In modern day society, binary perception of sex and gender has long been challenged. People of non-binary identities, such as transgender and intersex people, are a prime example of the complexity of ways of human recognition. In the usual surface-level sense, people tend to perceive sex and gender through the established gender roles associated with the two sexes. However, frequently people’s behavior transcends the assumably logical imperatives that demands to be in line with the conventional gender roles. Thinking about sex and gender within the framework of conventional male-female dichotomy creates a strictly binary perception of the whole gender spectrum.
Binary thinking of sex and gender is being challenged by the aforementioned transgender and intersex people, as they do not coincide with the medically perceived gender dichotomy based on their primary or secondary sexual characteristics. Thus, they cannot be recognized as the representatives of the any of the traditionally recognized categories “men” and “women” and are outside of these categories. Therefore, the reduction of the sexes and genders to the conventional dichotomy is a distorted perception of humans’ biological and social diversity. Biological in the case of intersex people, and psychological in the case of transgenders, mismatch to the conventional binary sexes and gender, suggests that male-female dichotomy is socially constructed and is not conditioned by nature.
However, it is important to remember that conventional binary perception of sexes stretches onto the majority of social relations, and in many ways forms them. Case in point, the division of professional fields into traditionally male and female conditions further stereotyping and discrimination of people based on their sex and gender. It can lead to a misinterpretation of cause-and-effect processes and erroneously attribute certain causes and effects to certain genders. For instance, the notion that social work is an occupation for women, and military service is strictly for men reinforces the gender stereotyping and conditions repetitions of certain patterns and discrimination within these professional fields. Binary thinking reduces a person who is a complex being to a narrow range of characteristics associated with their gender and restrains free self-expression, which, in turn, impoverishes social relations.