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What isn’t Nonbinary?
In 2021, this may seem like a silly question. Nonbinary is to be not binary, but is it all it means? We could flesh it out in commonly phrased prescripts like, “nonbinary is to be something in between, outside of, or some combination of a man or a woman.” But that definition, while true for many under the enby umbrella, doesn’t sit well with me because it requires a juxtaposition of the binary to make sense of nonbinary.
Let’s compare gender to simple geometry, and say that binary is a 2D square. On one side, you have “woman,” and on the other side, you have “man.” A 3D cube can look like a square from a certain perspective, but when you flip it around, you find that a cube has far more perspectives than a 2D square on a 2D plane. I find comparing nonbinary to binary to be like this. Ultimately, the cube (nonbinary) can superficially look like that square (binary). Still, they are not the same, especially if we delve into the theoretical fourth dimension and see the lines and apexes that turn in, over, outside, and around itself, in ways we could never perceive or imagine with our human brains. And then, what of the substance within the cube? What of the substance outside of the cube? These are concepts that do not rely on the 2d square to exist. And that, in a likely confusing nutshell, is my conception of nonbinary.
