Nonbinary 101: Beyond the Binary – Taboo Science Podcast

What if the government declared you don’t exist? In 2025, that’s exactly what happened to nonbinary people—but they’re not going anywhere. This episode breaks down what nonbinary actually means (hint: it’s not “between man and woman”), why they/them pronouns are harder for our brains to process, and how some nonbinary people use hormones to craft their perfect gender recipe. With help from psychologist Dr. Em Matsuno and our sensitivity reader Newt Schottelkotte, we’re exploring everything from microdosing testosterone to why misgendering is the default for nonbinary folks—along with the benefits to the journey of gender discovery. Whether you’re nonbinary yourself, know someone who is, or are just trying to figure out how to not mess up someone’s pronouns, this episode will help you understand what it means to make your own gender from scratch.

Introduction

[00:00:00] Ashley: What if the government declared you don’t exist?

[00:00:24] Ashley: Right now in 2025, the US government is decimating trans rights across the board. An executive order signed on Trump’s first day in office declared that there were only two genders, both determined at conception.

[00:00:47] Ashley: Gender related terms were banned from CDC research. Passports were required to match a person’s sex assigned at birth. Trans people were banned from serving in the military. Incarcerated trans people were stripped of their healthcare and placed according to their sex assigned at birth.

[00:01:08] Ashley: 20 states now have laws banning trans people from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity. And 29 states now ban transgender youth from participating in school sports.

[00:01:25] Ashley: And in all these fireworks over sports participation and bathroom bans, there’s one group that’s been literally erased from existence. Legislatively, at least. Non-binary people.

[00:01:48] Ashley: Because all those laws I just mentioned: The bathroom bans, the sports restrictions, the healthcare rollbacks, those affect non-binary people too. But for them, there’s an added twist. Their gender doesn’t even exist anymore in the eyes of the US government.

[00:02:16] Ashley: Want a passport, you have to choose M or F. No more X marker. Need to fly internationally? The airline has to assign you a gender, male or female, pick one. Federal forms are binary only, and In many states, you can’t even update your driver’s license or birth certificate to match your actual identity, not because they won’t recognize your transition, but because they won’t recognize that your category of identity exists in the first place.

[00:02:45] Ashley: Unfortunately, for non-binary people, this is nothing new. Being forced into a box you don’t belong in is par for the course. Because a lot of people fundamentally don’t understand what non-binary even means, and we accidentally place them in that binary gender box as a result.

[00:03:21] Ashley: Today we’re gonna work to understand what non-binary means, why it’s not a third gender or the middle of the spectrum between male and female, but a whole other thing. We’ll talk pronouns, androgyzing hormones and the silver lining that comes with creating your gender from scratch.

[00:03:21] Ashley: I’m Ashley Hamer Pritchard, and this is Taboo Science, the podcast that answers the questions you are not allowed to ask.

[00:03:43] Ashley: I wanna start by admitting something. The moment I decided I was gonna embark on this project, I created a listener survey to find out how much my audience knew about the trans community, and I immediately fucked up. In the question about how you identify, I put cisgender, transgender and non-binary, and I only let you choose one. A few early respondents spoke up, and I now know that non-binary does fall under the trans umbrella. Some of the time.

[00:03:52] Em Matsuno: If there’s anything I’ve learned about non-binary people is that we don’t like to be put in the box and anytime we try to put non-binary people in a category, they just shake that up.

What is Non-Binary

[00:04:03] Ashley: That is Dr. Em Matsuno.

[00:04:04] Em Matsuno: My pronouns are they them, and I’m an assistant professor of counseling psychology at Arizona State University. And my research focuses on all things trans and non-binary. One of my particular areas of interest is on non-binary populations.

[00:04:21] Ashley: Dr. Matsuno says the label transgender can be seen as a big umbrella that encompasses anyone whose gender doesn’t align with their assigned sex at birth.

[00:04:29] Em Matsuno: And then non-binary might be considered an umbrella under the broader trans umbrella that encompasses different gender identities that do not fit within the gender binary. So I describe it as people who do not exclusively identify as a man or a woman. And I use that specifically because some people might partially identify as a man or a woman, or sometimes identify as a man or a woman, but not strictly in that very binary, rigid way.

[00:05:00] Ashley: Non-binary is not necessarily in the middle of the gender spectrum. It’s not necessarily outside of the gender spectrum. It’s kinda like everyone’s ordering dinner and there are only two choices on the menu. Male and female. Non-binary people are like, neither of those look good to me. I’m gonna make my own dinner from scratch. Maybe that’ll involve ingredients from the choices on the menu. Maybe it won’t.

[00:05:23] Em Matsuno: There’s actually a lot of different ways that people experience a non-binary identity. So, for example, some people don’t feel like they have a gender or just don’t feel relate to any gender identity labels at all.

[00:05:42] Em Matsuno: And so that might be encompassed by the term like agender, whereas other people experience multiple genders. Um, so that could be either simultaneously or different times. So like gender fluid. Would be another maybe common label for people who feel like their, their gender identity is fluid and changes.

[00:06:06] Em Matsuno: And that could change day to day. But that could also change of like, you know, there was a five year portion of my life where I identified as a woman, and then there was another period of my life where I identified as a man and now I’m in this middle space. And then other people just feel like their gender is a third gender that’s not man or woman and it’s just something different.

[00:06:27] Em Matsuno: And so non-binary, I think is the most commonly used label, identity label, for example, I identify as non-binary. But people have all kinds of other labels, but might still say I’m non-binary in the umbrella sense.

[00:06:49] Ashley: Those other labels might include gender queer, agender, bigender, demi gender, or gender fluid, among many others. Non-binary can also be shortened to enby, E-N-B-Y, the phonetic spelling of the letters NB for non-binary. Some people don’t like using the letters on their own because of their prior usage meaning non-black. Other people are just fine with it. Nothing about non-binary identities is simple, and they like it that way.

[00:06:56] Newt Schottelkotte: Every single person does being non-binary differently, every single non-binary person has a different definition of what being neither a man nor a woman means to them. Everybody is going to have their own coming out and their own way that they present their gender differently. And to quote my queen, Yoga with Adriene, you gotta find what feels good.

Newt’s Story

[00:07:34] Ashley: That is Newton Schottelkotte.

[00:07:34] Newt Schottelkotte: Most folks call me Newt. Um, my pronouns are they, she and I am a audio engineer, sound designer, composer, and general person who works in podcasting sometimes.

[00:07:37] Ashley: And the sensitivity reader for this very podcast. Newt reads all these scripts and flags anything that might accidentally be offensive or insensitive and suggests things that I haven’t thought about.

[00:07:55] Ashley: Newt says that compared to their binary trans friends, that is trans men and trans women, the path to gender euphoria as a non-binary person feels muddier.

[00:07:55] Newt Schottelkotte: In my experience it’s been a lot more back and forth of deciding, okay, what does androgyny specifically look like to me based on the amount of physical masculine and feminine traits that I possess?

[00:08:34] Newt Schottelkotte: And also, how do I want to alter or emphasize aspects of not just my physical appearance, but the way that I project gendered signals to the world to try and as clearly as possible, communicate to people what is Newt’s whole deal?

[00:08:53] Ashley: Newt is a perfect example of making their meal from scratch. Over time, they’ve tried out different configurations until they landed on exactly what non-binary means to them.

[00:08:53] Newt Schottelkotte: For context, I’m 23. This is gonna be so dated to my age, but I found out like what non-binary was through Tumblr.

[00:09:02] Ashley: Newt was a particular fan of Tumblr’s communities for, what else? Podcasts! Fiction podcasts specifically.

[00:09:09] Newt Schottelkotte: One of the things that I loved so much about that community was that it was full of so many like diverse creators in terms of like race, gender, sexuality, and that was the first place that I sort of learned, oh, you can be something either in between or entirely outside, male or female, and I. I actually remember it really, really clearly.

[00:09:31] Newt Schottelkotte: I was in choir class, uh, my freshman year, I think of high school. And I was reading on Tumblr in between like us going through sheet music. A post where somebody talked about using they, them pronouns, and it sort of clicked in my head of like, oh yeah, that feels a lot better for me.

[00:09:56] Newt Schottelkotte: So I, I tried out, she, they for a while I realized, yeah, like they is what I really like.

[00:10:05] Ashley: But Newt didn’t come out yet. Their Ohio hometown wasn’t all that welcoming to trans people, so they waited until it was time to go to college.

[00:10:05] Newt Schottelkotte: And I remember I moved into my dorm with my parents and the next morning we were gonna go to breakfast before they left. And, I changed my name and my pronouns on my Instagram bio before I told them so I couldn’t chicken out.

[00:10:32] Newt Schottelkotte: And I told them. It took, some time for everyone in my family to kind of like get exactly what was going on.

[00:10:38] Ashley: Newt dressed androgynously and wore their hair short, but over time they realized that wasn’t quite enough.

Medical Transition

[00:10:40] Newt Schottelkotte: I felt dysphoria around my chest. I used a binder.

[00:10:49] Ashley: A binder as we explored in the second episode, is a piece of clothing designed to flatten the chest to make it more masculine looking.

[00:10:56] Newt Schottelkotte: And then later I discovered trans tape, which is fantastic and much more healthy long-term than binding. Please try trans tape, I promise. My voice was also something that I was very dysphoric about because I have an accent. And that accent tended to make my voice go even higher.

[00:11:23] Ashley: So Newt started testosterone. This point was a learning experience for me. I had assumed that non-binary people didn’t have any desire for hormones because hormones are designed to make you more masculine or more feminine, and I assumed they wanted to stay somewhere in the middle. And many do. But if you have a lot of characteristics of your sex assigned at birth that don’t match the way you wanna present to the world, medical interventions can help you get to a place that feels right for you. Here’s Dr. Matsuno again.

[00:11:35] Em Matsuno: I think there’s a lot more diversity in terms of like transition steps or paths that people take, who are non-binary. I mean, same with trans men and trans women. It’s not always like, you want the X, Y, and Z on this path. But, I think everybody is different in terms of trying to achieve for them what feels congruent and what feels like, okay, this is my gender.

[00:12:10] Em Matsuno: And a lot of people want some things and not others.

[00:12:10] Em Matsuno: For example, I know a lot of non-binary people who have top surgery but do not take hormones. Because then they would feel like, I wanna be more masc, or I wanna be more femme, but I don’t wanna be too much. So there’s like this back and forth.

[00:12:29] Em Matsuno: With hormones, some people might do microdosing, which is just taking a, a small dose of the hormones so you get like a little bit slower pace and you get like smaller effects. But it’s hard because with hormones you don’t always know exactly what effects you’re gonna get

[00:12:44] Em Matsuno: ’cause every body’s different. So for some people, like, let’s take taking testosterone for example. Some people you might grow facial hair, some people you might not grow facial hair. For some people your voice will get a lot deeper. For other people, it won’t get as deep or as quickly.

[00:12:49] Ashley: It’s worth mentioning that all of these paths can be taken by binary trans people too. As Riley Black said in the first episode, gender isn’t about jumping from one box to another. You have the whole sandbox to play with.

[00:13:02] Ashley: When Newt began microdosing testosterone, they noticed some physical changes they were really pleased with. By combining T with weightlifting, they were able to reduce their chest by a full cup size.

[00:13:13] Newt Schottelkotte: I don’t bind or tape anymore because I feel that I have other physically masculine aspects of my body that balance that out. And also I like the size that my chest is at now.

[00:13:32] Ashley: And with those changes came some rethinking of earlier choices Newt had made about their gender presentation.

[00:13:32] Newt Schottelkotte: The way that I once explained it to a friend is I was living in a house.

[00:13:43] Newt Schottelkotte: And I wanted to do a gut renovation on the house, but it just wasn’t the right time yet. So I changed little things like the couch or the wallpaper or like the lamps that were used. And when I finally was able to do that gut renovation, AKA starting T, I did it. And I looked at it and I said, okay, now that we’ve done the gut renovation.

[00:14:07] Newt Schottelkotte: I don’t think this couch works anymore, or I think that the walls need to be a different color to go with the rest of what the house looks like. So it is okay to try different aspects of a physical or social transition. And as you become more familiar with what feels good to you and what you want to look, sound, feel like, et cetera, realize, okay, I actually wanna go back to this thing that was the way that it was before. It is a wonderful process of finding out where the puzzle pieces fit to create a body that it feels good to live in.

[00:14:39] Ashley: When we come back, we’re covering pronouns and how to use them, the challenges of binary normativity, and the power of resilience.

[00:14:53] Ashley: When you don’t identify as a man or a woman, you also tend not to identify with male or female pronouns like he and him or she and her. They, them is overwhelmingly the most common set of pronouns that non-binary people use, but there are others.

Pronouns

[00:15:10] Ashley: Here’s Dr. Matsuno.

[00:15:10] Em Matsuno: There’s a really cool survey called the Gender Census that surveys like thousands of non-binary people and just tracks how language and pronouns evolve over time, which is really cool.

[00:15:30] Ashley: According to that report, 75% of non-binary people use they them pronouns, a figure that’s stayed roughly the same over the last 10 years.

[00:15:30] Em Matsuno: But I would say also very commonly is mixing pronouns. Most people have met people that use, he, they, she, they, any pronouns. No pronouns. So there’s a lot more combining or like in these circumstances I use they, in these circumstances I use she. Or whatnot.

[00:15:47] Em Matsuno: So I would say that’s probably the next largest chunk of people of how they use pronouns. And then, yeah, with the no pronouns, some people like to just use their name. So instead of saying a pronoun, you just use the name over and over. And then there’s a, small portion, but some people use different pronouns

[00:16:09] Em Matsuno: which are termed like neo pronouns. Which would be like, hir, hirs, that’s kind of combining he and her. So hir, HIR. I’ve also actually more often met people that use it, the its pronouns which people might feel like, a little uncomfortable with, but being referred to as it or it’s versus, uh, he or she.

[00:16:33] Ashley: Combinations of pronouns have been a particular curiosity for me. I’ve seen trans people on social media complain that certain people only use one of their pronouns when they use multiple, for example, and I was left wondering how I should choose which pronouns to use if I have a few to choose from.

[00:16:52] Ashley: I’ve learned the answer and it is gonna blow your mind. You’ve gotta ask the person. Everyone does it differently. You might’ve noticed that Newt introduced themself with multiple pronouns. Here’s how theirs work.

[00:17:00] Newt Schottelkotte: For several years, I just went by they, them, and when I started testosterone, that obviously deepened my voice a little bit, some of my facial features have changed, things like that. Because my job working in audio as a stage hand, stuff like that, it tends to be a bit of a sausage fest. People just assumed, oh, this is a person who’s working in a male dominated environment. They’ve got a deeper voice and certain facial features. I’m just gonna assume that this is a guy.

[00:17:38] Newt Schottelkotte: And that really frustrated me for a couple of reasons. Number one. Nobody likes to get misgendered, whether you’re cis or trans or whatever. And number two, I consider myself before anything else, a woman in sound, just because the environments that I work in, it is so, so important for any non men to be able to like, recognize each other. It’s basically saying I’m not the only girl in a room full of like 30, 40-year-old guys who are maybe about to do some locker room talk.

[00:18:05] Newt Schottelkotte: I am willing to be seen as more adjacent to a woman with the exchange of, any other woman in the room knows, okay. I’m not the only one and I am able to be, for lack of a better term, an ally to her.

[00:18:37] Newt Schottelkotte: So when I tell people, like, my pronouns are, they, she, the she more so acts as like a modifier. Most people, just because I do present very androgynously, tend to end up defaulting to they when I tell them. But I will sometimes like refer to myself with the she when I am in those workspaces. And it lets people know like, yes, Newt is non-binary, but, again, for lack of a better term, Newt’s one of the girls.

[00:18:51] Ashley: So it’s almost like they is how you see yourself personally. She is sort of your, your badge of honor. Your, your, your, your, uh, I don’t know what the metaphor would be, but it’s for, it’s for other people

[00:19:17] Newt Schottelkotte: my worksona.

[00:19:17] Ashley: There you go. Worksona. I love that.

[00:19:17] Ashley: Non-binary pronouns like they, them have been a particularly political concept lately. Like in the tagline, Kamala is for they them, Trump is for you. Non-binary pronouns are an easy target for anti-trans crusaders because they feel new and uncomfortable and make some people feel like they’re gonna make a mistake and someone’s gonna attack them for it.

[00:20:03] Ashley: Studies show that people have a harder time with non-binary pronouns like they them, than they do with binary pronouns like he or she. Even college students who are some of the most comfortable with these pronouns. When they’re asked to tell stories using they them pronouns, they make more errors and pronounce those pronouns less smoothly than binary pronouns, which suggests that their brains are working harder to say them. And when authors write about someone with a non-binary identity, they use pronouns less often.

[00:20:16] Em Matsuno: I do think one of the reasons non-binary people are so stigmatized is because of they, them pronouns and people not wanting to use they them pronouns and people being mad and upset that they have to use they, them pronouns.

[00:20:38] Em Matsuno: It takes time to learn, like you have to practice. It is kind of adjusting like a little bit, like learning a new language, even though we often use they without realizing it.

[00:20:56] Ashley: It’s true. Everyone uses they them pronouns anytime they don’t know someone’s gender. But seeing someone in front of you triggers automatic binary assumptions and it takes cognitive work to override that. It takes practice and like anything you’re not familiar with, at first, you’re gonna suck at it.

[00:21:05] Em Matsuno: I think the hardest part is that you have to make mistakes in public. And people can’t handle feeling embarrassed or feeling ashamed of making a mistake. And I think that’s the main reason for me. This is my personal opinion of why people have such a hard time.

[00:21:23] Em Matsuno: Maybe they use the wrong pronoun and it’s unintentional, but they feel like, oh, I hurt this person, or this person hates me now. Or everybody thinks that I’m a transphobic person. And so this shame response comes up and we hate to feel the shame. It’s so uncomfortable. It’s very hard to tolerate.

[00:21:47] Ashley: So they make excuses.

[00:21:47] Em Matsuno: How am I supposed to keep up with all the language at my age? Or, how am I supposed to know they them pronouns when you look so feminine or masculine or whatever.

[00:21:51] Ashley: Once they’ve absolved themselves of responsibility, they blame the non-binary person.

[00:21:51] Em Matsuno: You are making me feel like a bad person. You’re inconveniencing me or you’re trying to make me look bad when the non-binary person, like I’m just trying to be affirmed or seen as who I am.

[00:22:17] Em Matsuno: And so it’s very challenging for non-binary people to navigate whether or not to correct people or tell people because we are in the receiving end of those shame responses. And people will act out aggressively or with so much guilt, and like needing us to reassure them that, you’re not a bad person, it’s okay.

[00:22:53] Newt Schottelkotte: Something that I had to get really good at at every single stage of my transition was if someone just errantly used the wrong pronoun, finding a classy break in the conversation to be like, oh, also by the way I use they, and finding a way to make it like quick, simple and leave as little space as possible for the conversation to be derailed by apologies.

[00:23:10] Newt Schottelkotte: Because what I always tell people who like wanna be normal about being corrected on pronouns is just say, oh, got it, thank you. And then move on. It’s the equivalent of like, when you didn’t know that somebody got married and they have a new last name and you introduce them incorrectly and they’re like, oh, actually, I’m Ellen Clark now.

[00:23:15] Newt Schottelkotte: And you’re like, oh, okay. Ellen Clark. This is Ellen Clark. Anyway. It’s just fix it and forget it.

Binary Normativity

[00:23:27] Ashley: I mentioned that a big reason non-binary pronouns can be difficult is that we’re socialized to slot everybody into one of two genders. That’s an effect of something called binary normativity.

[00:23:31] Em Matsuno: People might be familiar with the term cis normativity. So what cis normativity means is that there’s like an assumption that everybody you meet is cisgender. Everybody is cisgender, and that is what’s normal, that’s what’s expected, and that’s what’s preferred. I assume everybody’s cisgender and I think everybody should be cisgender.

[00:23:51] Em Matsuno: This can be interpersonally, but it can also happen in more structural levels. So just in paperwork, not recognizing that somebody’s assigned sex might be different than their gender, and so you only have one question that says sex. Or just assuming like, certain body parts that people might have based on their appearance. So that would be like cis normativity.

[00:24:10] Ashley: Binary normativity is a concept that Dr. Matsuno and her team identified. It’s the assumption that there are only two genders and that’s what’s normal and ideal.

[00:24:18] Em Matsuno: Like most bathrooms, there’s two options. A lot of rhetoric you hear these days is that there’s only two genders. With pronouns, people only wanna use he or she. So there’s all these ways that we reinforce that only binary genders exist.

[00:25:00] Ashley: While a binary trans person has to contend with cis normativity, non-binary people deal with both cis normativity and binary normativity. That form that only offers one set of check boxes for a person’s sex may not encompass the nuance that someone’s gender may differ from their sex at birth, but a binary trans person can still check the box for how they identify. That box often doesn’t exist for a non-binary person.

[00:25:09] Ashley: These binary assumptions also create interpersonal struggles.

[00:25:17] Em Matsuno: You’re almost never assumed to be a non-binary person. Like people are always gonna put you in one box or the other.

[00:25:17] Newt Schottelkotte: Part of the reason why I eventually ended up putting the she back in is because I understood that most of the time, unless I was like in very specific queer spaces, people were going to either give me a he or a she pronoun unless I said something and. I decided that if I have to be misgendered, I would rather be misgendered as a woman than as a man.

[00:25:46] Newt Schottelkotte: People will start off with a he or a she, and it can be a death by a thousand cuts thing.

[00:26:07] Em Matsuno: even if it’s a small slight, it’s like when it’s daily, and it’s more of just feeling like, people don’t see me for who I am. People are misperceiving me and it’s kind of hard to explain how that, like you’re never feeling affirmed in your gender or seen correctly can be very challenging and difficult.

[00:26:08] Ashley: I mean, I know being misgendered is also something that binary trans people go through.

[00:26:18] Em Matsuno: Absolutely.

[00:26:18] Ashley: But it sounds like it’s not the default the way that it is for non-binary people. Do you think that’s true?

[00:26:18] Em Matsuno: Yeah, I mean the research shows that it’s more frequently experienced for non-binary people. There might be a period where people are, especially if they’re like taking hormones or they’re going through like changes in their body where they’re getting a lot of misgendering and they feel really vulnerable, but they might get to a place where then in their day to day people are viewing them as a man or a woman.

[00:26:47] Em Matsuno: Not always the case. But I think it is harder to achieve that affirmation as a non-binary person.

[00:26:54] Ashley: Being misgendered can feel invalidating, but often, non-binary people will literally be invalidated by the people around them.

[00:26:55] Em Matsuno: So somebody comes out as non-binary. Other people will say to your face, that’s not a real thing. You’re just doing this for attention. This is a new phenomenon that’s for young people. That’s not for your people your age, that’s for white people, that’s not for people of color.

[00:27:14] Ashley: In Dr. Matsuno’s research, these invalidating statements take two forms.

[00:27:14] Em Matsuno: Either one: Okay, non-binary is real, but you’re not really non-binary because you don’t look non-binary. Like all these different assumptions of what it means to be non-binary.

[00:27:44] Em Matsuno: Or it’s just people don’t believe that it’s a real thing, so they just say like, non-binary doesn’t exist, which then puts non-binary people in the position of having to try to argue and prove that their identity is valid or prove that the existence of non-binary people altogether is valid.

[00:28:05] Ashley: But with all the misgendering binary assumptions and outright ignorance of non-binary as a concept, there can be a silver lining. One is that, according to Newt, the process of having to identify what non-binary means to you often leads people to explore gender presentations and gendered signifiers they never would’ve considered otherwise. There’s a freedom to understanding yourself better.

[00:28:28] Ashley: Another bright spot in all the hardship non-binary people face? The profound meaning in finding yourself and your community. Dr. Matsuno knows this firsthand. They grew up in rural Wyoming.

[00:28:28] Em Matsuno: I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, which is a rural, like all of Wyoming is rural. It was very homogenous, not a very diverse place. I mean, first and foremost, like very predominantly white. Even though I’m half white, I’m multiracial.

[00:28:55] Em Matsuno: I definitely felt othered from my peers and then like very, very few queer people. And we had the murder of Matthew Shepard looming in the background as a very big historical event.

[00:29:07] Ashley: Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old gay college freshman who was tied to a fence and brutally beaten in a hate crime in 1998, and it all happened in Laramie, Wyoming.

[00:29:07] Em Matsuno: I had like a lot of internalized shame about my identity as a queer person and did not know a lot of other queer people. So I remember in my senior year of high school, I had to do like an ethnography and so I decided to do an ethnography on the GSA or the Gay Straight Alliance at the university. So that was just for my homework purely. That’s the only reason, right?

[00:29:45] Ashley: Dr. Matsuno says it was uncomfortable at first because of all that internalized shame, but they also recognized it was important to meet and learn about other queer people in their community.

[00:29:45] Em Matsuno: And as part of that project, I did an interview with a non-binary college student. And that was the first time I had ever learned that that was possible. I never had known that there would be any other options besides, besides the two.

[00:30:13] Em Matsuno: And then I think it took a while to meet more non-binary people that I really could imagine what my life could be like as that.

[00:30:13] Em Matsuno: I would always say like, you know, if there was a world where there were three genders, I would be the third gender, but there’s only two.

[00:30:13] Em Matsuno: But it’s like, wait, we can create this world. I was like, oh wait, this could be a reality for me. And I think I needed to see other people do it, to give myself the courage to also kind of explore that for myself.

[00:30:32] Ashley: That moment of recognition, of seeing someone living as non-binary and realizing you could too, that’s one of the things that keeps non-binary people going.

[00:30:56] Ashley: Dr. Matsuno does a lot of research into resilience, not as an individual trait that might help someone bounce back from a one-time hardship, but as more of a process that can change depending on your environment.

Resilience and Community

[00:30:56] Em Matsuno: That’s a lot of what my research has focused on is, expanding from that, like trait-based individual conceptualization to identifying sources of resilience that are not just at the individual, but at the interpersonal and community level and even societal level, as well.

[00:31:21] Em Matsuno: And identifying like resilience will look different for trans and non-binary people, than for like the general public. So trying to identify those like specific sources of resilience for trans and non-binary people as well.

[00:31:46] Ashley: And one big source of resilience? Finding people who accept you for who you are.

[00:31:46] Em Matsuno: So finding people who say, I believe you. You don’t have to prove yourself. I understand that there’s a million ways to be non-binary, that you don’t have to be androgynous or use they them pronouns.

[00:32:05] Em Matsuno: To be valid. Like there’s all kinds of diversity and, and you’re valid. And then within the community and why community support is so helpful is, you know, hopefully it’s a place that you can be validated and affirmed, but you can also see a diversity of non-binary people and see other role models and representation of like, oh, okay.

[00:32:05] Em Matsuno: I’m not the only one. There’s other non-binary people that look like me or have my similar experience. So having access to those role models I think is super important, especially for non-binary where there’s not as much like representation in media, for example, or like communities. And so being able to find people with shared identities who you can relate to, is super healing and, and promotes resilience.

Conclusion

[00:32:31] Ashley: So what if the government declared you don’t exist? Non-binary people have always existed, long before anyone thought to legislate them out of existence, and they’ll continue to exist long after. Being non-binary isn’t about fitting into a third box or landing perfectly in the middle of some imaginary spectrum.

[00:33:15] Ashley: It’s about having the freedom to explore what feels right for you. Whether that’s dressing androgynously or not, pursuing medical transition or not, or using they, them, they, she, or any other combination of pronouns. Like Newt said, you gotta find what feels good.

[00:33:15] Ashley: And for those of us who aren’t non-binary, the best thing we can do is get comfortable with discomfort. Practice non-binary pronouns. Ask questions in good faith. When you’re corrected, say, got it, thank you, and move on. And most importantly, believe people when they tell you who they are.

[00:33:35] Ashley: Thanks for listening. If you’re a paid Patreon member, stick around until the end of the credits for some bonus content. If you’re not, head to patreon.com/tab. If you’re not, head to patreon.com/taboo science to join for as little as $5 a month.

[00:33:56] Ashley: Thanks to Kath Ozog for joining at the Taboo Tier and Jostein Rødstar. I got my Danish friend to pronounce that one for me, and The Sound of Rain Falling on Snow for joining at the Tabooer Tier. I took a poll and changed the tier names. You are welcome.

[00:34:17] Ashley: Thank you so much to Em Matsuno. You can check out them and their lab’s research at empowermentlab.wordpress.com, where they also have a handy list of resources for trans and non-binary people, their families, trans medical care, all sorts of stuff.

[00:34:34] Ashley: Thank you also to Newton Schottelkotte. They’re always here doing a sensitivity read of my scripts, letting me know where I’m going off the rails or how I could say something in a better way, and it was super generous of them to share their own story on top of that. They’re also a really talented podcaster, audio engineer and writer in their own right, and you can check out their stuff at newtschottelkotte.com. That’s N-E-W-T-S-C-H-O-T-T-E-L-K-O-T-T e.com. They’ll also There will also be a link in the show notes.

[00:34:58] Ashley: Taboo Science is written and produced by me, Ashley Hamer Pritchard. Our sensitivity reader is Newton Schottelkotte. The theme was by Danny Lopatka of DLC Music Episode. Music is from Epidemic Sound. For the next episode, we’re diving into healthcare access for trans people and how the legacies of some straight white men from the 1950s are still haunting doctors’ offices today. I hope you tune in. I won’t tell anyone.