What, exactly, is gender? This is not merely a dispute over the meaning of a word. It reaches into the centre of feminist theory, and into many of the contemporary arguments about class, identity, power and privilege. In ordinary speech, people often use “gender” as a substitute for “sex”. Perhaps because the word “sex” also gestures toward sexual intercourse, and carries with it a faint social awkwardness, “gender” has become the softer, more respectable term for the biological fact of whether someone is female or male. In this way, we can avoid speaking too directly about bodies, reproductive functions and the physiological processes implied by that division.
But “gender” did not originally mean this. At first, it was mainly a grammatical term, referring to the classification of nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter in certain languages. Only later, especially from the mid-twentieth century onward, did it acquire a new meaning in social theory, allowing people to distinguish between sex and gender. For feminism, this distinction was once crucial. It allowed us to say that some differences between women and men might be connected to biology, while others are not innate at all, but produced by family, school, culture, custom, religion, media and social expectation. This is what feminists have often called gendered socialisation.
At least, that was the function gender once served in feminist theory. A basic feminist insight was that sex referred to bodily reality, while gender referred to social construction. In other words, a person might be born female or male, but no one is born naturally destined to be gentle or hard, delicate or rough, submissive or dominant. On this view — which, for the sake of simplicity, we may call the radical feminist view — gender is a system of externally imposed norms. It prescribes and forbids certain forms of behaviour on the basis of bodily traits that have no moral significance in themselves.
These norms are not merely external; they are coercive. Nor are they a neutral set of stylistic options. They are a hierarchy. This hierarchy has two positions: male above female, man above woman, masculinity above femininity. Masculinity is associated with authority; femininity with subordination. A newborn child is placed into one category or the other because of the appearance of its external genitalia. The convex body is assigned to the higher position; the concave body to the lower one. From there, society begins its work of education, expectation, reward, punishment and discipline.
From birth, most girls are trained to be quiet, considerate, compliant and caring; most boys are trained to be active, forceful, competitive and dominant. Girls are encouraged to be sweet, gentle and well-behaved; boys to be brave, tough, outgoing and ambitious. This value system, and the process by which people are shaped into the roles it demands, is what radical feminism criticises as gender. Understood in this way, it is not difficult to see why gender is oppressive. It restricts women and men alike, but more importantly, it places men above women and presents that inequality as natural, normal and inevitable. The radical feminist aim, therefore, is not to make the pink box and the blue box more diverse. It is to dismantle the boxes themselves. It is to stop placing people into preassigned roles, and to allow character, desire, ability and ways of life to develop without being governed in advance by a coercive gender order.
Yet this understanding conflicts sharply with another contemporary view. Many people do not regard gender as merely social construction, nor as an externally imposed hierarchy. They understand gender as something internal, personal and innate: a deep experience of identity. On this view — which, for convenience, we may call the queer feminist view of gender — gender is oppressive not because it is hierarchical or socially imposed, but because society recognises only two genders. If we acknowledge that gender is a deep identity, and that this identity is not limited to “man” and “woman”, then people will supposedly become freer.
On this account, liberation does not mean abolishing gender, but expanding it. Thus we see the proliferation of new identity labels: non-binary, genderqueer, pangender, polygender, agender, demiboy, demigirl, neutrois, genderfluid, and many increasingly specific and personal terms besides. Supporters of this view often say that “gender is not a binary; it is a spectrum.” At first, this sounds generous and open. It seems better able to accommodate the complexity of human experience. It no longer requires everyone to fall into the two categories of man or woman, but allows people to name themselves across a wider range.
But the problem lies precisely here. Once we say that gender is a spectrum, we must ask: what is this spectrum? What are its two ends? How does it operate? And what is its relationship to the identity called “non-binary”?
Many supporters of the spectrum model describe themselves as non-binary, distinguishing themselves from the majority of people assumed to be binary. But if gender is truly not a binary but a spectrum, then strictly speaking, no one can be purely binary. No one is identical with absolute masculinity, and no one is identical with absolute femininity. In that case, “non-binary” can no longer mark out a special group, because everyone could be called non-binary. If a concept applies to everyone, it can no longer distinguish some people from others.
To avoid this, proponents of the spectrum view seem required to insist on two things at once: gender is not binary, but it can still somehow be divided into binary and non-binary people. Such a claim is not entirely impossible. Some traits can indeed be described both as a continuum and through binary labels. Height is an obvious example. Height is clearly continuous; people fall at many points along it. Yet in ordinary language we still say that one person is tall and another is short.
However, “tall” and “short” are not absolute properties. They are comparative ones. A child may be tall among children of the same age, but not tall among adults. An adult woman may be tall among women, but short compared with professional basketball players. Height always refers to some average, some group, some frame of comparison. No one is absolutely tall, and no one is absolutely short. Someone near the average could even be jokingly described as having “non-binary height”.
But if we transfer this analogy to gender, the difficulties appear immediately. If gender, like height, is comparative, then a person’s gender is no longer determined purely by self-identification. It depends on that person’s relative position among others. Whether you are “more feminine” or “more masculine” would depend on where you fall within the distribution of a given group, not simply on how you declare yourself inwardly to be. A person who thinks of herself as a woman might be told that someone else is “more of a woman” than she is; a person who identifies as non-binary might, by being too close to one end of the spectrum, be classified as binary after all. This plainly conflicts with the claim that each individual is the sole authority on their own gender identity.
Moreover, if the height analogy holds, then those at the two extremes are the rare cases. Most people fall somewhere in the middle. So if gender is truly a spectrum, non-binary people are not the exception but the norm. Binary people would be the unusual, extreme minority. Yet in much gender-identity discourse, non-binary identity is presented as a special identity set against a large population of “binary cisgender” people. This logical tension cannot be easily resolved.
To Call Oneself Non-Binary Is to Create Another False Binary
If gender is a continuum running from masculinity to femininity, then everyone occupies some point along that line. The problem is that no one fully equals either endpoint. The most conventionally feminine woman may possess traits society calls masculine; the most conventionally masculine man may show traits society calls feminine. Human character is mixed, contradictory and fluid. No one is a textbook gender template.
In this sense, I could quite easily call myself non-binary. Even if I have a female body and call myself a woman, I do not think of myself as a flat gender stereotype. I am not the perfect specimen of “womanhood”, nor a two-dimensional figure assembled out of meekness, self-sacrifice, maternity and ornamentation. Of course there are many parts of my personality that do not conform to traditional feminine norms. If non-binary simply means “not wholly conforming to gender stereotypes”, then everyone is non-binary.
But this is precisely what would deprive “non-binary” of its meaning as a special identity. Many people who describe themselves as non-binary can do so only by relying on the existence of a much larger group: the supposedly binary, cisgender, norm-conforming majority. That is, they need most people to remain trapped in conventional gender boxes in order to define themselves as the people who have escaped them. Reality is not so neat. Almost no one conforms perfectly to every social expectation attached to their sex. Each of us obeys some norms, passively accepts others, and resists still others.
Thus, calling oneself non-binary can sometimes fail to break down binaries and instead create new ones. On one side are ordinary, conventional, compliant, supposedly unreflective “binary cisgender people”. On the other are complex, special, transgressive and politically aware “non-binary people”. This division replaces old boxes with new ones. It does not abolish the gender order; it merely creates within it a position that appears freer and more interesting.
Similar problems arise with other identity labels. If a person calls themselves pangender, what does that mean? Does it mean they contain every possible point on the spectrum? Simultaneously? But if the two ends of the spectrum are opposed, how can one person fully occupy both at once? If masculinity means dominance, strength and aggression, while femininity means submission, softness and passivity, then in their purest forms they cannot coexist. If you disagree with these definitions of masculinity and femininity, you are free to redefine them. But as long as you retain a spectrum, you must still define its ends; and the ends are ends precisely because they are distinct and opposed.
The label “agender” faces a similar difficulty. Some people say that they have no internal experience of gender, that they feel neither masculine nor feminine, and are therefore agender. But if some people can refuse to define themselves in gendered terms, why can others not do the same? If everyone were to say that they lack an internal, essential gender identity, then “agender” would become a universal condition rather than a special identity. Agender can exist only against the background of gender. To define oneself by having no gender is therefore to assume that most other people do have one, while for some reason one does not.
Once we define the problem as the fact that society recognises too few genders, the next question is unavoidable: how many must it recognise? Three? Ten? A hundred? A thousand? If everyone’s internal experience is unique, and if gender identity can be divided indefinitely, then the only consistent answer is that there are as many genders as there are people. Billions of human beings would mean billions of gender identities.
But when gender expands to this degree, what remains to distinguish it from personality, taste, temperament, aesthetic preference or self-description? If a person’s gender can be frost, the sun, music, the sea, a planet, darkness, or even a kind of food, why should we call any of this gender rather than imagination, preference, poetic metaphor or personal style? “Gender” cannot simply be a decorative word for making oneself sound unique and complicated. In feminist theory, its meaning was originally to name a social system that binds behaviour, temperament and value to reproductive function.
If we already agree that a person’s interests, character, clothing, occupation and conduct should not be determined by their genitals, then we have already performed the essential act of disentanglement. To continue calling all differences of personality “gender” may only reinforce the very framework we ought to be escaping. What we should say is that human beings have countless ways of living. Instead, we say that human beings have countless genders. In doing so, the concept of gender does not disappear. It expands until it swallows the whole complexity of personhood.
Certain non-binary labels make this especially clear. Consider a gender named after a person’s own name: the idea that one’s gender is best described by one’s name, useful for people who do not yet know what they identify as but know they are not cisgender. This example reveals the problem almost perfectly. The emphasis is not on clearly saying what one is, but on declaring that one is not that ordinary, conventional, insufficiently transgressive thing called cisgender.
The desire not to be “cisgender” is understandable. For women especially, it is very easy to understand. Who wants to be confined by society’s stereotyped imagination of the female body? Who wants to be seen as a natural caregiver, a potential mother, the bearer of domestic labour, the object of male desire? Who does not want to be understood as a whole person, rather than as a bundle of bodily functions and social roles?
The Solution Is Not to Slip Through the Bars of the Cage While Leaving the Rest of Womankind Trapped Inside
I , too, do not want to be reduced to the term “cis woman”. My thoughts, desires, abilities, contradictions and ambitions are far more complex than society’s traditional idea of womanhood. I do not want others to assume, because of my female body, that I am more suited to caring, yielding, sacrificing or placing other people’s needs before my own. Nor do I want to be seen as a mother, wife, domestic worker or sexual object rather than a person with an independent inner life.
But the solution is not to announce myself as agender, as if that could free me from the condition of being female. Reality does not stop operating because a new identity label has been adopted. Whatever I call myself, the world will still see my female body and treat me accordingly. I might tell an employer that I am not a woman but an agender person; I might demand the use of new pronouns. But this will not necessarily stop an interviewer from seeing me as someone who might become pregnant, give birth or take on domestic responsibilities. Sex-based oppression does not vanish simply because I reject a word.
Here we reach one of the most difficult contradictions within gender-identity politics. Many people understand “transgender” as being connected to distress about the sexed body: a person experiences suffering in relation to their body and wishes to change it so that it more closely resembles the body of the other sex. This is the older and more familiar experience associated with transsexuality. But in contemporary gender-identity discourse, the definition of transgender has shifted. It no longer necessarily involves bodily dysphoria, nor any desire to alter the body. It is defined instead as a mismatch between one’s internal gender identity and the gender assigned at birth.
At the same time, “cisgender” is defined as the state in which one’s internal gender identity matches the gender assigned at birth. But if gender identity is a complex and endlessly divisible spectrum, this definition becomes difficult to sustain. No one is precisely assigned an internal identity position at birth. At birth, people observe external genitalia and infer biological sex. No one can know at that moment the child’s future personality, temperament, preferences, aesthetic tastes, self-understanding or supposed internal experience of gender. If gender identity can be infinitely specific, then no one can be accurately named at birth.
In other words, none of us is assigned a detailed gender identity at birth. We are placed into one of two sex categories, and then raised according to the social norms attached to that category. Long before we can express any self-understanding, society has already begun teaching us how to be girls or boys, women or men. If being transgender means “not having been assigned the correct gender identity at birth”, then almost everyone satisfies the definition. No one’s particular personality or inner experience can be accurately predicted at birth.
The spectrum theory therefore leads to a strange conclusion: if gender is a spectrum, then everyone is transgender. Or, conversely, if everyone is simply an inaccurately assigned individual, then the category “transgender” loses its specific meaning. Either conclusion is unsatisfactory. It obscures the structural oppression of women as a sex class, and may also flatten the distinctive experiences of those who do experience bodily dysphoria and seek to alleviate it through social or bodily transition.
The way to avoid this conclusion is to understand gender differently: gender is not a spectrum. It is not an innate, internal, essential property of persons. It is not a core seed carried inside each of us, waiting for society to recognise it. Rather, gender is a social system, an externally imposed hierarchy. It divides people into two positions and assigns different values to those positions: male above female, man above woman, masculinity above femininity.
Of course, people differ in how they respond to this system. Some find it relatively easy to adapt to the role associated with their sex; others find that role suffocating, painful or impossible to bear. Some find safety in traditional norms; others experience only constraint. These differences are real and deserve attention. But they do not prove that gender itself is an internal identity spectrum. They prove only that human beings respond differently to the same hierarchical order.
Gender as a Hierarchy Perpetuates the Subordination of Women to Men and Restricts the Development of Everyone
What truly resembles a spectrum is human personality itself. More accurately, it is not even a simple spectrum, because human personality is not a single line running from one extreme to another. It is more like a loose, tangled, overlapping mass: desire, habit, taste, ability, vulnerability, courage, tenderness, ambition, fear and creativity all mixed together. There is no need to rename this complexity as countless genders.
The problem with the gender system is that it claims there are two kinds of personality, and that these personalities are determined by the reproductive organs one is born with. It tells girls what they should be, and boys what they should be; women what they should become, and men what they should become. The first step in breaking this system is, of course, to challenge gender norms and to explore different forms of appearance, dress, gesture, expression and life. No one should prevent others from expressing themselves in ways that make them feel free. A person may wear skirts, use cosmetics, cut their hair short, grow it long, be tough, gentle, quiet or flamboyant, without needing permission from the gender system.
So if someone wants to call themselves genderqueer, non-binary, or some kind of femme-presenting identity, they are free to do so. Personal style, naming, aesthetic presentation and self-description can all be forms of play and release. The problem begins when these labels are made to perform political work: when a person not only names themselves, but demands that others call themselves cisgender; when they need a large conventional binary other against which to display their own complexity and transgression; when they claim that those classified as cisgender therefore possess structural privilege, while they are politically oppressed because their unique identity is not properly understood.
To call oneself boxless while requiring most people to admit that they remain inside boxes is not the abolition of boxes. It merely turns escape from the box into a new form of identity capital. The real problem is not that there are too few boxes, nor that we must add purple, silver, transparent or star-coloured boxes to the existing pink and blue ones. The real problem is why human beings must be boxed at all.
The solution is not to reify gender by inventing ever more categories to fix every subtle variation of human personality. The solution is to abolish gender itself. We do not need a system that binds personality to reproductive function. Without such a system, people would be freer, not poorer. Gender as a hierarchy naturalises the subordination of women to men and restricts the development of both sexes. Repackaging gender as an identity spectrum does not solve this problem.
You do not need a deep, internal, essential gender experience in order to dress as you like. You do not need to prove that your soul is feminine in order to enjoy cosmetics, cooking, craft or care. Nor do you need to prove that your essence is masculine in order to pursue power, risk, intensity or ambition. You may love whom you love, do the work you want to do, and live in the manner you choose. These freedoms do not require new gender labels to become legitimate.
Likewise, you do not need to be genderqueer in order to queer gender. Real subversion does not mean moving from the pink box into a more special box. It means asking why the boxes exist at all. In the face of an oppressive system that sorts people into pink and blue boxes, the answer is not to create more and more boxes that are neither pink nor blue. The answer is to tear the boxes down.
