Gender Identities beyond the Binary Tradition

(A typically French comment about our anatomies)

Nationality, age, political views, marital status, education, financial conditions, religion, race, and position in the family are only some of the many markers of one's identity. But, above and beyond all of them, most people would consider the primary source of their identity to be their gender. This relates to how we perceive and express ourselves, and what terms we use to describe ourselves to others. In the majority of cases this means perceiving, expressing and describing oneself as either male or female, consistently with the sex attributed to one at birth.

However, a growing number of people, especially among the younger generations, choose to depart from that tradition; those ‘whose gender expression does not conform to conventional ideas of male and female’ (Stonewall 2017) consider themselves as transgender. Some of them (often described as transsexuals) will decide to adopt the opposite gender than the one attributed to them at birth, their new identity still falling within binary parameters. Some will view transsexuals as suffering from a medical or mental health condition, while others will think of them as having made a creative, adaptive existential choice.

Less radical gender-nonconformist individuals may feel they belong to both genders, or belong to neither, or belong somewhere between the two; in other words, they challenge the binary assumptions that one can only be either a male or a female and may describe themselves as having a non-binary gender identity. Many traditional external signifiers of gender identity - such as hair-styles, items of clothing, tattoos, jewellery, makeup - have in the course of the past few decades been losing much of their meaning as they can now be worn indifferently by anybody, thus facilitating the display of an androgynous identity. An often conflictual process for trans people is that of coming out: to themselves first, and then to family, friends a