The Struggles of Rejecting the Gender Binary (Published 2019) (2024)

‘Why didn’t you wear makeup today?’

Jan Tate asked her client during a therapy session in May of last year.

“I didn’t feel the need to.”

“Would today be the day to begin using Salem instead of Hannah?”

There was a long pause and a hushed reply: “Yeah. But it would hurt a lot worse to start asking people to call me Salem and have them not do it than not to ask them.”

Tate is a psychotherapist at the Carolina Partners clinic in Durham, N.C. She specializes in clients who are pushing against the bounds of gender. Salem is 20 and was, in the phrase Salem prefers, assigned male at birth, with a more clearly masculine name — that it is a “deadname” is all Salem will say about it. Salem uses gender-neutral they/them pronouns. They’d failed, so far, to get their parents, their sister or their two remaining friends to understand and accept that they were neither a man nor a woman, that they were nonbinary, gender fluid, gender expansive. They’d chosen the name Salem to fit with their identity, but they’d almost never asked anyone to call them by it. It was easier — definitely not easy, but easier — to let themself be considered conventionally transgender, male to female, and go by the name Hannah.

Tate, who is 31, suggested that Salem practice the request now, in the safety of her office. Sitting across from the therapist, they could hardly manage it — “Can you call me Salem?” — and as soon as they did, they turned their face away. Their brown hair fell with a loose curl just past their slim shoulders. Unlike two days before, when Salem arrived for therapy with their full lips in dark red lipstick and a dash of blush across each cheekbone, and with their long fingernails painted a bright lavender, this afternoon there was only the nail polish.

They wore a gray V-neck T-shirt and jeans. With an ankle crossed over the other knee, they picked at the rubber rim of one of their sneakers, picking, picking. The pain of being nonbinary was “excruciating,” they told me later, a torment mixing disconnection from themself and isolation from everyone else. Tate said to me that “I often find myself gut-knotted after sessions with Salem, because of the things they don’t say” — because of the feelings Salem kept locked away, even from her, for fear that their experience was inexpressible, incomprehensible. She imagined Salem in an “abyss,” undergoing a torture that was the emotional equivalent of “taking a saw blade and cutting into the skin of an arm.”

Tate was raised Southern Baptist on a small tobacco-and-cattle farm in a town not far from Salem’s. She is cisgender — the gender she was assigned at birth and her sense of identity match up. But she’s gay, and as a teenager, when she was struggling with her sexuality, she found solace in talks with the father of a close friend, a former deacon at her church, a middle-aged doctor who was making a full transition from male to female and was barred from the congregation and kicked out of her medical practice. Ever since, Tate has felt keenly for anyone pitted against gender conformity. She’s especially invested in the battles of people like Salem, who yearn not to go from one category to the other but to escape altogether. And philosophically, she’s electrified by the profound challenge that people like Salem put up against dominant preconceptions. What if our most fundamental means of perceiving and classifying one another is illusory and can be swept away?