Beyond the Binary: Unlinking Gender Identity and Gender Expression

The distinction between gender identity and gender expression is often misconstrued, or crammed into one ill-fitting package. The concepts, and their sometimes arbitrary societal link, impact and often restrict people of all genders in how they show up in the world and how they are perceived.

So, let’s get into it.

Gender identity is a person’s internal and individual experience with gender, their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or somewhere else entirely in the gender spectrum. 

Creator @monstersincooperated responded to a TikTok comment asking in jest, “So womanhood is just some magical girly feeling and not a biological reality? Gotcha,” affirming, “You say that like it’s silly, but yes!” Agender creator @h.mourland stitched the video and expanded on the topic, explaining gender as a qualia, a fancy philosophical term for a subjective mental experience, just like our individual experiences of taste, color, and smell.

“We do not think qualia; we feel them,” Mourland says. They cite neuroscientist and philosopher Antonio Damasio, who said feelings come before language. “What that means to me is that we could not possibly utilize language to describe the full scope of a feeling. We can utilize language to attempt to describe our feelings, but we will never get all of it in there. Gender is the same; it defies definition; it is a purely subjective experience. Nobody can take that from you.”

In that vein, if you were to approach multiple women, men, nonbinary people, and asked each explicitly, “What makes you know you are (their gender) innately in your brain, without referencing your anatomy or assigned sex at birth?” I can guarantee the responses from each gender will differ abundantly.

Because each person’s experience with gender is subjective, people are going to express their gender identity in an abundance of ways, built from their lives and experiences surrounding gender. For nonbinary folks specifically, let’s remember the phrase is telling us what a person’s gender is not (binary); it’s not some neatly packaged third gender that sits somewhere between “man” and “woman.”

Conversely, gender expression is how a person publicly expresses and presents their gender, including behavior and outward appearance, along with a person’s pronouns and chosen name.

A woman may present in a way society views as masculine: short hair; bulky, earth-tone clothing; no makeup; maybe she wears a binder, but her womanhood is no more or less real than another woman who consistently wears dresses; heels; has glamorous, long hair; and loves to rock her cleavage. The same is true for men and nonbinary folks; gender expression does not equal gender identity, and disconnecting the two concepts benefits everyone, including cisgender people.

Folks will often look at a person and make a judgment as to what gender they believe that person is based on their gender expression, which further points to the need to disconnect gender identity and expression as always intrinsically fused.

The fact is, people of all genders have an abundance of innate features and genetic factors that defy how we arbitrarily facilitate masculinity and femininity. Society looks at a defined jaw line, broad shoulders, muscles as “masculine,” or large hips, small hands, and a soft voice as “feminine,” even though it’s very clear looking around in the world that all people have these features, their assigned sex at birth aside. We just take it upon ourselves to say that’s a “masculine woman” or a “feminine man” when these attributes aren’t exclusive to one assigned binary sex at birth.

Beyond genetics and bodies, the ideas that a dress is feminine, that short hair or body hair is masculine, that nonbinary folks have to be androgynous, are solely ideas. It’s a modern fabrication based on Westernized gender ideas that ultimately date back to the way Europeans viewed the “correct” expression of gender among themselves, white people. And these ideas ripple into the broad understanding of gender we see today and the societally imposed restrictions surrounding it.

Nonbinary author, performer, and speaker Alok Vaid-Menon spoke on this topic recently, saying when we think about what a man or woman “looks like,” it has been definition by white people, with BIPOC folks never taken into consideration.

“When European colonists would go to Indigenous lands across the world, they would write in their journals, ‘Why are these men wearing dresses? Why are these women bare-chested?’ They never thought to ask, ‘Maybe that garment is not a dress,’ because actually, many peoples across the world wore skirts, and that wasn’t a gender marker; it was just their cultural item. Or maybe these people didn’t experience being bare-chested as a form of nudity. Maybe they had their own understanding of nudity that was, like, not having tattoos or not wearing piercings. They never actually asked people, ‘How do you understand society and gender?’ They took a Western, colonial idea of gender and evaluated people.”

Though this criminally brief primer on the topic barely scratches the surface, I challenge anyone reading this column to start interrogating and disconnecting their perceived links between gender identity and gender expression, if they have not already.
As a starting point, I’ll offer up some advice I gave to my parents last year in a conversation around my gender and pronouns. In part to ease my pronouns transition, but on a broader level to push my parents to begin dissociating perceived gender with a person’s actual gender identity, I recommended they begin referring to folks who have not yet disclosed their gender (like strangers in public, service workers) with gender neutral, they/them pronouns until they know otherwise. 

Just because a person is presenting a certain way, we don’t inherently know their gender identity.

It’s a small step that can begin to break down some of these false connections we’ve made in our head surrounding gender identity versus expression. For a little extra homework, revisit the above prompt and apply it to yourself, “Only in reference to my feelings and subjective experience surrounding gender, what makes me (my gender)?”

You might be surprised by your response.