poet Lucille Clifton, “Won’t you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life?”

After all, gender is a scam

And though there may be concerns about the motivations of non-trans non-binary people, “we don’t live in a safe society for them to be trans in the first place. That’s something we also cannot deny.”

Though McLean holds space for anyone defining themselves as non-binary, whether or not they’re also trans, he contends that “while each individual has autonomy and agency to classify themselves (or not) how they see fit, we can’t act like, for example, patriarchy isn’t still standing there with a belt and a switch and a gun in his hand.” The... See more

To that end, Dr. Shay-Akil McLean, a Black trans educator, organizer and sociologist, says our conversations about gender autonomy and self-determination must be situated within a decolonial, historical context. By this he means it’s important to note that trans folks were only ever called trans because cis people needed a way to differentiate, and... See more

“Ultimately, gender is a cell into which all people, cis, trans and otherwise, are imprisoned.”

Various words have been used by folks like me to describe how we move through the world, from “genderqueer” to “gender fluid, “gender nonconforming” to “gender variant.” This context is important because expansive identities have existed across history and across cultures, according to Archie Crowley, chair of the Linguistic Society of America’s... See more

began my journey to non-binary bad bitchery in undergraduate school at Morehouse College in Atlanta

Da’Shaun Harrison’s relationship to their gender is both infinite and finite. Infinite because the Atlanta-based writer and activist sees being non-binary as “an imagined future,” something they’re always aspiring to, something that is so far beyond the man-woman binary that it delegitimizes gender altogether. Finite because non-binary people exist... See more