Non-binary is not a gender
While binary evokes a gender-duopoly, non-binary is really not about gender at all.
When we are thinking about the details of our work, how much do we actually think about our gender? I doubt anyone has ever thought while programming, As a man, how do I write a program to perform a sieve sort?
That is the essence of non-binary thinking, which is about not thinking about gender when it is not relevant at all. The real point here is that for the great majority that most of us do during the day, gender is not part of our thinking. It is only when we are idle, or doing a gender-specific task, that we may turn to our idea of our gender and what it means to us.
After all, we rarely think about what colour our eyes are when we go about our lives, but we would rightly question whether it is relevant if we were restricted from certain occupations based upon that.
Given this, why is there the big focus on gender and what forms it might take? That is more to do with preserving societal roles than about what people actually do with their thinking time. It is important to many who want to control our societies that gender be a principal decider of our key relationships, just because embedding that thinking in societies fosters their continued status and privilege as part of that gender. Such people do not want the complications that come with having more than two, let alone that it can be a personal choice.
In this context, the idea of trans people threatens the whole investment in the simplicity of fixed genders and thus fixed roles, leading to predictable and exploitable outcomes. Having gender choice is a consumer option that undermines the exploitable order of things. 1.7% of people are not born as only one gender, which undermines that basic premise, but when steps were taken in the past to make such people conform to one gender, often without them having any choice in that process, they have had to choose to play that gender role, which undermines the whole gender is not a personal choice spin.
Thus gender can very much be a choice about what role we want to play in life, but it is not mandatory, so we can also choose to leave it out of consideration altogether for what we think about the majority of our time. If others are demanding adherence to gender roles, look to their motives, because they will not be concerned about our welfare at all, but how it challenges their investment in the continuation of their own choices of their own roles. Do not be sidetracked by others' expectation of roles. They are always a personal choice, unless we acquiesce.
Having a term composed of a negative is perhaps what creates some confusion for many, so it might be that we will come to another term that more correctly reflects the positive and eclectic nature of the thinking state we want to be in.
Sports
△Sports has become a focus for the gender debate, but perhaps some clearer thinking around how athletes are rated may be needed.
In sports, that 1.7% has already created problems, and trying to shoehorn everything into two genders for some convenience of deciding who the elites are is the real problem. Many sports rank competitors by other criteria than gender, such as weight, like jockeys, so perhaps there are also other criteria that can be used to classify people more fairly. Then it would not matter if they are trans, or any gender, but what performance category they are in. The range of capabilities for each gender are so wide that they substantially overlap, making many other criteria much better for grading.
Even weight can be a pretty poor categorisation for the sports for which it is used, as it is still not measuring the actual qualities that will principally determine their likely performance level. Instead we see competitors going to extraordinary lengths in the days or hours before weigh-in time to just squeeze in under their preferred upper weight limit, hoping that that gives them an advantage. Perhaps there is a better set of criteria that are not so dependent upon an athlete's state at a particular time, but more about revealing their base performance level.
This would provide a more level playing field that is not dependent upon loosely-related simplistic criteria that is often reflecting society's prejudices, or something easy to test for that simplifies administration for the sports code but does not directly reflect what an athlete spends the bulk of their time honing their bodies and minds for. Sports are now in the big money league, so we should expect them to up their game as to how they rate athletes, even if that makes it more complex for them.
Such criteria may even make it easier to allot team players into what roles they are best suited for. Testing should reflect what it takes to remain in a multi-year career, and so should not be defined by what happens on one day where so many variables can derail performance on that day. Education has been moving away from where an exam on one day can define so much of a person's future to testing that involves rating the results of tasks that require days or weeks to complete, and so are a much better measure of their composite skills. Sports elites deserve that sort of investment by a code.
What is the purpose?
△There are many situations where ideas of gender may be relevant, but we are often asked to specify a gender even though the real purpose of the question is not about our preferences at all.
Such a situation is in medical examinations, where the question is often asked of a patient, but what really needs to happen is that the practitioner needs to make their own assessment of the patient's characteristics. A patient is being asked to make a decision without knowing why they are being asked for it, nor given any guidance as to how to answer it in a relevant way. For this situation, there are the words
These are at the discretion of the practitioner and not the patient. The terms may apply to different parts of the body, and so only need to refer to those of interest to the practitioner. These situations highlight why making gender some ultimate criteria for judging ourselves just creates extra complications unrelated to the situation at hand. When we do that, we inadvertently invite a lot of muddled thinking into what can really be simple decisions made by those who need to make them for their purposes, and which may be unrelated to how we actually see ourselves.
Clothing is another area where there needs to be some catering to differing body shapes that have traditionally been defined by gender. Even though a lot of clothing is now classed as unisex, those that need to be tighter-fitting have usually been classed as male or female because those were the convenient way to identify clothing shape requirements. Since we are now trying to decouple the personal choosing of gender from such practical adaptations, perhaps we can also use
We are often expected to internalise what are really just judgements made by other people for their own purposes. In many cases those purposes will be to help them do their job, but too often are just reflecting theirs or historical societal prejudices. If we do not make efforts to reduce opportunities for expressing prejudices, we will keep sentencing us and future generations to stresses that are not needed, and only complicate solving the real problems we face, be they personal or societal.