I believe what Alok V. Manon means to move beyond the gender binary is to almost ignore what gender is in people. If that sounds rude, that is not my intention. I just think Alok explained to us all the negative ways people discriminate due to someone’s gender identity or the way they express gender, and that makes me think that people are too focused on the label aspects of it all. People tend to argue the biology, the ethics, the safety but in the end none of that really matters. Yes labels keep organization but it also keeps order and puts people into categories. This allows people to have more power than necessary. 

I can definitely agree with moving beyond the binary. A lot of the time cisgender people, that includes myself, do not realize the way we express our gender may go against the binary norm. Have you seen men start wearing cropped tops recently? That has become a nice trend I feel. One of my all time favorites was the fashion trend of skin tight clothes turning into all baggy clothes, almost completely unisex outfits. Girls started wearing baggy pants and we haven’t stopped. Boys have started wearing more jewelry and makeup and girls have started looking in both the mens and womens departments when shopping. This is all so normal for our generation now and that’s because we made it that way. We have made it comfortable for most of us because we had the power to. We have had access to the education that has taught us how gender and sexuality is fluid. We are not all taught that masculinity and femininity is wrong or right. We are told to express ourselves. In a lot of ways we are lucky for this and I hope my generation uses all their tools to better our future, not drag it back to the past.

I was just speaking about this in my reading reflection about how I felt as if I took the way that I identified for granted. I was assigned female at birth and grew up as a girl, used she/her pronouns my whole life. I have never really questioned that part of my identity. Maybe I should be more upset at that but I am just not and that is one of my privileges. Yes, being a girl is hard and a lot of the time unsafe but I have to recognize that people that do go against the binary norm in order to feel themselves have more obstacles in life. Yes I wear mens clothing, take up space when I sit, occasionally spit in the street if I absolutely have to, never liked dolls as a kid and that may go against binary norms. However, I still love to shop, get ready for special occasions in pretty dresses, sit when I have to use the restroom, occasionally let men speak over me, hate playing sports and I think that fits the binary norm as well.