ABSTRACT
Despite the growing body of scholarship on trans people, there remains a dearth of empirical data explicitly focusing on non-binary people’s experiences in social life. This chapter is guided by the question of what are the challenges that non-binary people experience in everyday life in the United States. Using in-depth interviews with 18 non-binary people in a Midwestern US city, we show that how non-binary people negotiate gender in social interaction is a complex process that involves the intertwining relationship between cultural norms and an Anglophone-based linguistic system built upon the assumption of a two-and-only-two gender system. We demonstrate how non-binary people confront the constraints of English language by consistently having to self-disclose to strangers one’s gender identity, remind familiars of their genders and engage with and resist the attempts of others to fold them into binary genders. As a consequence, people who identify as non-binary are rendered invisible in social life as there are no commonly recognised ways to interact, and no existing cultural schemas with which to make sense of non-binary people. In social interaction, in particular, these cultural schemas perpetuate trans* oppression, but also reflect attention on how all individuals – regardless of gender identity – experience the constraints of gender in everyday life.
