Check it out: The Man Enough Podcast with guest Alok Vaid-Menon

By Rikki Clos, LCSW (they/them)

One of the cornerstones that our culture stands upon is the male-female gender binary. This is what men look, act, and feel like. This is what women look, act and feel like. They are supposedly mutually exclusive, and any transgression against those norms is treasonous, leaving anyone who is considered gender non-conforming or transgender to be ridiculed, harassed, and worse. The negative effects of the gender binary have been widely studied with a focus on its effects on people who aren’t cisgender, but in their book Beyond the Gender Binary (2020) and as they explain in an episode of The Man Enough Podcast, Alok Vaid-Menon asserts that the gender binary hurts everyone, not just those of us who fall under the gender non-conforming umbrella.

Alok (they/them) is an Indian-American writer, author, poet, and performance artist who is gender non-conforming (GNC) and transfeminine. They authored the book Beyond the Gender Binary wherein they expound upon the damaging nature of the gender binary. They also guested on The Man Enough podcast, where Justin Baldoni, Liz Plank, and Jamey Heath explore facets of gender and manhood. The episode is certainly worth a listen to hear from Alok themself the points they expand upon in their own experience of gender in America both personally and scholarly, but I’ll touch on some of the highlights that I found prominent.

In the episode, Alok emphasizes how our culture focuses on comprehension of gender over compassion, and how this is problematic.The focus in conversation about gender that I have found with cisgender (cis) people both personally and in my work as a therapist is usually on whether or not they understand a GNC identity. This puts the weight of explanation onto the GNC person to explain their experience in such a way that someone will understand from their cisgender (and typically binary) perspective the experience of being gender expansive or transgender, which can be very painful and frustrating for the GNC person and typically unsatisfying for the cis person. This divests the cis person from holding compassion as the focus of conversations and making space for themself and others to grow as individuals rather than as members of a rigid group (e.g. “men” or “women”). As Alok said, “There’s enough room for all of us.”

But not only does the binary damage GNC and trans folks, it damages everyone. The gender binary certainly punishes people for transgressing against it and tries to disappear those people, but it also creates painfully rigid limits on every single person. It teaches all of us that anything outside of the binary is bad and worth hating, but the truth is very few people fall entirely within the rigid labels of “man” or “woman” without nuance or complexity. Because of this, people learn to hate those parts of themself that fall outside the binary. Alok argues that for the focus to shift to compassion, everyone must begin to love themselves, including those complex parts, in order to begin loving GNC and trans folks too. In this way, we as a culture need to deconstruct the gender binary in order to achieve self-love.

The gender binary is a model of scarcity, as if there isn’t enough gender to go around. And in order for scarcity to exist, there must be those with and those without. Thus, deconstructing the binary is scary for some because it feels like loss, but in reality, as Alok explains, there are as many genders as there are people on Earth because no one person’s experience with gender is identical to another’s. And that’s not bad, that’s beautiful. Gender is socially constructed, meaning that we as a society have defined what gender means and created the gender binary rather than it being biologically-determined as some believe (Hyde, Bigler, Joel, Tate, & van Anders, 2019). So if we have the space and compassion for one another, why not let gender be a playground, a place of fun and playfulness, rather than a rigid binary which only serves to hurt?

It is part of our mission here at Umbrella Collective to give clients the space to be curious and explore all things gender and find their own unique understanding of themselves. If you or someone you love is interested in exploring their relationship to gender, submit an Eligibility Questionnaire to start therapy with us.

Umbrella Collective Eligibility Questionnaire: https://www.umbrellacollective.org/eligibility

The Man Enough Podcast: https://manenough.com/podcast/

The episode of The Man Enough Podcast starring Alok Vaid-Menon: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1SovB8DUniC7EwCg3hRgCM?si=2ead81ba7df74423

More about Alok’s work and to buy their book Beyond the Gender Binary: https://www.alokvmenon.com/

Hyde, J. S., Bigler, R. S., Joel, D., Tate, C. C., & van Anders, S. M. (2019). The future of sex and gender in psychology: Five challenges to the gender binary. American Psychologist, 74(2), 171–193. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000307