Neither Male Nor Female: The Non-Binary Gender

People’s sexual orientations can be quite diverse, but that also applies to genders. Whether you are male or female or something in between, if everyone has to decide for themselves, we’ll end up finding more and more!

The non-binary gender

You can’t make snap decisions about people anymore, we’re all just too different for that. And because each and every one of us is so unique, that should also apply to genders. Being simply ‘male’ or ‘female’ just isn’t enough anymore.

Therefore, it is now possible for people who were born intersex, meaning people who could not be clearly assigned a gender at birth, to define themselves as ‘diverse.’ This means that the individual is neither a man nor a woman, but a gender that exists in between the two.

As a result, people who were born without a clear biological gender no longer have to decide whether they want to be male or female, but they can simply be a part of this new category instead. This is a step in the right direction when it comes to accepting non-binary sexuality and understanding that there are more genders than the more classic male and female. However, there are still some people who don’t fit into this group, as their genitals allowed them to be assigned a specific gender at birth, but they still don’t identify as either male or female.

Drag performer Xenia – Living between the genders

This is true for drag performer Xenia von Uexküll. This artist sees themselves as neither male nor female, but as non-binary instead. They believe that having two clear categories isn’t enough to properly reflect the diversity of all people:

I am a non-binary person. That means that I don’t want to be categorized as a woman or as a man. Looking at our diverse society, the gender situation is still rather simple, and the vast majority of people live as either a man or a woman.

For example, Xenia von Uexküll, the drag performer in Berlin who also goes by xixiinthemorning, wrote in the newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung, that he/she is convinced that sexual organs should be no more important when determining gender than the colour of someone’s hair. If children grew up with this in mind, then the inequality that exists between men and woman in the workplace, in bringing up children and in many other social situations would soon be a thing of the past.

We’ve already taken the first important step and people whose biological gender was unclear at birth can now choose to identify as a gender in the middle. Maybe one day, that will also apply to people like Xenia who don’t feel like they are either male or female, even though their biological gender was clear.