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Sexualities
0(0) 1–23
Specificity without ! The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1363460720981564
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through the
“non-binary lesbian”

Levi CR Hord
Columbia University, USA

Abstract
This paper uses the paradigmatic pairing of non-binary and lesbian as identity labels to
investigate changes in conceptualizations of sexual specificity as gender becomes
divorced from its founding binaries. Contrary to the belief that lesbian is threatened
by movement away from binary gender, this analysis postulates that it is not individual
identities that are becoming problematic as gender identity becomes less binary; rather,
it is the fundamental structure of identity which, for decades, has sanctioned identities
built on exclusions. This cultural shift has the potential to liberate structures of desire,
giving way to a model in which sexuality without gender is more redemptive than
contentious.

Keywords
Non-binary gender, lesbian, gender identity, binary, desire

If desire could liberate itself, it would have nothing to do with the preliminary mark-
ing by sexes (Monique Wittig, 1979: 114)

Are we ready for “sexuality without gender”?

In 1994, Biddy Martin published “Sexualities without genders and other queer
utopias,” illuminating the problematics of sexual identities when the stability of

Corresponding author:
Levi CR Hord, Columbia University, 602 Philosophy Hall, 1150 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Email: lch2152@columbia.edu
2 Sexualities 0(0)

genders they are founded upon is challenged. Twenty-five years ago, Martin was
speaking to a shift prompted by queer theory and culture, an “evacuation of
interior essences” (105) in favor of queer gender crossings that left the political
effectiveness of lesbian feminism in question. Her implicit question (what happens
to lesbianism when queer thought fractures the idea of “woman”?) is presciently
relevant in 2020. In ways that Martin may not have foreseen, gender identities are
proliferating, and the ways in which sexualities are identified and named alongside
gender identities are continually being troubled. The question that this article will
attempt to answer is both inspired by Martin’s original query and a response to the
cultural changes in gender and sexuality in the 25 years intervening. How will the
available ways of naming and claiming sexual specificity change when removed
from the binary model of gender on which they were founded?
In order to explore this question, I focus on the contemporary and paradigmatic
example of the non-binary lesbian. Though there has been a movement toward
gender non-specific sexuality labels for the purposes of transgender and non-
binary inclusion, there has also been a notable pairing of non-binary gender iden-
tity with lesbian sexuality, despite the latter’s apparent indexing of womanhood.
The non-binary lesbian is indicative of both the place of and need for lesbian
specificity and the place of and need for a non-binary ideology of gender in this
social and historical moment, and how the two interact with and alter each other.
I argue that, contrary to the belief that lesbian is threatened by movement away
from binary gender, lesbian specificity stands to be liberated and strengthened
when removed from binary systems. Rather than being a debate about whether
we can have sexuality without gender, this is better conceived as a question of
whether we can maintain the specificities of dearly held identities outside of the
systems of identity which demand subject’s continual definition within binaries and
against others. This becomes especially clear in light of the fact that it is not lesbian
specificity (nor the communities and lives organized around it) that is losing its
fitness to task in the 21st century: it is the fundamental structure of identity itself.
After situating this argument in the context of prior scholarship on the tensions
between lesbian identity and radical departures from gender, I argue that previous
engagements in this debate have reproduced the terms of exclusion and binary
opposition that constrain all thought about and politics of identity. Using Judith
Butler’s (1993b) theorization of identity’s basis on systems of exclusion, I argue
that by replacing the “exclusion model” with the non-binary ideology of gender
that is permeating lgbtqþ subcultures, we may more deeply consider the meaning
and necessity of lesbian specificity on its own terms.
This theorization of non-binary maintains that it carries its own ideology about
identity that does neither prescribe content nor strive to protect it with border
reinforcements. Non-binary gender, as is exposed in its pairing with lesbian, does
not rely on the systems of binary exclusion that have heretofore been used to
describe foundational gender identity and the sexual specificities which rely on
it. Reaching even beyond queer (and its inherent attachment to anti-normativity
and opposition), I argue that non-binary demonstrates a resignification away from
Hord 3

pre-existing binary determination without repeating its restrictions, doing damage

to the assumption that one must be a certain type of subject to refuse a restricting
ideology, to hold a resistant politics, or to participate in coalition. To reveal what
this refusal of gender (as we know it) means for sexuality, I take up Monique
Wittig’s lesbian as an example of a non-binary figure who preserves the specificity
of lesbianism outside of its overwrought exclusions, and demonstrates that lesbi-
anism may better thrive in a non-exclusionary model if those who have a stake in
lesbian definitions are willing to let go of their hard borders. I conclude by dis-
cussing how this cultural shift, captured in the pairing of non-binary and lesbian,
has the potential to liberate structures of desire as a whole, giving way to a model
in which sexuality without gender is more redemptive than contentious.
This paper, unlike many of the critiques aimed at finding space between the
apparent essentialist/constructionist and feminist/queer binaries, does not aim to
prescribe a middle ground, nor does it hope to make a political statement about the
deployment of non-binary and lesbian identities alongside each other in the register
of these debates. Similarly, I am not speaking of “identity” as if my project were to
deal with a split subject rather than with a multifaceted expression of being in a
particular social and historical context. Rather, I am investigating the ways in
which thinking through lesbian specificity in a moment characterized by an
increasingly non-binary philosophy of gender can broaden our notions of identity
and specificity outside of a deadlocked identity politics. In short, I will argue
that—contrary to popular narratives—non-binary is enacting its own reparative
reading of identity politics, and non-binary gender may be the one thing that
allows lesbian —and other dearly held sexual orientations—to persist into an
uncertain future.

Exclusions and their discontents

Fraught histories of identity
Debates about the longevity and content of lesbian have been ongoing since the
term first started being used, with many concerns about lesbian visibility and
potential extinction at the hands of gender politics rising to the surface throughout
the decades (Jeffreys, 2014; Morris, 2016). Most of these critiques have emerged
from within various traditions of lesbian feminism. Lesbian feminisms, in the
recent debates about gender identity, have consistently been reduced to some of
their least compelling and most essentialist authors. While it is not my intention to
perpetuate this reduction of lesbian feminism as a powerful collection of ideas, my
argument responds to a specific line of thought within some lesbian feminist tra-
ditions that views the destabilization of gender as a threat to lesbian existence.
These concerns have historically corresponded with a definition of lesbian as nec-
essarily being woman in both identification and birth sex; this association can be
seen in the work of writers like Ti-Grace Atkinson and Janice Raymond, for
instance. It does not seem a coincidence that writers such as these are often
4 Sexualities 0(0)

invoked in rhetorical movements to reduce lesbian feminism to its elements of

exclusion. The fact that “lesbian feminism” and “radical feminism” have become
shorthands for exclusion both by those who reject and by those who perpetuate
them in contemporary contexts, however, is crucially relevant to my argument. It is
this persistent thread and association with exclusivity as the basis for identity that
is being challenged by non-binary, which makes the histories of this idea relevant
here, rather than richer and more nuanced histories of lesbian feminisms. It is the
progression of the debate that takes exclusivity as its subject that I trace in brief.
Exclusive definitions of lesbian—as extensions of the idea that there is an essen-
tial core to “woman”—have produced many figures over the decades who seem to
threaten lesbian visibility: the butch, the bisexual, the trans woman, the trans man,
the queer, and, most recently, the non-binary person. In each iteration of this
debate, lesbianism has been feared anachronistic and has been restated as essential
in an attempt to stabilize group identity. However, critiques most commonly
grouped as “queer”1 reveal that this anxiety over group essence has often had
the unintended effect of demonstrating that lesbian, like any other, is a contingent
and inherently unstable category (Farquhar, 2000: 232). Because most of these
critiques are anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist (Halberstam, 1996; Wilton,
1995), lesbian is sometimes painted as regressive in comparison to other models of
talking about desire that purport being able to “escape from gender” and its fixity
entirely (Martin, 1994: 105).
These debates are prolific and heated because their interlocuters are, of course,
attached to the identities they defend. Identity politics permeate all thought about
identity, up to and including queer interventions that make a point of transcending
them. Much scholarship on lesbian identity relies on ideas of generational conflict
and progress narratives, as captured by Garber:

Contemporary theory adores a vacuum. [. . .] One side argues that homosexuality is

innate, an “essential” identity; the other counters that social and historical circum-
stances shape and define, or “construct” identity. A third discourse denounces the
either/or nature of the argument. (2001: 2)

Even formulations that directly attack this binary thinking cannot seem to think
themselves outside of the framework of lesbian feminism vs. queer theory in the
process. This either/or/between model in theory is repeated—sometimes earnestly,
others critically—by nearly everyone speaking of lesbian identity’s discontents, as
if the discovery of opposition and the suggestion of an overlapping middle path
were the only approach. This fault does not sit squarely with lesbian studies: it is
repeated by queer theorists (Doan, 2007; Garber, 2001; Stein, 1997). Although the
reality is closer to a shared, messy genealogy with more in common than sup-
posed,2 queer theory often appears as the progressive rejection of essentialism to
a fault. Rethinkings suggested for the purpose of battling essentialism and ahis-
toricism leave the binary between lesbian and its supposed successors untouched,
Hord 5

even as they couch it in airier “post-modern” terms that suggest proliferation and
unboundedness.
Most recently, many theorists have attempted to rescue lesbian not only from
invisibility, but from the dichotomous battles that have been fought over its honor.
Thinkers such as Shane Phelan (1994), Clare Hemmings (2011), Lynne Huffer
(2013), and Kevin Henderson (2018) have brilliantly confronted the intellectual
deadlock of a genealogy that so often positions lesbian as essentialist and queer as
its teleological vanquisher. Each of them also takes issue with the reduction of
lesbian feminism, acknowledging and confirming that this has become a cultural
truism as well as a hallmark of scholarly debate. The broad consensus of these
writers is that we should be suspicious of progress narratives that position lesbian
and its histories as essentialist, and that there is something that we are categorically
missing (even pointedly ignoring) in the radical thought of earlier lesbian writing.
Henderson positions the lesbian as a central figure in the imaginative and nec-
essary project of joining queer, trans, and feminist politics, and looks back to
Wittig’s lesbian materialism in order to begin thinking difference differently: think-
ing it, crucially, outside of the separations that feed back into identity politics. In
fact, he joins a plethora of calls for the lesbian to be reconsidered as vital to the
movement of bringing together disciplines (sexuality studies, feminism, transgen-
der studies, queer theory) that have been pried apart (2018: 186). Henderson’s key
argument is that continuing to cast the lesbian as the anachronistic subject of
mistaken 1970s and 1980s radicalism that slipped into racism and exclusionary
separatism is harmful for transgender politics. In the same way that critiquing
radical lesbian thought as always-already-white leaves no room to consider the
thought of Black lesbian feminists (Hemmings, 2011: 53), encoding lesbians as
always already trans-exclusionary and gender-conforming is to make impossible
the transgender lesbian (Henderson 2018: 190), and, I add, to render lesbian
thought and specificity irredeemable in a moment of rapid reorganization
of gender ideologies. “If the transgender subject is the subject of the
present,” Henderson notes, “we must leave the lesbian subject behind for her
exclusions” (190).
Henderson’s mission, one that this article extends, is to counter this reading by
forwarding one based on Wittig’s distrust of ontological difference (explored in
context below), positing a queer-trans-feminism in place of its disparate parts. He
meaningfully extends this project to the point of asking academics and activists to
be equally distrustful of a divide between “cis” and “trans” that suggests a natural
difference rather than a vector of regulatory power, and risks “turning radical
trans politics into a kind of interest-group liberalism” (2018: 200). This divide,
he says, also naturalizes the lesbian as cisgender, rendering the lesbian potential of
“disruptive, exciting, capacious, radicalizing, [and] erotic” to the “normative, dry,
boring, exclusionary, essentialist, and old” (200) that has become a dominant
image of regression.
Henderson’s framework leaves a gap, however. Though he is right to suggest
that many queer and trans people scapegoat lesbians in contemporary political
6 Sexualities 0(0)

debates about gender identity, his idea that the rise of trans and non-binary pol-
itics/cultures unequivocally redoubles this sidelining of lesbian (2018: 190) suggests
that there is some truth in the genealogical reading that he is arguing against. That
is, despite his acknowledgment of trans women who are lesbians, he must proceed
from the premise that the abandonment of lesbian by emerging trans communities
is a stable cultural truism. The example of non-binary demonstrates that this, in
fact, is not necessarily the case. Further, his solution of finding a complex shared
genealogy stops short of finding an intertwined future that does not leave those
terms—or the structures of identity politics that forged them—in place. And while
he is correct to identify that these tired discourses are being repeated in contem-
porary discussions of the place of the lesbian as gender dissolves, he is leaving out a
vital but unrecognized phenomenon of how the lesbian is already experiencing a
rebirth—one that cleanses the term of anachronism and political incorrectness—
through its increasingly frequent pairing with non-binary. Non-binary and its
attendant ideology may be that which disrupts the system on which these identity
politics are built.

Specificity or identity?
Throughout most of the history mentioned above, those speaking of lesbian spe-
cificity have translated specificity as essence or as boundary. However, approaches
to the definitive specificity of any identity, community, or label are directly respon-
sive to the cultural and political contexts in which they are stated. The histories of
lesbian identity, therefore, are not necessarily the futures of lesbian specificity. In
this section, I work with the notion of lesbian specificity as an alternative to lesbian
identity, suggesting that there is a specificity to lesbian experience that can be lived
but which resists being solidified.
Lesbian specificity has been used by many, most notably Phelan, to avoid
essentialism while engaging the notion of a shared experience. While this is my
goal, I am additionally drawing on Butler’s idea that claiming a sexual identity
category (and the unavoidable baggage of its significations) means turning against
the actual sexuality supposed to be contained in that category, as labels are always
technologies of control (1993b: 308). That is, when the label “lesbian” is used, it is
for the purposes of “control[ling] the very eroticism it claims to describe and
authorize” (308). What one authorizes is not necessarily continuous with the actu-
ality of lesbian sexuality: it is a politicized authorization encapsulating many other
factors. The content of lesbian’s sexual specificity becomes an excess. In speaking
of specificity here, I seek to say something about the content of lesbian experience,
that thing which compels us to name and defend it, without defining in advance
what that might be (Butler, 1993a).
Specificity is not something that we should stop defending or cultivating.
Neither is specificity a reiteration of essentialism: as Shane Phelan says, “[t]he
demand for specificity thus provides recognition of the individual, even as it refutes
the supposition of a unitary subject” (1994: 11). Specificity can locate us within
Hord 7

systems of power, allow for effective liberatory work to be done, and insist—
depending on how we label it—“that there is more to us than the categories,
that we have an integrity that cannot be captured in those terms” (Phelan, 1994:
8). Of course, specificity has never been an uncomplicated matter for lesbians, cast
as that which sanctions the possibilities and realities of lesbian existence (Bolsø,
2008: 59) and that which must redeem the ultra-precarious subject position in the
face of lesbian oppression (Farquhar, 2000: 220; Fuss, 1990: 98). It has, at different
times, been described in various ways: as a continuum of care, a commitment of
the body, a transcendent love between women-identified women, an anger toward
male domination, a context-dependant essence, and a completely contingent his-
torical construction either within or beyond “the problematics of sexual differ-
ence” (all cited in Fuss, 1990: 45). Other descriptions have focused on lesbianism as
a structure of desire (Bolsø, 2008: 51), a collection of political beliefs centering
egalitarianism and libertarian ideals (Jenness, 1998: 483), and a lived application of
feminist politics (Rudy, 2001: 195).
The cultural and political contexts of the 1970s and 1980s, unlike today’s con-
texts, were an important catalyst for the translation of lesbian specificity as essen-
tialism. Diana Fuss recalls that essence functions as a sign, and as such gains
different political and personal investments depending on “shifting and determi-
native discursive relations” of the social field in which it is spoken (1990: 20). In
reference to the fluid meanings of the terms used to claim identities, this suggests
that there are no intrinsic values contained within the sign lesbian: no inherent
conservatism or radicalism beyond the content of its many uses. Rather, lesbian is
responsive to the needs of its time, and is particularly responsive due to its place in
a feminist context that demands a causal relationship between identity and politics
(Fuss, 1990: 100). This is true both of the lesbian feminist moment of the 1970s and
of the contemporary moment of non-binary. Precisely what lesbian, and lesbian
specificity, is responding to in present contexts is a guiding question of this paper.
Though I do not offer any straightforward elaboration here on what lesbian spe-
cificity might mean, the explorations of its responsiveness in the past are, I con-
tend, related to the fact that many still do feel compelled to name and defend it. In
order to understand the potential of lesbian within non-binary frameworks, the
needs that it has been called to meet in the past, and what accumulated meanings it
therefore still carries, must first be understood.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the kind of lesbian identity which is currently associated
with the biologically determinist arose through a nexus of feminist politics and a
call to authenticity. Feminism that focused on women’s unity and emancipation
became lesbianism’s obvious ideology: both were committed to letting women’s
energies flow toward other women (Lorde, 1984). As a result, identification with the
same sex through the field of lesbian politics became secondary to the particular
desire for the same sex (Jenness, 1998: 480). The erotic parts of lesbian that could
not be captured by its container were allowed less movement and thus less disrup-
tion of the framework of binary sex. Identity, and everything that it leaves out,
became the operative part of lesbian life.3 One of the reasons that the prioritization
8 Sexualities 0(0)

of identity over practice became central in this era was due to the influence of large
civil rights movements (for lesbians, these were gay and lesbian organization post-
Stonewall and the early 1970s women’s movement), putting a powerful emphasis
on “personal authenticity – the unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direc-
tion, self-understanding, and creativity” (Escoffier, 1993: 10). In response, the
lesbian became attached to a brand of authenticity that demanded personal politics
be accessed only by the discovery of a “true” identity (Fuss, 1990: 100), which
would inevitably lead to an authentic (and thus coherent) women’s culture
(Escoffier, 1993: 16). This orientation toward authenticity was made stark by
the concept of “false consciousness,” the insult lobbed at many bisexual women,
transmasculine people, and others whose desire for or identification with non-
women was treated as a removable barrier to lesbian authenticity (Weise, 1992).
What many contemporary thinkers, building off of queer theorists in the 1990s,
reduce to 1970s “essentialism” was rooted in the practice of constructing and
defending borders: its persistent “our” and its coherent “woman,” resting on the
“‘the’ difference that all women shared vis-à-vis all men” (Phelan, 1994: 2). Though
lesbian identity projects did not begin with the bulk of their roots in biological
determinism, there was an eventual slippage among certain lesbian feminists from
searching for a positive sense of women’s community and lesbian culture toward a
lauding of sexual difference, as the need to justify that community arose (Stein,
1997: 15). In some—though not all—cases, a necessary and productive foundation
of exclusion became linked to a purposeful act of reinforcing boundaries in order
to define group identity against other types of people. This is one of the main
reasons that lesbian feminism retains an often-damning signification in the present.
This is despite many definitive texts, such as Gayle Rubin’s 1992 “Of catamites and
kings,” which explicitly names this problem in some lesbian communities, and
argues for the inclusion of transmasculine people within them based on the his-
torical contingency and arbitrariness of boundaries. Clearly, the assumption of a
widespread commitment to the kinds of damaging “essentialism,” that seems to
culturally hang about discussions of lesbian feminism today, was not universal,
totalizing, or consistently dominant. However, as Rubin’s nuanced objection to it
signals, it was an association that had built up during the previous two decades: a
transmutation, perhaps, of an initial exclusion into a practice of exclusion.
It is worth thinking about whether or not there would have been, in the 1970s,
any possibility for lesbianism to be defined outside of gender, or outside of a
relation to men. In the political and historical context of the time, and in the
presence of a mode of feminist politics that already claimed to speak for all
women, lesbian oppression was theorized within a system of differential domina-
tion, which meant that lesbian specificity most sensibly meant sameness. And
despite attempts to relegate essentialism to the past, the “desire to judge” who
fits into the bounds of lesbianism—whether the criteria be sexual practice, politics,
or aesthetics—has remained constant (Farquhar, 2000: 227) and is carried forward
into the present in hostile responses to non-binary lesbianism.
Hord 9

Exposing the exclusion model of identity

Instead of trying to redeem lesbian specificity from within the terms of these
debates, it should become clear that the fundamental problem is not with the
lesbian lives taking place under this sign, but with the structure of identity being
sanctioned. The fact that identities are always based on sets of exclusions has
hitherto determined the binary ways in which they are thought (i.e. I am this
because I am not that). In her essay “Imitation and gender insubordination,”
Butler describes how any totalization of the “I” (in the sense of proclaiming an
identity, of attaching oneself to the ontological “to be”) is based on the sets of
exclusions that we make in trying to define what is constitutive of that identity. To
be a lesbian is dangerously contentless before one lays the groundwork of not being
a man, of not being attracted to men. This, of course, is the reason that these
debates seem endless: in this model “[lesbian] specificity,” Butler notes, “can
only be demarcated by exclusions that return to disrupt its claim to coherence”
(1993b: 309). The fact that the same process is active, for Butler, in the psycho-
logical formulation of gender identity and the structures of melancholia that
compel us to manhood and womanhood, respectively,4 doubles its strength in
the determination of lesbian identity: it doubly relies on the gender binary, rein-
forcing the boundary that sits between woman and not-woman. This has resulted in
an especially resilient identity politics: a specificity that got swallowed by a cult of
difference, “as if ‘difference’ was something experienced only as women, or as
lesbians” (Phelan, 1994: xiv). It has also impoverished the terms in which we
think lesbian specificity in relation to gender identity, as it is not clear what the
“true determinant” of sexuality should be (“the phantasy structure, the act, the
orifice, the gender, the anatomy?” (Butler, 1993b: 310)). Regardless of what con-
siderations may be opened through questions like Butler’s, the combined weight of
the intertwined sets of exclusions that determine both gender and sexuality ensures
that womanhood sits firmly at the center of lesbianism in many of the answers.
Both personally and epistemologically, this model of exclusions has its own
thrall. It is also clear, and has been since Butler’s formulation, that what these
exclusions refuse to capture is just as substantial as what they attempt to. Butler
reminds us that the “I” in question in identity always exceeds determinations based
on exclusions, always spills over the boundaries and in doing so produces “the very
excess in and by the act which seeks to exhaust the semantic field of that ‘I’” (309).
Returning to the figure of the lesbian, it is fair to ask whether this excess has ever
been properly addressed in formulations of specificity. What is this excess, for the
lesbian? Is it the opposite of lesbian specificity, or is it lesbian specificity itself?
Another way of phrasing this question, and the beginning of a potential answer
that I believe the non-binary lesbian reveals, is echoed in the assertion that begins
this paper: If desire could liberate itself, it would have nothing to do with the pre-
liminary markings of the sexes.
In light of the above, it is clear that it is not lesbian specificity as essentialism
that has lost its relevance, but the structure of identification and naming sexual
10 Sexualities 0(0)

specificity that is no longer functional given an increase in a new non-binary ide-

ology of gender. While the idea that liberated desire would have no relation to
binary sex has an easily readable relation to non-binary and its rejection of those
preliminary markings, non-binary has something to offer us structurally beyond a
simple inversion of terms. The exclusions that we make when we claim an identity
are both a product of their time and a reproduction of an ethical framework. The
1970s and 1980s required something like the exclusion model of identity in order to
create livable lives for those seeking them under the sign lesbian. This illuminates
something important: that it is not lesbian specificity in particular that is losing its
place and purpose as times goes on: it is the exclusion model of identity itself. The
recuperation of the term lesbian then, importantly, does not rest on the claim that
all of radical lesbian feminism was somehow “wrong,” or something that lesbian-
ism needs to be saved from, which has become one of many impassible barriers to
present day discussion. Instead, lesbian is able to be recuperated in part because—
as demonstrated above—it is responsive to its contexts. In the next section, I will
explore what non-binary exposes about identities that are based on systems of
exclusions, and what might be able to function in place of “identity” and yet
remain sturdy enough to bear the weight of sexual specificity. As Leslie
Feinberg once claimed, “[w]e all need help in creating new worlds and concepts
that say who we are, not who we aren’t” (1998: 27).
Theorizing the rise of the non-binary lesbian can provide insight into how this
call is being met in ways irreconcilable with the exclusion model of identity, but
which allow its prized terms new life.

The moment of non-binary and the preservation of

lesbian specificity
Non-binary as ideology
To begin my theorization of the non-binary lesbian—and thus my commentary on
what happens to notions of specificity when subjects choose other than a model of
identity that is based on binary exclusions—I will clarify what I mean by non-
binary. I do not consider non-binary as having been shaped as an identity in the
same way that lesbian has been shaped as one, as it does not share the basis of
exclusion described above that all other identities do. Rather, I would like to
consider non-binary as a subject position with a connected ideology about
gender—a particular sort of space that one can occupy in what I have come to
see as our current “non-binary moment.”5
The concept of non-binary’s recent popularity as a gender label has not yet been
satisfactorily addressed in scholarship, although its usage in relation to gender
began to increase in 2010 and experienced spikes in usage through 2017 and
2018.6 In existing academic attempts to define the term, non-binary gender has
been related to readers in rather straightforward terms, masking much of its var-
iability and potential. This is partially owing to its having not yet been
Hord 11

unanimously defined, due to its frequent use as an umbrella term and the fact that
it lacks a standard narrative. If one takes most recent academic writing on the topic
at face value, non-binary can be summed up as any gender identity in which one
identifies as neither male nor female, both male and female, as different genders at
different times, or as having no gender (Richards et al., 2016). There is a tension
between uses of non-binary as a label in itself, and as an umbrella term which
functions as an anachronistic container for other labels with longer and different
histories of rejecting gender dichotomies.7 These applications, and perhaps even
the term non-binary, are problematic in themselves, and reveal one reason why
there is no consensus on non-binary—the suitable descriptors that hold easy mean-
ing for others are ironically dichotomous. The fact that academic sources largely
have not progressed beyond this point may signal the limits of even queer theory’s
deconstructive project—relying, as it does, on anti-normativity in a persistently
binary sense (a focus on the non of non-binary)—and alert us to the need for a new
model of conceptualizing gender and sexuality. In this article, as an initial step to
think outside of these limits, I use non-binary to refer precisely to the reality of its
ambiguous and widespread use in the past 10 years. I use it to reference the posited
subject position, and its connected ideologies of gender, that has arisen both within
and in departure from “trans” and “queer” and which appears in its cultural usage
ununified but for its rejection of the correlation between identity and assigned sex.
Public concern confirms that the demand for recognition of non-binary identity
(in the form of increasing advocacy for gender-neutral washrooms, language
awareness, etc.) has implications beyond the individual, asking as it does for the
restructuring of a society organized around naturalized binaries. Likely because
the idea of non-binary gender exists in such an obvious conflict with the ways in
which our society takes binary gender as foundational, many non-binary perspec-
tives demand new ideologies about gender. Non-binary experience does not just
create a new subject position which functions within the logics of existing gender or
identity schemas; rather, the non-binary subject position critiques the very terms
through which we understand gender identity, and thus requires ideological pad-
ding—something that has not yet been explored in depth, and which I expect
future terminology will illuminate beyond my capacities in the present. While it
might seem that by naming the binary and signaling an opposition to it the label
inherently reinvokes the founding binary’s strength, the non-binary narratives that
we have access to (e.g. in Bornstein and Bergman, 2010; Rajunov and Duane,
2019; Spoon and Coyote, 2014) dismantle the exclusion model by stepping outside
of traditional transgender narratives (i.e. a discomfort with or felt wrongness about
assigned femininity necessarily resulting in a masculine identification, or vice
versa) and by speaking about gender in distinctly idiosyncratic terms.8 Non-
binary is difficult to pin down precisely because it does not rest on established
correspondences between sex, gender, and expression, nor does it rest on estab-
lished narratives of their rejection.
I argue that non-binary is more a framing ideology than it is an identity. It has
no prescriptive content, no prescriptive behaviors or aesthetics. It has been applied
12 Sexualities 0(0)

across cultural and racial lines,9 and in tandem with countless other labels. Unlike
lesbian, it does not attempt to index a particular relation to others, or a particular
opposition to other configurations of sexuality or gender. This should begin to
reveal what is unique about non-binary, as all indexes of relations are, of course,
based on the act of exclusion through which we experience all relationality. The
lack of prescriptiveness often causes people to read non-binary as an extension of
queer frameworks, or as yet another branch on the proliferating tree of queer
identities, quite seamlessly aligned with the queer values of non-normativity, ambi-
guity, and anti-structuralism. However, as Wiegman and Wilson (2015) and
Sedgewick and Frank (2003) identify, queer perspectives often become caught
up in oppositionality and negativity themselves in an attempt to work against
posited norms. I see this project as an extension of their idea that we may be
able to, through other means, imagine what broadly “queer” perspectives might
become if they were less tied to direct opposition, if they were able to extend to
spaces quite distinctly their own. While it is clear that there are connections
between queer and non-binary ways of intervening in dominant frameworks,
I maintain that this moment in which we are both individually and collectively
forced to confront what might exist creatively around, without, within, or adjacent
to our understanding of totalizing binaries is a unique opportunity. Non-binary
challenges that inextricable link between identity, binaries, and processes of exclu-
sion. At this moment, it has not and cannot be solidified as a certain type of
identity: it is neither fully transgender nor fully cisgender, nor does it demand a
particular or fixed type of transgression beyond its foundational ideology.
While it is based on the exclusion of the binary system itself, it does not foun-
dationally exclude any other type of gender expression. What non-binary is exclu-
sive to, then, is an existing ideology of gender: that which insists not only on
linking biological sex and gender, but also precipitates the linking of gender and
appearance, descriptions and existence. Exclusion of ideology is not the same kind
of basis for identity as exclusion of a state of being or a set of actions. To dem-
onstrate the difference with an example, someone assigned female at birth could
choose to maintain a recognizably femme appearance while using the label non-
binary to signal an awareness and intentional rejection of the system which ascribes
and commands such femininity. Femininity—or any unavoidable content of gen-
dered experience that this example could hold—is decoupled from sex, intention-
ally decoupled from prescribed womanhood, decoupled from essentialist identity,
and yet persists as a non-exclusive vector. Its presence, under non-binary, does not
signal “not man” any more than it signals “woman.” In excluding gendered deter-
minations as a principle of meaning, non-binary excludes nothing else.
Non-binary does not contain queer’s prerogative to move toward the shattering
of self, nor base itself solely on the limitations of possibilities: if one were both not
man and not woman, expunging all that had been coded as masculine or feminine,
and going against all “proper” behaviors assigned to these genders, there would be
nothing left with which to populate an experience of gender. Rather, non-binary
does not refuse these things, and does not make claims about itself on the basis of
Hord 13

hard exclusions, but resignifies the meanings of behaviors, aesthetics, and words
outside of their preexisting binary determination. While non-binary has no partic-
ular discontinuities with queer’s ethos, just as I argue it has none with lesbian, the
reading of non-binary as an equivalent movement in a queer genealogy is a mistake
largely because it limits the thought about and meanings of this phenomenon to
the same old progress narratives and binary frameworks. Halberstam (2005) plays
with this reading, tracing today’s “gender-ambiguous individual” as “futurity
itself, a kind of heroic fulfillment of the postmodern promises of gender flexibility”
(18). By suggesting that present uses of non-binary may more accurately represent a
discontinuity than an imagined fulfillment of a specifically queer logic, I am not
suggesting that non-binary represents a new conceptual frontier. Nor do I argue
that it somehow escapes burdened histories or hierarchical power relations in its
actual deployments. I do contend, however, that its lack of prescription and exclu-
sion make it accessible to a much broader range of subjects than queer is and has
been, especially given the differences in the political contexts in which each arose.
Thinking through the non-binary lesbian is an opportunity to examine what this
new ideology does to the very concepts of identity and sexuality. A start to think-
ing of non-binary outside of this framework is to consider what purpose it meets in
today’s context, just as lesbian met the context of previous decades in shifting ways.
For instance, let us return to Henderson’s idea that transgender politics need to be
diverted away from slipping back into a binary (cis/trans) that suggests that there
is a natural divide that undermines many of the radical politics that trans could
mount, and that posits a gender normative subject that appeals for tolerance must
be directed to. Non-binary suggests (often contentiously) that we do not have to be
one sort of subject in order to refuse a restricting dominant ideology. It escapes, as
much as anything can, the “demand made by power” to be knowable, to be subject
to, to “parse endlessly the particulars” of identity back into the power structures
that define it (Menon, 2015: 2).

The rise of the non-binary lesbian

The non-binary lesbian has not yet been discussed in academic work. In many
cases, as Clare Hemmings aptly identifies, there are parts of minority subcultures
that do not fit into our dominant narratives of them, let alone the academic
narratives that seek to make sense of their developing idiosyncrasies. Such has
been the case with the term lesbian in much linguistic research on its recent use,
which suggests the term falling out of use in favor of terms that refuse boundaries,
fixity, and gender specificity.10 The theory that grapples with this data explains the
trends in the terms of the dichotomous, binary narratives of identity politics: les-
bian feminist Bonnie Morris (2016), for instance, reads this shift as part of an
attack on identities that do not center men, while Jack Halberstam (2005), from a
queer theory perspective, suggests that younger people find labels increasingly
oppressive and unable to capture their uniqueness in a “post-gender” neoliberal
world (18). However, whether due to temporal context (the specific language
14 Sexualities 0(0)

around non-binary had not yet emerged at the time Halberstam was writing) or the
seduction of a coherent statement such as Morris’s, neither of these accounts
grapple with the growing number of subjects who are choosing to combine non-
binary’s rejection of our current gender paradigm with the specificity of the lesbian
who was forged within it, to constitute a growing body of non-binary lesbians.
Recent data on terminology use hints at the conjunction of lesbian and non-
binary. In Oakley’s (2016) study of terminology use in online Tumblr bios (a space
where contemporary non-binary, trans, and queer narratives flourish), the most
frequently used gender identity terms were trans, genderfluid, and genderqueer and
were most frequently used alongside the sexuality terms queer and bisexual, fol-
lowed closely by lesbian. This suggested co-occurrence is confirmed in a large-scale
analysis by White et al. (2018) of what sexuality and gender labels are being used in
conjunction. While their general finding was that traditional gender labels (female,
male) occurred mostly with traditional sexuality labels (straight, lesbian, bisexual)
and open ones (different, other, genderfluid) occurred alongside the like (other,
pansexual, queer), their data also show the co-occurrence of different gender
with lesbian and genderfluid with lesbian as a significant portion of their top 30
co-occurring pairs (249). This co-occurrence—which goes against dominant
assumptions that non-exclusionary gender labels must be paired with non-
gendered sexuality labels (e.g. queer, pansexual)—demonstrates that some who
are currently couched in a burgeoning non-binary ideology are approaching the
use of sexuality labels differently, including the use of lesbian.
Additionally, cultural conversations are taking place surrounding the non-
binary lesbian, with split and strong opinions confirming that the perceived conflict
in this identity is already contentious. While the articles cited below are not aca-
demic sources, online editorials represent one of the only areas in which discussion
around the non-binary lesbian has begun to emerge, and are worth acknowledging
as indications of the ways in which people are living and thinking through the
connections between the two terms.
Some of these contributions seek simply to explain how the two can co-exist
using personal perspectives. A 2018 piece from PinkNews entitled “Can you be
both non-binary and lesbian?” provides the anonymous personal testimonies:

I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive – lesbians have not always
strictly identified as women, [there have] always been lots of gender non-
conforming lesbians

My sexuality is lesbian but also my experience of gender is lesbian – I know some

people joke that their gender is dyke or lesbian, but that is genuinely how I feel.

(Ashenden, 2018)

Other articles describe non-binary lesbianism as being a simple middle ground for
non-binary people who identify with femininity and are attracted to women/
Hord 15

feminine-identified people, or for people who go between genders, at least one of

which includes some sort of woman-identification (even if only contextually, such
as during sex) (Finch, 2016).
However, a significant amount of the commentary on non-binary lesbians is not
as positive, and harkens back to many of the exclusionary identity politics dis-
cussed above. Katie Herzog’s (2018) article “If the Future is Non-Binary, it’s a
Bleak One for Women” claims that non-binary “erases a population” of both cis
and trans women, as a deluded way of exempting oneself from the oppression that
comes with womanhood. Noting an increase in non-binary identification, she says
that some are “arguing that an ode to dyke culture should be supplanted by one
that centers people who have rejected the concept of women” and that it is “hard
to see what’s so progressive about that.” Similarly, Black butch lesbian activist
Pippa Fleming links the rise of non-binary to patriarchy and sex-based oppression,
asserting that “the gender-identity movement’s attempt to rebrand the lesbian as
queer, and the pronouncement that ‘anyone can be a lesbian’, are nothing short of
erasure” (2018).
Clearly, non-binary lesbianism is a phenomenon gaining popularity, and it is
also being folded back into dichotomous discourses before it has had the chance to
be seen for what it may have the potential to challenge. In an attempt to demon-
strate the potential of the non-binary lesbian to disrupt binary systems of identity
in ways that the cultural discussions around it may currently be missing, I turn
back to Monique Wittig’s rich theorizations of lesbian specificity outside of binary
womanhood.

Monique Wittig’s non-binary lesbian

In order to understand how this growing non-binary ideology interacts with iden-
tities rich in specificity, it is necessary to consider the example of Wittig’s lesbian.
Both Butler and Henderson have conducted in-depth analyses of Wittig’s work in
the context of lesbian identity politics, but I extend their analyses to argue that
Wittig’s lesbian is a non-binary figure who preserves the specificity of lesbianism
outside of its overwrought exclusions. In fact, as I will demonstrate, lesbian spe-
cificity (in the sense of the content of that label, the palpable parts that are left in
excess when we make exclusionary claims) thrives better here than in other models,
giving us a sense of what may happen to a compelled sexual identity when removed
from its exclusionary determinations.
What some see as taking away from lesbian specificity, the refusal of woman,
Wittig posits as the root of lesbian specificity. Lesbians are not women because
they destroy the naturalized coherence of the heterosexual paradigm in which
woman only has meaning in subordinate relation to men (1993: 103). Thus, in
her view, feminisms that celebrate the concept of woman recreate their own
oppression by not fighting for the eradication of the class that subordinates
them (which, she notes is also what leads to the cyclical and complacent develop-
ment of “new” theories of lesbian specificity) (1993: 105). She also relates this
16 Sexualities 0(0)

problem to “straight society’s” basis on “the necessity of different/other at every

level” (1992: 55), and it is this difference that she takes issue with as being a false
ontology. On a political level she believes that it is the responsibility of lesbians and
gay men to stop using the language of difference, the language of women and men,
suggesting that the specificity of these sexual identities should have contained an
anti-gender binary component from the start.
What does Wittig mean, then, for lesbian specificity? In keeping with her anti-
essentialist viewpoint, she does not propose any content to fill the gap she leaves
with the removal of woman (Henderson, 2018: 197). She also refuses the notion
that lesbian specificity is a narrowly sexual specificity, saying that “[l]esbianism is
much more than sexuality. Lesbianism opens onto another dimension of the
human (insofar as its definition is not based on the ’difference’ of the sexes).
Today lesbians are discovering this dimension outside what is masculine and fem-
inine” (Wittig, 1979: 117). This openness resonates with contemporary non-binary
ideologies, and purposefully avoids the exclusion model of identity. More impor-
tantly, it demonstrates that Wittig is invested in maintaining a lesbian specificity
outside of its founding system, and that articulations of this specificity transcend
identity politics to link to both the richness of a “lesbian” experience and the
emancipatory goals of “lesbian” politics.
Indeed, the self-assertions of non-binary lesbians today seem to echo many of
Wittig’s premonitions. For instance, an anonymous person in the PinkNews article
states that “[a]s a lesbian you defy probably one of the biggest gender roles that
exists, which is for your life to revolve around a man, [which complements] how
being non-binary also doesn’t conform to expectations of gender” (Ashenden,
2018). Another commentator shares that:

Being nonbinary is basically a way of understanding how my gender feels considering

I no longer rely on the heterosexual and male-centered outlook I am expected to have.
[. . .] [W]hat is the social context of womanhood but a binary opposite to men in order
to find a suitable male partner? We wouldn’t divide the two out without a purpose
and when you know you’ll never be with a man, it’s all arbitrary and seems useless. So
why does gender matter when you’re only interested in one? (Bouris, 2018)

There is more in Wittig’s formulation that is useful for understanding how the
identities non-binary and lesbian are functioning together, and how this might
become a new mode of considering the politics of identity. Judith Butler (2007)
discusses how Wittig does not simply reverse the terms of oppression in order to
confront the system of power. Rather, she universalizes11 the lesbian point of view
(520), opening it to a contentious degree beyond womanhood. This, perhaps,
opens borders to subjects who—in Wittig’s time, and in Butler’s—were antithetical
to lesbian identity. In doing this, Wittig demonstrates that the universal point of
view does not have to be the hegemonic one: in her work, opposing the traditions
of Western thought on which binary systems of exclusion are built, the universal is
not the masculine. Rather, in her texts, the “lesbian point of view assaults the
Hord 17

presumption that the masculine is the general/universal by appearing without

depending on the masculine” (Henderson, 2018: 198), exposing and refuting the
idea that the “categories of sex determine in advance whose perspective will qualify
as universal” (Butler, 2007: 522).
Recalling this aspect of Wittig’s work reveals that non-binary, in constructing an
ideology that works against the exclusion model instead of inverting existing power
structures, is performing the same action of demonstrating that what may be seen
as a minority subject position (or an identity) may be far more impactful when its
developed specificity is allowed to thrive on its own terms rather than within the
terms of its restrictions. Non-binary, because it refuses set content and because it
resignifies away from pre-existing binary determination without repeating its
restrictions, demonstrates that we do not need to be one type of subject in order
to refuse a restricting ideology, to hold a resistant politics, or to participate in
coalition. Wittig demonstrates that this is liberating for the lesbian whose life,
desire, and culture—with a flick of the linguistic switch—can begin to figure for
themselves, can begin to develop their own ontology (Butler, 2007: 525) and strong
specificity outside of mandatory exclusions.
Pairing lesbian with non-binary similarly lets lesbian specificity flourish. There
have been many arguments that the similar openness that accompanies queerness
negatively elides womanhood (Humphrey, 1999: 226). Non-binary repeats this
expansiveness with the entire system of gender difference, and even though it
can reasonably be accused of performing the same erosion of womanhood, the
example of the non-binary lesbian demonstrates the opposite: that non-binary is
leaving space for the articulation of lesbian specificity, and all of its excesses and
nuances, outside of its postulated opposite. As I have said above, non-binary
performs the further step of universalizing outside of a framework of minority
status. We do not have to leave behind some of the important aspects of lesbian
specificity (like modes of care and eroticism and relationality we may
call “feminine”) but resignify them away from their determination as feminine
in a binary sense, which actually allows us to cast them as lesbian in a more
meaningful way.

Liberating desire: Considering a post-identity sexual specificity

In this article, I have argued that contemporary sexualities and gender identities
require a new structure of articulation, and that the non-binary lesbian offers a
paradigmatic example of the potentials of a non-binary ideology to replace systems
of exclusion by maintaining previously exclusionary labels in ways that disrupt
their founding binaries but allow their specificities to thrive and deepen. To con-
clude, I want to return to the broader question of the effects of non-binary gender
on our experiences and claimings of specific sexual identities, contingent as they
seem to be on gendered alignments. If exclusions produce excesses, if we will not
find a way within them to express what we experience as the specificity of lesbian
experience (or any other identity that attempts to capture the content of our
18 Sexualities 0(0)

relation to others), then it may be that liberating them from these exclusions allows
for the expression of this free of dichotomy, in a positive rather than a negative
sense. This seems to open a new space for sexual specificity, as it does for both
Wittig and Butler, suggesting that any concern over the extinction of lesbian at the
hands of non-binary is misplaced. This can be demonstrated, once more, by con-
trasting two possible readings of the Wittig quote that begins this paper. “If desire
could liberate itself, it would have nothing to do with the preliminary markings of
the sexes” as the potential to appear hostile to lesbian specificity, if read in the
sense (naturalized for all of us) that liberated desire would flow indiscriminately
toward both sexes, between and among male and female. However, if read in the
sense that liberated desire can be specific desire—desire for certain bodily forma-
tions, certain constructed or intentional gendered aesthetics, for certain affective
relations, or certain politically guided orientations—but need not be connected to
our preliminary markings in their force as determinative inscriptions, it begins to
appear that non-binary is a intervention that will reinforce lesbian specificity rather
than undermine it. Though beyond the scope of this paper, it is necessary to extend
these arguments to other sexual specificities and their own unique politics. Labels
previously thought restricting in various ways (gay, bisexual, butch, and a host of
others) may be similarly liberated and maintained within non-binary ideologies.
This beginning of what could be a new perspective on gender and sexuality also
works toward healing some of the divides between feminism and queer/trans pol-
itics, as in Henderson’s project. In this sense, it addresses some of the shortcomings
of prior attempts to consider what sexuality could be outside of the gender that
binds feminism together, such as Martin’s work. While Martin raises many bril-
liant points about this question within the context of queer/feminist debates, using
non-binary to open up these debates reveals that the conflict with feminism has
never been an emphasis on gender, but an emphasis on gender difference. The
argument that I have made above regarding how non-binary could strengthen
lesbian specificity could also then be applied to a political context in which the
growth of these ways of thinking gender could also bolster a feminist politics that is
less likely to let the fruits of its own labor spoil.
It is worth remembering, as we move forward with the energy of the non-binary
lesbian, that what prompted this analysis is the fact that lesbian is curiously sur-
viving, reiterating, and permutating against its supposed impending death. This
phenomenon is evidence that the term lesbian is still being afforded the respect,
notability, and effort that it takes to preserve a concept through opening it back
up. And, of course, as important as this specificity is, it is perhaps even more
exciting to think that the non-binary lesbian is not the conclusion of any massive,
teleological shift: that this is a way of thinking a figure outside of the trappings of
identity politics that could be extrapolated to other border wars, in other contexts,
until we require new concepts to do the work this one cannot.
Hord 19

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

ORCID iD
Levi CR Hord https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2610-5519

Notes
1. While many of these critiques can be classified as “queer” because of queer theory’s
legacy of revealing contingency and instability, many notable ones emerged from within
lesbian feminist communities (see Blackwood, 2002, for an overview of some of this
thought in the 1970s and 1980s, and Rubin, 1992, for an example). The variability of
these critiques further shows essentialism to be an aspect of lesbian feminism that was
by no means universal or agreed upon. Though not all critiques of essentialism were
aligned with present understandings of queerness, I use the term here to highlight its
positioning in these debates as the carrier of a progress narrative.
2. See, for example, Linda Garber’s (2001) argument that queer theory did not represent a
radical break with lesbian feminist politics but came from these politics and its mod-
ifications by working-class lesbians and lesbians of color.
3. See, for example, Hollibaugh and Moraga’s (1983) critique of how lesbian identity
politics limit expressions of lesbian desire (particularly in the areas of butch/femme,
roleplay, and S&M).
4. In Gender Trouble (1990), Butler uses psychoanalytic theories to explain how gender (in
the sense of the link between male assignment and masculinity, and female assignment
and femininity) relies on what Freud describes as “melancholia.” Melancholia referen-
ces the incorporation of a lost love object into a subject’s ego, thus, that gender (via the
parent) which we are prohibited from desiring (in heterosexual family structures)
becomes internalized, and becomes that which produces stable, heterosexual gender
roles. In simpler terms, according to Butler, the fact that young boys cannot desire
their father means that they lose and therefore incorporate the father (as masculinity,
as that very binary role which prompted the probation in the first place) as productive
of their gender.
5. In articulating this concept, I am drawing on Kadji Amin’s (2016) idea of the “moment
of trans,” a particular moment of hypervisibility of transgender narratives and the
proliferation of discourses surrounding gender identity.
6. The term “non-binary” being used in relation to gender is a recent and localized phe-
nomenon. A Google Trends analysis shows that the term has experienced spikes in
usage beginning around 2010 and continuing into the present in the United States,
Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom (https://trends.google.com/trends/
explore?date=all&q=non-binary%20gender)
20 Sexualities 0(0)

7. Identity terms such as androgynous, pangender, bigender, gender fluid, agender, neu-
trois, gender-neutral and genderqueer are also considered to be “non-binary” identities
in the sense that they refuse or elude binary sex/gender designations (Richards et al.,
2016: 96).
8. The relationship between trans and non-binary is not straightforward, as many consider
non-binary to automatically qualify as trans (following Stryker’s (2008) definition of trans
as “movement away from an initially assigned gender position”), while some consider trans
to require a certain commitment to recognizable gendered destination through transition
(see Prosser, 1998) and therefore to exist in opposition to non-binary. My own use of the
term trans is not exclusive of non-binary, and I embrace definitions of trans which include its
ability to signal refusal of gender binaries and gendered destinations. However, I acknowl-
edge that this inclusion is still contested, and that there are legitimate criticisms of trans
scholarship that positions trans as reducible to the same challenge to boundaries initially
defined by queer (see, for example, Chu and Drager, 2019). In setting non-binary defini-
tionally against traditional narratives of transition, I aim to draw attention to its rejection
of exclusion as a founding logic of transgender identity (which dates back to the creation
medical diagnostic criteria in the 1950s) rather than to suggest that trans, in itself or in its
present deployments, is exclusionary.
9. Though race has been shown to shape conceptualization of non-binary (Sarfaty,
2016), non-binary is not exclusive to a white lexicon. However, cultural images sup-
posedly representative of non-binary people are predominantly white and
androgynous. This has prompted concerted efforts from non-binary people of
color and allies to challenge this representation, including the hashtag
#NonBinaryIsntWhite, which gained popularity on Twitter in 2018. Many see non-
binary and its departures from trans- and gender normativity as connected to projects
of racial and anti-colonial resistance which link binary thinking to western imperial-
ism (see, for example, Nicolazzo, 2016). However, the insidiousness of the ways in
which non-binary can depict whiteness and masculinity as neutral categories requires
a great deal of further analysis.
10. Russell et al. (2009) suggest that traditional labels like gay, lesbian, and bisexual have
lost meaning for contemporary adolescents, as Vrangalova and Savin-Williams (2012)
demonstrate that most non-heterosexual people will now identify their sexuality with
indeterminates (i.e. mostly gay, bisexual, or mostly straight) rather than on either end of
the posited spectrum. Terms such as queer and pansexual have seen spikes in usage,
particularly among those who already use non-binary gender identity labels (Eisenberg
et al., 2017; White et al., 2018). This is clearly connected to the ideology developed
around non-binary identity, as the main reasons given for usage were that these sexu-
ality labels do not assume a binary cisgender identity, and they do not designate the
gender identity of the person the user is attracted to (Galupo et al., 2016). Just over 60%
of people who are following the trends of open, genderless terminology use were
assigned female at birth, and the majority of them are under 21 years old (Kuper
et al., 2012), suggesting why much of the tension of this shift has been felt more
deeply in lesbian communities than others.
11. While Butler’s piece engages much more thoroughly with the concept of universalization
and its effects on queer politics, this specific concern was more relevant to the queer
politics of the 1990s, and I am employing Butler’s remarks to speak about how Wittig
further liberates lesbian from a connection to binary identity.
Hord 21

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Levi CR Hord is a PhD student in English & Comparative Literature at Columbia

University. Their research theorizes structural shifts in contemporary gender iden-
tity and the epistemologies of gender claims, with a focus on non-binary gender.