【by Yo-Ling Chen, Dec. 2024】
July, 2024. There are over thirty of us gathered in the long rectangular basement of DAYBREAK, a leftist event space run by New Bloom Magazine in Taipei. It is about 3:30PM on a Saturday afternoon and I am MCing self-introductions for a quarterly ‘trans and nonbinary’ party. Usually, groups of regulars who already know each other arrive later in the evening, with most of the punctual afternoon crowd either bravely coming alone or simply being less integrated into this social scene. We pass a corded mic around the room, giving everyone an opportunity to introduce themselves and share a “fun fact” that will hopefully facilitate new connections with others. One attendee shares that she recently started training at a boxing gym; another attendee shares that they really like ants. The microphone makes its way to a tall, slender woman poised on the armrest of a couch. With a cool, nonchalant composure, she introduces herself with a single sentence before passing on the mic: “I’m a binary trans with a freshly cut abalone.”[1]
The next person immediately begins their self-introduction without batting an eye, but my mind is still lingering on the peculiar category of “binary trans” in explicit articulation with the vivid euphemism of “a freshly cut abalone.” Was this self-introduction meant to be a form of self-satire, playing up the trope that the only thing “binary” trans women care about is getting bottom surgery? Or could it have been some kind of veiled commentary on the construction of “nonbinary” as a largely non-surgical category in Taiwan? Why did she feel the need to introduce herself as “binary trans” in the first place? Unfortunately, I never found the opportunity to ask this attendee about her self-introduction.
In his polemical genealogy of nonbinary identity, Kadji Amin draws attention to how the construction of “binary” as non-binary’s idealized definitional opposite follows a broader pattern in Western taxonomical efforts to organize sexual and gender diversity through the use of dyadic distinctions—from heterosexuality/homosexuality, to cisgender/transgender, and now, binary/nonbinary.[2] Amin considers these dyads to be idealized to the extent that they reflect more the results of binaristic taxonomical thinking than how people actually experience themselves. He argues that so-called “binary trans” people would “never choose this term to describe themselves or their relationship to gender.”[3] Yet, in the past few years, a variety of transgender people in Taiwan have done exactly that.
How might we understand the empirical manifestations and effects that “nonbinary” is having outside of the US-context from which Amin theorizes? In this essay, I explore the development of “nonbinary” as a discourse in Taiwan in conversation with Amin’s polemic genealogy of this category. Drawing on my experiences and observations doing nonbinary activism in Taiwan since 2021, I first provide a brief history of how the Chinese term for nonbinary, feieryuan (非二元), came to be taken up by Taiwan’s LGBTQIA+ communities. I then turn to a closer discussion of the convergences and divergences of nonbinary as a category in Taiwan with Amin’s provocative arguments about how nonbinary identity is negatively changing transgender politics. Ultimately, while the discourse of “nonbinary” in Taiwan has inherited much of the genealogical baggage that Amin rightly criticizes, the empirical reality of “nonbinary” as a lived category in Taiwan differs in important ways from the strawperson that Amin sets up in his polemic.
A Recent History of a Transpacific Accident
The first recorded use of feieryuan (非二元) as the Chinese translation of the English gender identity term “nonbinary” in Taiwan was by intersex activist and Organization Intersex International-Chinese (Oii-Chinese) founder Hiker Chiu on December 1, 2013. Chiu posted a Chinese translation of the “Public Statement by the Third International Intersex Forum” on Oii-Chinese’s website, which included the demand that “All adults and capable minors should be able to choose between female (F), male (M), non-binary or multiple options” on identification documents. A week later on December 9, 2013, Chiu submitted written comments on behalf of Oii-Chinese to the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s “Gender Change Registration Requirements Meeting,” urging the Taiwanese government to establish “X” as a third legal gender category since the existing birth certificate third sex marker ‘ambiguous’ “did not help grown-up non-binary gender-identified and presenting people.”[4] While feieryuan was henceforth established as the Chinese translation of “nonbinary,” this term did not experience widespread circulation outside of specialist discussions around legal gender marker options in Taiwan at the time.
In subsequent years, feieryuan saw occasional usage in online publications, such as in a November 2015 Chinese translation of Alok Vaid-Menon’s article, “Greater transgender visibility hasn’t helped nonbinary people – like me,” or a blogpost a month later by transgender activist Xin-En Wu (吳馨恩) entitled “Alliance between Women, Transgender, and Nonbinary People.” While sporadic, one-off uses of the term feieryuan can be found across the mid- to late-2010s, it was not widely known across Taiwan’s LGBTQIA+. It was not until May of 2019 when a group of four transmasc nonbinary people formed the first nonbinary community organization in Taiwan, Taiwan Non-binary Queer Sluts (台灣非二元酷兒浪子, TWNBQS), that the term feieryuan became a staple of gender diversity discourse in Taiwan.
TWNBQS marched in the inaugural Taiwan Transgender March on October 25, 2019, as well as Taipei Pride the next day. The composition of TWNBQS at the time was majority Chinese-English bilingual and consisted of a mix of Taiwanese people, international students, US expats, and Taiwanese Americans such as myself.[5] In the late fall of 2019, Sky Ford, a nonbinary college student from the US who was then studying abroad in Taiwan, initiated a bilingual nonbinary book project entitled《去你的二元世界：看見性別酷兒故事 What Binary? A Collection of Genderqueer Stories》. Fembooks (女書店), the first independent feminist bookstore in Taiwan, enthusiastically supported the early development of TWNBQS by providing a meeting space for nonbinary community gatherings, as well as publication support for the What Binary? book project. After two initial meetings at Fembooks in November and December of 2019, TWNBQS launched a crowdfunding campaign for What Binary?, which reached its fundraising goal by April of 2020.
In March of 2020, the Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights (TAPCPR) conducted a 2020 Transgender Human Rights Survey. The survey ultimately gathered a convenience sample of 592 participants from Taiwan’s transgender community, with 134 participants indicating their gender as feieryuan. TAPCPR’s community survey is the best estimation we have of the size of Taiwan’s early nonbinary community in the spring of 2020.
At the time, TWNBQS’s monthly discussion meetings at Fembooks were the only regular nonbinary community gatherings in Taiwan. Nonbinary visibility would increase dramatically after May of 2020 when What Binary? was published as the first and currently only non-binary specific book in Taiwan with an initial printing of 300 copies.[6]
What Binary? was published bilingually in Chinese and English and had a total of thirteen contributors, five of whom were either from the US or had studied abroad in the US. The unpaginated preface of the book offers a definition of non-binary as “Any gender identity that does not fit into the traditional male/female gender framework.”[7] The authors further distinguished nonbinary people from “binary transgender people.” In the group interview that forms the first chapter of the book, one contributor writes that they left Taiwan’s existing transgender community spaces because they were “too binary,” “toxic,” and “traumatizing” in their use of “cis standards” for evaluating the successfulness of whether a trans person passed or not.[8] A group interview contributor from the US further observes that gay and queer people in Taiwan seem to “understand binary trans identities and not grasp nonbinary ones yet.”[9] As a whole, What Binary? articulates nonbinary identity as distinct from the more socially legible yet allegedly toxic category of “binary trans” (二元跨).
The book launch of What Binary? in the summer and fall of 2020 included book reviews, podcast interviews, and multiple book launch events across Taiwan. TWNBQS soon became synonymous with nonbinary activism and the term feieryuan in Taiwan, even attracting some media attention. 2020 as a whole was a period of high organizational activity for TWNBQS that helped to permanently establish feieryuan as common parlance within LGBTQIA+ circles in Taiwan. This peak activity waned in the early spring of 2021, as TWNBQS entered into a phase of diminished activity due to membership changes. Nevertheless, momentum gains from the publication of What Binary? and TWNBQS’s advocacy work helped feieryuan to continue being spread across Taiwan’s LGBTQIA+ communities independent of TWNBQS, with future nonbinary content creators and activists—such as Trif Trans Bar founder Trif Chiu, Instagrammer @goo_li_, Genderless 真的累死 Podcast host Haru, and 莫名其喵 Catfound podcast host Siena—publicly coming into their nonbinary identities by the end of 2021. Furthermore, news of Japanese American singer-songwriter Hikaru Utada (宇多田光) coming out as nonbinary circulated throughout Taiwan’s LGBTQIA+ community in the summer of 2021. Mainstream LGBTQIA+ advocacy groups such as TAPCPR also began incorporating feieryuan into their public messaging on transgender issues in 2021. In late September of 2021, TWNBQS joined TAPCPR’s press conference following the historic court ruling that allowed transgender plaintiff Xiao E to change her legal gender without providing proof of surgery.
By 2022, feieryuan became unavoidable terminology within LGBTQIA+ circles. In early 2022, Shih Hsin University Professor Yi-Chien Chen’s Executive Yuan policy report on legal gender change requirements recommended that feieryuan be added as a third legal gender option, which further consolidated the legitimacy and staying power of this term within transgender legal advocacy. TAPCPR began publishing nonbinary life stories during this time as well. According to a national LGBTI convenience sample survey conducted by the Executive Yuan and Taiwan Equality Campaign that gathered over 13,000 respondents, by the fall of 2022, there were 565 survey respondents who identified as feieryuan. If “nonbinary” is analyzed as an umbrella term for all gender identities that are not exclusively male or female, this figure rises to 1469. From late October of 2022 to late January of 2023, Taiwan Tongzhi (LGBTQ+) Hotline Association conducted a transgender community survey that gathered 832 respondents. Of these respondents, 25% identified as feieryuan.
Whereas the first few years of TWNBQS’s activity from 2019 to 2021 were highly bilingual, owing in part to the transnational composition of TWNBQS’s early membership, from 2022 onwards, feieryuan as a concept was localized into Taiwanese gender diversity discourse and developed independent of TWNBQS. While public messaging using the term feieryuan rarely articulated it in contradistinction to eryuan (二元), or “binary” gender, I began noticing an increase in the colloquial usage of the term eryuankua (二元跨), or “binary trans,” amongst Taiwan’s trans community from approximately 2022 onwards. Interestingly, the “binary” and “nonbinary” distinction that was initially articulated by TWNBQS as a criticism of so-called binary trans sociality has been taken up by precisely those subjects of critique. Transgender community members in Taiwan who use the term “binary trans” to describe themselves have explained to me that they do so simply as a way to state that, while their gender identity is fully male or female, they acknowledge and support the existence of nonbinary gender. In this sense, I would argue that this uptake of “binary trans” by Taiwan’s trans community can be interpreted along the lines of Finn Enke’s observations on the uptake of “cis” as a sign of trans allyship and not as a pejorative label.[10]
Are We All Nonbinary in Taiwan?
Nevertheless, there are certainly members of Taiwan’s transgender community who are critical of nonbinary gender identity. One friend who does not use the term “binary trans” to describe herself once shared with me that she thought feieryuan had become an “identity trashcan”[11] filled with the incoherent hodgepodge of anyone who feels the slightest discomfort at being categorized as a man or woman and thus declares themself to be nonbinary independent of their gender presentation. While this view is certainly in the minority, it raises the question of how we might understand the relationship between nonbinary identity, transition, and transgender politics—which brings me back to Amin.
Amin controversially argues that nonbinary identity has replaced gender transition with self-identification as the primary basis of transgender politics, so much so that “nonbinary identification is ‘valid’ regardless of outward expression.”[12] For Amin, “contemporary gender identity is the apotheosis of the liberal Western fantasy of self-determining ‘autological’ selfhood.”[13] Nonbinary identity represents a deepening of gender identification into psychic interiority and away from “the unchosen genealogical bonds of the social.”[14] It is the sociality of transition rather than the sovereign authenticity of psychic gender, Amin argues, that should be restored as the proper basis of trans politics. While Amin stops short of mocking the category of nonbinary as an “identity trashcan,” it is not a stretch to understand his claim that “nonbinary is not a true social category but rather a vast umbrella with no positive content”[15] as essentially saying the same thing.
But has nonbinary identity really done away with transition altogether? Within Taiwan’s nonbinary community, I have heard and also repeated innumerable times the assurance that nonbinary identification is valid even if someone is functionally passing as a man or woman, such as for nonbinary people whose social circumstances prevent gender experimentation. Discursively, nonbinary identity in Taiwan is indeed fully decoupled from gender transition, as efforts to police the boundaries of what “counts” as being “nonbinary enough” draw immediate criticism by nonbinary community members. Yet this discursive characteristic of nonbinary identity–neat as it may be for polemical writing—does not fully represent how nonbinary people actually live their lives.
In order to better understand the demographic characteristics and gender situation of Taiwan’s nonbinary community, TWNBQS conducted two nonbinary community surveys in 2023 and 2024. Both surveys made use of the broadest definition of nonbinary as possible—anyone whose gender identity was not exclusively male or female. In the 2024 survey, an entire section was devoted to better understanding the various ways that nonbinary people in Taiwan engage (or don’t) in gender transition; 71.78%—the majority of the 372 respondents—reported not being interested in gender-affirming hormone therapy, with only 8.87% currently taking exogenous hormones. 76.61% of respondents assigned male at birth reported that they were uninterested in penectomy, while 92.62% of respondents assigned female at birth reported that they were uninterested in penectomy; a higher proportion of respondents reported being uninterested in vaginoplasty (79.03) and phalloplasty (96.72%). With the exception of 38.93% of respondents assigned female at birth reporting that they were either considering, wanted to get but haven’t, or have already gotten top surgery and 37.90% of respondents assigned male at birth reporting that they were either considering, wanted to get but haven’t, or have already gotten facial feminization surgery, the overwhelming majority of respondents indicated little interest in gender-affirming surgical intervention. Be it through hormones or surgery, Taiwan’s nonbinary community generally does not engage in or desire medical transition.
Yet when it came to gender presentation, only 17.20% of respondents indicated that they did not do any adjustments to their appearance to better align their presentation with their gender identity. Indeed, the majority of respondents reported undergoing some form of gender presentation adjustment, be it 73.88% of respondents assigned female at birth choosing to wear androgynous clothing or 65.32% of respondents assigned male at birth undergoing facial hair removal. While a minority—less than one in five people—of Taiwan’s nonbinary community could be described as the sovereign gender identity strawperson that Amin criticizes, the majority of people are engaged in some form of transition-related activity, be it changes in dress or hairstyle, voice training, hair removal, or binding to name just a few of the more prominent activities. At least in Taiwan, the claim that nonbinary identity has done away with transition is an overstatement.
At first glance, the importation of feieryuan into Taiwan has brought with it many of the discursive features of US nonbinary discourse such as the denigrated definitional other of “binary trans,” as well as an insistence on the primacy and validity of gender self-identification that Amin criticizes. However, the empirical reality of how Taiwan’s trans and nonbinary community have navigated the emergence of nonbinary discourse are not adequately understood through the broader claims of Amin’s polemics. While medical transition is relatively rare amongst nonbinary people in Taiwan, social transition and adjustments to gender presentation remains an important part of how nonbinary people here are living their lives. Furthermore, despite the negative and presentist connotations of its initial articulation in What Binary?, the term “binary trans” has been taken up by Taiwan’s transgender community as a neutral marker of nonbinary allyship. These empirical observations suggest a substantial gap between what is happening on the ground with nonbinary discourse in Taiwan and what is genealogically argued at the conceptual level in Amin’s polemic against nonbinary identity. While there is much to appreciate about Amin’s polemic genealogy, further attention should be paid to how people are actually inhabiting nonbinary (or in this case, feieryuan) as a gender category and its attendant definitional others (such as eryuankua)—lest our critiques of nonbinary identity vis a vis the distinctions of the psychic/social and identity/transition lapse into the dyadic idealization that Amin accuses nonbinary itself of trafficking in.
AUTHOR
Yo-Ling Chen (they/them/他) is a trans nonbinary Taiwanese American writer, translator, activist, and independent scholar based in Taipei. They are a contributing editor at New Bloom Magazine, as well as a founding editor and translator at 酷兒翻越 Queer Margins, which specializes in English-to-Chinese translation of gender and intimacy diversity content. Yo-Ling’s academic research and teaching focuses on the intersections of transgender studies, asexuality studies, and Taiwan studies. Their independent scholarship has been published by Routledge, where they are currently working on a co-edited volume tentatively titled Global Asexualities and Aromanticism. Yo-Ling is a core member of Taiwan Non-binary Queer Sluts, where they conducted both the 2023 and 2024 Taiwan Nonbinary Community Surveys.
NOTES
[1] “我是個剛割完鮑魚的二元跨。”
[2] Kadji Amin, 2022, “We Are All Nonbinary: A Brief History of Accidents,” Representations 158(1): 106-119.
[3] Amin 2022, 114.
[4] “第三欄「不明」的設立亦無助於成長後非二元性別認同與外表的朋友，基於上述說明第5點，建議於法律性別設立第三性X” (page 32 of pdf)
[5] I first met TWNBQS members during an informal gathering in Da’an Park on International Non-binary Day in 2019. At the time, I was based in the United States and attended this event with another Taiwanese American friend. That friend became a core member of TWNBQS until the fall of 2020. By then, I had just relocated to Taiwan. I officially joined TWNBQS as a core member in early 2021 and have been engaged in nonbinary activism with this organization since.
[6] The first printing of What Binary? sold out in October of 2023. An online flip version of the book can be accessed here.
[7] Please note that throughout the book, there is slight variation between the Chinese and English texts. This quote is taken directly from the English text. The Chinese text reads: “非二元性別者是指任何不將自己限制於傳統男女性別框架的人們。”
[8] The English text reads: “I was quite active in the Taiwanese trans community, but I felt the culture was too binary, and that was really toxic to me. A lot of discourses traumatized me, especially when they used cis standards to evaluate the successfulness of a trans person.” The Chinese text reads: “我有一段時間有在台灣的跨性別圈比較活躍，但是我覺得太二元了讓我很創傷。很多言論就是我光是看到我就會覺得很不能接受，尤其很常看到以順性別的標準來衡量一個人是否為成功的跨性別。”
[9] This quote is taken directly from the English text. The Chinese text reads: “我覺得我去過的（台灣的）同志或酷兒空間跟美國類似的地方相比對於我的性別並沒有那麼理解，不過大部分我遇到的同志看起來都蠻支持的。感覺他們比較懂二元跨性別，但是還是沒有很清楚非二元的認同。”
[10] Finn Enke, 2012, “The Education of Little Cis: Cisgender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies,” in Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender or Gender Studies, 60-77.
[11] “認同垃圾桶”
[13] Ibid., 116.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., 117.