Red: "Non-Binary" Person Rejects Male/Female Gender Duality
by Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger's Newsmagazine
Sunday Jul 17th, 2011 8:39 PM
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/07/17/18685039.phpRED: "Non-Binary" Person Isn't Male, Female or Anything "In Between"
interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
The first time I met Red, special projects coordinator for the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center, they introduced themselves as "non-binary." That piqued my journalist's curiosity and I decided then and there that I wanted to interview them. Red explained that "non-binary" means someone who does not consider themselves male or female. I ran into them a few other times before setting up the interview — at which I learned that "they," "them" and "their," along with the normally plural verb forms that go with them, are the proper ways to refer to a non-binary person even if you're only describing one individual.
[...]
Red is living a life that makes them, in essence, a minority within a minority within a minority. Transgender people are a relatively small, though significant, part of the Queer community; and Red is a minority among Transgender people because most Transgender people accept a binary concept of gender and simply believe that their inner being doesn't match the physiology of the body they were born into or the gender they were, to use one of those phrases whose meaning Red had to explain to me, "coercively assigned" at birth.
