The violence of contesting non-binary, trans and diverse gender identities: Emergent cultural formations, adversities and ethics

Rob Cover

Introduction

An epistemic shift in Western gender identity occurred in the mid-2010s. For several centuries, gender has been discursively framed in Euro-American cultural formations through the masculine/feminine binary (with variations, transitions and androgynies). This was despite the knowledge, value and contribution of alternative cultural gender frameworks in other regions that articulated a non-dualist or non-binary framing such as the fa’afafine in Polynesia¹ or hijra in India.² Western humanities discourses across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presented various critiques of gender and sexual binaries, particularly drawing on Foucauldian and post-structuralist perspectives in the ontology of gender and sexual identity.³ Despite the kinds of scholarly critique that have been available and the various historical instances of gender play in Western avant-garde cultures in the 1970s and 1990s—such as the emergence of queer cultures⁴—gender has popularly remained rooted in liberal-humanist frameworks of essentialism,⁵ the cultural logic of sex/gender distinctions and the efficacy of binary thinking as the governing framework of subjectivity.⁶

In the mid-2010s, a very substantial proliferation of gender (and sexual identity) terms emerged, primarily in grassroots social justice debates occurring on online platforms such as Tumblr and Reddit. In many respects, these disavowed the hegemony of gender and sexual subjectivity by the labels masculine, feminine, man, woman, heterosexual, homosexual, straight and LGBTQ+, as well as the logic of dichotomies that mutually defined these terms and excluded alternative frameworks and discourses.⁷ The increasingly widespread use of alternative gender terms, identities and labels that are not defined by binary logics has accompanied the circulation of lists of several hundred gender and sexual identity labels or descriptors: including non-binary, bi-gender, demigirl, transcurious, demisexual, antiboy and many others. The terms are a testament to one new mode of contemporary diversification of gender, and to the practical, everyday disruption of gender binaries upon which affirmation, rights and policy protection discourses were founded.⁸ At the same time, the emergence of practices of preferred pronouns and the use of ‘cis’ (non-changing) in gender descriptions have together underscored the contingency of gender in everyday communication. Notably, these practices emerge not from humanities critique, but from a popular (and sometimes populist) rejection of ‘authorised’ knowledge frameworks on gender.

This emergent, alternative gender framework is not to be understood as something wholly ‘novel’ or ‘alien’—as something that has had an impact on contemporary culture in ways that have caused people to change how they identify their genders and sexualities. Rather, this new framework emerges from within culture: in the terminology of Raymond Williams⁹ it is emergent in a way that responds to and challenges dominant cultural formations and structures of feeling. It responds to a crisis in gender and sexual identity in which the extant gender/sexual order did not adequately recognise the nuance, fluidity, contingency and lived experience of everyday people, resulting in the materialisation of a more diverse approach to subjectivity that recognises nuance, contingency and agency. As with all emergent cultural formations, dominant and residual conservative perspectives actively (and sometimes violently) contest that emergence, particularly the veracity of its logic, its deconstruction or ‘unworlding’ of binary-based gender arrangements, and the social changes felt likely to arise from a proliferation of diverse genders and sexualities.

This article explores some of the ways in which humanities discourses of cultural studies and post-structuralist ethics can, together, be utilised to understand the significance of this cultural change in proliferating gender subjectivity, and why the backlash contestation should be understood not as a polarised argument between conservative and progressive forces, but as an argument between dominant liberal-humanist approaches to gender equality and an emergent disruption of these for their failure to produce inclusivity and coherent subjectivity. I begin with a brief summary of the emergent discourse or what I have referred to as a new ‘taxonomy’ of gender and sexual identity¹⁰ to provide a context for this research. This will be followed with a brief analysis of some key forms of antagonism, hostility and political contestation towards the new taxonomy, drawing on a diverse range of key example of public contention from contemporary Western-anglophone countries. I address some of the ways in which the contestation from the dominant can be understood as an act of violence towards not only the lives it objects to but also the supportive ‘ecology’ in which diversities thrive.

The proliferation of genders beyond binaries

The shifts in gender identity practices during the 2010s began particularly among young people drawing on alternative knowledge frameworks and discourses that emerged in online settings. Digital platforms such as Tumblr provided affordances for discourse among those who felt disenfranchised by narrow social expectations of masculine/feminine binary gender, by essentialist approaches that expressed gender as innate, by the persistence of restrictive gender stereotypes, and by continued criticism of the veracity of transgender subjectivity and gender-affirming care practices.¹¹ Indeed, many young people have taken the opportunity to engage creatively in defining their own sense of gender (and sexuality), and this has included the production of hundreds of new, diverse categories or ‘labels’ of gender identity, many of them eschewing traditional binary thinking of masculine/feminine, hetero/homo and straight/LGBTQ+.

The most notable (and one of the most contested by conservatives) is the emergence of non-binary as a distinct gender identity that, sitting alongside trans subjectivities, presents an assault on hegemonic practices of gender dichotomisation. On the one hand, there have been many historical examples of gender play that do not sit easily with binary knowledge frameworks. Historical examples of individuals who adopted androgyny as a meaningful framework for a lived gender experience are many,¹² although often figured as the mark of excessive individuation and eccentricity. The term ‘gender-queer’ began to circulate in zines and informal publications in the early 1990s to describe alternatives to masculine/feminine binary-based gender identities, some of which drew on earlier discourses of androgyny,¹³ although the term non-binary began to circulate online as a more emphatic rejection of masculine/feminine norms in the early 2000s.¹⁴ Non-binary as a term or label is often used to describe a gender identity that is articulated, lived or experienced as ‘nether male nor female’¹⁵ but is sometimes used as a catch-all term for any gender identity that ‘lies outside the one-or-the-other binary of “man” and “woman”, “he” and “she”, “male” and “female”’.¹⁶ Non-binary has, therefore, become both a term of identity itself (e.g. an identity label to self-describe a gender expression) and an umbrella term for genders that fall outside the strictures of a mutually exclusive masculine/feminine binary and a perception that gender is biological and innate.¹⁷ Its uptake as a term of gender expression is a performative act of affiliation with social and critical perspectives that disavow gender normativities produced through, or reliant on, dichotomies.

Alongside those grassroots developments, of course, a more sophisticated program of critique and deconstruction of the gender binary has operated in scholarly critique, particularly in philosophy, sociology, anthropology and some aspects of psychoanalysis and post-structuralist deconstruction. Much twentieth and twenty-first century critical theory, for example, recognises that gender categories as they were framed across the twentieth century came to be understood, lived and experienced as discrete, innate and unified ‘personages’ and ‘identities’ that were constructed and, for some, constraining. In this sense, the hegemonic binary gender arrangement was critically understood to elide many alternative or marginal perspectives or experiences,¹⁸ and relegated as unintelligible for those whose identities were not able to be clearly articulated along the narrow lines of such dichotomies.¹⁹ Early twentieth-century European sexologists, such as Magnus Hirschfeld, offered a ‘third sex’ argument to explain the lives of gender and sexually diverse people,²⁰ although that particular brand of sexology did not hold into later decades. Later, post-structuralist feminism²¹ and queer theory critiqued the masculine/feminine and hetero/homo binaries as too narrow and normative,²² and argued that the very idea of a biological basis for gender (or ‘sex’) had itself been constituted in language, discourse and myth, and performed in such a way as to create the illusion of an authentic inner self.²³ As important and powerful as such critical contestations of dominant regimes of gender have been, their challenge to dominant liberal accounts of essentialist gender identity had little impact on the everyday experience of gender and how gendered identity has been represented in Western culture and communication, policy, health and education, where the logic of the masculine/feminine binary was largely retained into the twenty-first century.

Rather, the shift that has occurred in the widespread lived experience of everyday people makes only tangential reference to critical, feminist and queer theory, and speaks instead to a rights-based articulation for recognition of identity and self-determination to identify one’s gender in ways that operate outside the older, dominant knowledge framework. That is, a hegemonic binary-based gender framework is perceived as no longer adequately representing the lived experience of gender or as permitting authenticity, intelligibility, inclusivity and diversity. The adoption of non-binary as a self-descriptor of gender alongside the proliferation of other, alternative gender terms has had an effect in a range of fields, including communication, legislation, and electoral politics. In online settings, social networking platforms and dating sites have responded by expanding the selection of identity categories available to users building a profile and, in many cases, adopting an ‘open descriptor’ form for gender to ensures users are not constrained by existing terminology.²⁴ Legislation that makes gender identification optional on birth certificates and removes the requirement that a transgender person has had gender-affirming surgery in order to have a new gender identity recognised in documentation has been enacted in some jurisdictions, thereby permitting agender and non-binary gender persons a greater range of options on identificatory descriptors and recognising that trans identities themselves are complex, diverse and varied, authentic and meaningful.²⁵

Identities, cultural emergences and gender innovations

To understand why this epochal change has occurred among grassroots popular discourse and lived experience (rather than drawing on humanities discourses of gender critique and deconstruction as occurred more readily with terms like gender-queer in the 1990s), it is helpful to understand the shift in terms of cultural formations and structures of feeling. Raymond Williams provided a powerful cultural studies perspective on social shifts by distinguishing between residual, dominant and emergent cultures.²⁶ All three formations are part of the broad structure of feeling of a culture but function in different, sometimes contradictory ways.

The residual in terms of gender and sexuality might be described as the residue of patriarchal misogyny and blatant homophobia—forms of speech and behaviour that, by everyday community standards, are considered an excess of the past but remain active in everyday life. For Williams, the residual describes certain meanings, values, experiences and ways of being that operate today but cannot be expressed or understood in terms of dominant culture. Accounts that argue that, say, men should receive higher pay than cisgender women, that heterosexuality is the only natural form of attraction, or that men ‘own’ their wives remain an aspect of the contemporary cultural process, but the ideas have little logical meaning in the context of the dominant liberal-humanist framework through which we institutionally recognise practices of gender equality (such as women’s right to serve in parliaments) and LGBTQ+ rights and protections (such as marriage equality or freedom from vilification). These residual forms are broadly disallowed by dominant liberal-humanist and neoliberal formations, as they do not serve the processes of capital, including labour and consumption. Nevertheless, they are not wholly excluded as cultural expressions because, as Williams notes, the dominant cannot never act to fully exclude the residual without the risk of that act causing a resurgence and return to dominance.²⁷

The dominant gender and sexual framework in Western liberal-humanist cultures is constituted in a framework of ‘tolerance’ of gender equality and LGBTQ+ incorporation into everyday education, workplace and familial settings, often through commodification and encouragement for participation in labour, consumption and social inclusivity. It is perhaps best described as the toleration of the other (of women, of non-heterosexuals) through encouragement to participate in labour and in consumer culture that makes possible a semblance of equitability and social inclusivity.²⁸ The concept (albeit not necessarily the practice), then, is one of a society comprising two equal genders, through recognition of authenticity and classification based in identity innateness and biological essentialism.

Williams described the emergent as a cultural formation marked by new articulations that arise not as processes isolated from the dominant but from varied configurations of knowledge, meanings, values, practices and relationships. That which is emergent is not necessarily fully oppositional to the dominant, but may include ‘elements of some new phase of the dominant culture’ as well as those that are depicted as ‘substantially alternative’.²⁹ In other words, a new emergent process does not come about in isolation, but responds to and is conditioned by the dominant in ways that leave it open to reincorporation³⁰ or contestation.³¹ As a formation initially articulated by younger people dialoguing in online settings of collective intelligence,³² the post-binary knowledge framework and the proliferation of new gender and sexual identities actively challenge the dominant on the basis of demands for nuance, inclusivity and alignment with lived experience, offering a more complex tabulation and taxonomy of labels that destabilise the dominant knowledge frameworks of gender and sexual subjectivity.

However, the emergent formation does not emerge simply because people have begun collectively to disavow binary frameworks, nor because there has necessarily been an increase in the number of people who feel disenfranchised from dominant masculine/feminine and hetero/homo formations. Rather, it is because the dominant framework is increasingly recognised as being in crisis. Following Antonio Gramsci, it is noted that organic crises emerge in ways that demonstrate to the public that ‘uncurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves’.³³ There are two aspects to the contradiction at the heart of the dominant regime: first, the binary framework of gender and sexuality has shown itself to have deep flaws related to inclusion and justice; second, as gender equality has increased and liberalisation of alternative sexualities has become better accepted, questions arise as to who those frameworks serve, what the conditions of being included are, and what happens to those whose deeply felt experience of identity does not align with a discourse that enables intelligibility, coherence and recognisability, these being the conditions for social participation and belonging.³⁴ Whereas humanities critiques of gender subjectivity failed to take root popularly, an emergent cultural framework challenges the dominant from the fringes of lived experience as a response to the failures of inclusivity and diversity within the dominant knowledge framework.

Antagonisms and hostilities

As with all emergent cultural formations, the new taxonomy of gender and sexuality and its post-binary knowledge framework is marked by contestation from perspectives that adhere rigidly—and often reductively—to the dominant. While initially this was limited to low-scale marginalisation and occasional ridicule, since about 2020 this contestation from the dominant has taken a more aggressive, violent turn. That is, debates that occurred in obscure settings among social justice communities have now appeared in everyday political settings focused on questions of legitimacy, access to healthcare, and administrative and policy inclusions, taking the form of aggressive public and political debate, the expression of outrage and anger, and the subsumption of emergent gender subjectivity by political and statutory law. Laws have been enacted in some jurisdictions in the United States, and in many parts of the world topics of gender norms have become electoral issues. Those seen to ‘play’ with gender such as drag performers have been subject to threats and violence in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. There are five ‘frames’ or ‘practices’ of contestation that I describe below, each of which can be understood as a further shift in the violence of adversity and contestation. This article does not seek to provide a systematic survey of all the thousands of examples, but to provide some representative examples to unpack the five key thematic frames or practices of contestation.

1. Online shaming

The first frame by which the emergent proliferation of gender identity labels is contested with substantial adversity occurs online, and this is unsurprising since the debates and discourses by which these emerged also emerged across online platforms.³⁵ Cyberbullying has been experienced in online communication since the early internet, although a substantial recognised increase in a broad range of online adversities, hate speech, trolling and other adversarial behaviour has been identified since the mid-2010s.³⁶ The toxicity of digital platforms is having a known serious impact on the health, mental health and wellbeing of users,³⁷ including several high-profile instances of suicidality.³⁸ Gender minority youth are understood to be among the most frequent victims of online abuse.³⁹

There is not the scope in this article for a widespread sampling of instances of digital hostility directed towards those who have identified themselves online as gender diverse. One representative example, however, illustrates the way in which contestation plays out through questioning the legitimacy of post-binary gender subjectivity. A post on the social media question-and-answer platform Quora asking people’s thoughts about non-binary gender identity received greater than 100 answers, and many thousands of comments on those answers. While many gave positive and affirming responses to the question or described their own experience identifying as non-binary, approximately one-third used the language of ridicule to question the legitimacy or veracity of such identifications. These include comments such as: ‘They don’t exist. You’re either a man or a woman’; ‘Any “studies” or “theories” [about non-binary gender are] highfalutin nonsense. Rubbish’; ‘The whole concept is bizarre, nonsensical, and sews unnecessary confusion in all who attempt to engage with it sincerely’; and ‘My opinion is that its [sic] absurd, and often times these “non binary” people are attention seekers, misinformed, and or indoctrinated in to leftist ideology.’

Across these responses (and many others) is a practice of de-legitimation of the lived experience and agency of those who identify as non-binary. Disavowing a meaningfully felt identity position through insult, dismissal, admonishment, reprimand or dehumanisation has a known negative impact on the wellbeing of minorities already engaged in a struggle over normativity.⁴⁰ Significant here is to recognise that digital platforms, as a setting of contestation about the emergence of new or alternative gender terminology, are marked by the rejection of alternative knowledge frameworks in favour of reinforcing hegemony through insult. Dismissals of knowledge formation based on lived experience and new identificatory practices often deploy the terms ‘woke’⁴¹ or ‘snowflake’⁴²—new forms of insult that subjugate identity claims by disavowing lived experience.⁴³ In all cases, acts of shaming and insult are deployed about gender topics to contest the legitimacy of gender diversity—particularly non-binary framings—and operate alongside the use of violent hate speech directly targeting gender minorities online.

2. Binary-affirming lobby groups

A second site of contestation is the aggressive lobbying by existing conservative organisations and the formation of new lobby groups. This is the frame by which contestation of the new gender knowledge framework shifts from hostile debates about legitimacy on digital platforms to the subsumption of the debate in political discourses, subjecting individual and collective lives to public judgement in a more ‘authorised’ setting than digital platforms.⁴⁴ There are many examples of formal and informal lobbying, although two are particularly representative for their contrast. The first is the emergence of those who have been labelled as Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. This lobbying, comprising both organised and casual anti-trans and non-binary sentiment, emerged in 2017 in response to Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Theresa May’s intention to reform the 2004 Gender Recognition Act to simplify and de-medicalise the process of changing the sex marker on birth certificates. The organised lobbying resulted in the formation of a movement that actively affirms dominant knowledge practices on gender (equality, women’s collective rights, lesbian identities) but actively opposes emerging practices of gender transition or affirmation and the wider framework of gender diversity. Underpinning this lobbying is a close adherence to biologically essentialist arguments and the sex/gender distinction to argue that it is both ‘impossible’ to change ‘sex’ and that those who identify as non-binary or other post-binary genders are ‘delusional’.⁴⁵

In the Australian context, the lobby group Binary Australia was formed in 2018 as a rebranding of the anti-marriage equality lobby group Marriage Alliance (subsequent to the success of the Marriage Equality campaign that year) and operates under the company name Gender Awareness Australia Ltd.⁴⁶ The group seeks to promote and celebrate the ‘inherent difference between boys and girls’. Claiming to ‘uphold the biological assertion that there are two complementary sexes’, the organisation’s mission is to ‘challenge the aggressive agenda to remove sex from our society in the areas of education, health, military, business, politics and the law’; to run campaigns focused on preventing gender-affirming healthcare legislation; and to prevent what they refer to as ‘radical gender ideology’ being built into school curricula where it will ‘teach transgender’ to children.⁴⁷

Although, clearly, both organisations are underpinned by radically different social and political frameworks, both utilise a narrow sex/gender distinction that, in the humanities, has been critiqued for over 30 years as incorrectly presenting a knowable and ‘real’ biological sex that is distinct from gender as a cultural practice, and recognising that the concept of natural binary ‘sex’ cannot escape its construction through regulatory practices.⁴⁸ Indeed, from the perspective of queer theory and post-structuralist feminist theory, the notion of an essential, biological sex is recognised as a strategy to conceal the constructedness of gender.⁴⁹ As a practice of contestation, then, these lobby groups not only question the legitimacy of the proliferation of gender categories, and transgender and non-binary lives, but also do so using the mechanism of ‘public judgement’ of gender diversity according to a strict, narrow logic of sex/gender and the primacy of a constructed ‘natural real’.

3. School curricula and parents’ ‘rights’

The third form of contestation shifts from the subjection of emergent identities to public discourse to a more conspiratorial perception that school curricula has been ‘infiltrated’ by left-wing progressive discourses seeking to undermine parental management of their children’s (binary) gender subjectivity. Indeed, debates over school curriculum and sex education are where we see the distinction between the liberal-dominant and the progressive-emergent at its most marked. For example, in the Australian context, a substantial public debate, driven primarily by political commentators for Murdoch-owned news publications, focused on state and national curricula designed to support gender and sexually diverse belonging and resilience.⁵⁰ Conservative commentator Jennifer Oriel described the ‘Safe Schools’ curriculum as being the effect of a progressive politics that infiltrated both education departments and the LGBTQ+ movement. Here, ‘progressive’ is written in an overly simplified framework as representing a presumed Marxist radical politics:

the debate is between those who support the right to childhood and children’s bodily dignity, the right to an education that educates, not indoctrinates, versus those who believe Marxist activism constitutes sound school curriculum.⁵¹

Oriel’s contestation of emergent gender frameworks, then, is situated in a wider debate about pedagogy and who controls it, what it looks like and the role of the community in determining it.

Through articulating a polarisation, Oriel avoids the conservative (or ‘residual’) misogyny, transphobia and homophobia that is more commonly perceived as the threat to trans and non-binary subjects, and instead frames the adversity as between a normative and ‘safe’ LGBTQ+ and gender politics (the dominant) in opposition to a radical perspective that has conspiratorially crept into school curricula (the emergent). In this respect, misreading of new diversities draws on false assumptions that connect the emergent to much older Marxist and materialist politics of disruption. This reflects the debates around school curriculum that occur in the United States, where school board meetings are often public ‘town hall’ events open to being addressed by members of the community who make links between, for example, non-binary inclusivity in schools and terms of moral panic such as Marxism, critical race theory and banned books. In that sense, this form of contestation is one that links different conspiratorial key concepts together to produce sensationalism and outrage.

Significantly, while the focus is on contesting emergent genders and sexualities, the mission of these political actors is to generate adversity between institutional school curriculum management and a perceived assault on the rights of parents. For example, in July 2022, in the US state of Ohio, one school board became the site of contestation between the dominant and the emergent over attempts by a lobby group to ban a book that included a non-binary character,⁵² while, in August 2022, a Texas school district voted to make illegal all classroom discussion of transgender identities and ‘gender fluidity’ while also seeking to ban books referencing gender subjectivity.⁵³ Across these cases in Australia and the US, a populist discourse is deployed to position parents as a ‘forgotten people’ or ‘silent majority’⁵⁴ who are perceived as automatically representing a dominant gender framework, in contrast to teachers, educators, curriculum experts and academics who are perceived as a ‘progressive elite’ subsequent to infiltration by radical (emergent) beliefs.

4. The sanctity of the binary toilet and gendered sports

The fourth site of contestation shifts from conspiratorial perceptions of infiltration and lost parental rights to the production of absurdist outrage. The site of adversity in this frame involves two settings: sex-discriminatory toilets and gender diversity in sport. These heated and sometimes extremist debates draw on a sustained link between gender discrimination and the marginalisation of transgender and non-binary persons to produce a kind of hysteria over so-called ‘correct’ usage of toilets⁵⁵ and ‘correct’ bodies participating in sport, again deploying a normative sex/gender distinction in which practice is expected to be over-determined by a narrow framing of biological sex. On this basis, several school district boards in the US have instituted policies and rules requiring trans and non-binary students to undergo onerous bureaucratic processes to be able to use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity⁵⁶ and outlined procedures to exclude gender diverse children from participating in teams aligned with their gender identity.⁵⁷

Progressive school boards are often subject to public outrage, heated argument and disruption over the issue, while, in Australia, the topics of toilets and gendered sport emerged in 2022 as an electoral issue.⁵⁸ False claims about cases of trans persons sexually assaulting girls in the context of toilets and sports have been deployed to generate outrage and anxiety, although in all cases these have been identified as anti-trans rhetoric and debunked as disinformation.⁵⁹ Arguably, the performativity of outrage over protections that allow trans and non-binary persons to use toilets or participate in sports is a violence on a basic aspect of corporeal belonging, deploying biological sex as a ‘master narrative’ to govern forms of exclusion, despite the measurable effects of such exclusion on the mental health of non-binary, transgender and cisgender LGBTQ+ people.⁶⁰

5. Subsuming contestation into protecting society

The final form or setting of contestation shifts from popular outrage to the use of statutory mechanisms to repress emergent genders on the spurious basis that to do so is to ‘protect’ society or ‘civilisation’. Perhaps the most high-profile example is the US House of Representatives Bill proposed in August 2022 by populist MAGA Republican congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene to criminalise all gender-affirming healthcare. Taylor Greene’s proposal targets any surgery or the provision or administration of hormonal treatments ‘for the purpose of changing the body of such individual to correspond to a sex that differs from their biological sex’. Titled the ‘Protect Children’s Innocence Act’, the law—if passed—would result in penalties of between 10 and 25 years for any healthcare practitioner or other person who participates in gender-affirmative care. It stands alongside directives at state level in the US that force investigation of the parents of any young person receiving gender-affirmative care for child abuse.⁶¹

There is a long history by which a construct of ‘children’s innocence’ is positioned against social and cultural change in relation to sexuality and gender;⁶² in this case the use of children’s innocence and the perception that those who draw on the emergent framework of gender fluidity and non-binary subjectivity are ‘victims’ who warrant state protection is an act of violence utilised to preserve the dominant and hegemonic exclusion of gender identity alternatives. The violence is not, as I will show in the next section, a case of preventing self-determination; instead, it is a violence that assaults the supportive ecology in which new and alternative knowledge frameworks about gender emerge and in which those whose lives are made liveable by diversity discourses are supported as subjects who are intelligible, coherent and grievable—that is, who would be mourned if lost.

An ecological approach to apprehending the violence of diversity contestation

In this final section I would like to offer a humanities-derived framework for why antagonistic and adversarial contestation of emergent gender and sexual knowledge practices is unethical. Naturally, liberal-institutional approaches to diversity and inclusivity tend to place ‘individual rights’ to wellbeing at the core of a tolerance framework that, itself, enabled the emergence of post-binary diversity with subject authenticity. However, liberal ethics based on liberty arguments, such as those of John Stuart Mill⁶³ that dominate North American public debate, tend to be responsible for generating much of the contestation described above alongside the freedom to determine one’s own gender subjectivity. This is particularly the case in freedom of expression claims utilised by those who contest gender diversity or use violent hate speech to assert the illegitimacy of minorities.⁶⁴ The fact that such ethical approaches enable both freedom and anti-freedom contestation points to the need for alternative ethics beyond the sorts of individualism that, on the one hand, claim rights for individual diversity and self-determination and, on the other, enable injurious speech and contestation. Rather, drawing on Judith Butler’s recent work on the ethics of non-violence,⁶⁵ and adapting it to recognises that emergences thrive not only in interdependency but also in cultural ecologies of supportive cohabitation, I argue that a focus of ethics must not be limited to protecting individual self-determination, agency and liveability but on that which permits diversity to flourish as an integral component of interdependent liveability.

Butler counters individualism as a basis for ethics on the grounds that non-dependency has only ever been mythical. They argue that ‘no body can sustain itself on its own’ but that all corporeal life is constituted precisely in ‘its lack of self-sufficiency’.⁶⁶ This interdependency is infused in our everyday embodied lives from corporeal support to social relations, psychic dependency on relationalities and the tools that enable communication. This constitutive interdependency leads to an ethical framework whereby a violence, such as exclusion or de-legitimation of identities, is not an individual attack on an individual victim, but occurs in, and assaults, social relations.⁶⁷ Acknowledging interdependency is not, however, to claim that interdependency is itself an ethical outcome; rather, the site of interdependency is the source of the dispute,⁶⁸ such as disputes between dominant and emergent gender frameworks.

For a concept of interdependency to work towards an ethical outcome, Butler argues for a new egalitarian imaginary that acknowledges the inequitable access to being recognised as a subject and, thus, that participating in that spectral interdependency is an act of violence against culture itself—that is, ‘violence assaults the living interdependency that is, or should be, our social world’.⁶⁹ For Butler, equality demands that all bodies are equally grievable—a non-violence does not start with a prohibition against harm, a reciprocity between two individual bodies to be kind, a ‘virtue ethics’ based in individual care, but an acknowledgement that interdependent bodies are (or should be), from the start, equally grievable, no matter the frame through which differences and hostilities determine differential treatment.⁷⁰ Indeed, for Butler, to be subject to such a calculation is already to be made ungrievable.

By recognising the significance of the range of social, healthcare, infrastructural, psychic, educational, participatory, lavatorial and digital supports that are the settings of the forms of contestation described above, we can take an ethics of non-violence a step further: violence is an assault not only on the interdependency of subjects, but also on the present and future ‘ecology’ in which that interdependency in all its diverse constituent components thrives in liveability. This is to deploy a spatial metaphor of thriving, social change and diversification as components of a new humanities ethics that calls for an end to the violent contestation of emergent gender knowledge frameworks. Indeed, Butler has already noted the significance of cohabitation as the condition of life in interdependent proximity—there is no possible ethical position that allows a subject to choose with whom to cohabit the earth. Unwilled proximity within a heterogeneous population and unchosen cohabitation of the world precedes us as irreversible conditions of social and political existence; they constitute us as embodied subjects and present the obligation not to do violence on the basis of difference.⁷¹

To incorporate a concept of ecology in this ethics is to recognise the significance of infrastructural support as a means by which interdependency can be more egalitarian and cohabitation sustained. This is a gamble, as it takes the focus away from the vulnerable body as the site of ethics, but a necessary one, since in our liberal-humanist culture the reference to corporeal subjectivity is always overwritten by conceptual frames that violently differentiate and radically individuate bodies: the biologically ‘correct’ gender versus the body that has affirmed a gender not recognised as the gender at the time of birth; the body that is coherently masculine or feminine versus the body that is non-binary; the body that uses the ‘correct’ toilet or plays in the ‘correct’ sporting team, and so on. In other words, an ethics of non-violence that is limited to interdependent bodies remains open to the combined force, as Avital Ronnell notes, of 1) the corporeal excess beyond language that makes it difficult to capture unfamiliar frameworks of bodies doing something beyond normativity, such as gender affirmation; (2) the body that is coded as ‘natural’ because it occupies the empty space of the Lacanian real; and (3) the aesthetics and storytelling of bodily consistency and intelligibility that traces a trajectory of gendered bodies from birth progressing through a lifecycle of gendered coherence, gendered roles and gendered recognisability.⁷²

In apprehending the violence of contesting gender diversity as a violence to the ecology that supports diversities to thrive, it is important to be careful not to posit an ecology as a pre-discursive ‘nature’ that, due to some mystic property, stabilises bodies according to some notion of biology. An ecology, in Margaret Mead’s 1964 framework, is usually thought of as ‘the mutual relations of organisms with their environment and with one another’.⁷³ If bodies are interdependent from the beginning, then that is an interdependency constituted not only in the fact of cohabitation but also within, through and emplaced by the conceptual and social ecologies that guarantee (for some) liveability, diversity and change.

When attempts to prevent gender diversity and diverse forms of liveability are made through contestation, online articulates and hate speech that question the legitimacy of alternative gender frameworks, lobbying that makes minority lives the subject of public debate, outrage over toilet use and sports teams, and legislation seeking to criminalise the provision of gender-affirming healthcare, we undoubtedly see a violence done to bodies, but also a violent destruction of the ecology that supports (or should support) those subjects to thrive in belonging, social participation and liveability.

The approach here, then, is that recognising the meaning of violence, not in terms of bodies as its object but in terms of the ecology that enables interdependent corporeal life to thrive, is the ecology we are ethically obliged to protect. An ecology in the pedestrian sense always produces new diversifications, even as it fosters contest. While contestation itself is not always violence, the form that the contestation takes in shutting down the emergence of new gender diversities is indeed violent and unethical because it eschews cohabitation with difference. We are bound to the supportive ecology by being constituted by it, and that obliges an orientation towards it such that the violence to one body or many bodies is equally unethical, because it is always a violence to the interdependency between the ecology and all subjects.

Conclusion: Towards public humanities intervention to foster ethics

This article has argued that the emergence of new gender diversities and practices, including trans subjectivities, non-binary identifications, the proliferation of gender identity terms and the deployment of gender-affirming healthcare, are not marginal practices but, when recognised through humanities critique in the terminology of social change of cultural formations, can be recognised as an epochal, epistemic shift in gender knowledge frameworks. As they have become more noted in public sphere discourse, healthcare and school curriculum over the past half-decade, the contestation by those who adhere to dominant, essentialist and binary understandings of gender has become more aggressive, heated and seeking to violently foreclose on this emergence.

I have identified the core themes, forms and practices of that contestation and characterised these as a struggle, in Raymond Williams’s terms, between the liberal-humanist dominant and a populist emergent knowledge framework,⁷⁴ in contrast to the more familiar ways of speaking about this struggle in the pedestrian terminology of right versus left or conservative versus progressive. No matter the framing of this contestation, it is indisputable that aggressive attempts to de-legitimise, stem or prevent gender diversification is unethical. By characterising this not only as a violence towards bodies or towards bodies in diverse interdependency as a fact of liveability, but also as a violence to the ecology itself that supports diverse subjectivities and critiques of normative frameworks to arise, I have argued that the persistence of the dominant is a violent assault on the culture in which future diversities can (or should) be formed in liveability.

Arguing that this form of dominant contestation is a violence to the ecology that prompts the emergence of alternative knowledge frameworks and ways of performing liveability is not, however, to say that there is no resistance to that violence. For example, certain forms of ‘cancel culture’ protest deployed to prevent transphobic and anti-diversity speakers from giving talks on university campuses⁷⁵ and forms of counter-lobbying have been settings of resistance. However, the distinction between those positioned to resist and those who are not is an example of where the supportive ecology is inequitably available, and where the erosion of those supports through the violence by which that ecology is subjected remains an ethical problem for the inequity of liveability.

This is where the humanities—having provided the earlier critiques of the gender binary, essentialism and innate subjectivity—are well positioned for public engagement with the issues. Where social and health sciences research has made clear the individual damage of the public de-legitimation of deeply felt alternative gender identities and practices, humanities discourse is better positioned to intervene in the contestation to point to the logical flaws at the heart of the dominant framework, its historical contingency, and its dual reliance on normativity and individualism. That is, by providing the critical tools to demonstrate that the foundation of the dominant argument for adhering to its knowledge framework is founded in a false binary logic, a false sense of ahistorical continuity and a biological nature that cannot be truly apprehended, a more sophisticated position for the emergent to argue back can overcome the limitations of an argument based on rights and lived experience alone. In other words, where much of the dominant violence is based in strict adherence to a sex/gender system that represents a biological binary reality, the humanities have a clear intervention point, having long deconstructed not only the binary but also the possibility that a biological sex is a knowable ‘real’ outside discourse, language and culture. This is not to suggest that such complex ethics can immediately solve contestation over gender diversity, nor that it will immediately prevent violence and injurious speech targeting gender minorities and those utilising emergent gender identities such as non-binary. Rather, a widespread reframing of the individualism that underpins rights, policies, financial inequalities, access to healthcare and education is core to a genuine inclusivity that embraces real diversity. Whether or not such an ethical framework can emerge and circulate in the same way as the emergent gender arrangement has done is not something that can be predicted in advance.

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2. 2 Hala Alyan, Hijra (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016).

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8. 8 Ashley Mardell, The ABC’s of LGBT+ (Coral Gables: Mango Media, 2016).

9. 9 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

10. 10 Cover, Emergent Identities.

11. 11 Ibid.

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18. 18 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 43.

19. 19 For example, Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London: Sphere, 1969).

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22. 22 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet.

23. 23 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).

24. 24 Rob Cover, ‘Micro-Minorities: The Emergence of New sexual Subjectivities, Categories and Labels among Sexually-Diverse Youth Online’, in Youth Sexualities: Public Feelings and Contemporary Cultural Politics ed. S. Talburt (New York: Praeger, 2018), 279–302.

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26. 26 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 122–5.

27. 27 Ibid., 123.

28. 28 Lisa Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’, in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics ed. Dana Nelson and Russ Castronovo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 175–94, doi.org/10.1215/9780822383901-007.

29. 29 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 123.

30. 30 Ibid., 124.

31. 31 Ibid., 126.

32. 32 Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge: Basic Books, 2003), doi.org/10.3917/soc.079.0075.

33. 33 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 179.

34. 34 Butler, Gender Trouble.

35. 35 Cover, Emergent Identities.

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38. 38 Rob Cover, ‘Digital Hostility: Contemporary Crisis, Disrupted Belonging and Self-Care Practices’, Media International Australia 184, no. 1 (2022): 79–91, doi.org/10.1177/1329878X221088048.

39. 39 Amanda Lenhart, Michele Ybarra, Kathryn Zickuhr and Myeshia Price-Feeney, ‘Online Harassment, Digital Abuse, and Cyberstalking in America’, Centre for Innovative Public Health Research, 4, accessed 19 August 2022, www.datasociety.net/pubs/oh/Online_Harassment_2016.pdf.

40. 40 Cover, ‘Digital Hostility’; Emma A. Jane, ‘Flaming? What Flaming? The Pitfalls and Potentials of Researching Online Hostility’, Ethics and Information Technology 17, no. 1 (2015): 65–87, doi.org/10.1007/s10676-015-9362-0.

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43. 43 Didier Eribon, Insult and the Gay Self (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

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46. 46 Laurence Barber, ‘Anti-Marriage Equality Org Rebrands as Anti-Trans Group Binary Australia’, Sydney Star Observer, 27 November 2018, www.starobserver.com.au/news/national-news/anti-marriage-equality-org-rebrands-as-anti-trans-group-binary-australia/173664.

47. 47 Binary Australia, ‘About Binary’, accessed 30 November 2023, www.binary.org.au/about.

48. 48 Butler, Gender Trouble, 32.

49. 49 Ibid., 140–1.

50. 50 Rob Cover, Mary Lou Rasmussen, Peter Aggleton and Daniel Marshall, ‘Progress in Question: Temporalities of Politics, Support and Belonging in Sexual- and Gender-Diverse Pedagogies’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 31, no. 6 (2017): 767–79, doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2017.1281883.

51. 51 Jennifer Oriel, ‘Left Falls into Queer Extremists’ Trap with Safe Schools Program’, Australian, 2 March 2016, www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/opinion/left-falls-into-queer-extremists-trap-with-safe-schools-program/news-story/4cb53ec9a0779aba50e30275b83ce01a.

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61. 61 Kelly Rissman, ‘“Disgusting and Appalling”: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Introduced a Bill That Criminalizes Performing Transgender Medical Care’, Vanity Fair, 20 August 2022, www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-wants-to-criminalizes-transgender-medical-care.

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63. 63 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government, ed. H. B. Acton (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1972).

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65. 65 Judith Butler, The Force of NonViolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London: Verso, 2020).

66. 66 Ibid., 49.

67. 67 Ibid., 9.

68. 68 Ibid., 40.

69. 69 Ibid., 24–5.

70. 70 Ibid., 56–7.

71. 71 Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 24.

72. 72 Avital Ronnell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 186.

73. 73 Margaret Mead, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (London: Routledge, 2017), 148–9.

74. 74 Williams, Marxism and Literature.

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