The Complexity of Navigating Feminism as a Nonbinary Person*: Interpellation, History, Power, and the Work of Holding Contradiction

*Note that the author recognises many of the ideas put forward apply to a number of gender identities, however, the author is writing from their own personal experience as a non binary, AFAB lesbian 

To navigate feminism as a nonbinary, AFAB person is to live inside a highly complex and nuanced conversation that began long before you were born, and that often speaks about you before it speaks with you. 

To be a nonbinary, AFAB, feminist is to feel gratitude to the movement that named misogyny and carved out rights for us; however, at the same time it is to feel, at times, unsettled by how that same movement addresses you, how places you in a neat box when it says ‘woman’. 

The French philosopher Louis Althusser described ideology as a force that ‘hails’ individuals into subject positions, a process he called interpellation. When you are addressed, “Hey, you!”, and you turn around, you become the subject of that call. You recognize yourself in the category that has been spoken. 

Gender is one of the most powerful sites of interpellation. From infancy, those assigned female at birth are hailed into girlhood through clothing, tone of voice, warnings about safety, expectations of softness, and assumptions of heterosexuality. Later, we are hailed into womanhood as future wives, mothers, caretakers, or objects of male desire. 

Even feminism itself hails subjects when is says, ‘Women deserve equality.’ When that call resonates, it can be electrifying; but what happens when it partially resonates? When you have been shaped by misogyny, disciplined by girlhood, harmed by patriarchy, and yet do not identify with the category of ‘woman’? 

This is the paradox that AFAB nonbinary feminists inhabit. We are both inside and slightly misaligned with feminism’s foundational category, as we are addressed, repeatedly, as women. We experience the structural consequences of that categorization, and yet our experience of gender does not sit within that word. 

To explore this complexity requires history, queer theory, feminist theory, and personal reckoning. It requires asking not only what feminism is, but how it interpellates its subjects, and what happens when those subjects do not fully recognize themselves in the mirror it holds up. 

The Political Necessity and Instability of ‘Woman’ 

Feminism as a modern political movement required a coherent subject, with the category ‘woman’ serving that function. Without a coherent subject, collective organisation against sex-based oppression would have lacked focus. 

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir articulated a foundational paradox- ‘woman’ is not an innate essence but a social condition. “One is not born, but becomes, a woman”-  a phrase that has reverberated through decades of gender theory. De Beauvoir’s insight destabilized biological determinism while preserving the political urgency of women’s oppression. 

Similarly, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique named the structural dissatisfaction of suburban housewives constrained by domestic ideology. Feminism in this era mobilized around reproductive autonomy, employment discrimination, sexual violence, and marital inequality- all framed as systemic harms directed at women as a class. 

The coherence of ‘woman’ as a category enabled important legal reform such as anti-discrimination statutes, reproductive rights, and workplace protections. These reforms rely on recognizing sex-based inequality, and the political traction necessary required definitional clarity. 

Yet that clarity was never absolute. Black feminists, including Bell Hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), critiqued white feminism’s universalizing tendencies, while Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality demonstrated that ‘woman’ is lived differently across race, class, disability, and nationality. The category of woman has always been more fractured than the early feminist rhetoric suggested. 

Nonbinary AFAB people enter a feminist tradition already marked by contestation. Our existence does not introduce instability; but rather reveals the instability that was always present. 

Interpellation and the Gendered Subject 

Interpellation offers a framework for understanding why the category ‘woman’ can feel simultaneously accurate and misaligned. 

From early childhood, AFAB individuals are hailed into gendered norms, with both subtle and overt expectations being placed on us.  We are praised for being ‘pretty’, reprimand for being ‘bossy’, warned about male danger, and pressured to be agreeable. These repeated calls construct a subject who recognizes themself as female within a patriarchal order. 

Importantly, interpellation does not require consent. You are called regardless of whether you wish to answer. The school dress code, the bathroom sign, the medical intake form- each calls you into womanhood. 

For those who eventually identify as nonbinary, this history does not evaporate. You may resist the call internally, reinterpret it, or reject it outright; but the social world continues to address and treat you as female. 

Feminism, too, often interpellates. When a speaker addresses ‘women in this room’, AFAB nonbinary individuals may feel the tug of recognition while simultaneously feeling the friction of misidentification.  

“Yes, misogyny has shaped me. No, I am not exactly who you are naming.” 

Lesbian History: Gender Variance Within the XX Sex 

Lesbian communities have long destabilized normative womanhood from within. In mid-twentieth-century bar cultures, butch and femme identities created gendered performances that did not conform to mainstream femininity, with butch lesbians in particular embodying forms of masculinity that unsettled binary expectations. 

Lesbian feminism intensified this challenge to patriarchal gender norms, while being largely rejected by the early feminist movement. Adrienne Rich’s articulation of compulsory heterosexuality reframed lesbian existence as political defiance, and sapphic desire disrupted patriarchy’s assumption that you were either a man or a woman, and that women’s bodies and emotional labor belong to men. 

Even in modern sapphic spaces debates about trans and non-binary inclusion and the meaning of lesbian identity have surfaced repeatedly. When nonbinary AFAB individuals identify as lesbian, some interpret this as conceptual incoherence- how can one be nonbinary and align with a category historically defined as “women loving women”? 

Yet historical evidence suggests that lesbian identity has always encompassed gender variance. The attempt to freeze lesbian into a strictly woman-centered identity risks erasing its own complex past. 

For many nonbinary lesbians, ‘lesbian’ names not only desire but history, culture, and resistance. It situates us within a lineage of people who defied compulsory heterosexuality and normative gender performance, even if their language surrounding gender differed. 

Queer Theory: Deconstructing and Rebuilding Categories 

The advent of queer theory as a distinct academic field in the 90’s deepened the critique of stable identity categories. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argued that gender is performative, something that is constituted through repeated acts governed by social norms. Gender coherence is an effect of regulation, not an expression of innate truth. 

To some, Butler’s work has been interpreted as threatening feminism’s political foundation. If ‘woman’ is unstable, how can feminism organise and who is it even representing?  If feminism doesn’t just represent women and femininity, then what? 

Yet Butler did not deny material oppression. Rather, she argued that categories are shaped by power and thus always partial. The challenge is not to abandon categories but to recognize their contingency. 

For nonbinary AFAB people, queer theory articulates lived experience. It provides conceptual space to say that one’s internal sense of gender does not fully align with womanhood, even while acknowledging that misogyny targets bodies read as belonging to the category ‘woman’. 

The task given to feminism is to prevent the collapse of identity into biology, and to affirm gender diversity without erasing sex-based realities.  It must recognise the intersectional nature required of feminism if misogyny and its codependent structures are to be challenged. 

Misogyny and Misrecognition: Living the Double Bind 

The lived experience of nonbinary AFAB people often involves a double bind. On one hand, patriarchal systems operate based on perceived sex. We suffer street harassment, reproductive control, workplace discrimination, and gender-based violence, with the added layers of being perceived as a unique kind of threat to patriarchal power structures because we aren’t women. 

We need feminism, and yet persistent categorization as women erases our identity. Feminist spaces may assume shared identification, leaving little room for nuance, and ignoring the way our gender creates a different experience of misogyny.   

This produces a unique form of minority stress, as we can be hyper-visible as biologically female in hostile environments, but invisible as nonbinary in supportive ones. Each space interpellates differently, demanding constant recalibration. 

Psychological research on identity invalidation indicates that chronic misrecognition correlates with anxiety, depression, and internalized doubt. The emotional labor of explaining oneself repeatedly can be exhausting. 

Leaving a High-Control Religious Community: Interpellation Intensified 

My own departure from a high-control religious community intensified my awareness of interpellation. I grew up in an environment where gender was divinely mandated- there was no choice but to live as a cisgender, heterosexual woman. 

The religious community I was part of functioned as an apparatus of ideological enforcement. Sermons, modesty codes, and expectations of living as a ‘traditional woman’ all hailed me into a narrowly defined womanhood.  

Leaving required not only rejecting doctrine but reconstructing selfhood. Feminism offered language for patriarchal critique, and queer theory offered language for gender complexity. Unfortunately though, the emotional residue of years spent answering to ‘woman’ as defined by theology lingered. 

When I became involved in feminist spaces that said ‘women’ in ways that assumed uncomplicated identification, I felt both solidarity and dissonance. The call was different, emancipatory rather than oppressive, yet it still presumed knowledge of who I am, and placed me into a box defined by others- a box defined by western patriarchy many centuries ago. 

While I was relieved to finally escape the strict enforcement of traditional womanhood, I saw and understood the way that some streams of feminism are rooted in misogyny through their conflation of gender with sex.   

Patriarchy requires rigid understanding of gender and sex in order to maintain its power structure, and to label every person who needs feminism as ‘woman’ plays into this. 

Socialization Without Determinism 

Discussions of female socialization often polarize debate. A nuanced approach acknowledges that AFAB individuals are frequently raised under specific gendered expectations shaped by patriarchy; however, socialization is neither uniform nor deterministic. 

Some internalize norms while some resist them, and many do both at the same time. Race, class, disability, culture, and religion change individual experience. 

Interpellation clarifies that being hailed does not guarantee compliance.  Nonbinary AFAB people often inhabit a history of partial compliance and persistent resistance; recognising that structural patterns need not erase agency. It is important to analyze power without flattening individual experience. 

Boundary Anxiety and Feminist Evolution 

Social movements evolve through contestation, and boundary disputes signal change. Some parts of the feminist movement fear that expanding gender categories undermines sex-based protections, or may erase women-centered spaces; while nonbinary individuals fear exclusion and delegitimization. 

These fears reflect real stakes, but it’s important to remember that movements survive by adapting, not by fossilizing. 

An interpellation-conscious feminism would examine how it constructs its subjects. It would ask, ‘who is being called when we say “women”? Who hears that call? Who feels misaligned? Who needs feminism?’ 

Evolution of the movement does not weaken feminism, but rather strengthens it. 

The patriarchy demands a rigid view of biological sex and the gender binary to maintain dominance.  Patriarchy demands the subordination of women to men, and therefore requires a strict understanding of who is a woman and who is a man, in order to determine who belongs in the dominant/man category, and who belongs in the submissive/woman category. 

The gender diverse and feminist communities both share a vested interest in dismantling this idea, and as such the evolution of the feminist movement to include more non-male people is incredibly important. 

Holding the Tension 

To navigate feminism as a nonbinary, AFAB person is to hold tension rather than resolve it. It means accepting that one can be shaped and hurt by misogyny without identifying as a woman, and it is to participate in the richness of gender rebellion and variance in queer history while expanding its language. 

Interpellation teaches us that ideology calls us into being, but we are not passive recipients. We can reinterpret the call. We can answer partially. We can refuse. 

Feminism has always evolved through discomfort, and the presence of nonbinary AFAB people within feminist discourse does not signal incoherence. It signals a living movement grappling with the complexity of gender in the twenty-first century. 

Complexity is not contradiction, but rather evidence that we are thinking carefully about power, identity, and belonging. 

And perhaps that careful thinking, that willingness to inhabit nuance rather than flee from it, is itself a feminist act.