Performing Beyond the Binary: Self-Presentation, Power & Nonbinary Identity
What does it mean to “perform” gender when your identity isn’t even recognised by the script?
For nonbinary people, the idea of performance isn’t abstract, it’s a daily reality. From the way we dress to how we speak, move, and navigate the world, our gender expression is often interpreted, challenged, or erased. We’re asked to explain ourselves, justify our existence, and make our identities legible in systems built for binaries.
Sociologist Erving Goffman once wrote that everyday life is like a stage, we’re all performers managing how we’re perceived by an audience. And while he wasn’t talking about gender identity explicitly, his ideas resonate deeply for many queer and nonbinary people. Every interaction can feel like a negotiation. Every outfit is a decision. Every new space is an audition for safety, belonging, or simply being understood.
But where Goffman saw the performance as strategic, for us, it’s often survival. And yet, it’s also something more: a space for power, play, and euphoria. A way of becoming ourselves, even when the world tries to tell us who we should be.
In this post, we’re unpacking what it means to perform gender as a nonbinary person. How we shape our identities, challenge expectations, and reclaim performance not as a pretence, but as a possibility.
What Goffman Got Right (and What He Missed)
In his work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman argued that we’re all performers. Every social interaction, he said, involves a kind of staging. There’s a “front stage” where we curate how we want to be seen and a “backstage” where we can relax or regroup. We adapt our behaviour depending on the audience and context, carefully managing impressions to navigate everyday life.
For nonbinary people, this idea hits close to home. We’re constantly managing how others see us, whether we want to or not. We fine-tune our tone of voice, our body language, and our wardrobe, because we know the stakes of being misread. Sometimes it’s for safety. Sometimes it’s for validation. Sometimes, it’s just to get through the day without questions.
But here’s where Goffman falls short: he doesn’t reckon with power. He doesn’t ask who gets to perform without question and who’s forced to. He doesn’t examine how structural forces like transphobia, cissexism, or racism shape which performances are seen as credible, safe, or even real. His stage assumes a level playing field. For nonbinary people, the stage is often rigged.
Goffman also treats performance as a strategy; something chosen. But for many of us, performance is survival. It’s not about manipulating an audience for effect. It’s about being seen enough to be safe, while still trying to be true to ourselves.
His work still offers value. It gives us a language to talk about how we present ourselves, how we’re interpreted, and how much energy it takes to maintain appearances. But for nonbinary people, we need to take those ideas further and ask what happens when your identity doesn’t fit the script, and you have to write your part in a play that wasn’t made for you.
The Nonbinary Experience of Performance
For nonbinary people, performance isn’t just about social polish or putting on a good face, it’s about navigating a world that often demands clarity where there is none. Most systems are built on the assumption that everyone is either male or female. So when you don’t fit neatly into either box, every day becomes a series of micro-negotiations.
It can look like choosing which bathroom is safest, not just the most accurate. It’s correcting someone on your pronouns—again—and weighing the risk before you do. Not only that, but it’s deciding whether to bind, pad, shave, paint, or cover, depending on who you’ll see and how much energy you have to explain yourself.
Performance, in this sense, becomes a toolkit for survival. It’s not always about expression, it’s about control. The control to steer how others read you. The control to reclaim power in a conversation where you're already marginalised. The control to decide who gets access to your truth and when.
But it’s not just about defence. There’s also power and intentionality in how we perform nonbinary identity. We aren’t just reacting to the binary, but we’re building something outside of it. In queer spaces, especially, performance can become a celebration of fluidity. A way to exaggerate gender, blur it, and remix it. A way to create art out of identity.
Still, the emotional labour of shifting roles from one space to another, code-switching between your queer friends, your workplace, and your family, all takes its toll. There’s a kind of fatigue that builds when you’re constantly managing how others see you, just to avoid being misunderstood or harmed.
But we do it anyway. Because visibility can be powerful. Because expression can be healing. Because even in a system that demands we pick a side, we know that our performance isn’t a lie; it’s a truth too complex for the stage we’ve been given.
Visibility, Legibility, and the Risk of Misinterpretation
Visibility is a double-edged sword. On one hand, being seen can feel like freedom. On the other, it can feel like exposure. For nonbinary people, simply existing in public often becomes a kind of performance that’s constantly being interpreted by others through a binary lens.
This is where anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s idea of interpretation becomes especially relevant. He argued that all social understanding is filtered through culture; what seems obvious to one person might carry a completely different meaning to another. That’s the danger for nonbinary folks: you can present your truth with care and clarity, but people will still project their assumptions onto you.
To a stranger, your oversized hoodie and painted nails might register as “feminine.” Your deep voice might cancel out your lipstick. Your short hair might be read as “masculine” no matter how you feel inside. The world is full of filters, and most of them weren’t designed to see us.
That means nonbinary performance often gets flattened, misunderstood, or erased. We’re seen as confused, trendy, rebellious, or just androgynous. Anything but legitimate. Sometimes, people try to slot us into the “closest” binary category just to feel comfortable. Other times, they refuse to engage at all.
Worse still, visibility can come with real risk. For many nonbinary people especially those who are Black, brown, disabled, visibly queer, or visibly trans being read as “non-normative” can lead to violence or exclusion. So, we learn to curate our presentation carefully, gauging how much to reveal, and where.
Legibility isn’t just about being understood. It’s about being allowed to exist without threat. That’s the painful paradox: you want to be seen as yourself, but you often have to filter yourself to be seen at all.
Authenticity Is a Trap: Why ‘Realness’ Is Overrated
Nonbinary people are often pressured to prove we’re “real.” Real enough to be respected. Real enough to be believed. Real enough to check a box, to get healthcare, to be included in the conversation. But what does real even mean in a world that refuses to recognise us on our terms?
The idea of authenticity can become a trap. It implies there’s one true version of ourselves buried under the performance; something fixed, coherent, and legible. But for many nonbinary people, our truth is in the fluidity. We don’t have one final form. Our gender isn’t something we find, it’s something we create, shift, undo, and remake over time.
This is where Goffman’s theory misses the mark again. He implies that there’s a “real” self behind the mask, a backstage version that reveals who we truly are when no one’s watching. But what if the self isn’t behind the performance but within it? What if performing gender isn’t hiding, what if it’s how we become?
When cis people say things like “just be yourself,” they usually mean “be consistent,” or “be easy to understand.” But nonbinary people know that authenticity doesn’t always look like clarity. It can look like a contradiction. Like change. Like deliberate incoherence in a world that demands simplicity.
That’s why “realness” is overrated. We’re not here to perform cis comfort or cultural clarity. We’re here to live in the truth of our bodies, our aesthetics, our desires whether they make sense to anyone else.
You don’t owe anyone consistency. You don’t have to be the same person every day. Your performance isn’t proof, it’s power. And it’s yours to shape.
Queer Joy in the Act of Becoming
Performance isn’t always about defence or survival. Sometimes, it’s about joy, about feeling alive in your body and taking pleasure in how you show up. For nonbinary people, performance can be a sacred act of becoming. It’s where experimentation meets euphoria.
Whether it’s the satisfaction of putting on a perfectly genderfuck outfit, the thrill of switching up pronouns for the first time, or the deep calm of being called “they” in a room that just gets it; these moments are more than affirming. They’re electrifying. They remind us that gender isn’t just a struggle. It’s also a playground.
This is where queer performance diverges from Goffman’s theory. While he focuses on managing impressions, queer performance is just as much about expression for ourselves, not just others. We try on looks, voices, and vibes not because we’re confused, but because we’re curious. We’re chasing what feels right, even if we can’t explain it yet.
And this act of becoming isn’t solitary. It’s collective. We learn from each other. We see someone online wearing the thing we thought only existed in our imagination, and suddenly it’s possible. We mirror one another, remix our influences, and birth new aesthetics that don’t fit the binary at all.
Queer joy is found in these everyday rebellions. In choosing what to wear, not for safety, but for celebration. In moving through the world with the audacity to be unrecognisable. In embracing our transience, our changeability, our refusal to be pinned down.
Becoming is a process, and that’s a gift. It means we’re never stuck, never finished, and never alone.
Performing Ourselves Into the Future
For nonbinary people, performance isn’t about pretending but about becoming. In a world that often demands we simplify ourselves to be seen, we continue to show up in all our complexity. We adapt, we resist, we play, and we build lives that make space for truth even when that truth shifts over time.
Goffman helped us see that identity is shaped by relationships. That we’re always performing, always negotiating how we’re read. But what he didn’t see is that performance can also be liberation. For those of us outside the binary, it’s about rewriting the script.
We are not “in between.” We are beyond. Beyond static roles, beyond forced clarity, beyond the idea that you have to perform gender “correctly” to deserve safety or respect.
Our performances are not deceptions. They’re declarations.
To be nonbinary is to move through a world not built for you and still find ways to shine. To laugh. To rest. To choose how you want to be seen, or not seen at all. It’s not about being real in the eyes of others. It’s about being real to yourself.
So whether you’re femme, masc, neither, both, or just vibing—your performance is valid. Your becoming is brave. And your future? That’s a stage you get to design.
Your Turn
How do you navigate gender performance in your own life? What parts of your identity feel most you, even if they don’t fit expectations?
Drop a comment below, share your story, or tag us on social @enbymeaning with your look, your feelings, or your favourite gender euphoria moment. Let’s make space for all the ways we perform, resist, and become together.
✨ You’re not alone. You’re not too much. You’re exactly enough.
