- In short: Tasmanian art gallery Mona has hung artworks by Pablo Picasso in a female toilet cubicle in response to a failed court bid to exclude men from a women-only art installation.
- In April, a court ruling found Mona discriminated when it refused a New South Wales man entry to its Ladies Lounge.
- What’s next? Mona curator Kirsha Kaechele is appealing the discrimination ruling in the Supreme Court.
You know, in Australia, there’s men’s only homeless shelters and women’s only homeless shelters, but no nonbinary only homeless shelters. And of the mixed gender homeless shelters, very few of them have a designated space for nonbinary people or people of all genders. If you’re nonbinary and homeless, chances are you either live on the street, or in a men’s section or a women’s section. Now, given the issues nonbinary youth tend to suffer with transphobic parents, I daresay nonbinary people are one of the groups most in need of homeless shelters. Some homeless shelters have a mixed gender space, and that’s the right way to do it. This is more common with shelters that house families as well as individuals.
Speaking of, recent studies show that nonbinary people are more common than both trans men and trans women. As societal gender issues literacy increases, the number of nonbinary-identifying people just goes up and up, and it’s showing no sign of slowing down. Given that there are a billion nonbinary genders and only two binary genders, I wouldn’t be surprised if the current gender revolution ends up with most people nonbinary. Nobody fits the ideals of masculinity or femininity perfectly, and there’s more and more young people opting out of the binary entirely, even if they’re the kind of people who could have gone their whole lives being happy with their assigned gender in the old world.
That would be good. Non binary was rare among the queer community when I was a teen. Already, friends have asked me to chat with their kids who are coming out. I don’t have much to say, they’re more onto it than I ever was. I was surprised by the number until you mentioned it’s more common now
There’s plenty of people who think binary gender is just a phase humanity briefly went through. They think there’ll be no such thing as men or women within two hundred years.
I can say with certainty that there are no binary babies, because babies don’t have gender. Gender starts developing at 2-3, solidifies at 4, morphs to its adult form at puberty, and continues developing either until 25 or until death. There’s no such thing as a baby boy or a baby girl, and it’s barely even fair to call a toddler a boy or a girl. In a few generations, gendering babies will be seen as barbaric, the same way many people see circumcision or female genital mutilation today. Children will choose their own pronouns when they’re old enough to talk, and it’ll be they/them or it/its until then.