‘AT the moment, for all that we have ‘they/them’ in our work signatures, it feels impossible to be truly recognised as non-binary,” says Bo, 35, an agender public-sector worker in the Highlands.

For Bo, who took part in a consultation workshop which helped inform the Scottish Government’s non-binary equality action plan, published last year, it feels as though we might have “skipped a step” on the road to achieving “fundamental recognition” for non-binary people.

In the conversations I had with several people around Scotland about what the future holds for those outside the gender binary, it’s clear that legal recognition remains a top priority, along with a need for wider cultural change.

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Despite some positive steps, and a fair amount of “lip service” at the political level, Bo feels there is still a ways to go before people truly accept and understand non-binary gender. “It feels as if people will just see you as what they presume your sex to be, regardless of what you say about how you identify,” they add.

Based on the recent census, and the volume of public discussion surrounding gender identity, it might be time to acknowledge the grey areas.

Census data published last month found that just one in six trans people identified as women, and roughly the same number identified as trans men. The rest identified as non-binary (almost half), in another way such as “genderfluid”, “agender” and “genderqueer” (one in 12), or did not provide details.

This reflects the broad spectrum of gender identity which is typically obscured in much of the media and political discourse around trans people.

Jennie Kermode, a 50-year-old journalist who lives in Paisley and has written books on non-binary people’s experiences, considers themself to be “somewhere in the middle” when it comes to gender.

However, Jennie stresses that “not everybody who describes themselves as non-binary is in the middle – some people will be quite feminine or quite masculine, and it’s not necessarily something people present in the way look”.

“A lot of non-binary people are very conscious of breaking down stereotypes and don’t feel they should have to express their gender by dressing in a certain way or whatever,” Jennie explains. This, they suggest, is something which many people, trans or not, might welcome “if there weren’t so much pressure attached around gender”.

Nonetheless, Jennie adds, many people are “just as certain in their identity as non-binary people” as those who identify as men or women, which makes recognising and respecting these identities vital.

Vic Valentine, manager of Scottish Trans, and a non-binary person themself, says they are “not surprised to see that so many of the trans people answering the question on the census are non-binary”.

In fact, Vic says the data aligns with the organisation’s “experience of talking to and working with trans people across the country”, and underlines the need for greater understanding – particularly amongst public services – of “who non-binary people are and what we might need to make sure we’re treated fairly and equally”.

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Ellie*, a multiply disabled, non-binary parent living in Inverness, says that ensuring service providers are “not just knowledgeable, but also empathetic and compassionate” is essential.

“I’ve taken my child, who is also non-binary, to the doctors’ office, and when I clarified – because they kept misgendering my child – the doctor said ‘oh is the kid non-binary? Is that your choice or is that their choice?’. Now I’m aware that this doctor in particular is not a safe place for future medical conversations,” Ellie says.

This kind of “pushback” is something they’ve had to deal with frequently, for example, when asking services not to classify them as Miss or Mr. “I don’t really go out now because I don’t want to have those conversations”, Ellie adds.

In order to address this, Ellie feels that adequate training and policies on respecting service users’ identities will have to be mandated in a similar way to anti-discrimination law.

“It needs to be enforced, and that does have to start at the government level, because as we’ve seen with Covid if you say ‘wear masks’ there’s a high compliance rate, if you say ‘don’t worry about it anymore’, it all goes away,” they argue. “That’s just how humans are.”

A commitment to making public services work better for non-binary people lies at the heart of the Scottish Government’s five-year plan, informed by the recommendations of its non-binary working group.

This includes actions around improving healthcare, inclusion in schools and children’s services, the removal of unnecessary gender markers from identity documents, recording data on non-binary people, and researching how legal recognition of non-binary people could work.

Legal recognition was, in many ways, the driving force behind the creation of the working group back in 2021, because the Government had concluded it did not hold sufficient evidence to include this within its gender recognition reform legislation.

Now, Bo says the uncertainty about when and if this will happen makes it feel as if “non-binary rights are being left behind”. While they still hope to see the Act – which was blocked by the UK Government last January – come into force, Bo feels that by limiting its scope to trans men and women, the Scottish Government sidestepped a broader interrogation of the gender binary.

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“If you can keep binary gender intact, and you can keep non-binary people intensely minoritised, you don’t need to address the issue of sex and gender being fundamentally different things,” Bo explains.

The census data, in Bo’s view, offers a challenge to the societal tendency to “categorise people” and “erase” those who fall outside the lines. In Bo’s eyes, legal recognition of non-binary gender is the “trunk of the tree that everything else comes from”, with an understanding that gender is diverse and “not biologically determined”.

Despite the setbacks to reform, Jennie has hope that non-binary recognition will be considered in the “next parliament”, alongside wider progress on accepting non-binary identities.

‘I’m reasonably optimistic,” Jennie says, adding that they were “very happy that – despite everything – the SNP government has been positive about moving things forward”.

In Jennie’s view, Labour’s return to dominance in Scotland and the strong potential for a Labour government at Holyrood in 2026 poses “more of a risk”, because there are “a higher proportion of people who are quite hostile” in the party to “any kind of gender variation”.

However, Jennie has hope that by spending the next year or two working to show people that trans people “just want to get on with our lives”, progress can continue.

All things considered, Jennie says, “public support is vastly better” than they “ever thought it could be” back when they first came out 23 years ago.

For Ellie's part, they try to be “temperate” in their hope for government action, particularly since they took part in the Scottish Government’s Covid-19 recovery group and felt as though the disabled people contributing to it had “wasted a year of our lives”.

That being said, having grown up in England before moving to the United States for 20 years, Ellie says the fact that the Government is even “listening” to non-binary people is “a nice change”.

“That’s why I moved here rather than England – because of the Scottish Government’s progressivism, so I do have faith that things will get better,” they explain.

This cautious optimism is based in a belief that “Scotland does the right thing”, Ellie says. “It might not immediately come out guns a-blazing, putting things to rights in terms of how non-binary people can expect to be treated, but I think it’s one of the things it will get right.”

*Name has been changed to protect anonymity