Our Mission
Beyond Binary Legal is an organization by and for people who live beyond the gender binary. We help our communities navigate a society built on the assumption of the gender binary and work to facilitate legal and cultural change.
Values
Self-Determination
We value nonbinary people as experts of our own experiences. Following in the footsteps of generations of identity-based movements in history, we recognize the rights of each person to make their own decisions about how to live and move through the world.
Self-determination includes but does not end with our choice of gender markers. In a binary society that requires us to select our gender everywhere--from doctor's offices to gym memberships, adding a nonbinary marker can be liberating for many, but it is often only a small step towards breaking down the harmful social construct of gender as a whole. It does not automatically bring us the dignity, value, and the affirmation needed to exist as our full selves. True self-determination includes embracing individual choices around personal information, bodily integrity, family formation, and more. We seek to counter the widespread, harmful effects of a rigid gender binary in society at large.
Centering Legacies of Resistance and Resilience
As we launch our work, we face a worldwide Pandemic that has highlighted what happens when our leaders value economic growth over the lives of our poor, disabled, queer, transgender, nonbinary, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, our incarcerated, and our immigrant communities. As we launch our work, our communities are uprising against white supremacy and anti-Blackness that has led to the murders and unchecked racialized police brutality against Black people in our community. As we launch our work, racialized and gendered violence combined with transphobia leads to ongoing murders of Black trans femmes. Therefore, we acknowledge that we must learn to effectively address the very supremacy that is built into our systems and in ourselves.
We acknowledge that, as a group, people living beyond the gender binary have many different needs, experiences, and identities. We also recognize that often, people in our communities who have been most marginalized by those in power have the best solutions and often come from legacies of resistance and resilience that can guide us now. Therefore, we embrace and celebrate the complexity of these differences.
We recognize as lawyers and nonprofit professionals with access to education and many other privileges that we must challenge the ways we uphold or maintain systems of harm ourselves, and continue to do so in the everyday decision-making of our work. We recognize that we will not achieve self determination or liberation without racial justice, disability justice, transformative, and economic justice as are all essential for meaningful progress to be possible. Our strategies and policies must reflect this reality.