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During his first term as president, Donald Trump implemented several policies that were seen as hostile to the LGBTQ+ community. Some notable examples included a ban on transgender individuals serving in the militaryslot paraiso, citing concerns about military readiness and unit cohesion, rolling back several protections for LGBTQ+ individuals, including guidance on transgender students’ rights and protection for LGBTQ+ workers. The Trump administration consistently opposed LGBTQ+ rights, including opposing the Equality Act, which aimed to provide federal protection for LGBTQ+ individuals. Such draconian measures undertaken by the Trump administration were widely criticised by LGBTQ+ advocates and human rights activists and organisations.

It has become worse. Since the beginning of his second term in 2025, Trump has launched a brutal and a well-planned onslaught on transgender and non-binary people. Some of his meticulously calculated executive orders like ‘Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation’, issued on January 28, 2025, and ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’, issued on January 20, 2025, were designed to humiliate, demonise and expunge transgender and non-binary people from public life. Nothing short of an act of state violence, such harsh measures are alleged to increase the chances of violence and suicide among young people.

His executive orders authorise federal agencies to discriminate against transgender and non-binary people by denying their identities and threatening their freedom of self-determination and self-expression. His diktats include rescinding federal non-discrimination protection, stripping LGBTQ+ people of guarantees across various federal government programmes, including social security, medicare, and housing programmes, and to use federal laws to override state-level protection and mandate discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, including criminalising gender nonconformity. Prohibiting the gender-affirming medical care policy of Trump will disrupt medical care for transgender people, potentially leading to significant distress, depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide. These policies would have devastating consequences for the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender people, who already face higher rates of poverty, homelessness, hunger and mortality. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has vowed to fight these policies through litigation, advocacy and organising resistance.

Between Us And Them: Outlook’s Next Issue ‘The Grid’

BY Outlook Web Desk

The Scientific and Social Reality

Interaction among human beings and multidimensional patterns of their relationships, often interspersed with dominance and subjugation, constitute one of the most complicated shifting domains of a society irrespective of the level of development at which it has currently been placed. Interpersonal boundaries of human relationships and their interactive patterns vary from generation to generation and cannot be systematised into a single dominant model over a long stretch of its documented history. Human interactions, being an intangible social phenomenon, are not based on any material substance, which can objectively be explored to unravel its multidimensionality as well as an equally mercurial stance of its permanent transformative nature and consequent kaleidoscopic contours of its varied interactive processes. Placed within contested sex (male and female) and gender (man and woman) binaries, the complexity of human relationships gets further intensified given their multiple interactive patterns.

Differentiated with distinctive reproductive organs, genitalia and chromosomes, sex binary refers to biological differences between males and females with different levels of hormones comprising higher levels of testosterone in the former and higher levels of estrogen in the latter. Often arrayed in medico-scientific contexts, the male-female binary differentiates between males with XY chromosomes and females with XX chromosomes. In contradistinction to biological differences between male and female components of sex binary, gender binary deals with their social and cultural constructs: masculinity and femininity respectively. The former refers to physical strength, aggression, and dominance of ‘man’, whereas the latter underlines the emotional, empathetic, and submissive characteristics often associated with ‘woman’. Gender binary extracts its meaning from sociocultural, and psychological realms of an individual’s gender identity based as it was on his/her internal sense of being male, and female rather than his/her biological distinctness. Gender and sex binaries cannot be placed in a straight line corresponding to their various characteristics facing each other. Sexual and gender orientations, often discussed together, as in the case of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and/or questioning, intersex, asexual (LGBTQIA+), noncisgender and non-straight identities, etc cannot be inferred from each other in a one-to-one comparative basis drawn through a common algorithm. A person who identifies as female could be either homosexual or heterosexual.

Trump’s executive orders authorise federal agencies to discriminate against transgender and non-binary people by denying their identities and threatening their freedom of self-determination and self-expression.

In terms of medically differentiated characteristics, sex binary is a fixed category of male-female continuum. Whereas, gender binary is a socially alive phenomenon meticulously woven around subjectively manufactured traits/features of being a man or woman, varying from generation to generation, regions, civilisations and epochs. Relying on socially acquired gender identity, gender binary exhibits its outer appearance in specific forms of dress, hair style or/and behavioural patterns, which are considered to be sociologically evolved in a given cultural setting. Gender identities are, in fact, social constructs. They often vary along with their changing contexts, and are neither given nor determined in terms of biological features as is the case with sex binary. They are, instead, acquired through gender socialisation processes in response to expected social behaviour as nurtured by diverse social agencies comprising parents,jiliko 747 teachers, media, and learning institutions in a given society. Thus, gender categories are sociologically chiselled modes of social meanings assigned to biologically differentiated attributes of individuals in a given society.

Despite the aforementioned differences between sex and gender binaries, they are often deployed interchangeably. The sex binary presumes that human society consisted of two sexes: male and female. An individual can be identified only by one sex determined on the basis of one’s biological characteristics. Gender binary, on the other end, embossed on the biologically determined sex categories (male and female), may assign different attributes and roles to both of these categories corresponding to their socially evolved respective reference points over a period of time. Since gender changes its attributes at different intervals over varied times and contexts, some scholars are of the opinion that this binary category should not be designated as a permanent category. Accordingly, they consider ‘gender’, both binary and non-binary, fluid. Non-binary for its socially constructed substance, and binary because of its being constituted by the objective criterion of biological determination. Thus, gender is deployed both in binary and non-binary frameworks. As a non-binary framework, it comes to acquire certain individual characteristics which are conceptualised as “a spectrum with ‘male’ and ‘female’ at either end point”.

Socially acquired meanings of gender identity are called ‘gender expression’, which, in turn, are conceptualised by archetypical outer behaviour embedded in dress sense/expression or other psychosomatic features associated with socially defined masculinity and femininity.

Clubbed together, sex and gender binaries throw an indomitable challenge to explicate the essence of human interpersonal relationships. Of the two, the gender-based binary is the most complicated. It is this binary which invariably assigns value to ‘male’ and correspondingly diminishes the status of its counterpart ‘female’, mainly in a patriarchal social setting, and in the process turns the male-female binary into a mutually differentiated matrix. The gender binary, on the other hand, based as it is on socially constructed patterns of human relationships, problematisesaround the dichotomous male-female conundrum. Human society is often seen through the prism of male-female centric sex binary characterised by its corresponding man-woman-centric gender binary. However, unlike sex binary, gender binary is not a fixed one. It goes beyond the bio-structural boundaries of two static variables: male and female. ‘Gender’ cannot simply be confined into two socially constructed distinct variables: man and woman. Since both these categories are based on culturally constituted social meanings, their gender identity and expression can be characterised in multiple ways: a man, a woman, both a man and a woman (intersex/trans), or neither of the two (agender/asexual). Intersex people with an assigned sex identity of male or female at birth may opt to be identified with a different sex identity later in life or an identity which is non-binary.

Given various instances of gender existing beyond a binary equation, the stereotyped binary model has been widely criticised for being overly simplistic and exclusionary.

Similarly, an individual may express his/her gender through a combination of both masculine and feminine characteristics—androgyny. A motley of masculine and feminine characteristics, androgyny is neither specifically feminine nor masculine. It refers to non-binary gender expression bringing together a seamless compound of masculine and feminine features. The traditional view of sex and gender binaries assumes that there are only two interfacing categories: male and female as well as man and woman. Given various instances of gender existing beyond a binary equation, the stereotyped binary model has been widely criticised for being overly simplistic and exclusionary as individuals may identify with traits from a muddle of both of the categories (male-female) or neither category. According to a general estimate, more than 12 per cent of persons born in the US between the early 1980s and the late 1990s—who are called ‘Generation Y’—consider themselves as transgender or gender nonconforming, and about half of them were of the opinion that stereotypical categorisations of man-woman binary are obsolete, which reveal less and conceal more. Further, they are also of the view that instead of a binary, gender needs to be presented as a spectrum.

Thinking Beyond Gender Binaries

BY Suraj Yengde

Many individuals identify themselves as intersex having biological characteristics that do not fit typical male or female categories. Born with or endogenously developed admixture of sexual traits of both female and male bodies, some intersex people also dissociate themselves from what is called cis or trans gender. Cisgender corresponds with one’s assigned sex at birth. Whereas transgender refers to a gender identity that does not correspond to the gender of a person assigned at birth. Thus, transgender and/or ‘gender nonconforming’ carry gender identities that do not align with their assigned sex (male or female) at birth or the given traditional gender identities (man or woman). The non-binary gender identity of transgender identifying as neither male nor female is a combination of both male and female characteristics. Many individuals find themselves unmoored from binary categories as male and female, or cisgender and transgender. In the US, an estimated 9.2 per cent of secondary school students do not wholly identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, yet only 1.8 per cent anonymously agreed to be identified as transgender when asked. Given the veritable human behaviour as well as its wider experience, it would be limiting its multifarious feature identity into a fossilised binary of male and female.

Transgender individuals often face challenges and discrimination due to the restrictive dimension of the traditional sex and gender binary system. In contrast to the binary index of gender identity, non-binary identities expand gender/sex identities beyond female or male categories. Consisting of elements of both femaleness and/or maleness, non-binary identities exist outside the female and male matrix, and, in some cases, might refer to an identity that is called ‘agender’ that does not support either male or female category. In addition, non-binary identities are also framed in such an innovative manner, which facilitates them in converging all those gender/sex identities that did not match with the sex assigned to the gender of a person at her/his birth. What has further complicated the sex/gender binary conundrum is the way non-binary people conceptualise their own identities in some highly diverse forms. There are some cases of non-binary people who would not like to identify themselves as transgender and/or cisgender. Those people who do not identify themselves with any of the non-binary categories of sex and gender can be described by the following terms of gender—queer or gender diverse.

It is in the aforementioned context that critical gender studies coined an innovative term ‘gender modality’ to enable researchers to broaden their perspectives and horizons to capture all other gender dimensions which lie beyond the given binary/non-binary categories. Gender modality denotes an identity that a person associates with the genders/he was assigned at birth. ‘Cisgender and transgender’ are some of the best-known gender modalities. This new term—gender modality—also refers to categories such as: ‘agender’ (which includes persons who do not identify either with man or woman), detrans or retrains (those who ceased, shifted or switched their gender), closeted trans-people (whose gender identity does not align with the gender they were assigned at birth and which they also refuse to reveal publicly), ‘gender-questioning individuals’ (who are unsure of their gender identity and are in the process of working it out), ‘gender-neutral people’ (who were raised without being referred to as s/he and girl/boy until they were old enough to express their gender identity) and, alters or ‘headmates’ (people with several distinct general identities/personalities that exist in the same body).

The widening recognition of non-binary gender categories has led to the formation of non-gendered language, mostly exemplified by advertising agencies worldwide. The conceptualisation of various non-binary gender categories has also led to new legislations in several countries, both in favour of (Australia, Canada, Germany and India) and against (USA and China) such non-binary gender categories.

(Views expressed are personal)

Ronki Ram is Shaheed Bhagat Singh Professor at the Department Of Political Science, Panjab University, Chandigarh

This article is a part of Outlook's March 1, 2025 issue 'The Grid', which explored the concept of binaries. It appeared in print as 'Masculin Féminin'.

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