Nonbinary Thinking, with Eris Young)

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Intro – 00:00

 

ERIS YOUNG: When you step away from the norm in any way, it's going to influence the way people interface with you, the way people treat you, the assumptions they make about you when they see you. I think it just made my childhood that much more complicated.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Eris Young, and the norm they stepped away from in middle school that caused some difficulty was the gender binary—the idea that there are two discrete genders, boy and girl, man and woman, end of story.

Today there's a growing chorus of scientists, biologists, psychologists, and other specialists who are making it clearer than ever that the gender binary doesn't capture the diversity of human experiences. This includes trans people and all who don't fall so neatly into one category or another. In this episode, Eris Young joins us to talk about their book, They/Them/Their: A Guide to Nonbinary and Genderqueer Identities.

There's no one right way to be a guy or a girl, or someone else entirely. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.

 

Getting Personal with the Audience – 01:31

 

BLAIR HODGES: Eris Young, welcome to Family Proclamations. It's great to have you on the show.

ERIS YOUNG: Thanks for having me, Blair. I'm really happy to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book, They/Them/Their. These are pronouns obviously, and they are pronouns you use. Your introduction to this book starts off with a glossary of sixteen terms. But you manage to actually keep it interesting!

We'll talk about those terms, but I think it says a lot that you had to spend time right off the bat with direct definitions. Talk a little bit about that decision for the book.

ERIS YOUNG: It is a bit odd. You don't often start off with a dictionary or a glossary. Because of the nature of the project and when it came out—this book came out in 2019 and I started writing it around 2017—and at that time we were at the very beginning of our understanding, at least in the Anglophone West, of nonbinary and genderqueer identities and trans identity in the mainstream.

For the book I wanted to get into the nitty gritty. I wanted to go deep as quickly as possible, but it meant there was a lot of explaining I had to do in a short space of time in order to be able to get past that basic stuff. I’ll talk a little bit later how I feel about glossaries and dictionaries and how that's changed over time. It's very much a product of where I was at and where we as a society were at when the book was written.

BLAIR HODGES: You say your target audience is people who want to understand but might not have the means yet. This isn't necessarily for people that have already been in all the online discussions about nonbinary and different gender identities, but for people trying to wrap their minds around it. It can be a little intimidating for people that aren't used to those discussions in those spaces, and you identify some of reasons.

It might feel like people are afraid of making a mistake so they're afraid to ask questions, or they might feel like they're virtue signaling if they're going overboard and trying to show how knowledgeable they are. Tell me a little bit more about those dynamics because your target audience was for interested and well-meaning people that just want to learn more.

ERIS YOUNG: It is funny how much has changed in the time since I wrote the book. It's only been a couple of years, so when I first wrote it I was very much—and I think that's the strength of the book—I was really doing what I could to reach as many people as possible. That meant I had to do a little bit of explaining and a little bit of making sure my readers were on the same page as me from the very beginning.

I've seen the book described as “accessible.” I've had a lot of cis people come up to me and enthuse about the way they were able to use the book to get to know the nonbinary people in their life, or to make their workplace more inclusive. I really value having been able to do that for people.

BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned cisgender folks. I'm cisgender. For people who aren't familiar with the terminology, that means my gender identity aligns with the sex I was assigned at birth, the assumptions people made based on what my body looked like back then. I fit into a typical male identity and my body aligns with that. The term “cis” is basically trying to get people to think about how cisgender itself is also an identity. To be nonbinary is an identity in the same way being cisgender is an identity, and it's trying to avoid hierarchies of comparison of better than or less than. It seems to serve an equalizing purpose.

ERIS YOUNG: It's absolutely an equalizer, and it's absolutely a way of challenging this otherness. Trans and gender non-conforming people, we tend to get placed into this "other" category, but really it's about repositioning cis and trans as categories of being on an equal footing with each other.

BLAIR HODGES: We'll expand on definitions as we go, but let's start here with more about your own personal biography. This book explores your own experiences. You're very personal here. You talk about what it was like growing up. You say you realized as a young child there was something different, or something uncomfortable maybe about how you were encouraged to act and dress and speak and play as a child. Tell people a little bit about how that felt, about how you were.

ERIS YOUNG: This is something I've thought about a lot over the years. I think in comparison to a lot of genderqueer and nonbinary people I was fairly lucky. My parents are very liberal in the sense of being quite flexible. They weren't very prescriptive. I did karate. I did art lessons. I managed to avoid a lot of the gendered activities—not to say I was very good at karate or art! I dodged a bullet a lot of people in my position don't always manage to avoid, so I'm very grateful to my parents for that.

When I was a little kid, especially an adolescent and in high school, I did feel different. This has to do with my sexuality, my gender, my neurodivergent stuff going on. There were a lot of times when if the adults in my life had had the opportunity to read a book or watch a TV program about transgender or about nonbinary identity, that would have helped me a lot.

This is what I'm trying to give to the nonbinary children, the trans children of the people reading my book. I don't think it's going to make a huge difference, but I have had quite a few parents reach out to me, and I've had some intense emotional conversations with parents who, as you say, they're really well-meaning and they're trying to understand, but they've been taught their whole lives gender and sex work a certain way. They're finding it difficult to try and engage while trying not to hurt the nonbinary or trans person in their life.

 

How Should Parents Approach It? – 08:20

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's right. There are a lot of different reactions parents can have, coming from a lot of different places. Some people might have very rigid ideas about sex and gender being inflexible, and gender assigned at birth is paramount, and so any kind of deviation from that is uncomfortable, or even evil or whatever to them.

Then you have people who are more open to it but might see social discrimination and might worry for their kids if they're nonbinary or trans, and they worry about discrimination kids would face.

Or maybe even the dreams a parent has for their kids, where in theory they're alright with trans identities or nonbinary identities, but they also have built this story of who their kid was going to be and then they have to let go of that story.

I think parental anxiety can come from a lot of different directions and it's not limited to "conservative" or traditionalist, anti-trans feelings, but can also come from people who are open and believe and accept trans identities as well.

ERIS YOUNG: I think so much of parenthood and family is—you know, we're so close to it. For some people family and parenthood is the most fundamental and personal thing in their life. That means ego plays into it a lot, whether we want it to or not. I see this talking to a lot of asexual and aromantic people as well. We'll have parents who are good, supportive, loving parents, but when they encounter something that disrupts their own ideas of what their family should look like, it can cause a lot of conflict.

Something I'm really hoping for, an idea that makes me quite emotional that I'm hoping for the future, is I'd like to see more parents approach their child's gender journey as not a challenge to them as a parent or as not an obstacle to their idea of their child's happy and stable future. Instead, I'd like to see parents approaching their child's gender exploration and potential transition as an adventure you're going on together as a family.

I think for a lot of people this practically isn't possible because society right now makes it hard to be trans or nonbinary or genderqueer. I'm hoping we can have incremental social change, such that in ten or twenty or fifty years we can celebrate it when our children decide they're something other than they were assigned at birth. I think that's a beautiful potential future. I'd like to work towards that.

 

Social Pressures – 11:23

 

BLAIRHODGES: In the book you also talk about some of the ways you felt anxiety, even though your parents were generally supportive and, it seems, flexible and open to different things. You also felt anxiety around public restrooms or different social situations.

What were the pressures? Did you feel pressure to conform to the gender binary that you had to resist? What did that pressure look like?

ERIS YOUNG: No matter who you are, there's a lot of pressure on you to conform to the sex assignment you were given at birth. Restrooms is a thing. We talk about it a lot. I still have to navigate that, although nowadays when you're an adult you can get away with pretty much anything by walking in and looking like you know what you're doing.

But as a kid I was—I don't want to say a little weirdo, but I was quite a shy child. [laughter] I was a nervous little kid. Not really knowing anything about the community that I would later enter, it added this extra layer of complication. I had a good childhood, but I was a funny little guy. I’ve definitely had some anxiety throughout my life, a lot to do with being neurodivergent.

What did it really look like? It kind of really started to come to the fore when I was in middle and high school, so in my early to mid-teens in California, in Orange County. We didn't have strict dress codes or anything. I was dressing in boy's clothes from high school. I think it more influenced the way people treated me and looked at me. When you step away from the norm in any way, it's going to influence the way people interface with you, the way people treat you, the assumptions they make about you when they see you. I think it just made my childhood that much more complicated.

BLAIR HODGES: This speaks to the idea of nonbinary people being thought of as egocentric or self-obsessed in presentation and stuff, and what interests me about you is you were not like that. It seems like you didn't want attention. And you also needed to express your gender identity in a way that made you feel comfortable in your body and in yourself. But you weren't going for attention. It seems like if anything, you wanted to not get extra attention.

ERIS YOUNG: It's funny because that is the stereotype, isn't it? Pretty much all of the trans and gender non-conforming people I know, myself included, we're just trying to live our lives and because we're now able to be visible and open in a way we never were before, going from invisible to visible is now being transformed into this perception of us being attention-seeking.

When you look at the ways some cis people act out and perform their gender, like don't even get me started! It's very funny we do get painted with this paintbrush and it all has to do with visibility and change. It's not that we're visible or trying to be obnoxious about it, it's that we exist and our existence challenges the status quo and makes people think about things they haven't had to think about before.

 

Biological Sex and Gender – 15:12

 

BLAIR HODGES: Your book also drills down on gender, sex, and the binary. For people who aren't familiar with this way of thinking about sex and gender your explanation is really helpful.

The most common understanding of sex and gender is a binary understanding. The idea is gender is determined by a person's physical body parts, their body morphology, maybe chromosomes, or whatever. That's also supposed to determine sexual orientation as well. Gender identity, sexual orientation, and sex are all thought to be one singular thing.

In your book you talk about how humans are loosely a “sexually dimorphic” species. There is a general view of a sex male, a sex female, and so it's easy to understand how we've arrived at these assumptions about sex and gender. But you complicate that for us. Talk about why that binary understanding is problematic.

ERIS YOUNG: This is a fun question with a lot of deep potential. One of the things that happened for me, while I was writing They/Them/Their the more research I did, the more it complicated that understanding. I was a twenty-year-old starting to write this book and I approached it with an understanding of: There is biological sex and some people feel they are not whatever they were assigned at birth.

In reality, the more you look at it and the more research you do, and the more you look at history and actually biology, that rigid, contiguous binary we've constructed and we've put on this pedestal in our society, it starts to crumble really quickly. It kind of broke my brain and put it back together, and that's part of why I'm so pleased I was able to write this book when I did because it made a lot of things make much more sense to me very quickly.

For example, I'm picturing three boxes with arrows between them, and you've got biological sex equals gender equals sexuality. Well, a good hundred years ago we started to disrupt this idea of gender equals sexuality. There are all sorts of different kinds of historical categorizations of homosexual people—as inverts, hermaphrodites. These are the quite pathological words placed onto us or claimed by us at different times. We've pretty much disrupted that connection.

We've also managed to start—with some setbacks, there's still backlash against homosexuality, but we're starting to be able to decouple this idea of biological sex equals gender. We've got trans people, we've got nonbinary people, all sorts of people who aren't cis.

We're also starting to come to understand biological sex is not as much a scientific reality as we're taught to believe, or as some people would want us to believe.

This was something revelatory for me as I was writing the book, is it turns out that intersex conditions—so people who are born with what we might call ambiguous genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics that develop differently from how we would expect them to based on that person's assigned sex, those ways of being, and there's actually dozens of different ways a person can be intersex—they're way, way, way more common than we're led to believe. I didn't know a person could be intersex. I didn't know that was a thing until my late teens. Mid to late teens.

BLAIR HODGES: Me too. It may have even been my twenties.

ERIS YOUNG: No one talks about it. The only way I was able to learn about it is through the trans community because historically trans and intersex communities have been allied and we share a lot of lived experiences, though we're not always overlapping Venn diagram circles. Intersex people exist and are around and we know them. It's not a marginal experience by any means.

BLAIR HODGES: That's even on a chromosomal level, right? It's not the case that it's a simple XX, XY. There are different combinations.

ERIS YOUNG: There are women who would present as cis women and who would never be seen as anything other than a cis woman who have a Y chromosome.

 

The Binary Impulse to Clock – 20:30

 

BLAIR HODGES: Alright, so I think one of the reasons this can be hard for people to grasp is, I think humans in general need these shortcut ways to sum each other up. We want to be able to look at each other, we want visual cues, and just to be able to get a picture of who a person is.

Perhaps even a lot of transgender folks, I think, want to present on one end of the binary or another. There's still a lot of social pressure or social expectations or social conditioning. To transition kind of happens on a scale, some people really want to transition in a way that helps them present as female, very female, feminine, femme. Other people want to present as masc, masculine, more male. But nonbinary folks don't always really feel comfortable at either end of that pole.

Here's a quote from you:

"A genderqueer person will most likely have been raised as either male or female, and most likely will have either a penis or vagina and attendant chromosomes and hormones, but will not feel that either of these labels suits them wholly. They might feel that both or neither of those labels applies."

So even with many trans folks the binary is strong, and we have genderqueer or nonbinary folks that challenged that polarity.

ERIS YOUNG: That's why we're here, isn't it? We do like categories. We like binaries. As people, we like to be able to make quick assumptions. I don't know if that's an inherent thing for human brains, or if it's something we're taught, but it does take a lot of work to get beyond.

For me, I had to do a lot of thinking, a lot of research, a lot of writing and talking to people. I had to be on Tumblr for quite a long time before I could get my brain out of these rigid categories I had been thinking in. In a way that's a privilege, but the more you do it, it's a skill. It's critical thinking. This way of being able to question the categories you're given. As a nonbinary person, I'm quite grateful I'm able to exist in between. I feel like it gives me a lot of freedom to play, to question, to challenge.

BLAIR HODGES: I think the more nonbinary and genderqueer folks we get to know, the more automatic it can become. I think even with pronouns. I have a coworker, they/them pronouns, and they're the second person I've spent a lot of time with. It took a little while to be able to automatically think—instead of “translating” it, instead of looking at them and having to decide to use their preferred pronoun—to it becoming automatic.

I also found that using they/them more generally helped do that as well. Referring to people as they/them more broadly.

Familiarity helps a lot, but also it can be challenging because we don't necessarily know we're running into people who might be nonbinary all the time. As you say in the book, it's hard to even get estimates of how many people identify as nonbinary. That's part of the challenge.

ERIS YOUNG: I agree. That's one of the problems. That's why it's so hard to be genderqueer or nonbinary, or one of the reasons is a lot of our social systems are built around these very rigid categories. When you break them, you stop being intelligible to the system you exist in. If I am nonbinary, but I have to choose M or F on a form, I get erased as a person.

BLAIR HODGES: That's right. You're facing this on forms, you're facing this as people are interacting with you, and from my perspective as a cisgendered person encountering a nonbinary person, my impulse has been to think, “What are they really?” Basically still thinking in terms of what gender they were assigned at birth and then triangulating from that.

So I think people are tempted to ask invasive questions about that. It's not my business what gender you or anyone else was assigned at birth, and the more I've been familiar with actual nonbinary folks and hanging out with them, the less that impulse exists to try to see them initially as "What are they really?" Or where's their transness? Where are they transitioning away from, instead of just seeing them as they are.

ERIS YOUNG: When you were taught that binary gender is the only thing, your brain is naturally going to go and try and fit the person you're talking to into one or the other category. The only way to do it, the easiest way, is to get to know people and talk to people, as you say.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you have to resist that, too? Does the impulse I'm talking about sound familiar to you? When you see someone and as they present your brain starts to automatically do this processing of what their gender identity is. Because we're in such a cisgender-heavy society, it seems that would be a default. I'm just guessing. I'm interested in your thoughts, maybe even for genderqueer folks, that they might have that same kind of impulse. What do you think?

ERIS YOUNG: We're subject to the same social conditioning everyone else is. It's different from individual to individual, but I had to do a lot of, I guess you would call it unlearning, as I was writing the book and as I was getting to know myself. I had to let go of all those impulses. I can't even say I did let go of them because it's an ongoing process.

I had to do a lot of unlearning and I have a lot of these harmful or unproductive instincts of trying to once I've clocked someone, my brain automatically wants me to try and wonder their sex assignment at birth. It's quite a harmful instinct and a hard one to get rid of. I have managed to get rid of that instinct by being myself and being with other people in my community.

I also wanted to loop back to the instinct of thinking what is the person's sex assignment at birth. That instinct to try and wonder about a person's sex assignment at birth, a lot of that comes from, or at least I think it comes from the way our society as a whole is really obsessed with bodies and specifically with categorizing bodies and medicalizing bodies and pathologizing difference. This is an instinct that exists on a lot of different levels, most often in the medical system, but it permeates throughout society.

It feels like a very Western, very Anglophone instinct to seek some kind of essential truth about a person. I use that phrase “essential truth” not on its face value, but what we're seeking is what we're taught to think as the truth of a person, when in reality the truth of a person doesn't have to have anything to do with what's in their pants.

I think there's this deep historical process that's kind of still ongoing, that contributes to this instinct we have to clock people.

 

Ignoring Versus Embracing – 28:24

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I find myself in such a strange position about it, because there's this weird tension of, it shouldn't matter all that much, but it also should matter because I also want to support folks, especially marginalized folks. I want to understand their experiences. There are legal issues, social pressures. I would shy away from a “gender blindness,” I guess. Or a way of erasing gender identity.

ERIS YOUNG: Right. I was at university for undergrad in mid-2010s, I guess, I don't know. There was a lot of discourse around, can you be race blind? Can you be post-racial? I mean, no, because you're a person who exists now. Regardless of whether biological sex or gender or even race, regardless of whether those things are actual "scientific realities," they affect the lived experience of real life people today. It's not possible to be gender blind. I think you're right to shy away from that impulse because I don't think it's necessarily a productive one. That's kind of like saying, "Oh, can't we all just get along?" when you're talking about social inequality.

At the same time, I don't want to be gender blind. I want to celebrate people's genders. I want to celebrate a trans woman's ability to joyfully embrace femininity and womanhood. I want to celebrate my own in-betweenness and my own playful way I live my gender. I think there is a well-meaning impulse to "not see gender." I don't think that's necessarily the most productive thing to do, because rather I think we should be trying to celebrate difference.

BLAIR HODGES: I think the idea of ignoring it is probably coming from a place of privilege. What it really means is I'm not comfortable with it and so let's just not talk about it--

ERIS YOUNG: I think you've hit the nail on the head.

 

Language Nerd – 30:49

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, when other people don't have that luxury of ignoring it.

Okay, so Eris you're also kind of a language nerd. You have a chapter in here about your linguistics I wanted to talk about, because this is a huge consideration. Language itself can be one of the biggest obstacles to social and legal acceptance of nonbinary and genderqueer identities. Let's talk a little bit about that, including the ways different languages are structured. Sometimes gender is literally baked into language.

ERIS YOUNG: When I wrote the book, my publisher sent me a list of topics they wanted to cover and I think pronouns were on the list. But then I rubbed my hands together like, "Something about language, you say?" [laughter]

I am a big language nerd. Any chance I get to talk about it I will take. We've had the pronouns debate. I think we're coming to the end of that debate, maybe? I guess my political instinct would be, can we stop talking about pronouns and start talking about suicide statistics? Obviously we can talk about both. But I think this "debate" around, "Oh, is it okay to use they/them pronouns?" Like, whatever. But language does have a huge effect on our lived realities.

Anyone who's studied any other languages knows this can be totally different depending on what language you're speaking. Your ability to maintain your own autonomy when it comes to gender presentation—what does it mean for someone to be genderqueer or nonbinary in a language like Spanish, where if you speak about someone else you basically have to assign them a binary gender? That was the kind of question I had been trying to get at.

There's other languages like Japanese, for example, and obviously there are caveats here because Japanese society—I'm not an expert—but it's not a wonderful place to be trans or nonbinary or queer, but the language itself just taken in a vacuum, you are allowed to basically claim gender for yourself based on the personal pronouns you use because you refer to yourself with a gender. You can use different forms of the word "I" based on how you see your own gender. I haven't studied it in a while, but it's broadly gendered. That's something you can exercise autonomy in. I could use boku if I wanted to be slightly more masculine, but not as masculine as saying ore, for example.

BLAIR HODGES: That's interesting because these Japanese words could be seen as over-gendering things, but it also gives people the opportunity to play with language or to identify themselves in their gender identity more on the fly and more subtly than having to say, "My gender pronouns are this." You can just refer to yourself.

ERIS YOUNG: You can signal to people on the fly.

BLAIR HODGES: If I was saying “I'm glad to meet you,” I could say that in a way that says “I being a cis person…” They would look at me and what I look like and I can give them gender clues just by saying, "I'm glad to meet you”?

ERIS YOUNG: It comes down to a part of gender presentation. One of the people I spoke to in writing They/Them/Their is Japanese and I asked them what their pronouns were, and they use they/them in English and boku in Japanese. Depending on the language you're speaking, the way language shapes gender experience is different. I think a lot of the ways we ourselves use language is so gendered. There's a lot of ways, at least in English, a person is able to signal their own gender in the language they use.

BLAIR HODGES: You talk about “natural gender” in language, which is the basic meaning of a word, like "woman," "man," and different languages have these natural gender words. And then there’s “grammatical gender—all the ways gender is embedded in language arbitrarily. Like in Spanish, there's your ways of signaling male and femaleness and there's also, as you said, in Japanese this way of signaling gender associated to other words, and even in phrases you might use.

And you say there are some “social convention” phrases that are more coded as masculine or feminine. I can't think of any examples, but I guess it might be like, let's say in English saying "holy cow" would be like, "Oh, that's kind of like a boy thing to say. Girls don't really say that." There's coded ways of even sending signals about your gender identity and phrases you use.

ERIS YOUNG: You're absolutely right. When I'm saying I don't think we need to have the pronouns debate anymore, I mean I don't think we need to debate about whether it's grammatical anymore.

 

Pronoun Go Round – 35:36

 

BLAIR HODGES: I guess even swearing in English. It used to be more so in the past, but it was not "ladylike" to use certain words. In English too.

You mentioned the pronoun debate, I do think it's important to talk about why that is important. Why that does matter to people. There's a quote here I highlighted from the book:

"The question at the heart of the pronoun debate is really fundamentally one about autonomy, the ability of a demographic, especially a marginalized one, to name itself and to claim agency or control over how it's referred to, and by extension treated."

I think this is what makes some opponents and critics so uncomfortable with the pronoun debate. They don't want to give up control over defining other people. They perhaps feel it's some sort of indictment even of themselves. It's really a control issue and a dignity issue. You talk a little bit about that history too, because they/them/their for a singular, people say, "Oh, ‘they,’ that's plural. It's not right to use that singularly." Your book is like, "Well, actually." [laughs]

ERIS YOUNG: I do a bit of "well, actually." English has actually had neutral pronouns in it. Old English had them and various times throughout history. People may not know this, but language changes a lot over time. English has had neutral pronouns at various times. I think Shakespeare used them. Jane Austen used them. So to say it's ungrammatical and it's a newfangled thing is pretty disingenuous.

BLAIR HODGES: People should note "they" as a singular pronoun actually is older than "you" as a singular pronoun. It was being used earlier than "you."

Let's talk about neopronouns too. This is where I feel I have to resist being the old man on the porch shaking my fist at the youths, because when I start seeing all the differences, people might see pronouns like ze and xe and ve, I'm not even a hundred percent sure how to pronounce a lot of these, but so it's easy for me to be the old man on the porch. Give us some info about these newer pronouns.

ERIS YOUNG: At the time I wrote the book, there were and still are people who use pronouns like ze/zir, ze/hir, which is a combination of him and her. They get conjugated, or they declined any other set of pronouns. But truth be told, I don't personally know many people that use neopronouns, and I wonder if that is because it's quite difficult to assert that. We're barely able to get people to not mis-gender us and to use they/them.

BLAIR HODGES: Like you said, there was a learning curve in being able to learn how to use they/them/their in the way I can now. It's a bigger lift when we're completely unfamiliar with new pronouns.

I see the utility of them. I think it's cool. I like how language changes to adapt to new realities. Maybe a hundred years from now someone will be like, "You didn't know? These pronouns have now carried the day." That'd be cool. But I feel that future would be a long way off.

ERIS YOUNG: It does feel a long way off. I'll probably talk a little bit later about backlash we're experiencing, especially here in the UK, and I wonder if a lot of people who would otherwise be using neopronouns because they feel that most accurately reflects who they are, are just sort of like, "I can't fight with people anymore. I'll just use they/them."

 

When You Get Misgendered – 40:01

 

BLAIR HODGES: This speaks to a broader issue of the kind of fights people are willing to have, and the rights that are at the forefront at the moment. That's a political calculation, which also means some people get hurt in the meantime, and pain exists in the meantime. But there are priorities that are set and there are imbalances of power. People get to kind of decide, "Let's rally together. What are we going for right now?" Choices have to be made. I think that can be tricky, but it speaks to the fact that language is a power game. All of this is wrapped up in power.

Not that everybody is even necessarily trying to exercise mean power over others, but sometimes we make mistakes. Now I'm looking for tips from you about how people can handle accidentally misgendering somebody, for example, what's a good approach when that happens?

ERIS YOUNG: Going back to this idea of we're not really trying to be the center of attention, even just because being the center of attention is quite dangerous, the best advice is to approach the interaction with good faith, understand you may be hurting someone more than you personally can empathize with, and there are certain situations where it's no one's fault.

I guess my advice would be if you accidentally misgender someone or deadname someone, you don't need to make a big deal out of it. Make sure the person knows you're sorry and you're trying, but you don't need to necessarily go, "Oh, God, I'm the worst! Oh no, I f*cked up so bad!" Don't make it about you, but also don't put them in the spotlight. You can correct yourself, say sorry, and then move on with the conversation. Maybe you can check in with that person later and say, "Are you okay?"

We're all adults here and there are ways of doing it sensitively just as long as you're being as respectful as you can be.

BLAIR HODGES: One thing I've been encouraged to resist is to say something like, "I hope you can be patient with me as I learn." Because again, that's making it about me and putting an obligation on that person to police their own feelings or to maybe even feel shame if they feel angry or upset about it.

ERIS YOUNG: Because sometimes I can't be patient with someone. I just need to step away. That's a good point.

BLAIR HODGES: I love this in your book where you talk about that, how does it feel to get misgendered? And you're like, "Well, it depends on the day. There are some days when I'm feeling fine and I see that as an annoyance and it's like, okay that's not really cool but I can move on." Then you can be in a different space at a different time when it hurts more. And it depends on your relationship to the person who's doing it, or the situation. There's no one way it's received when someone gets misgendered. It really depends.

I liked what you said of just being subtle about it, of being straightforward, apologizing, and not making too big of a deal out of it either. That otherwise puts more labor on a nonbinary or nongender conforming person.

ERIS YOUNG: I guess understand also you can apologize, and you should apologize, but the other person doesn't owe you forgiveness.

BLAIR HODGES: And don't feel resentful if they don't. They have a whole backlog of experiences that your one comment one day can be added to. I think that's all about not making it about me again. I would be making it about me if I was like, "Well, they should forgive me and if they don't then that's a problem," or “they're a bad person,” or whatever. That would be centering myself.

I've been working at not centering myself as much, especially coming from a more privileged position, being cis-het, being a white male. I'm perceived as the default or with all the privilege that brings. It's helpful to keep in mind that misgendering can be really hurtful, and other times it can just be annoying. I think being attuned to that is helpful.

I want to remind people Eris Young is our guest and we're talking about the book They/Them/Their: A Guide to Nonbinary and Queer Identities. This is a great book. Eris, I'm so glad we're able to sit down and talk with you about it today. And we've got more stuff to cover. 

 

Negotiating Unity in the Community – 44:28

 

BLAIR HODGES: I want to talk about the community aspect. It's Pride Month, by the way. Happy Pride, Eris!

ERIS YOUNG: Happy Pride!

BLAIR HODGES: Let's look at this acronym: LGBTQ. I've also seen it expanded to LGBTQIA+. There are different iterations of it. It didn't occur to me until pretty recently the way the acronym breaks down, the first few letters pertain more to sexual orientation, lesbian, gay, bi, and then we start to get to gender identity. Trans, queer, the T and Q, and I is intersex, A, asexuality, the plus means it can extend to pansexual and aromantic. There's all sorts of things.

But it's interesting to me that it's not fully distinguishing between sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and so on. It's all kind of lumped together as these marginalized identities. What that means is the LGB part of it can be really binary and even transphobic as well, even though the letter T appears in the bigger acronym.

Let's talk about the LGBTQ community, and how you address that in the book, and some of the nuances people miss who aren't really in those communities.

ERIS YOUNG: LGBTQ+, etc. It's an umbrella term. It is an expression of a shared experience of marginalization in terms of sex, gender, and sexuality. Naturally that means it's not a monolith. There are always going to be conflicts within the community. What do I want to say about this? —

BLAIR HODGES: It can be a touchy subject. The fact that you paused a little bit, what is that coming from? Just trying to organize your thoughts? Or are there some anxieties about unpacking this stuff?

ERIS YOUNG: There definitely is a little bit of anxiety there in terms of, as you mentioned earlier, we're under a lot of pressure, especially right now, to present a unified front to the rest of the world. We have to act in solidarity with each other. The same people who are trying to take rights away from transgender people, if they succeed in five years, they'll be coming after gays and lesbians who only recently managed to secure any kind of real legal or social security. We all need to be acting in solidarity with each other, but that's not always possible. There is a lot of conflict.

When you see LGB, and then you go T, and then you go Q, and queer sort of articulates a division within the community that I can see, which is you have assimilationist, usually LGB people, most often cis, and then you've got queer, trans, ace people who are more often likely, at least from my view, to be anti-assimilationist, who are more likely to want to reject the entire institution of marriage because of an understanding that marriage is a part of a heteronormative system. It can't be decoupled from that.

I think there are divisions within the community and a lot of the communities I belong to, the genderqueer and trans communities, I do consider myself to be queer. I think that's a more capacious term a lot of us use to describe ourselves. I'm trans, and I'm also asexual. I'm a triple threat of anti-assimilationist queerness because those are the identities that don't really slot in easily into the existing system.

There's been a lot of campaigning historically for gays and lesbians to be able to marry, though there is "marriage equality" in a lot of countries now, nonbinary people who don't have one or the other gender marker, often we are excluded from those so-called equal marriages. I think it's inherent to some identities, and obviously these identities don't have firm boundaries between them, but there's a lot of types of ways of being, of lived experience that don't have the luxury or the privilege of being able to assimilate.

You see a lot of corporations getting involved with Pride now because the corporations have realized the gays have money now, and a lot of us don't have money yet. The T, that's the poorest subgroup within the LGBTQIA+.

BLAIR HODGES: Economically speaking you can see lower incomes, more difficult job opportunities, education, violence committed against—

ERIS YOUNG: —Housing, incarceration.

BLAIR HODGES: I think there's been some temptation by old school LGB to throw that under the bus a little bit. They would say, I've heard this, "We fought for certain rights and we've got to protect those. We don't really get this other thing and don't feel obligated to it." They want to separate that out and even maybe display blatant transphobia. It's not the case that just because someone identifies as lesbian, gay, or bi they're going to be an ally of trans folks. That's just not a guarantee.

ERIS YOUNG: I think that's something that at least I, maybe naively, have been quite surprised and disappointed at. I come in good faith to the community and then I find some people don't want me there. It can be quite frustrating. It undermines the solidarity we're going to need in order to survive the next ten, twenty, fifty years. It's quite disappointing to see.

I do want to say at this point I think the handful of gays, lesbians, and “question mark” bisexuals—I think it's mainly cis gays and lesbians who are exhibiting transphobia. That's a very vocal, very limited minority. I think the vast majority of cis gays and lesbians are wholly supportive of the trans community and fully understanding our rights and our rights to dignity, health care, stability, security, they're all interconnected. I think most people within the community do understand that and are working alongside us. But there is a vocal and influential minority within the LGBTQ+ community working against full equality, the full equality of the umbrella as a whole. It's quite hard to see.

BLAIR HODGES: These are folks who are going to get platformed, too. One of the dangers is there's a kind of extra credibility in the eyes of transphobic folks.

ERIS YOUNG: “We have a gay we can wheel out who hates trans people, that means the whole community does.”

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. This happens with people who have detransitioned. A very small number of folks who transition and detransition in some way for any number of reasons, and then an even smaller subset of that then become spokespeople against trans rights and are platformed and given huge audiences.

ERIS YOUNG: Simply because they are able to pander to that transphobic ideology.

BLAIR HODGES: It's heartening to hear that solidarity continues, and is more prominent. Your book does a good job of talking about the necessary community building that has to happen if people are going to advance rights and protections. And celebrations too. It's not just about protection. It's also about celebration and embracing and acceptance and curiosity and exploring. That's important as well.

 

On Mental Health – 52:45

 

BLAIR HODGES: As your book talks about mental health issues, I think that's a good transition into that topic, your chapter on mental health is especially careful because some people believe identifying beyond the binary or outside of it, is itself a mental health problem. This has been pathologized even in scientific Enlightenment thinking, as scientists in the late 1800s are trying to classify things and start seeing nonbinary and trans identities as pathological.

Talk about the trickiness of mental health. Because on the one hand, it's been pathologized in negative ways. On the other hand, mental health issues do exist within the trans and nonbinary communities, in part because of the pressures that surround it. Mental health is a real concern, but it can also be deployed in really negative ways.

ERIS YOUNG: I think you pretty much said it. The mental health chapter in my book—that was one of the topics I knew from the beginning I wanted to talk about, because I wanted to know what was going on. I think that chapter for me was all about trying to pick apart where these negative mental health outcomes actually come from.

On the surface we've got these two facts that seem to contradict each other. We have on the one hand documented, disproportionate experiences of mental illness within the trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer communities. On the other side you have this understanding—and this was intuitive for me—this understanding that there is nothing wrong with being trans or being nonbinary. It's not an illness, it's just another way of being in the world. I really wanted in while writing that chapter, to try and dig a little deeper and get at what was really going on.

What I basically found was it's a combination of gender dysphoria and marginalization stress, which is this experience, this way of describing the negative mental health outcomes—anxiety, depression—that come when a person is living as a marginalized person. Any kind of minority might experience this. It's the stresses of dealing with microaggressions. The everyday stress of being misgendered, of feeling like you don't fit and that society isn't built for you.

BLAIR HODGES: These are physical things that happen. You talk about blood pressure elevation, more stress hormones being released, which is hard on the body, and it impacts mental and physical health. When people feel these marginalized stressors it has physical impacts. As you said, if you were to set a group of nonbinary folks or trans folks and a group of cis het folks next to each other, you're going to see a disproportionate amount of marginalized folks with depression, anxiety, and other things.

It would be easy to say those people are broken people and their gender identity issues are because they have mental problems, or they're depressed, or it's part of all that. Instead of saying there's nothing wrong with who they are, but what they experience causes these negative outcomes. That's a crucial distinction to make.

ERIS YOUNG: It's a really crucial distinction, but it's also quite a pernicious assumption. I can easily see where it comes from. When you have someone whose existence challenges people in positions of power, I can see why it was very convenient for people in medical institutions to be able to say “It's an illness, look how depressed they are,” and just in that way sort of brush queers, trans people under the rug.

 

Medical Approaches – 56:38

 

BLAIR HODGES: There's also a chapter here specifically about medical issues, which is another touchy subject. As you've already hinted at, there's some distrust between genderqueer folks, trans folks, and medical resources and medical practitioners because of a history of diagnosis, this history of assuming these identities are disorders, and a history of attempts to cure them.

We think of conversion therapy today as a religiously grounded thing, and obviously there are religious groups still trying to practice it, but it also grew out of the medical industry and out of psychology. It wasn't just religious fundamentalists who wanted to fix gay people or trans people, but rather medical industry saying, "Is there a way we can fix this problem for them so their gender aligns with their sex?" That's a long history—

ERIS YOUNG: So they reintegrate into society.

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. This is where it's tricky because medical advances have helped, with hormone blockers and helping people medically transition, whether it be through hormones, whether it be through surgical procedures, but behind all of that is a lot of baggage and ongoing distrust.

ERIS YOUNG: I think trans people who decide they want to transition medically, whatever that means for them, are put in this contradictory position where you are forced to rely on a system that has consistently dehumanized and pathologized you and people like you. That can create a lot of trauma.

It's like being in a position where someone has hurt you and you have to see that person every day. It can be quite harmful. That really does come down to this post-European enlightenment shift in mindset that made us start to see biological sex as a kind of scientific reality and to uphold that as the most important thing.

It also comes down to the way we have this system of capitalism that exploded after the Industrial Revolution, and you had men and women's social roles become more and more divergent from each other. Women were increasingly relegated to the home and men were increasingly placed in positions of economic power that were now outside the home. What that meant was, for men in power, it was very convenient for them to use this new scientific knowledge to make claims about the people they wanted to exclude from power. Usually this was women, but it's been weaponized against trans people, colonized people, queer people, generally since that time.

BLAIR HODGES: As though there's something inherently inferior about them.

ERIS YOUNG: Inferior, broken, and somehow being unwilling or unable or refusing to conform to a very specific norm is a moral failing and an illness.

BLAIR HODGES: And hey, we can fix it! Using science.

ERIS YOUNG: That's why in the community we have these assimilationist and anti-assimilationist groups getting in conflict with each other, because society offers you a way to re-enter society. Come back to the bosom of society. All you have to do is promise not to challenge the people in power anymore. It's really tempting and I can see why people fall into that.

BLAIR HODGES: That can even happen in the process of transitioning too. We're staring down the barrel of all these new laws people are trying to pass that prevent gender affirming medical care, especially for young people. It's at a critical time. The idea of puberty blockers is to prolong a time when a young person can come to terms with who they are.

ERIS YOUNG: Just some breathing space. To get to know yourself a bit better.

BLAIR HODGES: They want to be like, "That's too dangerous. Let's just cut that completely off and then they can decide when they're older." But that means a body has undergone changes it didn't necessarily have to to begin with. The medical community is offering options now for people to take more control over their identities and their presentation in ways that alleviate suicidality.

This part fascinated me where you talked about, for example, a care provider you had who thought you were transitioning to male and was prescribing testosterone and was like, "Your levels aren't where they should be." You're like, "Oh, interesting," but you also felt like you couldn't say like, "They're where I want them to be."

ERIS YOUNG: It puts you in this position of having to misrepresent yourself. I think this is not as common anymore. Here in the UK we do have gender identity clinics, for how much longer we'll have those I do not know, but I do know a few people I've spoken to have accessed those services. There are people who are being very open about their nonbinary identity and their desire to transition in a way that isn't strictly from one end of the pole to another.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm pausing the interview for a quick second with an update because Eris's words about care being under threat were prescient. Since we recorded the interview months ago, the UK has paused the prescription of puberty blockers for minors, under the advice of a partisan report produced by Dr. Hilary Cass, who other reporters say has worked with anti-trans activist groups and conversion therapists.

To get a better sense about why prescriptions are being paused, I suggest following independent reporters who've been covering these stories. Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart are two of my favorite resources to go to. I hope to cover more about these recent studies and these laws later on the show. Back to Eris Young.

 

What Is Transitioning Like? – 1:02:30

 

BLAIR HODGES: Give us a sixty second snapshot of what the process generally looks like for a young person who, let's say from a very young age they've talked about not being a boy or a girl, or maybe they've talked about being a gender they weren't assigned at birth. What does the process look like to transition? There are many ways to transition, so just give us a snapshot of what people go through.

ERIS YOUNG: It varies a lot between the US and the UK and from state to state, obviously, and country to country, region to region. I think rural trans people will experience, for example, using gender identity services in the UK a lot differently than someone who's based in a city.

If they're very young they might be able to access puberty blockers. That would only be for a short period of time they would be prescribed. They are not generally prescribed longer than a few years from my understanding. That would just give them a little bit of breathing space, because generally at the point of access of the first point of entry into the gender identity medical system, that's the moment at which a child is able to declare there's something going on with me and I want to explore it in more depth.

At the point of being prescribed puberty blockers, that would just give them a little bit of breathing room to talk to people, hopefully. I'm of two minds about speaking to a cis therapist about gender stuff, but explore the community, explore their options, think about what kind of gender presentation feels right for them, think long and hard about what kind of medical transition they might want to undergo or not undergo at all.

Then after a few years, they would then in an ideal world access hormone replacement therapy, so either and/or testosterone or estrogen, while this whole time they'll be transitioning socially, ideally, if it's safe to do so, exploring different names, different pronouns.

I actually don't know if this is the lived reality of people right now. I'm sure in very progressive cities it probably is. The reality I'm sure is much more difficult than I'm making it out to be.

BLAIR HODGES: This is the impression I think opponents have, is this idea that it's super easy and these kids are being manipulated, or the word people use is “groomed.” This term that has been rightly used to talk about adults pressuring children into sexual situations or conversion therapy, but they're trying to use it as though these people are trying to brainwash kids into thinking they're different.

ERIS YOUNG: That's the same kind of bullsh*t that was said about gay people back in the eighties or nineties. “They're grooming our children and making them gay.” No. No, we aren't.

BLAIR HODGES: Opponents of gay marriage would say, “we can't have gay men in particular father children because what they really want to do is abuse kids” or whatever. We're seeing those exact same arguments play out here. For anyone who has spent any time with a kid who identifies as trans, good luck trying to convince them of something else. I can barely get my kid to brush his teeth every night. There's the claim that it's way too easy, that it's coercive, that kids aren't interested in this really.

ERIS YOUNG: It's the reverse. It's the kids that are educating themselves and coming to this with clear eyes and letting go of the social programming they've had. The kids are so much more conversant with all of this stuff than I was at their age. They should be supported in that.

BLAIR HODGES: The parents I see are involved. There's nervousness, there's anxiety, and fear and love and all kinds of emotions they're dealing with. It's not this simple process. Your book is helpful in laying out why these processes are necessary and helpful, and also some of the downsides. It's clear eyed about some changes that could improve the system, more patient-centered informed consent models, where medical professionals are laying out options and talking about drawbacks and talking about side effects and talking about possibilities.

ERIS YOUNG: I think the biggest change that needs to happen within the medical community is to understand or to acknowledge trans people are the experts on their own lived experience and are capable of making informed decisions for themselves and are best placed to make informed decisions for themselves. Not some faceless gender recognition panel of old cis people. I think that's the biggest change I'd like to see in the medical system. I have no idea if we'll ever get there.

 

Legal Issues – 1:07:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: Speaking of changes, let's also talk about legal issues. So you say nonbinary folks are most concerned with two factors. First, they need basic legal recognition of their identities, especially on official documents, birth certificates, and other things. Then second, with greater visibility will come a greater need for legal protection from discrimination, from violence. Those are the big things.

Tell us what legal protections exist now, and what legal protections you'd really like to see happen that don't exist mostly.

ERIS YOUNG: It's a little tricky. These things are changing all the time. They vary by country, they vary over time, they walk forward and get knocked back.

Just last year in the UK, we saw Scotland vote by a pretty solid majority to reform the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland. This was the Scottish people voting in favor of making the legal process and medical process for transitioning easier and more humane. It would allow people to start the process younger, and it would eliminate some of the more dehumanizing and traumatic aspects of the current UK gender recognition system.

Then what we saw was that Westminster, so the overarching government in the UK, which is a conservative government run by the Tory Party, Boris Johnson or whoever they've got down there now, they simply decided to ignore it. They saw that Scotland had voted, exercised the democratic process, and they decided not to uphold it. The Gender Recognition Act has not been reformed, even though Scotland voted to do it. We've seen even in the course of one year massive progress and massive walking back of that progress because of a transphobic government the UK has.

It really varies a lot and it's all extremely in flux right now. I'm pretty excited that I've now been able to, I think at the beginning of last year, I applied for a passport just at the time Joe Biden announced you can now get an X on your gender marker, so I got that which was very cool. I filled out my application and then had to come back to the UK but in my mom's house right now there's a driver's license for me with an X gender marker on it that I have to go and get. I've got these nonbinary friendly, inclusive gender markers on my driver's license. In California, literally all I had to do was fill out a gender declaration form. It took a minute to fill it out. It was super easy. I'm grateful my family is based in California. We have a lot of rights other queers in other states don't.

Something I'm wondering is, the more we see progress being made in one area, for example in legal documentation, what then does that mean, for example, to the criminal justice system? Or I should say, the quote-unquote "justice system"?

This is all theoretical. What happens to somebody with an X gender marker on their documentation if they get arrested, if they become incarcerated?

BLAIR HODGES: If they're incarcerated, where do they go? If prisons are separated by binary where would they go?

ERIS YOUNG: Is it possible to change your birth certificate right now? I'm not sure. I haven't looked into it. If it is, how much longer will we have that privilege, or that right of being able to do that? But the more we change things, the more we start to see how entrenched binary gender is throughout the entire system.

Obviously, what passes for a criminal justice system in the United States is fundamentally broken and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Part of that is going to be, how is sex and gender treated within that system. I don't know if anyone has done any formal study of people with nonbinary legal documentation or just of nonbinary people within the criminal justice system in the States. I'd be very interested to see what they're finding because it would be another layer of complication on an already horrific experience.

BLAIR HODGES: We're also seeing general access to care being affected in places. Utah, where I'm meeting you from, has passed legislation to prevent gender affirming care for minors. It's causing so much pain and damage. Hopefully the courts can help address that, but that remains to be seen. Legally it feels like we have a long way to go, and I think it's going to be a heavier lift in some ways than gay marriage because cis het people could more easily wrap our heads around gay marriage. It was just like, oh, these people want to get married. Cool.

ERIS YOUNG: This is us asking for a separate thing. It's not an assimilation. We're asking for actual change, not just to access something existing.

 

Is There Reason to Hope? – 1:12:54

 

BLAIR HODGES: To be yourselves. Let us be us, not let us be like you.

ERIS YOUNG: Yes. 

BLAIR HODGES: With that in mind, are you generally optimistic? Let's close on that. What are some reasons for optimism, some things to keep our eyes on?

ERIS YOUNG: Something I find reassuring is, it's not the same all over the world right now. We are seeing backlash, but it's not the same. One of my friends here in Scotland, they're nonbinary and their son is trans. They just went to Canada and stayed there for a few weeks. They said they felt safer and more seen and more understood than they had in years of living in the UK. It wasn't just that there are legal recognitions over there. It's the way they were treated in the day-to-day by normal everyday cis people. Just regular people treated them with respect and understanding. They didn't want to leave. In a way, it is cause for optimism because it makes me think it's not this way everywhere and it doesn't have to be.

At the same time, it's quite depressing because we can't all move to Canada. There's space there, but you know. [laughter] I want to believe it won't be like it is in the UK or certain parts of the USA forever. I have to hope, but at the same time, and I think directly correlated with the increase in visibility that trans and nonbinary people have had in recent years, we've become really visible or we've been really visible and uncompromising when it comes to claiming space and claiming language for ourselves. What that means is there are a lot of people, especially people in power, who are made upset by that, who are afraid of it because it makes them think about themselves and think about their own position in the world.

If they acknowledge us then they have to question a lot of the things they've based their whole lives around. Because they're people in power they've applied an equal and opposite pressure to our own attempts to demand rights and equality. I think the next ten years is going to be difficult.

BLAIR HODGES: From where I sit—this is complete theory, there's no study backing this theory I have—but I have a theory that there are more people who would be supportive of nonbinary identities, that there are more people who could come to easily understand trans folks and their experiences, and the opposition is a very dedicated, vocal, and powerful minority of voices who have a disproportionate impact on what policies are passed, on how people are treated.

What that means to me is if that's true, that puts more onus on me to use my voice and my position to advocate for equality and for greater understanding. It really becomes the sort of middle grounders or folks who are like, "Yeah, that sounds fine to me. But I'm also living my life over here." That's who I want to start paying attention.

Because most queer folks are already in the fight. They kind of have to be. Some take breaks here and there or want to hop out because otherwise they might end their lives or something. For me, I want these folks who are interested, maybe kindly curious, to be more than that. To be embracing and to be vocal, and to use our voices to show there are numbers behind this, and this is a pathway to a better society.

I don't know. As I said, I haven't seen researched stats on that. I don't know. But I do think that's the case. I hope it is.

That's one of the reasons I am thankful for folks like you sharing your story, and sharing your knowledge, because that's a huge labor in and of itself, in addition to being who you are in a society that can be oppressive. I want to close with that gratitude to you for helping educate me and others with this really great book, They/Them/Their. I just want to say thanks.

ERIS YOUNG: Thanks. Right back at you, Blair. I'm really excited you've invited me on here. I'm happy to be able to talk about my work and share it with more and more people. I appreciate your questions. They've been very challenging and really getting to the heart of what I'm trying to do with this book. I'm also very grateful to you.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises! – 1:17:46

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks. Let's conclude with our little game I like to play at the end. It's a little choose your own adventure. It's called regrets, challenges, surprises. You can speak to one, you can speak to two, you can speak to all three. Is there anything you regret about the book? Was there anything specifically challenging about the book you didn't anticipate ahead of time? Or was there a big thing you learned, something that was surprising? You can speak to one, two, or all three of those.

ERIS YOUNG: I think I'll talk on regrets and surprises. One of the things I would do differently now if I were to write the book again, and if you've read my second book, Ace Voices I talk a lot about that, is this idea of a dictionary as a coercive tool. This idea that if you write something down and you write a definition, if you give an identity term a definition, then that makes it rigid. It solidifies it. Where in reality, it might be more fluid and more unresolved. I think I would handle my definitions of terms with a little bit more nuance maybe, or a more mindful way of talking about definitions of terms. But I did manage to do that in my second book. I'm happy with that.

BLAIR HODGES: Let me say, I have read your second book. We will be talking with you about it in a later episode. Thanks for being willing to do it. It's about Ace Voices. It's going to be great. I did notice that, and it seems like a book about asexuality is primed to call that out and to say let's be more careful with rigid definitions. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. Surprises.

ERIS YOUNG: I think the thing that really surprised me was that rigid idea of biological sex is actually fake. Gender is a conspiracy. It goes all the way to the top. Realizing all these systems of everything from binary gender to capitalism to colonialism, they're all the same system, and that was something I found really difficult to hold in my brain at one time. That was part of the thing about the book and with Ace Voices as well that sort of broke my brain into little pieces so I could start putting it back together again.

BLAIR HODGES: The social construction of this stuff is when you can start really wrapping your head around it, and it's not this aimless relativism that has no roots. It's not saying anything goes. It's a recognition of how humans make decisions and are influenced to make decisions about how we view the world, about what's possible in the world, about what's possible for ourselves and for others, and how those things are negotiable, and how they change. It's not a linear line that goes straight—the moral arc of the universe toward justice. It's not like that either. It requires active work and involvement. I feel similar to that in how I've come to understand these issues myself as well. For me it actually began in disability studies, which I did for my master's degree.

ERIS YOUNG: There's so much overlap there. There's so much work being done in in disability activism right now.

BLAIR HODGES: Social construction, the ways we build our society create and exacerbate disabilities and make them what they are. We have other choices. I hope people will pick up this book, Eris, They/Them/Their. It's a great way to answer a lot of questions you might feel reluctant about asking a friend or family member, and it can help spark conversations.

You could maybe bring the book to a friend, "Hey, what do you think about this? Here's something Eris said. What do you think?" Because you're not the be-all, end-all definer and you don't try to be. It can educate but also give opportunities for people to have conversations with people they want to get to know better. It's really useful for that.

ERIS YOUNG: I'm very happy to hear you say that. It means a lot.

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks a lot, Eris. This has been a great discussion. Again, the book is They/Them/Their: A Guide to Nonbinary and Queer Identities. Eris also serves as fiction editor at Shoreline of Infinity Sci-Fi Magazine and previously was the writer in residence at Lighthouse in Edinburgh's Radical Bookshop. You were there from 2019 to 2022. Eris, we'll look forward to talking to you again. Thanks for being here on Family Proclamations.

ERIS YOUNG: Thanks very much for having me. See you again.

 

Outro

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening and special thanks to Camille Messick, my wonderful transcript editor, and also to David Ostler who sponsored this first group of transcripts. I'm looking for more transcript sponsors. They're not free, so help me out. If you've got a little extra money lying around my email addresses is blair@firesidepod.org. You can help me get these transcripts out. We do a full transcript of every episode.

You can also contact me at that email address with any questions or feedback about any of the episodes we've done so far, or ideas you have about future episodes. There's a lot more to come on Family Proclamations.

This is also the moment where I do the thing you hear on so many of the podcasts you listen to. I'm going to ask you to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts or in Spotify. Let me know what you think about it. Here's a new five-star review from Ariel Munyer. They say, "I love the wide variety of family structures this podcast seeks to highlight. So many interesting books and guests."

Hey, Ariel, thanks for that. I agree.  I'm having a great time producing the show. I love all the different books and guests I've been able to learn from and I enjoy hearing from people who like listening to it.

Alright, one more thing: the number one way people hear about podcasts is through a friend. Word of mouth. As you listen to this episode, maybe a friend of yours or a family member or somebody came to mind. Maybe send this episode their way. That might be just the person who needs to hear it and appreciate it.

Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and we'll see you next time.

 

NOTE: Transcripts have been edited for readability.