Magender: A Nonbinary Visualization in Three Acts
Written by Jessamine Manchester | @surely.u.jess
Some but not all, and certainly not nothing
I remember exactly where I was when I heard magenta was not a real color: lying upside down on a steadily decaying leather couch. An eighth grade science class project required me to search for quantifiable wavelengths of various colors, but magenta, strikingly, could not be classified. In an explanation that blew my 14-year-old mind, Google explained that magenta exists nowhere on the visible spectrum of light and is instead an optical illusion caused when our RGB cones detect an absence of green. The opposite ends of the spectrum still persist, leading to the color wheel taught in elementary art classes around the world.
The idea that an absence of color could result in something so bright and pink and real puzzled me for weeks to come. To me, all colors existed in a binary form, with black at one end and white at the other. Every other shade in the rainbow merely existed at some point in the middle, all blending together in their similarity. Although, even this perception had no clear answer as to which end was infinite and which end was a void.
Within the light spectrum, white light is an unfiltered reflection of every color imaginable at once, while black represents an absorption where no color is spared. But if I'd waited just forty more minutes for art class, I'd find white was the base unsoiled by crayons, and any attempt to mix contrasting paints together would result in a murky black. Magenta had never crossed my mind as an outlier. It was a combination of red and violet, some but not all, and certainly not nothing.
My ability to pinpoint the exact moment of an anecdote about colors but not the moment I started questioning my gender really shows the amount of attention I paid to my identity in the early years. I was a girl, and any information about transgender and nonbinary identities that I pursued was in order to understand other people. The fact that I didn't entirely resonate with the expectations of being female was irrelevant. Of course, this knowledge-building did lead to a question that haunted me periodically throughout my early teenage years: What was my reason for identifying as a girl? Every few months this thought crossed my brain with heightened anxiety and a feeling akin to motion sickness, before being banished with a simple explanation: I am a girl because I am not a boy, and any label other than girl positions me adjacent to an identity I would never see myself in. At this time, the phrase "there's more than 2 genders” presented itself as a sliding scale for me, where every step away from one took me closer to the other.
Lying upside down on a recently replaced couch in the summer of 2020, my identity was getting harder to ignore. I was free from the constant perception of existing outside my own house, but the isolation forced me to look inward and come to terms with the fact that there were parts of myself that I didn't have the tools to quantify. Luckily, the Instagram algorithm sent one such tool my way.
The image showed a chart depicting a six-by-six array of potential gender identities. The corners of the box contained absolutes of male/female and gendered/genderless, positioned for the two spectrums to cross in the center. By following the X-axis for a number and Y-axis for a letter, one could easily name their relationships to masculinity versus femininity and to the concept of gender as a whole. Best of all, it was color-coded: Blue for boys, pink for girls, chartreuse for genderqueer, and white for genderless, with so many beautiful shades in between.
Image sourced from @ANeonGreenCity on Twitter.
Finally, I had found an image to validate the potential of not quite being a girl while also not being a boy. I could examine my relation to this identity all I wanted, and as long as my placement contained either a F or a 6, I would still be able to ensure that my identity wasn't misconstrued. I proudly labeled myself an F5, taking pride in being almost-female-but-not-quite.
Nonbinary was no longer a term I reserved for others, and I quickly chose to share my self-discovery with a friend group comprised of many nonbinary members. To my surprise, I found that not everyone resonated with this simple and easy-to-use scale. One friend remarked about his difficulty, stating that if he was placed as far away from male as he saw himself it would take him far too close to female, an inverse to the predicament I sought to avoid. His dilemma confused me. I silently wondered why he wouldn't just choose whether to stay in the lane of A or 1.
Quickly, another nonbinary friend produced a meme parodying these types of gender charts. This meme featured an X-axis with the labels "solid" and "viscous," a Y-axis with the labels “large" and "tiny," and a Z-axis with the shapes "orb" and "cone." It also included so-called helpful tips, including, "You may select up to 9 genders" and "Fortify your gender against enemies." Like my previous example, it was also color-coded.
The other nonbinary members of the group quickly attempted to label themselves on this satirical scale, forgetting all about the self-discovery I had expressed moments ago. I did not join them in creating a gender identity with the icons "cone" or "orb." It was never clear which one was the girl.
Beyond our benchmarks of color
The existence of ultraviolet and infrared light has always confused me. The human species' visible spectrum of light is limited and colors do exist outside of our ability to see them, but I already know what violet and red look like. How much more "ultra" can we make them? Despite crayola co-opting these titles as names in their special edition crayon packs, I eventually learned that ultraviolet and infrared are not colors at all. They're just terms for wavelengths caused by radiation, responsible for sunburns and night vision goggles. If we could see ultraviolet and infrared light, they likely wouldn't appear red or purple at all, going beyond our benchmarks for color. If we could see more wavelengths of light, it would likely alter our perceptions of every color in between.
Unfortunately, we cannot see the space beyond red and purple. That bridge is, of course, occupied by magenta. You can spend forever chasing the furthest thing from red, but even as you try and push beyond violet, things start to look a little pink again. Suddenly your gradient is a circle, and you're wondering what's so different about all these colors to begin with.
Neopronouns are defined as a set of pronouns beyond the pronouns used in traditional English grammar. They can take many forms, limited only by the user's self-expression. Though most view neopronouns as a purely-online, Gen Z trend, they are by no means a twenty-first-century phenomenon. Writers have been periodically attempting to create gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns for over 200 years, with Charles Crozat Converse's 1858 proposal thon/thons/thonself being one of the first English examples.
Even before I knew I was nonbinary, I loved neopronouns. I would periodically ask others more knowledgeable on the subject if I could use them for myself while still identifying as female, and received a general consensus of, “Go ahead, but you might want to examine why you want to use neopronouns so much." I ignored this encouragement of exploring myself the way a child ignores the heartfelt message in their birthday cards to play with the rest of their gifts. In this metaphorical sense, the gifts were only to be played with inside of the house, until I eventually read the card’s message and was prepared to protect this gift from damage out in the real world.
While the pronoun set she/her/hers provides a convenient mechanism for me to engage in society, my preferred set of pronouns are ze/zir/zirs (pronounced and used the same as the former but with a Z sound). I resonate with this particular set for a few quantifiable reasons:
"Ze" has the same brevity as "he," leading to a more convenient experience in text.
"Zir/zirs/zirself” are phonetically similar to “her/hers/herself,” enough to maintain a slightly feminine vibe.
“Ze/zir” pronouns are some of the most popular neopronouns within the community. They are also easy to pronounce even if you have never encountered them before, meaning there will be less of a learning curve when someone is getting used to my new pronouns.
The thing I appreciate most about neopronouns, though, is the ability to create a personal pronoun that is not based on gender. The pronouns "he" and "she" subconsciously convey that even in scenarios where your name is not important enough to be reiterated, it is still necessary to remind others of your place in the binary. I admire the fact that using a singular "they" as a gender-neutral alternative has gained mainstream usage in recent years, but when applied to myself, the pronoun has almost felt too impersonal, like a sweater three sizes too big.
Even with all these quantifiable truths about my preference for neopronouns, there is something about ze/zir that I can't quite put into words. Being able to recognize myself as inherently beyond the binary, signified by my newfound pronouns, gave me the freedom to let some of my more “feminine” hobbies back into my life again without worrying about perceptions. While I vehemently despised dresses and makeup for the first 18 years of my life, they have become staples of my wardrobe from the time I started using ze/zir, because even acts that could be seen as gender-conforming became radical once I took my gender into my own hands.
I was no longer clinging to rows F and 6 on the gender graph like a nerd hugging the wall at a school dance in a cliché movie, but I wasn't trying to be perceived as male either. I was floating above these notions of masculinity and femininity, indulging in the facets I admired about each, and tossing the notion of separating the two aside.
l identify as a paragraph, not just a word
One of the most disproportionately heartbreaking moments I experienced in the past year was learning that there is no such thing as "shrimp colors." For those unfamiliar with the concept, for years scientists identified the mantis shrimp as the creature with the most light-detecting cones similar to human RGB receptors. Since humans have three cones and can see a variety of colors produced from the overlapping of these hues, and dogs have two cones and can see far less, it stood to reason that—with a whopping 12 cones—mantis shrimp would experience a world of colors beyond our wildest imaginations. After a series of trials, though, scientists have concluded that the mantis shrimp actually sees far less colors than humans are able to differentiate. Rather than relying on the combination of receptors to produce a full spectrum, it appears that each cone in a Mantis Shrimp eye is responsible for just one color, allowing it to make quick distinctions when hunting. Although such strict categorization may be advantageous for survival, it still saddens me that a creature once thought to experience color to the fullest is actually restricted by convenience.
Nearly a year after I first sent the gender chart to my nonbinary friends, I was now complaining to them about having to fill out the "tell us more about your gender identity" section on so many forms. Despite the transformative journey I had gone on in the past year, it became obvious that none of these questions were asking about that internal identity. They were merely interested in a handful of things:
Do you want us to call you something that's not your legal name? (No, Jessamine is such a unique name it perfectly fits my identity without feeling too gendered.)
Do we have to commit to learning a new set of pronouns for you? (Preferably yes, but I'm fine with using she/her since I know our society has a long way to go.)
Are you going to need a specific type of medical care? (No, I feel at home in my body even if society labels it as female.)
Can we count you as a diversity statistic? (Yes, although I'm not sure if you will.)
I recently revisited the gender chart that started it all, and I couldn't help but notice a few key limitations of the format. First, despite alleviating the discomfort caused by the one-dimensional scale I'd been using in the past, the positions of male and female as opposite from each other still conveys the implicit argument that any step away from one binary gender is as the other. In my opinion, saying "I am female because I am not male" is the same as saying "I am a cat because I am not a dog." Sure, there may be some contexts where the two are positioned as opposites in this logic, but not every living being can be broken down into categories of cat or dog.
Second, the scale of genderqueer to genderless that poses the two as opposites creates a similarly strange predicament. Gender is such a personal and hard-to-quantify identity for nonbinary people that it feels cheap to phrase it as, "You either have gender or you don't." Personally, I feel I am on both ends of this spectrum. My gender is not an inherent part of my identity, so I feel genderless, but—because of that absence—I am able to experience a gender that is of my own creation. The void is filled by a chaotic harmony of contradictions, and the unreachable space beyond somehow circles back around to the other side.
Last, and most glaringly, positioning gender on a six-by-six grid is always doomed to fail because it's an even number. There is no exact center. No matter which identity you feel neutral on, you always have to be closest to two definitive identities. Even the satirical cone/orb dichotomy had a midpoint!
In considering the flaws of this graph, I am reminded of one key theme from Eula Biss's brilliant essay, "The Pain Scale." Pain is an inherently subjective experience which can only be measured in relation to the victim's own suffering, but the alleviation of said pain requires a communication through a flawed scale to a healer who will never truly understand. I particularly resonated with a quote from Biss's father describing a need for the quantifiers: "One of the functions of the pain scale [...] is to protect doctors—to spare them some emotional pain. Hearing someone describe their pain as a 10 is much easier than hearing them describe it as a hot poker driven through their eyeball into their brain.”
My gender is not pain, though the threat of being misunderstood is. There is a high likelihood that even after over six pages of analysis, attempts to quantify this subjective experience will merely result in vague confusion in the reader. And at this point, I must acknowledge my privilege as a nonbinary person who feels at home in zir own skin—whose self-expression is easily mistaken for compliance. For those who find that their bodies, their minds, or their social presentations don't align with the spirit inside, any attempt to communicate their experiences can be perceived as a threat by cisgender audiences. This is particularly the case for those who were societally presumed to be male, where any step outside the notion of masculinity may identify them as a target of ridicule. Although these struggles are not present in my own circumstances, the pain of being misunderstood remains every time I am forced to remember the world insists on projecting gender onto me or that I have rarely seen my pronouns used for another person, especially in the media. I've become used to locking all of this rage behind steel doors, promising I'll come back to it another time.
Humanity needs language to understand. We need to position ideas in relation to other ideas, and to create units of measurement to standardize these relationships. The pain scale is flawed, but it facilitates the convenient mechanism of viewing pain in proportion to other pain and provides an entry point for further discussion of the internal experience. Likewise, even though the gender chart oversimplifies my internal experiences, it can provide a platform for self-discovery and accessible language to explain the experience to others still struggling with the idea of gender existing beyond the binary. Most parts of society are still struggling with using "they" as a gender neutral pronoun. As tired as I am of hearing this, a world beyond the chart's view of gender just isn't ready to exist yet.
Back to Biss's father's quote: If a numbered scale is put in place for the comfort of the listener, what are the unquantifiable descriptions cisgender society is not ready to confront? My gender is not pain. I asked some of my nonbinary friends to honestly describe how they viewed their own gender and received descriptions varying from the imagery of a shallow well to a constellation of asterisks to something quiet and older than time. One friend even described theirs as the aesthetic of bowling alley carpet. No one's gender experience is like "a hot poker driven through their eyeball into their brain," but the horror lies in the reality that others are experiencing a world we will never know and some will simply never comprehend that that's okay.
Not everyone thinks that magenta is a fake color. Some look at the argument that our eyes simply perceive the lack of a green wavelength as a mixture of red and blue and scoff—saying that's how it works with every color. Even though the so-called “real” colors between infrared and ultraviolet are born from a singular wavelength, these colors only are interpreted by the eye of the beholder. Our brains simply filter every experience through our RGB receptors, projecting every limited hue onto our surroundings. No one color is more natural than the rest.
When someone asks me to describe my gender identity, I still refer to the binary in terms of what I'll tolerate. I don't mind being called a girl, referred to with she/her pronouns, or people mistaking me for cisgender because it's more comfortable than the alternatives of being mistaken for male or using the mental energy I would have to spend to demand being seen as nonbinary.
What would you say if someone removed your frame of reference? Personally, I would say I am an explosion, barely contained by one gender role. I am some but not all, and certainly not nothing. I am a bridge linking opposites by the unknowable space beyond their extremes. I am a cavalcade of colors unleashed by absence. I am Magenta.
