This month, I talk to Robin Dembroff (Yale University) about the gender binary: what it is, what people mean when they say they’re outside of it, and what political motivation there may be for resisting it. Click on this link to download Episode 120 of Elucidations.

‘Gender binary’ is a funny term. It sounds like academic jargon, but in recent years we’ve been hearing it more and more in popular conversations as well. Our guest offers the following helpful characterization: the gender binary is the view that there are exactly two gender categories—man and woman—and for any given person, that person falls into exactly one of those categories. (In other words, you can’t be both, and you can’t be neither.) So when someone says they’re opposed to the gender binary, they must be contesting at least one of these points (though you don’t necessarily know which one, right off the bat). Maybe they think there are more than two genders, or maybe they think there are fewer than two genders, or maybe they think the same person can fall into more than one simultaneously, maybe they having a gender is optional, or maybe they think all of the above. Since there’s a fair amount of content in the idea of the gender binary, there are lots of different ways to disagree with it.

Continued…