy who looks like Channing Tatum, he is not going to face any persecution whatsoever for identifying as non-binary. Why would he? There are no laws prohibiting people from identifying as non-binary, no hate groups dedicated to attacking non-binary people, etc. It’s true that we don’t have discrimination protections that extend to the non-binary in many states, but that has not led to people who are non-binary losing their jobs or their housing.
Indeed, most people who identify as non-binary are highly privileged. You would be hard pressed to go to any urban or rural poor neighborhood in America and find non-binary people. In many such communities, they won’t even know what you are talking about. Where do you find non-binary people? In middle and upper class communities, at college campuses, in big trendy wealthy cities full of liberals. Again, contrast this with gays- while there are plenty of privileged gays, there are also plenty of gays who are economically stressed, and plenty who still live in communities where they must stay in the closet. Or contrast it with trans people- again, there are lots of well off trans people, but there are also a ton of poor, extremely oppressed trans sex workers. Go out on the street late at night in a bad neighborhood in America- you will find some very desperate gay and trans people; you won’t find any non-binaries out there.
So what does this have to do with the definition of LGBT? Well, while being oppressed really sucks if you are actually oppressed, what doesn’t suck is to be able to claim oppression when you are actually privileged. In certain spaces, such as in colleges and in certain progressive parts of the country, claiming oppression gets you deference. It leads to people listening to you. It can even allow you to claim the benefits of affirmative action programs. So claiming oppressed group status can be attractive. If you don’t believe me, look at Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug. It’s very tough to grow up a member of a racial minority in the United States. You face a ton of oppression. But if you can grow up white but then claim that status of oppression, it can move you ahead, not drop you farther behind. Dolezal and Krug both understood this.
The key point, though, is that as I said, there have to be two conditions present. Not only does a group have to not be historically oppressed, but it also has to be easy to join. Dolezal and Krug were found out because it’s actually pretty hard to claim ethnic or racial ancestry you don’t have. People can look you up. Similarly, most LGBT identities are pretty hard to fake. If you claim to be lesbian or gay or bi- but then keep dating partners of the opposite sex, people are going to get skeptical about it. And being a binary trans person is similarly almost impossible to fake. At the very least you have to socially transition- so if you were assigned male at birth, you have to start presenting as female. Being an intersex trans person is also impossible to fake- you have to be intersex.
But ANYONE can claim to be nonbinary. Maybe you might have to do something, but you don’t have to do much. An assigned female might start wearing less makeup and cut their hair, and announce non-binary status. An assigned male might grow a little hair out, or start shaving facial hair. So you have this status that is available to completely privileged people who can say “I’m LGBT too”, without actually sleeping with or dating anyone of the same sex, and without actually transitioning. Just change your pronouns and boom, you are member of an oppressed group. And that sort of thing can truly dilute the concept of LGBT. If policymakers think LGBT people are a bunch of folks in rich college towns who want to be called “they”, rather than people who have historically been beaten up, fired, and evicted because of who they loved and how they dressed, that can have a terrible effect on whether the movement can win its policy fights.
I can imagine one last objection. You might say “aren’t non-binary people allies? They know what it is like to be different, and in the minority”. And it’s true, they might make very good allies for LGBT people. And that’s all to the good. But here’s the thing- we don’t generally extend the group membership to allies. Rachel Dolezal, for instance, was, by all accounts, a strong advocate for Black people- she even headed an NAACP chapter. But that doesn’t make her Black. Lots of cis het people are strong supporters of LGBT rights. But they are not LGBT. Because they didn’t face the history, didn’t suffer the slurs and the discriminatory treatment. They are just allies. Which is fine. Allies are needed. Diluting the concept of an oppressed group, however, is counterproductive.
This is a good article, and you get it right: the oppressed class is people who refuse to conform to gender archetypes.
I will say though: although the word "non-binary" is new, people who refuse to conform to either feminine or masculine gender archetypes and have been oppressed have adopted it en masse at this point. And they've existed forever. You have your facts wrong.
If you look back in history, a bunch of those people who were oppressed for their failure to conform were quite resistant to adopting the term "male" or "female"; they DID reject the gender binary, and they got oppressed for it.
In some cases, their surrounding society told them to "choose" -- it was OK if they chose to fit the masculine archetype OR if they chose to fit the feminine archetype but they were gonna get punished if they didn't pick a binary side. OK to be a cis man or a trans woman who "passed", but not OK to be nonbinary -- this was an actual issue a lot of older people dealt with. You may not know the background, but that is the truth.
So although the term "non-binary" may be too prone to joiners, this population -- who wanted to not conform to EITHER traditional masculine OR traditional feminine archetypes -- was oppressed, is often still oppressed, and it is important to protect the class of people "who do not conform to gender archetypes". ("You can wear makeup and a dress, or you can wear jeans and a button-down shirt, but NOT BOTH.") And the reason YOU don't find them in poor areas is that they're getting beaten up and attacked for it. Still. Though less than in the 1970s or earlier.