‘Every snowflake is different, and every person is different’: ethical nonbinary futures beyond gender

This paper outlines the ways that 32 (so-called) 'Australian' nonbinary people imagine gender utopia. For this group of nonbinary people, most imagined a gender utopia to be one where gender as a form of social categorization and stratification was either no longer a feature, or less of a defining feature of selves, relationality or society. This perspective is at odds with a rising number of critics who suggest that nonbinary is collapsing into an individualized, normative identity category that reifies the binary and/or gender itself. While there was some diversity on the ontological level of gender's nature and possibilities, almost all participants shared a collectivist ethico-political impulse of freedom, both for oneself and for others. We argue that this can be read through Nicholas's concept of queer post-gender ethics and the nonbinary and/or queer ethics proposed by a small number of thinkers who see it as having transformative and radical potential. Significantly, most participants privileged enabling relationality over individualized identity as a site of commonality and demonstrated that nonbinary is often being conceptualized by its proponents as a site of political coalition.