Everything is Non-Binary

When your choices are two extremes and a middle ground, everyone picks the middle ground

Almost exactly ten years ago, I was radicalized by a Huffington Post article on “ambiverts.” Ambiverts are “people who express qualities and behaviors of both introverts and extraverts, depending on the situation” and “can take the best of both.” This was back when everyone was on Facebook, and my news feed lit up with people declaring themselves ambiverts and expressing joy that they finally found a word to describe themselves.

Reading from 2024, it’s probably easy to see how silly this is. What person on Earth, outside of agoraphobics and attention addicts, doesn’t exhibit qualities and behaviors of both introverts and extroverts? This new label does not carve reality along the joints. In practice, it exists merely for the vanity of those who wish to label themselves as somehow outside of the introvert/extrovert binary.

Suddenly, I started seeing this kind of thing everywhere. When you make a categorization system of two extreme options and a middle ground, almost everything will fall into the middle ground. You see this same phenomenon in discussions of parenting. So-called “experts” will describe the world of parenting styles as “authoritarian” on one extreme, “permissive” or “gentle” parenting on the other extreme, and then a middle ground of “authoritative” parenting which is a blend of the two styles. Authoritative, of course, is always presented as the correct option, and who could possibly disagree? So all the arguments aren’t about which style is correct, but instead which specific practice is authoritative. Did you comfort your child when she skinned her knee? Critics will call that gentle parenting, while proponents will call it authoritative. Did you force your kid to go to soccer practice? Critics call that authoritarian, but nobody is going to defend authoritarian parenting, so instead they say no no no, you’ve got it all wrong. That’s just being authoritative! Like a good parent!

There are a million other examples of this, but none more prominent than gender identity. And it’s just as silly. According to ChatGPT:

Being non-binary means identifying outside the traditional categories of exclusively male or female. Non-binary people may experience their gender as a blend of both, as something entirely different, or as fluid, shifting over time. This identity reflects a spectrum of gender experiences and is often used to signal that gender is more complex and individualized than a strict male/female binary.

This is just ambiverts all over again. There’s almost nobody that perfectly conforms to gender stereotypes. Nearly everyone behaves traditionally masculine in some respects and traditionally feminine in others.

If you’re reading this, it probably strikes you as an obvious point. That’s how I felt too! Honestly, it feels a bit silly to be writing this all out. But I see it all the time, and I’m sure there’s a 300-page journal article with hundreds of citations explaining why this isn’t the case. so I figure it’s worth saying. People are constantly trying to control the debate by presenting their preferred option as a middle ground between two obviously wrong extremes, and way too many people are falling for it.