We are All Nonbinary

EARLY work on gender offer efforts to think through the contemporary proliferation of queer and trans identities-many of which gather under the new umbrella category of nonbinary-in the Anglophone Global North?Despite Butler's own recent nonbinary identification, the answer to this question is by no means straightforward. 1 After all, whereas Butler's early work is animated by the desire to empty out the fictive core of gender, revealing it to be a mere effect of the compulsory repetition of gender norms, contemporary queer and trans culture invests strongly in the notion of gender identity, seeking to solidify new genders far outside of the confines of any ''heterosexual matrix.''2 The field of Trans Studies, moreover, has been durably oriented by Jay Prosser's foundational assertion that Butler's early work metaphorizes sex and is therefore unable to account for the transsexual desire to be differently embodied.3 While such dissonances are significant and important, they do not necessarily mean that Butler's early work has nothing to say to gender today.In this essay, I return to an early work of Butler's that was crucial to my own effort, in Disturbing Attachments: Gender, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (2017), to define the type of scholarly idealization to which I find minoritarian fields, including Queer Studies, particularly prone.This passage, from Butler's ''Afterword'' to Butch/Femme, a 1998 volume edited by Sally Munt, reads as follows: ''The regulatory operation of heterosexual norms idealizes heterosexuality through purifying those desires and practices of their instabilities, crossings, the incoherences of masculine and feminine and the anxieties through which the borders of those categories are lived.'' 4 While this passage ascribes the idealization of heterosexuality to the silent ''regulatory operations'' of dominant norms, Butler's broader analysis makes it clear that it is also lesbians themselves who, in their (understandable) effort to counter the claim that butch/femme is merely a poor copy of heterosexuality, end up shoring up heterosexuality's purity.That is to say