Who is Driving the Non-Binary Bandwagon?

The craze for identifying as 'non-binary' may seem ridiculous, and it is, but behind the silliness there are some seriously dangerous forces at work.

Some things make less sense the more you study them: the SNP’s finances, Joe Biden’s sentences…and being non-binary. The non-binaries say they identify as neither men nor women. When you ask what they mean by this it usually boils down, after some quivery-lip boo hoo, to men saying they like to be kinda feminine sometimes and women saying they often kinda don’t. It’s not exactly the Communist Manifesto.

When you point out some men have been camp and women butch since time immemorial non-binary guys tend to get aggressive while non-binary gals get sulky and say you’re picking on them which suggests this non-binary larp may require some more thought.

If like me you prefer to identify as non-lunatic you might be tempted to dismiss the whole phenomenon as a passing fad. After all it bears many of the hallmarks of previous fads that swept through society. In the 1990s, over 70 million teenagers bought a glorified keyring with a miniature screen. The Tamagotchi “egg” linked customers to a virtual pet that needed constant attention.

If you failed to press buttons to feed it, play with it or to let it poop regularly enough your virtual pet died. Kids became so obsessed with these non-existent pets that doctors worried about the impact on their mental health. In some countries bereavement counselling was offered. In the UK schools eventually banned them.

Today’s non binary fad encourages kids to obsess not about an imaginary pet but an imaginary gender identity. If they fail to pay enough attention they’re told not that the pet could die….but they might. This time round schools aren’t discouraging the compulsion. They promote it; along with multinational corporations, politicians and medical institutions run by men and women who should know better.

The irony is no one can agree on exactly what ‘non binary’ even means. It often seems no more than a new and more pretentious way to bang on about being trans. Where the boundary lies between the two, or if there even is one, is unclear. On the one hand the huge American LGBTQ+ charity The Trevor Project insists:

“It’s important to note that not all nonbinary folks identify as trans”.

Other lobby groups such as the UK’s LGBT Foundation argue non-binary fits under the so-called trans umbrella. This isn’t much help since the trans umbrella has by now grown so huge it could be used to protect the Polar ice caps.

Once upon a time trans meant just transvestites, in other words blokes who looked like truck-drivers in lingerie or transsexuals, mainly blokes who got rid of their knobs and grew moobs in order to organise feminism better. Or to creep out fellow…err… “lesbians”.

Either way, the word ‘trans’ implied…a transition from one gender or sex to the other. The problem was that by the 1990s an uncomfortable truth had to be faced by the trans lobby. Many of those who used hormones and surgery to try to physically change their sex were disappointed by the results. At best most women ended up looking like miniature, small-boned “men” while most men looked like gallumphing, big-jawed, deep-voiced “women” with huge hands and feet the size of Coco the Clown’s. Big, bold and brassy, Caitlyn Jenner isn’t a sex change exception. He is par for the course.

That’s why trans people who looked in the mirror after their transition and saw their old sexed body and face staring back at them began to reach for a new vocabulary. In the mid 1990s, activist Riki Wilchins, who had earlier co-founded Camp Trans, an annual protest against the exclusion of transwomen from the women-only Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, coined a new term to describe himself. ‘Genderqueer’ was born.

A slew of new identities and neologisms soon followed, such as agender, bigender, demigender or gender fluid. In the Naughties non-binary was adopted to encompass them all. The fact that non-binary was effectively an umbrella sheltering under another umbrella - the very definition of pointless- was considered neither here nor there.

We should never forget though that despite the claim that being non-binary is a way of escaping society’s obsession with the two sexes, it was actually invented as a way to escape the inadequacy of medical transition. If it had remained as no more than that the rest of us might have felt some empathy; viewing it as a sign of self-awareness.

Unfortunately, an army of idiot celebrities jumped on the non-binary bandwagon and gave it a bad name. The singer Sam Smith was once an attractive young gay man. In his new non-binary guise…he resembles a well-fed sloth that’s been trained to twerk dressed in fishnets as a prank.

He was far from the only head-line grabbing doofus.