Flitting Between Many Middles

A primer on non-binary actualities and individualism Down Under

In the early 1990s, ‘transgender’ was repurposed by various groups of transsexuals in the US to basically include anyone whose gender expression was non-conforming with society’s expectations.

—b. binaohan, decolonizing trans/gender 101

I sat in a courtyard talking with a friend, a heater crackling somewhere to our upper right, the flame stark against my cheek. The chatter before it was otherwise mundane, but it was there, in a split second of revelation amid the same conversation, that the tiny breakthrough suddenly came: ‘Masculinity is so much more rigid,’ she offered. ‘There are plenty of things you can do as a woman without your gender being questioned or being destabilised. People react so much harshly to the alternative.’

‘Notice that there’s no “RuPaul’s Drag Kings”,’ says queer theorist Jack Halberstam, referring to the culture of drag where people, usually gay women, dress up as passable versions of men.

It’s as equally raucous and raunchy, with lip-syncing and costume competitions. We still have this idea that femininity is malleable, and masculinity is a protected domain of real power and privilege. It is not transferable or attainable. The public has no appetite for artificial masculinity.

The common ground reached in that moment was much needed. I imagined masculinity to be a packed room of permissible stereotypes, all of these characters somehow taut and muscular, elbows in each other’s mouths. Femininity™ was a larger gathering, with myriad types, fits and identities, but one with the almost ever-present apprehension of threat.

I’d seen adverse reactions among friends of all kinds as they moved past masculinity, or dysfunctioned within it, over many years. Some succeeded, shaping themselves on what they admired in others and the traits that were rewarded. They melded to its form, they fought for its fruits. They wanted the honour, dignity and diplomatic authority that come with being seen as a man. They wanted to be considered natural doers, leaders and thinkers, they wanted the easy utilitarianism of it. And usually, when they got it, they were as deeply frustrated as they had been at the beginning of their search. Exaltation just wasn’t possible.

Days later, returning home on an unacceptably early Jetstar flight and continuing to reflect, I thought about every voyeuristic fantasy of redemption that underscored the popular trans narrative in Australia. I thought of the takeaway perspective your everyday cisgender person wants to hear: ‘I’ve experienced both sides of the coin, and here’s what I have to say about the side of patriarchy everyone else doesn’t see!’ Everyone wants a Jezabel style headline because trans people have not readily exposed ourselves to scrutiny in the way people want us to.

Compared to the wave of representation happening in the United States, or even the policy changes of places such as Cuba, our representational battle lines appear feeble and half-hearted. The Australian public can’t make up their mind about us, or maybe they haven’t been able to. They are ready to witness gender non-conforming and trans people in a way that snaps and sparkles and briefly illuminates, as long as it’s coming from Cate McGregor giving her take on current affairs and expressing scorn for gender fluidity for daytime TV. But otherwise vocal, politicised trans people remain mostly invisible in these arenas.

What we are allowed to say or do is at the discretion of those in power, and that won’t change unless they see reason to. You can bet it will change if there’s money in it for them, and I fear the backlash if we were to push any further—the moral panics that erupted as part of the plebiscite and safe schools discussions were just the beginning. People call this festishisation, tokenisation, but I just want to describe these moments as they happen and how that affects our collective understanding. And who would want that anyway? From what I can see, that type of inclusion comes across as demeaning. That’s hardly ‘acceptance’.

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If gender is not tangibly separate from class, nationhood or culture, then is the true gender binary that reigns in Australia ‘sheilas and drongos’ or ‘chicks and mates’; ‘beach babes and surfie hunks’? Is this all a deliriously kitsch joke? Interviewed by Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler wonders:

What if we shift the question from ‘who do I want to be?’ to the question, ‘what kind of life do I want to live with others?’ It seems to me that then many of the questions you pose about happiness, but perhaps also about ‘the good life’—very ancient yet urgent philosophical questions—take shape in a new way. If the I who wants this name or seeks to live a certain kind of life is bound up with a ‘you’ and a ‘they’ then we are already involved in a social struggle when we ask how best any of us are to live.

Asad Haider expresses similar sensibilities:

The framework of identity reduces politics to who you are as an individual and gaining recognition as an individual, rather than your membership in a collectivity and the collective struggle against an oppressive social structure. As a result, (liberal) identity politics paradoxically ends up reinforcing the very norms it set out to criticize.

Or consider the words of Susan Sontag: ‘Each time that one (that I) surrenders to one’s vanities, each time that one thinks and lives for the sake of “appearing”, one betrays … It is not necessary to deliver oneself to others, but only to those whom one loves.’ This is the classic parable—to look away from the crowds gathered in the arena and turn to our friends who stand in the centre with us, to recognise which opinions matter and whom we must dedicate ourselves to.

The decision to tackle questions of gender and their connection to your identity, to start the process of questioning, is seen as a strictly individualistic journey, and sometimes it’s lived out that way, assuming our decisions and histories take place in a bubble. If gender were really ‘over’ we wouldn’t have to keep talking about it. My decision to embrace certain behaviours, to adopt long lost principles that my world had previously made impossible, was a series of movements that helped me to align more with my communities and the people I loved. It also exposed me to the reactions of a hostile world as it delivered a new phenomenon called transmisogyny.

I often put the simplification we see in the mainstream down to the liberalisation of transness and the sample size of discourse that has entered the public view, in efforts to make some trans people non-threatening to the average Australian at the expense of others. Of course, late capitalism thrives on individualism and the lone archetype, and it’s no surprise this is the framework in which trans people have been situated now that progressive aspirations have accidentally aligned with the interests of capital.

I notice that after making new friends amid a period of resettling, many of whom were from disparate backgrounds and previously did not know each other, we began picking up on each other’s traits. Like complementary bacteria combining, we bonded over the infinitesimal links we then shared. We cut our hair similarly, swapped clothes and mended broken items in a meditative and careful way, lent each other books with dog-eared pages and shared poetry, favourite movies and food. Gender might be a query in which we attune more to the focuses and parallels of each other’s lives, in which we can better serve those we care about outside the prescribed formats, to understand others the more we begin to understand ourselves. It means doing our best to temporarily break down toxic social expectations, creating healthier dialogues in place of the old ones.

Non-binary can be seen as a reflexive nexus that enables us to fill many roles among the circles and social theatres we frequent, stepping outside the allotted binaries, even if it places us in precarity. If we are to abandon the gender stations we were placed in at birth, it needs to be in some way multi-faceted and unselfish. We must take into account why gendered discrimination is part of the colonial floorplan that pits us against each other and keeps us down and makes things more convenient for capitalism. Yet still, we are pushed without warning into a merciless world upon coming out as trans. Maybe it’s natural to tap into the power of individual desire if it’s what comes first.

There’s a reason, then, why ‘third genders’ have historically been regarded as community mystics, astrologers or even therapists. Removed from the mundane, the most precious work lies in disturbing the platitudes of the present, divining the future. Nina Dodd argues that ‘Recognising something behind heterosexuality gives Queer and Trans folk a lens to look beyond and before, a set of focal rings to imagine our clear and blurry collective futures and to understand and honour the past.’ Chloë Reeson points to a challenge of trans identity:

I drive back to Melbourne. I stop at my brother’s house in Armadale. He asks me what pronouns I want to use. I tell him I’m not sure. He says he knows a non-binary person who requests interchangeable pronouns. I say, ‘that sounds like what I would want’. I think no-one is going to do that …

I need specifically this body to exist. My existence is my thoughts. My thoughts are not female. My body is female. To change my body to ‘match’ my thoughts is to risk my body, which is to risk my existence.

 

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Sometimes when the topic of gender identity comes up people ask when I ‘knew’. There’s an expectation there was one moment when things became clear for me, that I realised I was somehow fated to be different. It does not allow for the many years spent tackling these questions behind closed doors and drawing out answers from nothingness. I get it, and I know it’s definitely an attractive narrative—a sellable one that vies for clean endings and a linearity that is not always possible for us. There seems also to be an expectation that I must know clearly, now, what my gender identity entails and what effect that will have on my future. Every trans person is expected to be a philosopher on their own personal history.

I remember gender being a lens through which I could look back on my life, making me realise that my youth and my teenage years were spent in proximity to women, in an unrecognised companionship with them. My inner life was, and will probably always be, a turbulent sorority that only I bore witness to. As others detected some kind of femininity in me, I was first pushed into hyper-masculine arenas and measured in terms of my athleticism. When I failed to impress, I was encouraged to engage in feminised hobbies and caring roles like my grandmothers.

In Australia particularly, sport and physical ability—or other kinds of competitiveness—are the standards by which masculinity is often measured. I grew to become my most sterling self in closeness to women, in the way I took on their skills and behaviours, mimicking them, noting them, applying them delicately and conscientiously. In ‘Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People’, Joan Roughgarden suggests that these people are our ‘tutors’ … and that while young (cisgender) people commonly emulate the behaviours and trajectories of their own sex, parents or otherwise, transgender identity might act as the acceptance of ‘tutors’ beyond our own sex. When I was with boys I always noticed that I was able to be myself only to the degree they unconsciously permitted me to be. It wasn’t karmic necessarily, but I didn’t have to be playing with barbie dolls every day to feel like I would eventually make the decision to step fully out of masculinity. It didn’t have to be just a ‘feeling’, it could be a platform.

I held tight to the company of my grandmothers, and cherish the moments spent with them: pacing around our lower middle-class neighbourhoods, mindfully taking in nature, in lofty public museums and in quietly enclosed spaces, modelling myself on their wisdom and counsel. They were almost always in close proximity; a lucky refuge for me from the coarse rural maleness I was pushed towards, drawn to the way they experienced the world through tactility and creation. Those were the whisper networks of lived knowledge and spoken histories that I’ve traced into adulthood.

Still, I try to distance myself from the flippant, libertarian form of identity politics that rules the mainstream trans politic, that feels divorced from a trans lineage and relies too much on ideas of destiny. I reject the popular categorisation of ‘brain sex’—although I think dysphoria as it has been medicalised is categorically psychological—I argue this role modelling isn’t separate from my individual conception of gender identity. I don’t think I am exempt from the power that comes with being seen as male—having once being seen as pure sinew in denim—but the overwhelming proof has been that the social class assigned to me has become illegitimised by my incidental, and then purposeful, deviation from a gender binary. I often joke that I don’t identify with womanhood like trans women might, but in a Kate Bornstein kind of way I feel confident identifying myself with ‘grandmotherliness’ or alternatively ‘boyishness’ or even ‘sissyness’. The reality is that we all cling to stereotypes and mythologies before we can metabolise that into something less scripted. If I have to adhere, at least let there be some degree of dictation in the process.

One of the biggest ideas shared among Marxist feminists, trans feminists and black feminists—that is often swept under the rug in other feminist creeds in favour of a Darwinist kind of essentialism—is that men and women ‘suffer’ under patriarchy, and are steadily compromised as a result of their gendered realities. They are more hurt than they realise, always pushed past their pain threshold. Nonetheless, one of those social classes benefits structurally from that hierarchy in our culture, so disproportionately that they are less compelled to fight against it, may even replicate those hierarchical mechanisms in a violent way to maintain the status quo, even as they lose out on an emotional or spiritual level. Some men may know how deeply pained they are by it, but continue to choose the safest available option. In his essay ‘A black woman took my job’, Michael Kimmel writes:

women make gender visible, but most men do not know they are gendered beings. Courses on gender are still populated mostly by women. Most men don’t see that gender is as central to their lives as it is to women’s. The privilege of privilege is that its terms are rendered invisible. It’s a luxury not to have to think about race, class, or gender. Only those marginalized by some category understand how powerful that category is when deployed against them.

Since the Enlightenment, psychologist Pani Farvid argues, traits associated with men and masculinity have been prioritised, whereas traits associated with women and femininity have been delegitimised. While this does not account for the place of gender non-conforming women who definitely experience misogyny but still may be ‘masculine’, butch women especially, thousands of people from all backgrounds and experiences thus conspire to resist the central modes of womanhood or manhood and obfuscate the cisgender gaze through non-binarism.

At times this resistance is viewed as a kind of gender nihilism; in line with the queer tradition of futurity and horizontality, of an identity that is running towards a fading horizon, ever in danger of being eclipsed. It’s been said that it’s an incoherent identity. But therein lies the appeal. Despite eye-rolling from everyone along the political spectrum when the subject of gender fluidity comes up, gender non-conformity has severe material implications for those who match its many indices. To suggest otherwise even in jest is a failure of progressive politics.

For the unacquainted, ‘non-binary’ refers to someone who has refused to bear the weight of the gender binary, someone who does not feel at home with their assigned birth sex but may not feel comfortable strictly evoking ‘man’ or ‘woman’. Of course everyone is a mixture of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits, but the uncertain ground between these poles can lead to a new kind of social ostracism, a denial of access to basic resources. It gives rise to its own classes of gender experience that are deliberately treated and then excluded from or rejected in wider cultural discourse. There is a line one passes where that mix becomes immediate, and has deep, undeniably profound repercussions.

Perhaps those who call themselves non-binary or use gender-neutral orthodoxies feel they have surpassed the binary, to the best of their ability, or live in an inscrutable space between it. Perhaps the way they are positioned in the world and the way they think and talk, react and connect, dress and speak, do not sit clearly as ‘man’ or ‘woman’, so that it’s paralysing or determinately incompatible with the universe and their lived experience. Trying valiantly to lodge all of their behaviours into one option would be inessential, painful (even dangerous) or untruthful. Adopting an alternative brings meaning and momentary structure, even if it can only be realised among their own communities.

By living vocally as someone who is gender non-conforming (which may speak more to gender expression) or non-binary (which may speak to gender identity or self-affiliation, and create licence for less categorical living) and being large and inescapably in the world is, as Sara Ahmed might put it, to pose a problem. It is to exist as a series of microcosms and breakages that can threaten the everyday cisgender person’s conception of their own identity. Even after telling myself that non-binary was the tool to adopt, that using that language made me feel more clear about myself and my futures, and gave words to my experiences and gendered phenomena, I feel it equally as a disillusioning and puzzling category to live in.

Dismissing the patterns of gender you are expected to carry out since birth invites pain as much as it may bring inner clarity and sometimes comfort to us, knowing that we are speaking and moving ‘authentically’ through our lives. It also means that, despite my best wishes, using that term may not speak to many of my experiences at all. If we accept that patriarchy is a totalising force, then we also have to agree that none of us can be exempt from it. But as we turn and adjust ourselves on a shoddy lounge chair to find the most functional and comfortable formation, we have a small degree of agency about where the discomfort will ultimately lie, and where it will hit.

‘Cisgender’ people may never have to twist or adjust because the position they find has always worked for them. Perhaps it is even more than suitable. They can slide into social scenes and new circles without distrust, with an army of comparisons behind them. Isn’t that how we interpret new people? We identify strangers by their facial expressions, their eyes and pattern of movements, the tonality of their voice and the leanings of their body as a way of trying to feel safe among the unfamiliar. But ‘non-binary’ does not share that code. It is not recognisable to patriarchy, which is a deference to womanhood and manhood. Our relationships to the constructed roles determine how successfully we will exist in our environments, just like everyone else.

Photograph by the author

Even before using the word audaciously to call myself ‘non-binary’ I had misgivings about it. I’d seen (mostly middle/upper class, mostly white/settler) non-binary people proclaim with an unconvincing degree of certainty that they felt totally at ease now, readied, even proud, that they’d been able to settle upon it as an identity. You can call yourself a third gender all you want, I thought, and you can adopt a postmodern theoretical tagline that claims to move past the binary of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. But it remains true that the society that encircles me on every front, my social life, my work life, essentially the whole of my public life, will vehemently remind me that I am (was) an echo, a malfunction of a man, a traitor, and just as ineffective at conventional femininity. How bizarre that it matters, and could even be something to yearn for, but also how liberating. This is a sentence that affects all GNC/trans people, who are measured on how well they can fit in cisgender moulds of womanhood or manhood, and are often punished in some way if they fall short. There was a pulling happening here—an invisible disaffection as my personal life transformed in response to reach a new personhood, and my ‘public life’ responded to that transformation.

This was not pure fatalism. It was the result of quietly conducted research I’d done throughout the course of a 23-year life, much of which had been spent feeling deeply, pathologically uncomfortable in my skin. I’d taken stock of the social circles and subcultures I was attached to, I had done the maths.

You can take this as the experience of one white non-binary person. When trying them on in secret, feminine clothes often ended up fitting me, and compared to the experiences of friends, the dichotomy of ‘public/private’ was not as explicit as others—my body is not as closely surveilled as the public bodies of black people, of trans people of colour, or of sistergirls and brotherboys who realised that femininity and masculinity were modelled around white aesthetics of beauty and acceptability. In ‘gender is black’, Hari Ziyad argued that:

Black gender has not been used to indicate a shared womanhood or manhood with people within white society, but to highlight how Black people are out of step with womanhood and manhood. Black gender is always gender done wrong, done dysfunctionally, done in a way that is not ‘normal’. Even if we didn’t have the language to describe this experience, all Black people have lived through it. This is why Black boys are hyper-criminalized just as Black girls and other Black non-male children are made invisible when talking about the issues of Black children.

One can easily conclude that there is no easy assimilation tactic, it’s often futile, and performing gender to the extent that your family, friends and workmates might expect of you is shattering work. It’s being reminded of hard edges that previously could have been easily stepped over. A failure to encompass maleness for me, a slight in the grand plan, was par for the course. It set me apart in school and in every intimate setting, and later on in life, when I was buying blouses by the handful and wearing them in the absence of any permission to adopt a different dress code. There are so many queer people I know who echo similar sentiments. There was no choice for them in adopting queerness—it was a label forcibly assigned from the moment they begun expressing ‘unconventional’ traits, one they could not escape from and had to react to.

I attracted stares, street harassment, jabs from friends and workmates, and began to see ‘being in public’ as humiliating and often risky, but for whatever reason I pressed on into unfamiliar territory. It was the qualifier that drew unwanted attention, judgement, othering and sometimes physical violence. But I had some models that had graced life’s stages before I showed up. The glam rock larger-than-life figures of the 1970s, the stylistic licks, smarm and kitsch of the 1980s, the poeticism and sensitivity of the singer-songwriter heyday of the 1990s, the effervescence and fluoro trash of the club kids.

Now transgenderism—which was once almost inextricable from anarchism, radical politics and activism—has become more normalised thanks to widespread representation. That this was the only option for trans people in the past seems obvious to me. You can’t live in one of the most politically volatile identities of the modern world and not realise that things are deeply, seriously wrong for people like you. You begin to dig, enquire, question; become desperate for a literature that will explain what you’re going through.

In a sense this modern pacifism has made people such as Caitlyn Jenner possible. She can proudly renounce anything that resembles the direct trans activism of the past, disavow the socialism and anarchism that made it possible and align herself, happily, with republicanism. Even Janet Mock, for example, can live in a Carrie Bradshaw fairytale like the one she details in Surpassing Certainty, becoming an editor for People magazine, moving to New York, ‘coming out’ in a high-stakes profile piece and going on to live pretty successfully as any other woman would.

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‘One cannot properly be said to “embody femininity” unless that person is white, able bodied, neurotypical, thin, middle—or higher—class, born with a certain body,’ writes b. binaohan. A common rebuff from ‘TERFs’ (trans exclusionary radical feminists) is that the musculatures of femininity that trans women and trans-feminine people adopt, the kind of mannerisms, traditions and energies that trans women accept and (apparently) imitate, are caricatures. This might be true for wealthier trans women, who are some of the most visible and vocal, just as it might be the same if not worse for wealthier cisgender women who view the precepts and necessities of feminism as beyond their concern. Anti-trans or trans exclusionary feminists—who overwhelmingly are straight women (despite claims that TERF ideology is solely the domain of resentful lesbians) of the feminist tradition or not—see trans women as interlopers upon women’s spaces. The trans womanhood, they claim, is a kind of manifest destiny tied to the genitalia they were born with and the ‘practical function’ they may serve, whether or not they ever decide to have children.

This seems a careless and inadequate way to view things. Whenever I’m feeling enough self-hate to go down those TERF rabbit holes, I feel swayed only by their almost amorphously cult-like conviction (although ‘TERFs are not a party or a unified front’, says Andrea Long Chu) but unconvinced that it can align with the true, lived realities of the trans people I know. Maybe the life I lived used to restrict me on all fronts, but those desires, thoughts and behaviours were still there, just dormant. I didn’t have the necessary avenues or confidence to allow myself to be fully seen, nor did I realise the repercussions.

The sanction for a gender mode outside maleness allowed trans people to become more known. It allowed me also to feel less overcome with shame, gave me the tools to process that shame constructively even as it posed even more difficult questions that needed answering; to move instead through the world more ‘authentically’. I stopped trying to arch my shoulders more broadly, the way I walked was rhythmic and sometimes effeminate, even clumsy, like Lindsey Wixson. Socially I became less invested in the shallow banter that was expected of me as a guy and re-evaluated the way I related to the people around me, and the tenets of those relationships shifted. The old friends drifted away. I found better ones.

The way I am perceived along a lineage of gender is judged completely differently where my parents live in outer-suburban Adelaide, the roughages of central New South Wales and the strips and walkways of Sydney. In those cultures that always correspond to the brutishness of the architectural, the bystanders among crowds take on their own interpretations. In the cosmopolitan stretches of progressive Melbourne, trans people whom I might assume were my allies perceived me as brutishly masc on the basis of my class conditioning and wrote me off, implying that I wasn’t trans/queer enough to feel a sense of belonging that comes from queer spaces. If I didn’t submit to their politics, I would be excluded. This clashed with the testimonies of most of my friends, who saw me as almost puppy like, giving, self-effacing, gentle, silly. Only you can become the primary judge of your own disposition. If not you, then who? What other choice but to be swallowed into other’s perceptions of you?

There’s a reason so many memoirs and autobiographical accounts from trans people lean on this notion of a ‘truth’. It means being ordained by the trans and queer libraries and ancestries that support us to move along our inner passageways, to ‘let ourselves out’ of that imagined place, and to let our bodies mirror that in time, in the metaphysical world. Instead of trying, fruitlessly and desperately, to model ourselves on our male or female counterparts exclusively so that we can reap the rewards of acceptability and ‘conformity’, we sacrifice binarism and make choices in our own time. And, as Jacqueline Rose says in ‘Who do you think you are?’

Transsexual people are brilliant at telling their stories. That has been a central part of their increasingly successful struggle for acceptance. But it is one of the ironies of their situation that attention sought and gained is not always in their best interest, since the most engaged, enthusiastic audience may have a prurient, or brutal, agenda of its own.

 

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Writing for TNI, Meredith Tulusan says:

Foucault argued that homosexuality is a modern phenomenon generated by isolating same-sex desire as a mark of identity, which only works by presuming an artificially stable and binary gender system. In arguing that homosexuality is a form of gender variance, I’m not claiming that all trans people are gay, but rather that all gay people fall within a gender-nonconforming space whose borders are demarcated by ‘transgender’ in the current Western model. This other model of sexuality operates inside of a model of gender, instead of simplifying gender to make sexuality equally binary.

It is incontestable that those who live openly gender non-conforming lives are subject to harassment—scorn from friends and allies and even people in progressive communities who view them as living novelties or hypotheticals. They bear the brunt of severe violence, often solicited by the state, or at the least justified by it. They are faced with exclusion, questioning and repeated rebuffs from society’s superstructures. A recent study showed that in Australia, gender-nonconforming university students were most likely to be sexually assaulted. At a panel discussion about prison abolition that I recently attended, someone asked, ‘Where is there room for non-binary people in the discussion of trans people in prison?’

The panellist who responded laughed. ‘If there’s ever a place for a gender binary to be rampantly and violent enforced in this society, it is in prison.’

For all the efforts of some sects of radical feminism to ‘abolish gender’—efforts that usually led to private discussions among aggrieved university-educated white women and occasionally made their way into peer-reviewed texts and slogans, has only marginally shifted the idea of gender as being a restrictive force that needed to be liquidated. Even in the past five years the trans movement has made gender fluidity and diversity, even among people who might not call themselves trans or non-binary, markedly more optional and possible. It’s meant that the pressure to adhere to binary-based expectations have loosened somewhat.

The trans community aren’t the only ones seeing the benefit of this cultural shift, and we are targeted more because of our recognisability. As Andrea Long Chu writes in ‘on liking women’: ‘We are separatists from our own bodies … Because of Jeffreys, a few women in the Seventies got haircuts. Because of us, there are literally fewer men on the planet.’ We arguably don’t get paid our dues for this shift.

The vision of ‘ending gender’ is rooted in an ideal, but makes no suggestion about what can be done to improve our capacities and freedoms. Chipping away at patriarchy or gendered stratification hasn’t brought us closer to ‘ending gender’ but it is, slowly, improving our capacities.

Jonno Revanche is a writer based in Sydney and Adelaide on Gadigal/Kaurna land. They are interested in exploring the residue of ephemeral subcultures and geographical, psychological, emotional experiences from beyond the margins.