How social media helps non-binaries find unique places on gender spectrum

The first time Matice Moore realised that Moore’s gender might have been incorrect was during an argument with a girlfriend. Moore was assigned female at birth and was raised as a girl. “She said one of the reasons she was breaking up with me is because she wanted to be with a woman,” Moore told me. The exchange was deeply emotional. “She could barely finish the sentence.” The observation clarified a feeling that had been nagging at Moore, who was 30 at the time. “I always felt that I have a boy inside me who needs to share space with this woman-facing identity,” Moore said. “But I didn’t know how to bring that to the surface.”

Shortly after that conversation, Moore said, “I started exploring my gender variants and what they meant.” At first, Moore considered transitioning genders. Moore researched hormone therapy and surgery, but something about that didn’t feel quite right. “I realised that wasn’t me, either,” Moore said. “I came to this understanding for myself that gender was projected onto my body, and I don’t need to alter my body to affirm my gender or align with one gender or another.”

At that time, around 2013, Moore, who is black, was living in Tucson and had few friends of colour — and even fewer who were gender-nonconforming. But Moore worked in the African-American student-affairs office at the University of Arizona and often attended conferences focused on social justice and organising, where many of the participants and attendees embodied the gender spectrum. It was the first time Moore was surrounded by nonbinary people. Gender-neutral pronouns like “they” and “them” were much more common in these spaces. By the summer of 2014, Moore began using them, too, and going by their middle name, Matice, which felt more androgynous than their birth name, Maria. Moore continued to interact with people from the conferences on Facebook and other forms of social media using the new name and pronouns. Online, Moore said, “I felt the availability to identify in that way.”

Around the same time, Moore became aware of a performance-and-poetry group (now disbanded) called Dark Matter. Moore became transfixed by videos of one of its members, Alok Vaid-Menon, who was able to eloquently dismiss conventional notions of gender, particularly the idea that there are only two. Seeing people like Vaid-Menon online gave Moore the courage to reconsider how they approached gender. Moore began experimenting with their outward appearance. Before Moore changed the pronoun they used, Moore had favored a more masculine, dandy-like aesthetic — close-cropped hair, button-down shirts and bow ties — in large part to fit in at work. Moore began wearing their hair longer and often chose less gender-specific clothing, like T-shirts or boxy tops, which felt more natural and comfortable to them. Vaid-Menon’s assuredness, Moore said, “boosted my confidence in terms of defining and asserting my own identity in public spaces.”

A shift in technology emboldened Moore, too. In 2014, Facebook updated its site to include nonbinary gender identities and pronouns, adding more than 50 options for users who don’t identify as male or female, including agender, gender-questioning and intersex. It was a profound moment for Moore. “They had options I didn’t even know about,” Moore told me. That summer, Moore selected “nonbinary,” alerting their wider social spheres, including childhood friends and family members who also used the site. For Moore, it saved them some of the energy of having to explain their name and pronoun shift. Moore also clarified their gender pronouns on Instagram. “I wrote it into my profile to make it more explicit.” To some, the act might seem small, but for Moore, their identity “felt crystallized, and important.”

Several societies and cultures understand gender as more varied than just man or woman, but in the United States, a gender binary has been the norm. “In our cultural history, we’ve never had anything close to a third category, or even the notion that you could be in between categories,” said Barbara Risman, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Risman, who recently published a book called “Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles With the Gender Structure,” contrasted her early research with what she is seeing now. Few of the people she interviewed for the book in 2012 and 2013 were openly using nongendered pronouns, if they even knew about them. Just four years later, she began researching nonbinary young adults because the landscape had changed so radically. “It was reflexive with their friends at school, social groups. Many colleges classes start out with ‘Name, major and preferred pronouns,’ ” Risman told me. In Risman’s experience, it used to take decades to introduce new ideas about sex, sexuality or gender, and even longer for them to trickle upstream into society. “What’s fascinating is how quickly the public conversation has led to legal changes,” Risman said. California and Washington, among others, now allow people to select “x” as their gender, instead of “male” or “female,” on identity documents. “And I am convinced that it has to do with — like everything else in society — the rapid flow of information.”

Helana Darwin, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who began researching nonbinary identities in 2014, found that the social-media community played an unparalleled role in people’s lives, especially those who were geographically isolated from other nonbinary people. “Either they were very confused about what was going on or just feeling crushingly lonely and without support, and their online community was the only support in their lives,” Darwin told me. “They turned to the site to understand they aren’t alone.” Most of her subjects said social media was instrumental in deepening their understanding of their identities. “A 61-year-old person in my sample told me that they lived the vast majority of their life as though they were a gay man and was mistaken often as a drag queen after coming out. They didn’t discover nonbinary until they were in their 50s, and it was a freeing moment of understanding that nothing is wrong. They didn’t have to force themselves into the gay-man or trans-woman box — they could just be them. They described it as transcendent.”

When Darwin began her study four years ago, she was shocked to discover that the body of research on nonbinary people was nearly nonexistent. “Even as nonbinary people are becoming increasing visible and vocal, there were still only a handful of articles published in the field of sociology that were even tangentially about nonbinary people and even fewer that were explicitly about nonbinary people.” What little research there was tended to lump the nonbinary experience into trans-woman and trans-man experience, even though all signs pointed to deep differences. The void in the field, she thinks, was due to society’s reliance on the notion that all humans engage in some sense of gender-based identity performance, which reaffirms the idea that gender exists. “There was an academic lag that isn’t keeping with the very urgent and exponentially profound gender revolution happening in our culture.”

Her research found that social media is a gathering place for discussing the logistics of gender — providing advice, reassurance and emotional support, as well as soliciting feedback about everything from voice modulation to hairstyles. The internet is a place where nonbinary people can learn about mixing masculine and feminine elements to the point of obscuring concrete identification as either. As one person she interviewed put it, “Every day someone can’t tell what I am is a good day.”

Nearly everyone Darwin interviewed remarked about the power of acquiring language that spoke to their identity, and they tended to find that language on the internet. But Harry Barbee, a nonbinary sociologist at Florida State University who studies sex, gender and sexuality, cautioned against treating social media as a curative. “When the world assumes you don’t exist, you’re forced to define yourself into existence if you want some semblance of recognition and social viability, and so the internet and social media helps achieve this,” Barbee said. “But it’s not a dream world where we are free to be you and me, because it can also be a mechanism for social control.” Barbee has been researching what it means to live as nonbinary in a binary world. Social media, Barbee said, is “one realm where they do feel free to share who they are, but they’re realistic about the limitations of the space. Even online, they are confronted by hostility and people who are telling them they’re just confused or that makes no sense, or want to talk to them about their genitals.”

Growing up in Columbia, S.C., Ahomari Turner always felt like an alien. “In high school and middle school, I felt that I had to be a boy, that I had to pretend to be straight, which is really hard for me, because it was just obvious that I was not.” Around the time Turner was 24, a friend who identified as male began referring to Turner as “she.” Even though it was confusing, Turner said, “I didn’t correct him, because it felt great.” Turner, who is now 27 and uses “they” and “them” as pronouns, began to realize around this time that they were intersex. As a child, they visited doctors, multiple times. Those visits were followed by unexplained surgeries. “I was growing breasts, and it was confusing,” Turner told me. “I felt so alone, because I didn’t have any friends experiencing similar things.”

Intersex people don’t fit neatly into a binary, in part, Turner told me, because their bodies are neither. Turner turned to the internet and came across the YouTube videos and writings of Pidgeon Pagonis, a dark-haired, charismatic intersex activist who lives in Chicago and is strikingly honest about the involuntary procedures they endured. It was the first time Turner understood what happened to them as a child.

Pagonis identifies as nonbinary, and the word resonated with Turner. Not long after that, Turner began searching for other nonbinary people online and found Rain Dove, a gorgeous gender-nonconforming model with an awe-inspiring jawline who proudly represents their fluidity. “I’ve known this was an identity before I had language for it,” Turner told me. “Once I heard it, I was like, ‘Yes, that’s me.’ ” Turner no longer felt a need to fit into other people’s expectations of gender. Turner let their hair grow out to frame their soft eyes and full lips. Their Instagram posts often feature them posing in oversise T-shirts amid soft lighting. Under the banner of nonbinary, Turner told me, “I can be fat; I can be thin. I can be feminine, and I can be masculine.”

Turner, who is black, pointed out that mainstream gender-nonconforming narratives tend to privilege white upper-class bodies. One of the most obvious examples is Taylor Mason, a non-binary character on the Showtime drama “Billions,” played by the nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon. “The people who usually get lifted up are skinny, white and femme, as if that’s the only face of people who are nonbinary, and it’s very far from it,” Turner said. Online, the faces can be far more varied, especially through hashtags like #NonbinaryIsntWhite, a movement on Twitter and Instagram, where people who identify as nonbinary post selfies. The result has been a kaleidoscopic board of inspiration for a multitude of gender and racial expressions, with wildly varying styles of dress, makeup and settings. To scroll through the images is to understand that there is no one way to be nonbinary. The entire point underscores the idea that there is no status quo, no “normal” and no need to limit yourself based on a societal ideal. One post from a person using the handle SevaQuinn shows themselves in a black button-down with a flower in their hair and the caption, “My ethnicity is about as mixed as my gender.” Another person posting under the handle AfroAutPunk shows themselves wearing a Prince shirt, headphones and lipstick, with the caption, “Black, fat, disabled, nonbinary, queer and intersex.”

Psychologists often posit that as children, we operate almost like scientists, experimenting and gathering information to make sense of our surroundings. Children use their available resources — generally limited to their immediate environment — to gather cues, including information about gender roles, to create a sense of self. Alison Gopnik, a renowned philosopher and child psychologist, told me that it’s not enough to simply tell children that other identities or ways of being exist. “That still won’t necessarily change their perspective,” she said. “They have to see it.”

In her 2009 book, “The Philosophical Baby,” Gopnik writes that “when we travel, we return to the wide-ranging curiosity of childhood, and we discover new things about ourselves.” In a new geographic area, our attention is heightened, and everything, from differently labelled condiments to streetwear, becomes riveting. “This new knowledge lets us imagine new ways that we could live ourselves,” she asserts. Flying overfeeds in social media can feel like viewing portholes into new dimensions and realities, so I asked Gopnick if it’s possible that social media can function as a foreign country, where millions of new ideas and identities and habitats are on display — and whether that exposure can pry our calcified minds open in unexpected ways. “Absolutely,” she said. “Having a wider range of possibilities to look at gives people a sense of a wider range of possibilities, and those different experiences might lead to having different identities.”

When we dive into Instagram or Facebook, we are on exploratory missions, processing large volumes of information that help us shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And this is a country that a majority of young adults are visiting on a regular basis. A Pew study from this year found that some 88 per cent of 18-to-29-year-olds report using some form of social media, and 71 per cent of Americans between ages 18 and 24 use Instagram. Social media is perhaps the most influential form of media they now have. They turn to it for the profound and the mundane — to shape their views and their aesthetics. Social media is a testing ground for expression, the locus of experimentation and exploration — particularly for those who cannot yet fully inhabit themselves offline for fear of discrimination, or worse. Because of that, it has become a lifeline for many people struggling to find others just like them.

Alok Vaid-Menon, who shaped Moore’s gender journey, has become an influential figure to others navigating gender nonconformity. Vaid-Menon, who is 27, grew up moving between two worlds in College Station, Tex., a small town about an hour outside Houston. “There was an unwelcome mat at every door,” Vaid-Menon told me. At home, Vaid-Menon was part of a tight-knit Indian community, while at school, Vaid-Menon’s world was predominantly white and evangelical. Bullying and racism were de rigueur there. As a young child, Vaid-Menon spent hours online on Myspace and Xanga — a blog-based social network popular in the early 2000s — sharing journal entries and poetry that were mostly about “existential loneliness.” Through those interactions, Vaid-Menon met people who praised the young teenager on the beauty of their words and creativity. Vaid-Menon began to thrive.

“I don’t know if I ever saw anyone who looked like me, ever, even online,” Vaid-Menon said, before adding with a laugh, “until maybe Joanne the Scammer,” referring to the online persona of a mischievous woman in a ratty fur coat and an even rattier blond wig, portrayed by Branden Miller. But online friends, whom Vaid-Menon described affectionately as a “ragtag group,” were among the first to affirm the feelings and uncertainty Vaid-Menon was experiencing. There was a collective sense that everyone could share stories that were forbidden in their offline lives. “Seeing visible queer people online and seeing people be vulnerable — all of that created me.” In the beginning, Vaid-Menon was just trying to meet peers and get information about queer and trans identities, with the hope of finding clarity on their own feelings. “But then I started getting messages from random people in, like, Arkansas, and that taught me that strangers can be people we feel more close to than our blood family,” Vaid-Menon said. “That paradox is what I do with my social media today.”

Vaid-Menon is extremely active on Instagram, uploading daily stories and posts for their 146,000 followers. Scrolling through their page reveals an inspired bouquet of multicoloured and multipatterned outfits, lips coated in blues, pinks or purples. They are constantly playing around with their presentation, seamlessly blending together suits, thigh-high boots, dresses, sweaters, hair colours, makeup, footwear and accessories to create a look that truly feels beyond any known understanding of masculine or feminine — which is exactly the point. Many of Vaid-Menon’s posts feature a confident and smiling Vaid-Menon at performances or speaking engagements, often posing with trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming friends, including the Canadian artist Vivek Shraya, the Brazilian singer Liniker and the Stonewall activist Miss Major.

To the average scroller, the photos themselves give the impression of a celebratory postgender, postracial world. But reading the accompanying text more often than not reveals a life marked by anxiety, trauma and fear. One such post features Vaid-Menon against a pink backdrop in a striped, sequined two-piece dress. Pouting aqua lips and yellow-lidded eyes are framed by cascading curls. The entire effect is of a futuristic pinup. The text reads: “In the last year that i posted this I still receive daily hate mail from people of all genders telling me that my body hair is ugly & that I need to shave to be more ‘real’ & ‘beautiful.’ So i figured i would repost because people still don’t get it! Body hair has no gender! Facial hair has no gender!” Another post shows a beaming Vaid-Menon posing in front of a stone wall, wearing a marigold-yellow button-down embroidered with flowers and neon patchwork shorts that meet patent-leather boots — one hot pink, the other lime green. Vaid-Menon’s blue-tinged hair is pulled into a side ponytail that flirts with bright orange pom-pom earrings. The caption reads: “the worst thing just happened!! i was trapped underground in the subway for an hour because of a train malfunction. I was dressed feminine & one of my worst fears is getting on trains & being trapped with people harassing me — you can’t escape & no one defends you :/ i had to really focus on my breath & it took everything in me not to have a full blown panic attack!”

Although social media generally conditions users to share only their highlights — the success reel of their lives — Vaid-Menon thinks it’s important to share the reality of living in a gender-nonconforming body; they want people to understand what the daily experience can be like. “The majority of nonbinary, gender-nonconforming cannot manifest themselves because to do so would mean violence, death, harassment and punishment,” Vaid-Menon told me. But Vaid-Menon believes that more people will respond to the vulnerability Vaid-Menon expresses; it’s something they learned as a young gender-questioning person growing up in a small Republican town. “It taught me that people do not have to understand in order to care, because people cared about me outside of my gender and perceptions.”

Vaid-Menon is a gifted public speaker and lecturer and uses Instagram like an open-source pulpit, drawing from their academic background and knowledge of South Asian gender systems to challenge heteronormativity and the treatment of marginalised people. If being vulnerable is one way Vaid-Menon tries to reach people, being outspoken about gender is another. In one recent Instagram Live video, hours after the news broke that the Trump administration planned to sign an executive order that would narrow the definition of gender to an immutable, biological condition, limiting protections for transgender people under federal civil rights law, Vaid-Menon sits wearing an olive green jacket and a topknot dyed to match and delivers a searing lecture about the widely adopted binary notions of sex and gender. “There is a gender-sex distinction that has been normalized even in progressive movements,” Vaid-Menon begins. “There’s an idea that gender is a cultural attribute, expressed by fashion and outfits, whereas the body has to do with sex. There’s a series of binaries that are created here.” Vaid-Menon warms up as the talk continues, speaking in a cadence that is accelerating and tinged with anger. “Why is it that when trans people take hormones, it’s seen as body modification, and if cis people take hormones for, like, a medical condition, it’s not seen as body modification? That’s where transphobia lives. The body is mutable. Sex is mutable. Sex is not a ‘biological essential category.’ We allow gender to be nonconforming while we stabilize sex.”

Personally, Vaid-Menon doesn’t identify as any gender. “Nonbinary is so oxymoronic,” Vaid-Menon told me. “We’re defining ourselves by an absence and not our abundance.” When pressed, they will describe themselves as transfeminine, gender-nonconforming and nonbinary — but only reluctantly. “I really try to escape having to put myself in these categories,” Vaid-Menon said. “I wanted to be free from boxes — not end up in a new one.” Social media is one of the few outlets for that uninhibited expression.

Vaid-Menon views social media as strategic, and as a practice to push everyone to rethink their conception of gender. “Technology is not an obstacle to intimacy — it is a conduit for it, and it expands our capacity for it,” Vaid-Menon told me. It offers a way to express emotions that are often repressed in person, especially for people who don’t fit into mainstream perceptions of gender. “It’s a type of intimacy we don’t even get in person.”

Hashtags and profiles are influencing an entire generation of people who now often develop their sense of selves online. As Turner told me, “People are finding ways to articulate how they feel about themselves, and that’s what happened to me too.”