Non-binary and genderqueer: An overview of the field

The existence of gender variance is widely documented both historically and cross-culturally (Herdt 1994;Matsuno and Budge, 2017).The term 'gender queer' emerged in the 1990s (see Whittle, 1996).It can be defined as 'any type of trans identity that is not always male or female.It is also where people feel they are a mixture of male and female' (Monro, 2005, pp.13).Genderqueer identities are diverse but share dis-identification with rigid gender binaries and in some cases, a direct challenge to the social institutions that perpetuate binaries (see Yeadon-Lee, 2016;Bradford et al., 2018;Davy, 2018).'Non-binary' is an umbrella term that includes those whose identity falls outside of or between male and female identities; as a person who can experience both male and female, at different times, or someone who does not experience or want to have a gender identity at all (Matsuno and Budge, 2017).Like genderqueer, non-binary can be traced to the work of transgender and transsexual authors who resisted or transcended gender binaries, for example Bornstein, who stated that 'Gender fluidity recognizes no borders or rules of gender.' (1994, pp.52).The earliest use of terms referring directly to non-binary seems to be around 2000, for example Haynes and McKenna's collection Unseen Genders: Beyond the Binaries.