What Is A Binary Anyway?

what I've found out so far, from living my life in—and outside of—a whole lot of binaries

A Koan to Start

You know what a koan is?

It’s a Zen Buddhist teaching story — short, strange, and designed to bust through the habits that keep us stuck. Koans don’t tell you what to think. They open doors you didn’t even know were there.

Maybe you’ve heard the classic one: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Usually, a student gets that koan when they're floating a little too high — all “nothing’s real, it’s all a dream.” The teacher sends them off with that question, and the poor student thinks hard. They might wave one hand around in the air. No sound. They might meditate for days, weeks, months.

Finally they come running back:
“Master, I have the answer! There’s no hand! There’s no sound! Everything is nothing!”

The Master sighs, walks over, and — smack — slaps them across the face.
“Hear that clap?” she says, laughing.
“This is a real world, with real hands that make real sounds. That’s where we begin.”

Not all koans involve getting slapped, thank goodness. Some are more like earworms for the soul. Here’s the one I want you to carry with you while you read:

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

You work with that one, please, and keep it tucked in the back of your mind.

Now… on with binaries.

What Is a Binary, Really?

When I started my gender transition back in 1984 in Philadelphia, "binary" wasn’t a word people used about gender. It lived in computer science and math. It wasn’t something we said about people’s lives.

When I started to write about this stuff in the 1990’s. I needed a word for the way the world divided everyone into “man” or “woman.” I called it "bipolar gender.” It wasn’t a joke (well, sometimes it was). It was just the best word I had.

Today, "gender binary" is everywhere. Some of us call ourselves nonbinary. But stop for a second: What is a binary, really?

At its simplest, a binary is just a structure built from two, and only two, parts.

We like to pretend those two parts are equal — but most of the time, they aren’t. If male and female were really equal, for example, nobody would care what gendered team you played on.

In most binaries, one side has more power. Sometimes the side with more power pretends it's the scrappy underdog, just to keep things confused. Either way, the idea that binaries are natural structures, all balanced, and all fair is just a story we tell ourselves. And it’s not a very good story.

Binaries Are More Than Structures

Binaries don’t just sit there like furniture. They’re active. They move, they grow, they fight to survive. And they’re loaded with rules

Rules for a binary’s survival:

You’re supposed to believe the binary is natural, inevitable, sacred. You’re supposed to believe God Himself made the binary. The trickiest ways that binaries survive are when they present themselves as ideologies we’ve got to believe in, live by, and enforce. For example, the ideology of patriarchal misogyny keeps the gender binary in place and well defended.

Rules for a binary’s growth:

Binaries aren’t content to stay small. They creep into every corner of life. As life expands, so does the binary running it.

Rules for behavior within the binary:

Binaries create simple codes — good/bad, right/wrong. Men do this, women never do that. The rules stayed simple, even as we got more complex. Feminism finally smashed a lot of those old codes, and brought in new, richer ways of thinking — diversity, equity, inclusion — all things binaries hate.

Rules for identity within the binary:

Binaries teach us to embody one side or the other: man or woman, liberal or conservative, saint or sinner, human or vermin, and so on.

And the number-one rule?

Never fight the binary itself. Only fight each other.

See how that all works? A binary isn’t just a structure. It’s a whole operating system running quietly in the background — until you notice it in action.

How Do Binaries Move and Act?

Binaries don’t just sit still. They act through the mind, language, and the body.

Through the mind:

We’re taught ideas about binaries before we even realize we’re learning.

“No, dear, only boys do that.”

“No, dear, only girls wear that.”

Ideas like that get planted early, and often. Hardly a day passes when we don’t gather some notion about a binary and store that notion in our minds as a definitive rule that we don’t even have to think about consciously. That’s how binaries act on our minds.

Through language:

We talk to others who have their own ideas. We argue, we grow, we change. Books, conversations, essays. Words, words, words. Language is the tool, or weapon with which we either reinforce or challenge the binaries we live with.

In the body:

This is the one we’re most familiar with. We embody a binary, like gender. We say or think I’m a man, or I’m a woman, and for the entirety of our lives, we tweak our bodies and gender expressions in obedience to the binary.

And among these three — mind, language, body — it’s through the mind that binaries work most powerfully, because that's where the idea of the binary starts, and that’s where we either stay stuck or start breaking free by questioning the thoughts we’ve long held as truth.

So, How Does One “Become” Nonbinary?

All you need do, actually is decide for yourself that living the binary doesn’t work for you. When it comes to gender, living as nonbinary comes in lots of flavors. You don’t have to look a certain way to live nonbinary. You don’t have to tell a certain story, or fit into a certain group. Here are just a couple of ways to do it.

We might say: I’m outside the structure of a binary, as in not one or the other I’m not a man and I’m not a woman. Neither of those work for me.

We might say: I’m outside the whole idea of a sex-and-gender binary, as in I’m a man or a woman — but I’m so much more than that.

We might say: I’m a man or a woman — but I refuse to live by the rules that prop up this binary. I refuse to let any binary decide who counts as human.

If you feel the pull of a binary — and choose not to enforce it — you’re living nonbinary. Even if you don’t embody the idea, you are still an ally.

And please keep in mind nonbinary is not some newfangled idea.

Jackie Curtis said in the 1970s, “I am not a boy, not a girl, I am not gay, not straight, I am not a drag queen, not a transsexual — I am just me, Jackie.”

For centuries, many American Indians have lived as Two-Spirit — neither/nor, both.

Thousands of years ago, the Galli priests of Cybele castrated themselves and lived outside male/female roles.

Even Christianity has nonbinary roots if you know where to look. Saint Eugenia lived among eunuchs, passed as a man named Eugene, became a priest, and performed miracles, some eighteen hundred years ago. A nonbinary saint! To top it off, their feast day is Christmas! How’s that for nonbinary ascension?

Nonbinary has always been part of humanity. It rises wherever a binary tries to shut a door in the face of humanity’s growth.

OK, So Why The Koan?

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

Let’s have a quickie look at that.

Living out a binary existence colors the entirety of our lives. Subscribing to any binary means we are more prone to simplifying things down to either/or. Belief in a binary, even an unconscious belief, can point us toward a life of black and white thinking, and a morality that comes in terms of good vs bad, with no gray areas whatsoever.

Living out a nonbinary existence also colors the entirety of our lives. The more we live some nonbinary life, the more we come to see the choice of either/or as a trap. We learn to avoid the big binaries of gender as male/female, race as white/POC, age as young/old, and class as 1%/the rest of us. As a bonus, the older we get as we live a nonbinary life, we also learn to avoid the dualities of leading or following, my way or the highway, good or evil, and all that jazz.

Final Thoughts

A binary is just an idea dressed up like it’s inevitable.

No binary is inevitable.

No binary is eternal.

No binary is sacred.

No binary is even particularly clever.

In fact, no binary has a mind of its own.

Once you see a binary for what it is, you no longer have to obey it.

You can walk right past it, head high, into whatever life you find most worth living.

Okay, that’s what I’ve figured out about binaries so far. I hope this kickstarts some good thinking for you, and helps you out of any either/or traps that might have you in their grip. Life outside of either/or is such freedom, and that’s what I want for you.

Why? Cuz I love you.