What Does Non-Binary Mean?
Transgender Translations for the Thoroughly Confused
Hi friends and welcome newcomers! Dedicated to my friend E., who has persistently, patiently, and respectfully discussed this issue with me, even though we disagree.
What is non-binary? Are women athletes allowed to take testosterone now? Is Nikki Hiltz male or female? These are some of the questions you’ve been asking me lately.
With the Paris Olympics coming up, reporters will not help you out – not if they adhere to new International Olympic Committee (IOC) media guidelines, which contend that the terms biologically male/female, born male/female, and genetically male/female constitute “problematic language” that can be “dehumanizing and inaccurate.”
“It is always preferable,” the IOC advises, “to emphasize a person’s actual gender identity rather than… referring to the sex category that was registered on their original birth certificate.”
This sentence is extraordinary. Translation: Don’t mention maleness when men compete “as women.” “Emphasize gender identity” instead.
I’ve been studying the transgender-sports issue for three years. I’ve been studying sex, gender, and sports for decades. I’ve been thinking about sex-role stereotypes since I took Sandra Bem’s Psychology of Sex Roles class at Stanford in 1974.
The only way I can answer your questions – and others, if you submit them – is by using accurate, sex-based language (female, male) and accurate, sex-based pronouns (hers, his), which is politically incorrect. I sincerely hope you find this clarifying rather than disrespectful.
I’m focusing on the non-binary question because American runner Nikki Hiltz and Canadian soccer player Quinn are Olympics-bound, proudly waving non-binary flags. They see themselves as pioneers: the first non-binary athletes to participate in the Olympic Games. "This is bigger than just me. It's the last day of Pride Month. I wanted to run this one for my community," Hiltz told NBS Sports after qualifying.
Quinn, who was celebrated as the “first trans, non-binary athlete to participate in the Olympic Games” in 2021, helped Canada win a gold. She told a reporter before those Games, “It’s a place for me to trailblaze as a trans athlete.”1
Q: What is non-binary?
A: A person who claims to “exist between or beyond the man-woman binary,” according to PFLAG.
Q: What does that mean?
A: Different things to different people. “Non-binary people may identify as being both a man and a woman, somewhere in between, or as falling completely outside these categories,” according to the Human Rights Campaign.2
Q: But can a person be neither man nor woman?
A: No. No one escapes the male-female human binary. Our bodies are designed along developmental pathways toward producing eggs (large gametes) or sperm (small gametes). Even people with disorders of sexual development, formerly called intersex conditions (.018 percent of the population) “don’t undermine the sex binary,” explains evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, “because there is no third gamete type.”34
Q: So what is non-binary?
A: A belief. A way of conceptualizing one’s self. A chosen identity.
Q: What category do non-binary athletes compete in?
A: Depends on whether they’re male or female. Since Hiltz and Quinn are female, they compete in the female category. When Hiltz ran the second-fastest time ever by an American woman in the women's 1,500-meter race, she was competing against women. Because she is a woman.
Hiltz’s winning time (3:55.33) is 15 seconds slower than the qualifying time to try out for the American men’s Olympic team (3:40.00). The three male American Olympic qualifiers finished at least 23 seconds faster than Hiltz (about 3:31-3:32).
This is why the female sports category exists: men have an inherent performance advantage due to differences between male and female bodies. If there were no female category, men would always win.
Q: Aren’t there non-binary categories in some sports now?
A: Not in the Olympics5, but many marathons, including London, Chicago, and Boston, offer a non-binary category. Here’s the problem for women: Guess who wins the non-binary races? Men. Because men are faster, stronger, etc.
Q: What does it mean when people say trans and non-binary?
A: Trans is an “umbrella term” encompassing almost everyone. It can be used by anyone to mean almost anything (see below). Trans and non-binary are ways of thinking, feeling, or believing — not descriptions of supernatural abilities to change or eliminate maleness or femaleness.
Q: But humans do change sex with surgery and hormones, don’t they?
A: No. We all have trillions of cells. Each cell is XX or XY. Adult males have about 36 trillion XY cells; adult females have about 28 trillion XX. Our sex determines, in addition to reproductive and sexual structures and functions, overall size, lung size, heart size, brain size, strength, muscle mass, bone density, physical proportions, body fat distribution, voice pitch, disease propensities and symptoms, baldness propensities, and many more sex-linked differences.
About 84 percent of adults who call themselves transgender have not had any related surgery. Almost 70 percent have ingested no cross-sex hormones. Transgender people are not the transsexuals of yore.6
It’s a state of mind. Not a state of body. “Self-ID” rules, which have been adopted by some sports organizations, allow any man to identify his way onto a women’s playing field. All he has to do is say, “I’m a woman.”7
Q: What percent of transgender people are non-binary?
A: Forty. Another 22 percent identify as “trans, gender non-conforming,” according to a recent Washington Post survey. Only a third identify as trans man or trans woman. Nearly half (48 percent) prefer they/them pronouns.8
Q: What’s gender nonconforming?
A: Every woman I know. Most feminists. Most female athletes. Officially, it’s “a person whose behavior or appearance does not conform to prevailing cultural and social expectations about what is appropriate to their gender.”
Which brings us back to my Stanford professor and mentor. Before Sandra Bem, mental health was defined separately for women and men, based on sex stereotypes. A mentally healthy woman was compassionate, tender, yielding. A mentally healthy man was ambitious, analytical, dominant.
Hogwash, said Bem. Why restrict ourselves, and our ideas about mental health, to culturally-imposed notions of femininity and masculinity? Her groundbreaking research showed that androgynous people – those who are comfortably, adaptably human, unconstrained by sex roles – are the most mentally healthy.
As a tall basketball player who preferred pants to skirts and girls to boys, I found this tremendously validating.
Bem explained: The fact that one is female or male shouldn’t be understood as “so authentically who we are that it needs to be elaborated.” Nor “so tenuous that it needs to be bolstered.” Nor “so limiting that it needs to be traded in for another model.” 9
Unfortunately, Bem’s utopic vision of body positivity and psycho-social freedom has been inverted. Rather than rejecting sex roles and accepting our maleness or femaleness as a simple fact that is only relevant for such things as sexuality, procreation, sports performance, privacy, and urination positions, the modern transgender movement defines itself in relation to those old sex-role stereotypes.
Transgender is now “an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.”10
Q: What does that mean?
A: Frankly, it’s absurdly broad. Most women engage in at least some “gender expressions (“clothing, appearance, mannerisms”)11 and other behaviors (assertiveness, confidence, athleticism) that do not conform to the feminine sex role.
Q: Are we all transgender, then?
A: No.
Q: But many of us do reject those stereotypes, don’t we?
A: Yes, fortunately. Bem called these people androgynous: an appearance or attitude that is neither typically feminine nor typically masculine. Six of the most popular gender identities – non-binary, androgynous, agender, gender fluid, genderqueer, and queer – indicate a rejection of masculinity or femininity or both.12 So far, so good.
Q: Then what’s the problem?
A: First, most transgender youth are teenage girls. Most identify as non-binary. Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, explains that prepubescent girls, influenced by social media and peer pressure and alarmed by the objectification, pornification, and vulnerability of their developing bodies, latch onto non-binary identities in an attempt to escape a scary female fate. They don’t want to be male, but “flee womanhood like a house on fire.”13
The massive Cass Review, which found no evidence that adolescent gender transitions are ever warranted, warns that even calling a girl “he” or “they” or a boys’ name can be dangerous because it can lead to drastic, irreversible, medically unjustifiable decisions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and double mastectomies. Quinn already had that surgery; Hiltz wants it.
Second, by confusing a preference or style (androgyny) with physical attributes (femaleness or maleness), the non-binary identity implies a unique, not-male-or-female person — requiring, for instance, a special sports category.
Q: Oh good, you’re finally back to sports.
A: Sorry. I’ve been trying to stay in that lane but context seems important, too.
Q: Hiltz says she wants “to take testosterone or grow facial hair or have top surgery.” That doesn’t sound non-binary, does it?14
A: Not to me.
Q: If Hiltz’ gender fluidity leads to her someday defining herself as a transgender man, would she then compete against men?
A: Highly unlikely. Very few female athletes compete in the men’s category.15 They can’t be competitive there, even after ingesting testosterone, because of the male performance advantage.
Q: Are trans or non-binary athletes allowed to take testosterone?
A: No. It’s against doping rules, though one female athlete recently received a therapeutic use exemption to compete in the nonbinary category on testosterone.
Q: Will there be males competing in the female category in Paris?
A: I don’t know yet. The IOC has taken a hands-off approach, delegating decision-making about female eligibility to each sport federation, which means the presence of males in women’s sports will be inconsistent and, if the IOC has its way, covert. Here’s a sport-by-sport listing of those policies.
Q: I have more questions.
A: I have more answers. How about that? But I try to keep these essays short and this one’s already long. So I’ll stop here. If you send more questions, I’ll make this the first in a series.
Other Stronger Women essays about gender and the female sports category:
For more info, see Women’s Sports Policy Working Group.
Karleigh Webb, “Quinn’s Olympics: They made history and they had game.” Outkick, August 6, 2021.
Human Rights Campaign, “Glossary of Terms.” This definition is almost identical: “People who identify as ‘genderqueer’ may see themselves as being both male and female, neither male nor female or as falling completely outside these categories.”
Colin Wright, “A Biologist Explains Why Sex Is Binary,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2023.
Ovotesticular disorder, in which a person is born with ovaries and testes, is the only true hermaphroditic condition, and it has only occurred in about 500 cases worldwide, ever. The rest of us are male or female.
Equestrian events are the only Olympic sports where men and women compete against each other because in effect, the horse is the athlete.
Annys Shin, “6 key takeaways from the Post-KFF survey of transgender Americans,” Washington Post, March 23, 2023.
See Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, “Sport-by-Sport Listing of US & International Policies Governing Who Can Compete in the Female Category — with Grades”
“Nov. 10-Dec. 1, 2022, Washington Post-KFF Trans in America survey,” Washington Post, March 22, 2023.
Sandra Lipsitz Bem, The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1994.
The American Psychological Association. Other organizations, from the American Psychiatric Association to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Endocrine Society define transgender in almost identical ways – including gender nonconforming behavior.
The Human Rights Campaign defines gender identity as “One's innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither.”
Jean C. Lloyd, “Why a Generation of Girls Is Fleeing Womanhood,” Public Discourse, August 10, 2020.
Thanks to Sarah Barker at The Female Category for pointing this out.
A rare exception: Iszak Henig, a female swimmer who was a champion at several youth age groups and also at Yale, joined the men’s team at Yale after coming out as transgender, and “took from 69th to 79th places in the 50, 100, and 200-yard men's freestyle events. In a New York Times editorial, he wrote that even though he would not be competitive on the men’s team, “it would make him his true, authentic self.” (Wikipedia, quoting Henig, Iszac "Opinion | I Chose to Compete as My True, Trans Self. I Win Less, but I Live More". The New York Times. January 5, 2023.)
“… rejecting sex roles and accepting our maleness or femaleness as a simple fact that is only relevant for such things as sexuality, procreation, sports performance, privacy, and urination positions…”
Why, why, why is this not where we are?
So sad that things have gone the other way.
Wish we could toss the word “gender” completely (other than in linguistics) and stick to “sex” for clarity. “Gender” at this point adds nothing but confusion to the discourse.
This is so good. You take a seemingly complicated subject and simplify it. Or maybe it's really a simple subject that society has made complicated and you unravel. Well done!