Nonbinary, Gender Anabaptists, and the State

Some reflections on my conversation with Marquis Bey and their latest book, out tomorrow

I don’t know how many of my Substack subscribers are also following the YouTube program I have been doing for the past few months, but I really hope you’ll check out the recording of today’s interview.

I had the opportunity to talk with Marquis Bey about their new book Nonbinary Life. I have been following this prolific writer for a while: their books Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure (both published in 2022) feature prominently in my forthcoming book, particularly the chapter looking at trans as not only a framework of experience and identity but also as an epistemology that challenged cis-white-heteronormative culture. In our conversation, we managed to touch many of the themes, concepts, and points they make in this poignant, powerful, and sometimes playful book.

The key takeaway is that they argue the nonbinary is not just another category of gender but that it ultimately strives to undermine and abolish gender itself as a system. Building on work like that of the Gender Accelerationist Manifesto, Bey says,

What I desire is a modality of relation wherein one need not emerge onto the scene of sociality through these vectors, wherein one does not have to exist racially, gendered, and so forth, in order to exist at all. These things ultimately foreclose that which we might have been were it not for having to be this particular racialized or gendered subject. We might deem this is nonbinary life: life that wants to live in ways not beholden to mandatory enumeration of all the ways we are said to exist on the current ledgers in place. Nonbinary life does not wish to be, and cannot be, accounted for by the rigid lines and accounts on the sheet used to keep track and tabs. And there is immense, otherworldly freedom in this.

I find it very compelling to have the desire to inhabit Nonbinary Life stated in this way. Bey effectively asks, “what has your gender ever done for you?” And most of the time the answer is that it has served as a stereotypical template I’m asked to negotiate, to struggle to reform into something I’d like to occupy, but which mostly serves as a means of repressing those nongenderconforming attributes that would disqualify my inclusion in the set. And in so far as I am included, or I find inclusion and community, in the group of people also considered to be men, most of what I find there is a just a way of routing either forms of love and friendship that should be available to me no matter my gender, or forms of hate and violence (aka misogyny, homophobia, transphobia) that I’d rather not have in my life. And if we simply stretch masculinity, expanding the gender to help both include more of those tasty bits I’d like to have in my life and dilute the toxins that most often float to the top, then as Bey (or more accurately one of Bey’s students) points out, “It becomes abolition in everything but name—gender abolition without the actual abolition. Just say it. Let it go. You’ll survive, I promise.”

I admit that much of my own desire to continue to say I am a he is wrapped up in politically occupying that category as someone who doesn’t like most of what that category portends: to be one of the good guys that helps with that stretching and expanding (assuming, of course, that I am one of those good guys, a very fraught proposition given the way incels and others already imagine themselves this way. Elliot Rodger called himself a “supreme gentleman.”) When I understand the nonbinary as gender abolition - and think about what the system of gender does to corral and corrupt our potentialities - it is hard for me to not also want to, as Bey puts it…

Bey’s book also helps highlight the reason that not only nonbinary but trans existence more broadly has been so vigorously and viciously attacked by the reactionaries. It is driven not just brute bigotry, salacious fearmongering, or devious distraction from the true sources of our oppression. Gender is itself one of the central instruments of control and classification for the state. And up until recently, it has been one that is easily imposed - in part because of all the supposed benefits it offers. But as we talk about disconnecting what I call our casting from our categories of disinterpellation, this political system is upset. As Bey puts it:

The State is the byzantine yet aimed organization of control, governance, surveillance, and domination. As a machine of control, simultaneously centralizing and dispersing power through deputization, it creates and forces hierarchies as a means of classificatory Order. Its chief function is to striate the space over which it reigns, to break up and parcel out, to stabilize and order. What incisively serves this function, in addition to things like racial, class, and sexual categories of identity, is gender. Bathrooms are broken up and parceled out, check boxes on forms stabilize and order, locker rooms and sports and country clubs and cotillions and debutantes and bachelor parties and baby showers and gender reveals order and parcel and fix. Gender is offered, or more accurately forced upon, as a way of massacring the body as soon as it’s born, indeed before it is born. And such massacring—such gender; gender as such—is vital for the production of a productive labour force or the productive body. Vital for capitalism. Gender, as deployed by the State, functions as a key technology of control and domination. Since it propounds by striating and coding human existence, enforcing surveillance, and quelling what cannot be categorized through the imposition and maintenance and structuralizing of gender, nonbinary life, then, is a practice— not just against gender, but against the State itself. By refusing the codification of gender, nonbinary life undermines the State’s power to manage and dominate, gesturing toward new possibilities of ungoverned, unbound existence.

As I say in our conversation, this passage calls to my mind the Anabaptists of Early Modern England, which Frances Bacon declared were terrorists. Though there were extremely radical versions of this creed (particularly in what we now call Germany), the basic premise was that babies shouldn’t be baptized into the church when they were first born, but should instead only be asked to declare their allegiance to God, to the church, and - in a moment when the church and state were basically the same thing - the state when they were old enough to decide for themselves. But this meant that, for ten, twelve, even eighteen years, a child could live in the state without declaring themselves subject to it. Indeed, they might not choose to do so at all. It was a recipe for chaos, for subversion, and ultimately for freedom from the authority of the state. Bacon and his followers - who, pace Silvia Federici, were also ultimately responsible for the crusade against “witches” i.e. women who refused to submit to the emergent capitalist, patriarchal order - were right to be afraid of this power. But that doesn’t mean we should be.

When our first child was born, we had a few possible names picked out, but our understanding was that we didn’t have to give a name before we left the hospital: instead we would have time to provide it to the state once we had gotten to know them. But the nurse on duty insisted we provide her with a name before she would let us leave the hospital. And, of course, all of our children - even the one that never lived - had their supposed gender marked on those forms before we could take them home.

The idea that they would be able to their own name - which all of our living kids have now done - not to mention declare their gender - is an affront to the ordering of the state. It is akin to the challenge of the anabaptists, of women who didn’t know their place, of peasants and slaves who refused to respect their masters, of all subjects who refused to be subjugated. If this is what Bey means by nonbinary, and I think that it is: sign me up.

Please watch the interview, read their book, and/or check out Bey’s short meditation on its major themes. And please share these posts widely, subscribe to the YouTube channel, and, if possible, support my work here to help me continue my work there.