2025/10/16 by Stef Rozitis · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Gender Roles and Identity Studies #Gender Diversity and Inequality #Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
paper · doi:10.1080/14681366.2025.2573403
openalex publication_date 2025/10/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Being non-binary is not a third box to tick. Rather, it is an ambivalence, a refusal to be categorised. Researchers in education continue to bracket out the non-binary, and to continue as if people were binary even though vulnerability of students who don’t fit the binary requires us to develop ways of working with minoritarian and becoming genders. Such an aim must be balanced with care not to add to the disproportionate resilience burden placed on trans and non-binary young people. I use autoethnography, analysing journal writing and poetry of a time when I was struggling to articulate my gender positionality as an AFAB, non-binary teacher and researcher. This allows me to think through visceral responses, difficulty finding language and the seemingly impossible contradictions of my positionality and how these may be useful for others. My non-binary identity, while often invisibilised, is a smooth space in contrast to the suffering of being read as an imposed gender that has never fit. Trans and non-binary young people do not need us to solve the answer of what or even who they are but to engage in self-questioning in a way that elbows out a space for them to exist without explanation.