Together Us

It has happened again; in as many weeks, feminist and queer voices have questioned the legitimacy of my presence in these movements. Most of us have navigated a feeling that our bodies take up too much space, but what if that same body was neither female nor male? In a society where binary ideas of sex intersect with politics, these parallels have become destructive. 

 

I have grappled with my broad shoulders and size 12 feet often causing others to misgender me. My child bearing hips are flesh over bones that will never shift for a foetus. My breasts are both markers of my sexual pleasure and a disconnection with identity. This six-foot frame is power and pain, but when settling into my gender fluidity it was my identity as a feminist that I found the hardest to reconcile. For most of my life I have heard the boring adage “feminists hate men”. This inaccurate binary somehow played into my conscience, and now as I relinquish my ‘She’ for ‘They’, can I still be a feminist?

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In recent years, a number of prominent female voices have dismissed the experiences of trans-women and gender-diverse humans, but our experiences of the patriarchy are relatively similar. Historically, our identity has been labelled as a sickness and is still problematically categorised as body dysmorphia. In Australia, to access specialised gender health services one has to be diagnosed with a mental health condition.

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Add to this, nearly a third of gender diverse people earn less than $15,000 per year despite almost 75 per cent of us having a tertiary qualification (Callander D, 2019) — what does this tell you about employment and wage parity? We also experience sexual violence at four times the rate of the general public (Callander D, 2019).

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Statistics for gender diverse people show increased experiences of partner violence, homelessness, unpaid labour, violations of human rights and disparity in health and education — this is before you add any conceptual notion of a gender-diverse person choosing to wear make-up or a dress.

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I move through identity in the flows of fabric, an outward expression of my internal flourishing. My cupboard adorns Gorman’s brightly coloured frocks that rub shoulders with my well-structured silk and velvet blazers. I hang my corsets as to not crease their bones and lay my binders one-on-top-of-the-other. As I take my undergarment and layer it in fabric, it is like coming out of the closet every day.

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Despite my fabulously curated outfit, walking down the street on any day appears to warrant sexual harassment — the same kind I had commonly experienced as a woman. When boarding the train at Flinders Street station, the carriage doors had not even shut before a man walked past, leaned over me and told me I was “a pretty girl” while toothing his bottom lip suggestively. My skin crawled. I felt immediately unsafe followed by a disgust for this body that traps me in a sex that has never felt whole.

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Living beyond gender norms becomes your own protest, when you begin to accept this world intentionally creates binary ideas — you learn everything is fluid. Nothing is good or bad. Nothing is female or male. Nothing is one or the other. Humans are complex with nuanced character and experiences living within the one body. The need to place everything on sliding scales is a limitation in our own social thinking.

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Structuralism is essentially the relationship between presence and absence but even the notion that something is with and without is an oversimplification. Jacques Derrida explains binary is often defined as a violent hierarchy, where one of the two governs the other. (Hogue, 2013). This pervasive ideology has found substance in our addictive culture; creating an us and them mentality that in many cases is literally divided by a centre seam.

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Western privilege promotes status based on the structure of one’s outfit; it incorporates hard edges symbolising strength and masculinity. Softer flows are iconography that scream woman, but centuries of history will show us robes and free flowing single sheets of linen draped the bodies of men long before we furnished them in a three-piece suit.

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Gender non-conforming writer and activist, Alok Vmenon recently said they found the term nonbinary unsatisfactory; they prefer infinity. “There are as many ways to be and look like a woman as there are women, there are as many ways to be and look like a man as there are men, and there are as many ways to be and look like whatever gender you are.” (Vmenon, 2020)

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This culture, the one society thinks is evolved; gender diversity sits at the fringe of. Our inherent anarchy is seen as demonstrative — in many countries our rights are being made illegal. Our binders are rigid marks of other. Many still equate us to freak; just the streets are our big top.

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But our disadvantage is our commonality in the feminist movement; the patriarchy wants to disempower our affinity for equality because it is weakened by our intersectionality. When you stop othering us — you together us. We are no longer defined in the historically unsuccessful story of man vs woman but simply patriarchy vs opportunity.

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This is our power. It is our knowledge. That the world is not perceiving us but rather we are conceiving it. The binary notion that feminism sits within biological sex is both naive and isolating. Ultimately, what sits beneath my black lace g-string, or that of anyone in the sisterhood, is neither relevant to identity nor politics.