by Malcolm Clark
There is nothing liberating or progressive about erasing every trace of one’s sex.
Some things make less sense the more you study them. The idea of ‘nonbinary’ is a bit like that.
Nonbinary is an umbrella term used to describe those people who believe they are outside the gender binary. They believe that they are neither male nor female.
When you ask nonbinaries what they mean by this, the response usually boils down to men saying they feel kinda feminine sometimes, and women saying they kinda don’t. When you point out that some men and women have felt this way since time immemorial, without feeling the need to turn it into a political cause, they become aggressive or sulky. All of which suggests that this nonbinary LARP may require some more thought.
If, like me, you prefer to identify as non-lunatic, you might be tempted to dismiss the nonbinary phenomenon as a passing fad, like the Tamagotchi ‘egg’ toys popular among children a couple of decades ago. But there’s a difference between the idea of nonbinary and fads like Tamagotchis, especially among the young. Schools banned Tamagotchis in the 1990s because they were a distraction. This time, our public institutions, from multinational corporations to medical bodies, are actively promoting the idea that you can be neither male nor female.
Advocates themselves seem unclear as to what ‘nonbinary’ means. Some seem unsure where to draw the line between being nonbinary and being trans. The huge American LGBTQ+ charity, the Trevor Project, insists that ‘It’s important to note that not all nonbinary folks identify as trans’. But the UK’s LGBT Foundation argues that nonbinary fits under the so-called trans umbrella. This isn’t much help, however, since the trans umbrella has by now grown so huge it could be used to protect the polar ice caps.
Throughout much of the 20th century, the prefix ‘trans’ tended to be used in relation to transvestites or transsexuals. It implied a transition from one gender or sex to the other. But this started to change in the 1990s. Disappointed by the physical results of transitioning – think big-jawed, deep-voiced ‘transwomen’ and miniature, small-boned ‘transmen’ – the trans lobby started to look for a new vocabulary that might capture what it is to be neither male nor female.
Activist Riki Wilchins played a key role in the development of nonbinary. He originally came to prominence in 1991, when he co-founded Camp Trans, an annual protest against the exclusion of transwomen from the women-only Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. In the mid-1990s, he sowed the seeds for the idea of being nonbinary by coining a new term to describe himself – namely, ‘genderqueer’.
It was a fortuitous moment for Wilchins. From the late 1990s onwards, with queer theory flourishing in universities in the UK and the US, a slew of new identities and neologisms were being turned out, from agender and bigender to demigender and genderfluid. Nonbinary started to be used by activists and academics to encompass these new identities in the 2000s. Indeed, in 2002, Wilchins co-authored the tellingly titled Genderqueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary.
It wasn’t really until the latter half of the 2010s that nonbinary moved from the spheres of academia and activism and into mainstream culture – largely because an army of idiot celebrities embraced it.
Singer Sam Smith was one such bandwagon-jumper. In 2019, he declared himself to be ‘nonbinary’ and embraced ‘they / them’ pronouns. Smith was once an attractive young gay man. In his new nonbinary guise, he has come to resemble someone forced to twerk in fishnets as a prank.
Smith was followed by Ellen Page, who announced on 1 December 2020 that she now identifies as ‘transgender and nonbinary’. She was henceforth to be known as Elliot Page, and would use ‘he’ and ‘they’ pronouns.
There was also actress Sara Ramirez. In 2021, she was held up by HBO as a bold new spokesthem for the nonbinary cause when she was cast in the Sex and the City spin-off, And Just Like That. Sadly, in her role as Che Diaz, she had all the comic timing of a metronome as she tub-thumped lines from the nonbinary gospel. In a trailer put out by HBO, she pompously critiques the fun gay characters and themes of old-style Sex and the City with the sternness of a hatchet-faced Maoist, claiming that the new show is ‘making space for a more expansive definition of queerness’.
To the broader public, celebrities claiming to be ‘nonbinary’ and pluralising their pronouns has looked absurd. Nowhere more so than in a 2022 Time magazine interview with ‘genderqueer’ author Maia Kobabe, in which she insisted on the pronouns ‘eir’ and ‘ey’. ‘Time spoke to… Maia Kobabe about eir work… and what ey make of the current cultural moment’, the magazine declared to confusion all round.
The vague, indefinable, neither-nor quality of ‘nonbinary’ certainly appeals to the narcissists among us. It offers even more opportunity for forensic self-obsession than the old trans identity does. And that’s saying something.
No one sums up this narcissism better than Alok Vaid-Menon, perhaps the most prominent nonbinary campaigner around today. He first gained a name for himself in the mid-2010s for performing execrable ‘poetry’ while dressed in garish women’s clothes that showed off a body hairy enough to put Burt Reynolds to shame.
In 2019, Vaid-Menon broke into the nonbinary big time when a lecture he gave went viral. In it, he denounced the fashion world for daring to make clothes targeted at men and women. He claimed that nonbinary people were so subversive they had been deliberately excluded from fashion. ‘My beauty is so tremendous it has to be edited out of magazines’, he declared.
Once upon a time it was permissible to laugh at a hairy bloke squeezed into a cocktail dress who takes himself much too seriously. But not today. Vaid-Menon’s pronouncements are treated with the kind of reverence once accorded to religious leaders. Last year, he was appointed as the first ever LGBTQ+ scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
Vaid-Menon’s rise appears to be based on little more than overweening self-confidence and an ability to espouse the banalities of the trans lobby. ‘There are as many ways to be as there are beings’, he once said, seemingly mistaking genders for personalities.
Vaid-Menon’s pseudo-profundities certainly appeal to empty-headed celebrities who struggle to distinguish between a sacred text and a riddle in a Christmas cracker. Take filmstar Jamie Lee Curtis who ‘interviewed’ Vaid-Menon at the Upfront Summit in 2023. She even gave him an opportunity to air his own spectacular delusion. ‘People often ask me why I continue to… live as incandescently as I do’, he claimed. Not outside your own head they don’t.
Vaid-Menon is not just given to boasting and uttering trans pieties. In 2021, an old social-media post of his resurfaced in which he also weighed into the debate about single-sex spaces. Instead of insisting that trans-identified males pose no risk to women and girls, as most trans activists do, he took a more original approach. He claimed that young girls aren’t as innocent as we think. ‘We have to challenge the idea that there is a perfect victim’, he said. ‘I believe in the radical notion that little girls, like the rest of us, are complicated people… Little girls are also queer, trans, kinky, deviant.’ He added that ‘no one is a perfect flower that can be corrupted’. This is sinister stuff.
Vaid-Menon is clearly not bothered by any flak he receives for his dubious views. He is nothing if not weapons-grade arrogant. This comes across in his lectures and writings, where he constantly downplays the significance of the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’, despite these categories having been at the centre of all human cultures for millenia. He claims to be willing to recognise man and woman as valid genders, but dismisses the existence of a ‘gender binary’. ‘I hold space for men and women but not gender binarism’, he states.
Is it any wonder someone who has such contempt for the deeply held convictions of the overwhelming majority of people would also believe he has the right to dismiss concerns about child safeguarding? It’s hard not to suspect Vaid-Menon’s questionable outlook is shared by much of the trans and nonbinary lobby.
As absurd and appalling as Vaid-Menon’s views may be, there is a far more disturbing driver behind the rise of nonbinary. In 2011, the website, genderqueer.me started to become the go-to site for young people who considered themselves nonbinary. It helped that it was set up by Micah Rajunov, a young woman with piercing blue eyes and a huge smile. It features heart-warming photographs of her wife and badly behaved dog, with its missing teeth and, of course, stories of her realisation that she was neither male nor female.
Rajunov’s influence didn’t stop at Genderqueer.me. In 2019, she co-edited Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity, a book that sold like hotcakes among the troubled youth of America. And yet for all her winsome smiles and self-deprecating humour, Rajunov’s influence is every bit as malign as Vaid-Menon’s.
In August 2020, she gave an extended interview to Google Talks, in which she relayed her journey to nonbinary authenticity. In a moment that’s all the more extraordinary for the casual way she lets it slip, Rajunov explains that she was initially unsure of her identity and so hung out at some trans conferences. It was there she heard that you no longer had to try to be the opposite gender to qualify as trans. Instead, you could be neither man nor woman. ‘I didn’t know what that meant really’, she admits, before adding the punchline: ‘But I knew that I wanted to have surgery, top surgery. I always say I transitioned backwards because I started with surgery and then I did everything else.’
In other words, Rajunov had little interest in attempting to look like another type of body. She wasn’t interested in transitioning to another sex or mimicking a male. Rajunov just wanted to remove her breasts.
It’s one thing to believe you are Jesus Christ or Napoleon.
With treatment, you can get over it.
But cut yourself up because you convinced yourself your born-sex is wrong and you are stuck with your mistake permanently
Or, like that cat-man, until you kill yourself at 54.
Not liking a bodily function doesn’t mean you aren’t a woman, or man, it just means you don’t enjoy cramps, bleeding, breast swelling then shrinking, nocturnal emissions, etc.
Sadly so many, now upwards of 10% of young people, misinterpret any of these as a reason to mutilate themselves for life in ways that render them infertile.
The elites who encouraged all this in young people because they want to depopulate the planet
have tremendous weights from their sins going forward.
The quiet part of the WEF agenda concerns the consequences of de-carbonisation. Heating, mining, crop production, transportation, mechanisation, manufacturing and lubrication, to say nothing of the numerous by-products of fossil fuels, would become impossible on the scale needed to sustain human life as we know it.
That precisely is the objective of the WEF – depopulation.
Every person who doesn’t reproduce is a “win” for our elites.
Yeah, you don’t treat someone that thinks they are Napoleon by letting them invade Russia.
Maybe “nonbinary” is just someone that can neither male nor female well.