“Gender is not a Binary, it’s a Spectrum”: Some Problems
But even the most conventionally masculine person will demonstrate some characteristics we associate with femininity, and vice versa.
.. The idea that gender is a spectrum, not a binary, negates the experiences of transsexual people who choose to move from one gender role to another, and renders their efforts at transition unintelligible. If gender is a spectrum, and your gender identity can be anywhere along that spectrum, why modify your body to make it more closely resemble that of the opposite sex?
.. Gender is the value system that ties certain desirable behaviours and characteristics to reproductive function. Once we’ve decoupled those behaviours and characteristics from reproductive function (which we should), and once we’ve rejected the idea that there are just two types of personality and that one is superior to the other (which we should), what can it possibly mean to continue to call this stuff “gender”? What meaning does the word “gender” have here, that the word “personality” cannot capture?
.. Some people will find it relatively easier and more painless to conform to the gender norms associated with their sex, while others find the gender roles associated with their sex so oppressive and limiting that they cannot tolerably live under them, and choose to transition to live in accordance with the opposite gender role.
.. So if you want to call yourself a genderqueer femme presenting demigirl, you go for it. Express that identity however you like. Have fun with it. A problem only emerges when you start making political claims on the basis of that label – when you start demanding that others call themselves cis, because you require there to be a bunch of boring binary cis people for you to define yourself in reference to; and when you insist that these cis women have structural advantage and political privilege over you, because they are socially read as the women they know themselves to be, while nobody really understands just how complex and interesting your gender identity is.
.. if you’re male, then the best way to do that – the most radical, revolutionary, genuinely non-masculine conforming thing you can do – has nothing to do with your dress or your hair or your makeup or your choice of pronouns. As a male person, the most gender non-conforming thing you can do is to stop making demands of women – of their time, of their resources, of their domestic, emotional and sexual labour.