What Does Non Binary Mean?

Here’s how you can use your privilege and be a better ally to non-binary people.

- Jamie Windust

Non-binary people are still very much misunderstood, despite many celebrities like Demi Lovato speaking about being non-binary. Fortunately, through the power of social media the landscape of sexuality and gender has been able to reach so many more people than before. I am non-binary, and have identified this way since 2015. My awakening with non-binary identities and the LGBTQIA+ term in general came through Twitter. It granted me an epiphany moment, and I was able to feel like the cogs were fitting.

WHAT DOES NON-BINARY MEAN?

The definition from Stonewall, a UK-based charity, describes non-binary as an “umbrella term for people whose gender identity doesn’t sit comfortably with ‘man’ or ‘woman’”. For me, it means the ability to choose and set your own rules and parameters of where you see yourself in this melting pot we call society.

It is the key to being free of any expectations anyone wants to set on you... Because, do you know what, we don’t have time for them. But hold up, just to throw another spanner in the works of the wonderful mechanism that is gender, there are two really important—and different—ways in which gender should be discussed.

‘Gender identity’ explains the ways in which people self-identify. That’s how we choose ourselves to identify our gender, and what we feel personally fits us. For example, non-binary/cis-gendered (not trans).

But then there is ‘gender expression’. This is the way in which you decide to express and live as your gender identity (it is the fun bit). The best part about gender expression is that it is a chance to completely tear the rule book apart.