Binnie was a columnist at
Maximum Rocknroll magazine for 9 years. Her early writing appeared in two
zines she self-published, ''The Fact That It's Funny Doesn't Make It A Joke
and Stereotype Threat''. While living in Oakland after 2007, Binnie was so tired of explaining to
cisgender people why they shouldn't call trans people the slur "
trannies" that she created a zine compiling three trans writers' arguments against the slur. She kept copies in her purse to share with people who used the word. She also discovered books during this time that would influence her later writing:
This Bridge Called My Back, edited by
Cherríe Moraga and
Gloria E. Anzaldúa, works by
Dennis Cooper and
Junot Díaz, and
Joanna Russ' essay "What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write". Some people credit
Nevada as the first novel in a modern wave of
trans literature. Katherine Cross identifies authors like Binnie,
Casey Plett,
Janet Mock, and
Ryka Aoki as the vanguard of trans women authors who created a new tradition of unapologetic, dark and authentic trans narratives. These works tend to discard prior tropes about trans people that were usually employed in works for
cisgender audiences, and instead the works showcase the personal experience of being trans and the impacts of
transmisogyny. At the
26th Lambda Literary Awards in 2014,
Nevada was a finalist for the
Transgender Fiction category, and Binnie won both the
Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and the MOTHA award for "outstanding contribution to the transgender cultural landscape." In 2021,
Picador signed
Nevada for publication in the UK for the first time, citing it as a "genuinely ground-breaking book, which has trenchant and inspired things to say about the trans experience". This same year, MCD announced it would reissue the book for wider distribution than the original run.
Short stories Binnie has published several short stories, including "Gamers", in
Meanwhile, Elsewhere (Topside Press, 2017) and "I Met a Girl Named Bat Who Met Jeffrey Palmer" published in the Lambda Award winning collection,
The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (Topside Press, 2012). An essay by Binnie is featured in
Videogames for Humans (
Instar, 2017). In much of Binnie's writing, her characters are not explicitly labeled as trans at the beginning of the story, which lets her explore how readers of art forms interpret stories through their own experiences. The unpublished short story "If You Leave" is a retelling of Andie Walsh's story from the film
Pretty in Pink, casting Walsh as a
punk rock trans girl who overcomes class and gender prejudices to find love. Andrew J. Young cites this short story as an example of a technique that trans and
queer people use to read mainstream works through a queer lens. The technique has a long tradition because mainstream works frequently have not depicted or prioritized a queer audience. In 2020, she was a script writer for
Council of Dads, an American TV drama which premiered on
NBC. She wrote the May 28, 2020, fifth episode "
Tradition!" Most recently, Binnie co-wrote and was the executive story editor for teen drama
Cruel Summer. In May 2022, Binnie appeared on the podcast
Gender Reveal, hosted by Tuck Woodstock. ==Personal life==