From the Newsstands: This story appeared in The Eagle's April 2024 print edition. You can find the digital version here.
I don’t remember when I put my pronouns in my Instagram bio — first as she/they, and then they/she.
I never told anyone explicitly about this, except eventually my sister and close friends. In my first serious relationship, I kept my pronouns as she/they out of fear that being truthful would hinder the normality of a partnership that I cherished.
After we broke up, I changed my pronouns on Instagram to they/she and told no one. My sister started using they/them for me almost exclusively, and I was so grateful. Only a few people in my entirely queer friend group did the same, and I told them I didn’t really care. To this day, I don’t know how much I do.
I never want to be the white person who acts oppressed because of my queerness or gender identity because I am not oppressed. Even for my perceived womanhood, I am lucky. I am feminine, from a well-off family and safe to organize for causes I care about, largely in socialist spaces.
Black transgender and nonbinary people are at a much greater risk of violence due to their identities, according to a Human Rights Campaign report, and to address the violence that queer people face in the United States, we must acknowledge this.
On days when I hear about young people being killed for being like me, I remember how hard it has felt to be so painfully misunderstood in my gender identity. I accepted that most people didn’t really care to understand.
In early February, Nex Benedict, a nonbinary and Native American high school student, faced a violent attack and died the next day, at just 16 years old. Ignorance and inaction by Benedict’s school and the state of Oklahoma could lead to more kids dying and facing bullying because of how they identify.
The Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization aiming to “end suicide among LGBTQ+ young people,” consistently finds that environment is an important factor in terms of queer mental health. In its 2023 U.S. National Survey on the mental health of LGBTQ+ young people, the Trevor Project reported that almost one in three LGBTQ+ young people said their mental health was poor because of policies against queer people and almost two in three said hearing about these policies makes their mental health much worse.
Policy dictating queer people’s livelihoods directly impacts how they live and can affect their mental health deeply. Over 40 percent of LGBTQ+ people considered suicide in the past year, according to the report. Transgender and nonbinary people are at a much greater risk of suicidal ideation than their cisgender counterparts.
Transgender and gender-nonconforming people, especially Black transgender women, are also at risk of fatal violence, according to another report by the HRC. Even after queer people are killed for their identity, they are often not taken seriously by the police.
In a world where trans and gender-nonconforming people are not prioritized, they are at risk of suffering violence and death. In spite of this ugly truth, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters called reactions to Benedict’s death “woke gender games.”
People like Walters may never change, and it is dangerous that he is in a position of power while using this sort of rhetoric. My goal for queer activism, though, is to include those who are willing to learn and understand so they can further support their queer neighbors.
An article from Harvard Law Review refers to nonbinary people as those who wish to “reject, permute or transcend” the gender binary. However, I have found that many sources — even others from Harvard — get it wrong. Sources refer to nonbinary people as choosing a third gender option when, by name and definition, being nonbinary rejects a gender binary altogether.
At the same time, any attempt to strictly define nonbinary is futile. Though some may argue that this is necessary to legally address the violence transgender and nonbinary people face, each nonbinary person sees their identity in a different way and, therefore, must be accommodated differently.
The Harvard Law Review article refers to the legal abolition of gender as “the old radical feminist dream of an androgynous or unisex society.” This comparison calls into question the importance of gender, as advocacy for a genderless society would likely face serious backlash because the truth of the matter is that gender is important to a lot of people. Especially queer people, because it can help us label how we feel.
Gender is a social construct that shapes our society, communities and interpersonal relationships in innumerable ways. On the contrary, a Psychology Today opinion piece argues that “gender cannot simultaneously be socially constructed and inherent to the individual.” Though gender is inherent for many gender-conforming people, meaning gender can be important to a person’s identity, it is still true that gender norms are created and upheld by everyone, whether this is intentional or not. Gender is ultimately what we make of it and have come to accept as a society, not something that is intrinsic to every single person.
While gender applies to people in different ways, nonbinary people can just as easily find importance in the absence of gender as gender-conforming people can find in the presence of it.
If you haven’t considered much of this until now, it is not too late to start caring about and including nonbinary people in your political and personal conversations. It is not too late to acknowledge and learn from misconceptions about nonbinary people.
We deserve your attention, respect and care. We deserve not only to be represented legally but also protected from the violence that kills people like Nex Benedict and hundreds of others each year. Even more face sexual, physical and emotional abuse, with a disproportionate number of victims being people of color, houseless people and sex workers. The first step toward a better future for transgender and nonbinary people is a shared, intentional and compassionate understanding.
Quinn Volpe is a sophomore in the School of Communication and Kogod School of Business and a columnist for The Eagle.
This article was edited by Alana Parker, Jelinda Montes and Abigail Pritchard. Copy editing done by Luna Jinks, Isabelle Kravis, Sarah Clayton and Charlie Mennuti.
