Non-Binary Trajectories as Epistemic Insurgency: On Decolonial Disobedience in Developmental Psychology

Taking gender dissidence as a form of epistemic disobedience, this article engages critically with dominant paradigms in developmental psychology by interrogating the normative frameworks that regulate intelligibility, pathologised differences, and delimit what counts as “normal” development. Bridging the Cultural Psychology of semiotic dynamics and Decolonial Studies, it examines interview narratives of non-binary individuals, considering how they generate meaning in relation to themselves, alterities, and sociocultural realities. Meaning-making occurs through ambivalent processes that both negotiate with and disrupt modern-colonial logics embedded in psychological knowledge. Four self-defined non-binary adults (aged 26–30) living in Brasília, Brazil participated in this qualitative study, which employed semi-structured interviews, the go-along method, and a reflection group; each functioning as "dispositifs" for the co-construction of narratives. These materials were analysed in an integrated design encompassing all three moments. The analysis unfolds through four interwoven thematic axes: (1) resistance as a constitutive force in meaning-making; (2) the polyphonic character of non-binarity and its entanglements with racialisation; (3) dealing with classificatory regimes such as “gender dysphoria”; and (4) institutional violence in psychotherapy. Therefore, dissident ways of living emerge as a site of insurgent knowledge, destabilising binary logics and activating new ways of knowing, theorising, and existing within and beyond the discipline. By bringing to the centre embodied lives historically erased or pathologised by psychology, the article advocates for an epistemic reorientation grounded in political accountability, situated onto-epistemologies, and commitment to reimagining psychological science in response to the complexities of the present and plural forms of life.