"Nonbinary is not real"

"Nonbinary is fake"

"Nonbinary is ridiculous"

These are the top three fill-ins you get if you Google "Nonbinary is".

Though nonbinary people seem to be one of the latest targets of Internet hate, there is no reason that stepping outside of the binary should be seen as a "radical" thing. Biological sex isn't binary, and gender and gender roles are simply constructs that humans created without a lot of reason known as to why, so why is not fitting into something that ultimately does not exist in the first place cause for such rampant hatred?

Despite what many think, people who are nonbinary are not the end of the world, nor the end of the trans movement. Nonbinary identities are not a new thing that Tumblr users made up, contrary to popular belief. They have existed in other cultures for hundreds and thousands of years, such as Hijra people in India, two-spirited people of Native America, Muxe people of Mexico, and many more. With historical context and a wider worldview in mind, the theory that nonbinary genders just appeared somewhere from the dark corners of the Internet simply doesn't hold up.

Even within the trans community, nonbinary people are not getting a lot of love. The community hosts many people who feel (rightfully so) that they have had to fight for legitimacy, and feel (unrightfully so) that nonbinary people are "dragging them down". These people tend to believe that one can only be trans if they experience crippling physical dysphoria and seek to fully medically/legally/socially transition. These people are called transmedicalists, or in some areas, truscum.

While the struggle for even the binary trans community to gain recognition has been rough, nonbinary people are not dragging their reputation down. In most cases, people who target nonbinary people are not friends of binary trans folks either, or have just been doing a decently good job at hiding and redirecting their internalized transphobia. Regardless, the people that truscum are trying to save the community from were never allies in the first place, and are not people that we should be trying to win the hearts of. Odds are, their views won't change, and we don't need to oust people out of our own community to try to please people who aren't in the trans community. Trans people, of all people, should know what it feels like to be ousted from their own community (yes, transphobia is extremely rampant in the gay/lesbian community), so why would they turn around and do the exact same thing to someone else?

Still, with a very long and still ever-expanding list of genders that don't fall within the male/female binary, and pronouns to go with them, it can be tough to keep up. But nobody is saying that you have to be an expert on every gender, we merely ask that you keep an open mind and be willing to learn new things. After all, is it really affecting your life so much if someone else is something like demigender? Does it really throw so much of a wrench in your day to call someone "ze" instead of "he"?

Honestly, it takes you more time to argue than it does to just correctly gender someone in the first place. Take a moment. Breathe. Someone using singular "they" and not fitting into one of the two socially constructed boxes of male or female is really not the end of the universe, I promise. The gender spectrum is relatively endless and still expanding, but if it makes someone feel comfortable to find the term "neutrois", identify with it, and perhaps for the first time in their life not feel weird or broken or freakish - who, exactly, are you to take that from them?