Square Peg in a Round Hole: Gender Beyond the Binary

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a slow and steady shift in the gender status quo, whereby we are increasingly acknowledging that there are more than two ways for people to define their gender. Shortly before I began my PhD, for instance, the national rail service of the Netherlands (the “Nederlandse Spoorwegen”) announced that they would be addressing their customers as ‘passengers’ (“reizigers” in Dutch), rather than as ‘ladies and gentlemen’. On a global scale, various countries have started to legally recognise “third” gender and sex categories (Ryan, 2018). Gender-neutral pronouns are being introduced to languages that did not yet have them (Gustafsson Sendén et al., 2015) and pre-existing gender-neutral pronouns have become more visible (Bradley et al., 2019). Advocates are arguing for more gender-neutral toilets (Bovens & Marcoci, 2023) and there has been an increased interest in “genderless” or unisex fashion (Kim et al., 2022). These developments signal a growing awareness of the limitations of the gender binary, which I observed when I was thinking about the topic of my PhD. The gender binary is the view that humans all fit into one of two categories, men and women, that these categories are biologically meaningful, and that this view is natural and unmalleable (Hyde et al., 2019). The effects of this view are pervasive to anyone who identifies outside of the binary, but also for all other LGBT+ individuals (Garelick et al., 2017; Prusaczyk & Hodson, 2020). Recent estimates suggest that anywhere from 3% to 35% of the general population see themselves as part man and part woman, or as something completely different from man and woman (in the Netherlands: Kuyper & Wijsen, 2014; in Flanders, Belgium: Van Caenegem et al., 2015; in Israel: Joel et al., 2014). This suggests that the gender binary may not adequately represent the self-views of a considerable number of people and that a move away from it may be justified. In other words, if many people feel like proverbial “square pegs” being shoved into “round holes”, perhaps moving away from those holes is a good idea. In this thesis, I set out to further investigate the societal move away from the gender binary, and specifically to further challenge two assumptions: (1) that the gender binary is helpful, either as a cognitive heuristic or as a way for us to identify with one another, and (2) that it is natural, in that it is upheld by something innate to humans. To do so, I looked at experiences of threat towards gender-inclusive interventions, people’s gender binary beliefs, and how people categorise both themselves and others by gender. In doing so, I have found further information about how we, as a society, can approach the societal shift away from the gender binary, by raising awareness about this data among the general population and reducing resistance to gender-inclusive interventions.