Why Nonbinary Genders Aren’t Real
They have no basis in science, they’re purely political. People say this as a joke, but they really did start on this site. It started as a way for millenials who grew up with their parents telling them they’re special. Now this need to be special has leaked into their adult lives. We have child adults identifying as these abstract genders as a way to be unique. It’s also harmful to REAL trans people. Ones who actually have gender dysphoria, got diagnosed by a doctor, uprooted their entire lives to transition. It makes it seem like all that is just a fashion statement, a trend. If you want to identify as one of these abstract genders, by all means, do so. Just don’t expect people to take you seriously, and don’t call yourself trans.
Also dont lie to your doctor about being non binary so you can get on HRT there is a reason its harder to get on it if your not trans bc funnily enought it isnt essential to u its cosmetic, SO STOP LYING TO UR DOCTORS N PRETENDING TO JUSY BE FTMS TO GEY ON T THE SYSTEM IS TRANSPHOBIC UR JUST A TWAT THAT WANTS TO BE SPECIAL N ITS TRYING TO PROTECT U FEOM FUCKING URSELF UP
Uh NBs lie because we NEED hormones but won’t get them unless we lie, why the fuck are you mad at us for that?
OP needs to read up on the colonial origins of the modern gender binary so maybe his bigoted historical revisionism can be a bit less racist next time, and kiss my actual, diagnosed, on-HRT-and-fundraising-for-surgery, uprooted-my-entire-life-to-transition genderfuck ass.
OP needs to fuck off to hell, but if we’re suggesting reading material for the trip, these utter walnuts might enjoy:
– Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come
the fucking SEMINAL piece that genderqueer activist Les Feinberg published in goddamn 1992, which was what made the word transgender popular for the first time. AS AN UMBRELLA TERM THAT INCLUDED BOTH BINARY AND NONBINARY PEOPLE.
WHICH IS WHAT IT STILL MEANS, IF YOU LOOK AT THE DEFINITION GIVEN ON LITERALLY ANY TRANS ORGANIZATION’S WEBSITE.
They could read all kinds of trans history and activist works by Feinberg. They could read anything by Kate Bornstein, the NONBINARY trans activist who has been writing and educating people about this stuff since the 90s too.
They could read anything by Riki Anne Wilchins, a genderqueer activist who transitioned 40 years ago, started the Transexual Menace activist group around 25 years ago – which they definitely haven’t heard about – and Hermaphrodites With Attitude, which might have been the first intersex activist group? – and founded GenderPAC, one of the strongest trans nonprofits, and was named one of TIME Magazine’s Top 100 Civic Innovators for the 21st Century. Oh yeah, AND started Camp Trans, the camp that protested outside of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival for years.
(Honestly, almost all the progress we’ve had politically in the US probably stems from the work of nonbinary trans people. I can’t think of a good counterexample, other than maybe now Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, who are both really strong advocates for nonbinary trans people?)
They could read literally any anthology of trans writing from the last 20 years, all of which will have authors identifying as genderqueer.
Fucking hell, I started a listserv (it was like a yahoo group before there were yahoo groups) for genderqueer people 20 years ago. I know somebody who still has the archives of it, if these yahoos would like to read that.
Even The Advocate, which was still doing things like polling cis gay folks about whether trans people should be included in the movement, was talking about genderqueer people in 1999. There were movies about and by us in queer film festivals like Frameline. There was an anthology specifically of genderqueer writing in 2002. This post has a LOT more examples: http://genderqueerid.com/gqhistory
Maybe they mean the word “nonbinary” itself, the you-can-say-it-in-front-of-your-mom version of “genderqueer,” was invented on Tumblr?
I can’t find anything on who coined it in a quick Google search, but i also don’t fucking care, so there’s that.
Oh, you know what else they could read?
– The “Center of Excellence for Transgender Health” at UCSF’s “Approach to genderqueer, gender non-conforming, and gender nonbinary people”: http://transhealth.ucsf.edu/trans?page=guidelines-gender-nonconforming
“Gender nonbinary people are as authentic in their gender status as transgender people who present with more binary gender identities or expressions…. As with people who have binary transgender identities, the process of gender affirmation and transition for those who are nonbinary is for some limited to an internal or purely social process; for others the process may involve a variety of gender affirming medical and/or surgical interventions.” (Which they go on to describe in detail.)
– They could read this transcript of “Ask A Gender Therapist,” about how the SOC have explicitly included nonbinary people since 2011: http://darahoffmanfox.com/ask-gender-therapist-can-transition-im-non-binary-genderfluid/
– They could talk to anybody at the queer youth clinic where my openly genderqueer ass (and a LOT of others) transitioned in fucking 1998. Here, enjoy: http://www.dimensionsclinic.org
Nonbinary people are trans. The only people who DON’T know this are the few trans people who are ignorant enough to not have EVEN READ THE STANDARDS OF CARE FFS.
(Obviously, anyone that ignorant is going to support cis people running the show for decades via the outdated and heterosexist SOC in the first place.
Obviously, it’s fucking fantastic and not at all transmisogynistic for them to be upholding what medical gatekeepers say as the end-all, be-all of Who Is Really Trans. Given that the history there, which isn’t even history in a lot of doctor’s offices, is one of forcing trans women in particular to pretend to be straight and high femme before they were even allowed hormones.
But hey, if that’s what doctors want, obviously they’re right, and trans lesbians and bi/pan women, and butch trans women, and queer trans men too, aren’t really trans either. Because that’s what cis doctors used to agree on!
Sure, that’s not what they say now. But they also don’t say that nonbinary people aren’t trans or shouldn’t transition anymore, so who knows what decade these fools’ sources are from!!)
Tag: gender
“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
—
Ruth Hubbard, “
The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’
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(via
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Yes.
(via geardrops)
THANK YOU
YES
THIS
Took me a while going through tags to find that post, with the terrible search system here. Google wasn’t even helping.
But, that quickly popped into mind with the “a man likes to feel like a man” thing earlier.
What that would even mean is…not necessarily consistent.
However much sarcasm Hausman may have been throwing in for effect, he did kinda have a point. (And I am reminded to reread that book.) Not too surprised that I never encountered that other version growing up–and likely would have interpreted it rather differently if I had.
[T]here may be low tolerance for paternalistic or prescriptive behavior patterns. Still cracking up at that way of putting it 😊
There really are some reasons for most of my berserk buttons, going back around to one point in the first linked post. A lot of them involving domineering behavior. And no wonder a lot of people don’t get why.
I’m starting to notice that when white trans people talk about decolonizing transgender they mostly talk about the many pre-colonial genders that once existed, describing them in a fascinated-but-unemotional anthropological style and engaging very little with the modern reality of trans people of color aroound the world.
Whereas when trans people of color talk about decolonizing transgender they talk about the personal struggle of finding your identity in a world where 99.9% of the material that’s supposed to be for you is written assuming a white western gender identity and every time someone asks you how you identify you’re forced to choose between doing hours of education work or naming a white western gender identity and if you try to explain yourself to your family they may start seeing you as a westernized other because the knowledge they once had to accept and honor you has been destroyed by the white man.
So I feel a bit queezy when I see a lot of those anthropological style “did you know some cultures have 5 genders!” articles that do not acknowledge the pain and trauma of colonialism in any way. There’s something there that turns the lives and genders of people of color into entertainment, amusing ‘did you knows’ with the pretence of progressiveness.
When somebody says that “a man likes to feel like a man,” all I hear is “A man likes to feel superior to you and it’s your job to make him believe it.”
Someone said this to me once, that a man needs to feel like a man, I replied “well I’m not stopping him” and had to watch this fragile creature try to explain to me that my strong personality could demean men.
Like, if I have to pretend you are a strong man and cater to that then clearly you’re not that strong dude.
transmisogyny cw
here’s a scary post that’s probably going to get me in a lot of trouble.
please understand that i am speaking from experience as best i can and contextualizing those experiences with what i know. please understand that i am not trying to step on anyone’s toes. that doesn’t mean i won’t, but if i do, i am open to discussion and to clarifying anything that i have said poorly.
that said, i want to talk about collateral transmisogyny.
trans women are the targets of transmisogyny, obviously. they’re the reason we need to fix this. most of all GNC/butch/otherwise non conforming trans women, who get shit from every side.
but it leaks. an ideology so simplistic and indiscriminate cannot possibly only hurt its prime target.
we’ve all seen that post about the cis woman getting kicked out of a women’s bathroom. we all understand this.
i have been braced for misplaced but direct transmisogyny since i gave up being a binary trans man and began retransitioning in idk 2014 or whenever it was. my gender now is irrelevant but my presentation fluctuates between butch and femme chick. however, i have a deep voice, facial and body hair, etc.
i haven’t dealt with nearly as much of it as i expected to. i can think of many reasons for that, top of the list I’m Not Actually A Trans Woman, but people on the street don’t automatically know that. i can think of things that might make people think one thing or another but what does anyone gain from this sort of speculation.
anyway, this post was prompted by the fact that my selfies were recently reblogged to a “TV” chaser blog. i don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about any of this. i just realized i was afraid to say it because i am scared to upset anyone which tends to mean someone else probably feels the same, so i have to say it.
i guess i do have something to say. having some similar experiences as a group of people you do not belong to is not appropriation. neither is talking about it, as long as you couch it in language like this that makes it clear that my experiences of collateral transmisogyny are not the same as experiencing it directly because of who you actually are.
to be very clear: i do not claim to share any of the actual experiences of trans women, just that i occasionally take some shit because of shitty attitudes about y’all.
i didn’t want to make this post because i don’t want to hurt, upset, or offend any of the trans women i love dearly or any trans women at all. but i think it still needs to be said. and i hope i’ve done this in a way that isn’t harmful to anyone. if i messed it up, i’ll correct as best i can.
Tbh I think a big issue is how we look at the problem? Like it has been more accepted in feminist spaces to be inclusive to transwomen…. but the current narrative still frames any “alignment” to masculinity as evil.
Like something that really bothers me is how “radfem” got replaced specifically with “terf” (or twerf even) and changed the narrative of bad feminism being specifically about transness and genitals and not that it is shitty to make people jump through hoops to prove themselves.
Like the problem is not genitals. It is one of the aspects of it but not the only one. The actual root issue is the enforcement of a narrow definition of what gender labels mean that excludes people from their chosen label for not fitting properly in the mold.
And this is really not helpful for transwomen because like, if my gnc ciswoman friends are basically experiencing imposter syndrome and I as a nb person am a mess, do people REALLY THINK that every single OTHER way a transwoman might “fail” at womanhood being held up as making someone not a real woman is helping???!?
You didn’t get rid of terfs at all. They just switched from “if you have a dick you aren’t a girl” to “if you don’t preform gender correctly you aren’t a girl”. Like fuck man I legit do not know if I am nb or a girl and probably never will because I have spent my whole life being told I was failing catastrophically at being female. I sit here and watch transwomen abused by ciswomen with identical language and behavior as I used to get trying to be a girl seeing people say it’s transmisogyny. But for some people it’s more failing to conform to gender then transness itself and if people don’t recognize that it goes beyond that they aren’t actually making the spaces safe. Like if you kick out ciswomen for being gender non conforming even if you make specific exceptions for transwomen because they have it harder that just sends the message that if they rock the boat they will lose their Girl Card and be ejected from their own supposed safe spaces built for them. It’s like the whole “you can ship but only to cope!” Turning into harassing people about their health statuses and eventually “we changed our minds we hate you too”. That isn’t real support it’s a damn threat to throw people to the wolves.
Where I’m living now, I was initially pretty surprised when I started running into spillover trasmisogynistic BS. That hadn’t been an issue before.
The difference, AFAICT? A particularly ugly combo of rigid expectations, shitty hypervisibility for trans women, and frankly more than a little xenoracism.
In this particular case, bigots aren’t sure what to think when they encounter some weird foreign AFAB person who is taller with bigger shoulders than a lot of local cis men, and very “wrong” body language because foreign. (Yes, I am also queer and NB, but never even came across as particularly GNC under some rather different cultural standards back home. I never felt like I was expected to actively try to pass as my assigned gender before in anything like the same way.)
So, they jump to the best match explanation they can think of for what type of Social Abomination™ they’re looking at. Which is pretty far off the mark, but they’re totally sincere in the hatefulness.
Like with other spillover transmisogyny? It mostly appals me just how much regular daily scrutiny actual trans women must live under while they’re just trying to go about their business, with so much hostility ready to erupt–and just how entitled these jerks feel to hassle anyone who sets off Possibly Transfeminine alarm bells.
Basically, this shit is too good an indication of just what a huge problem transmisogyny is. That’s what makes me really angry about any of it.
Occasionally getting aggressively sirred, that flavor of street harassment, or the stinkeye from old ladies when I’m trying to pee (where trans people do have actual legal protections, I might add)? Obviously not at all the same as living with that garbage constantly, and under more correct assumptions about what kind of person you are.
But, it’s still frustrating to deal with, and speaks to some way bigger problems. That’s why I will even bring it up, definitely not to suggest that it’s exactly the same experience, much less some type of competition. More than enough shittiness to go around, unfortunately, and it’s all part of the same disgusting social package 😑
(Everybody knows shit’s fucked! Dance 2 hours LOOP | Stephen Paul Taylor)
I’m intuitively certain that the best reported numbers of trans people grossly underreport actual prevalence, because the concepts and lexicon weren’t out there on the mainstream culture table till quite recently
in Gen X and preceding age cohorts, maybe some older millennials, the trans people who actually figured out their shit and ended up getting counted as trans people were those whose dysphoria (whatever type, this isn’t a specifically medicalist point) was so severe and constant they literally couldn’t repress it or interpret it as anything else so it was basically own it or death. I bet money there are four or five times as many people in middle age looking at all the trans visibility this last few years and slowly going “… oh” internally (and maybe doing something about it, but quite likely just carrying on with their lives and the adaptations and compensations they’re already adept at: these are the ones who could survive if not thrive in their birth gender assignments in the first place and their sunk costs are high) as people that age getting counted as trans by the official statistics
the average young USian person on this website is growing up in a world where trans is a thing that some people are. it’s a tough af position to be in, there’s still a hellish zip code lottery kind of like there was for being gay in 1990, etc, I’m not suggesting it’s a bed of roses or easy to claim, my point is that it’s a position that exists to be in. it’s there in the differential as a possibility. and I don’t know if young people realize how novel that is
I agree with this, because I’m pretty sure I’m one of those people. Whether I’m “a gnc woman” or “a person who needs T” matters less to me than whether I can present in the way I want to, though I won’t be surprised if I ever try t and go “well yep”
i’ve seen a lot of people concerned about questioning kids lately.
lots of people who were concerned that young girls might identify as nonbinary, for example, because of internalized misogyny. or young gay people who might identify as ace or aro, because of internalized homophobia.
i honestly have a lot of sympathy for people who mis-identify themselves. it’s something that most of us have struggled with at least once before realizing that we aren’t straight or aren’t cis. many of us have struggled with it twice, three times, or a dozen times!
it’s not fun to realize you were wrong. it’s not fun to live one way, feeling wrong and lost and strange and broken, because you wrongly believed that that must be who you are.
but. mis-identification is not caused by having “too many” options.
i understand this concern. i really do. I have no doubt that those examples i mentioned above do happen, very often. but it’s not really any different than my experience, and i would not blame it on any other person but myself. i was a “tomboy” little girl, i was gender nonconforming, i was a trans guy, i was a bi chick, i was a gay guy.
the way i choose to identify is ultimately up to me. i went through the trials of finding my identity in the haystack like everyone else.
i care a lot about the people who mis-identify, and i’d like to offer them support. this support does not mean that the groups that they mis-identified with are wrong or evil for allowing this person into their ranks. it means spreading the message that mis-identifying is okay! that it’s okay to change your labels as much as you want, and to try out different identities, and to change your mind or change over time. THAT is how you support a confused, questioning person.
try to remember that for every confused gay kid who thought they were ace because they couldn’t cope with the idea that they were gay, there was also a confused little ace kid who thought they were gay because they couldn’t cope with the idea that they were just “broken”.
try to remember that for every young girl who has been taught to hate femininity and herself, there is also a trans or nonbinary kid who is constantly being told “no, you HAVE to be a girl. there is no other option.”
we will make mistakes. everyone mis-labels themself. practically no one just knows themself without any effort – it’s a process of self-discovery, and it is painful and complicated. and we should be helping each other.
mis-identification happens when someone doesn’t know all of the options that exist. it happens because of stereotypes, because of bigotry, because of societal pressure and peer pressure and and and.
it is too complicated to blame on one thing. and you don’t know another person better than they know themself. assuming that is dangerous.
present all of the options to someone who is questioning instead of disguising, denying, or slandering some options rather than others. knowledge is power. that questioning person should be well-equipped to think, and try, and get to know themself, without you adding even more prejudice to the list.
concern is one thing, but pushing other people to identify one way instead of another because YOU think it’s right or better (or more likely!) is another thing entirely.
be careful. be kind. and support that questioning person no matter what they end up identifying as.
Also as someone who could legitimately go either way identification wise, if I was going to point to a specific reason I cannot identify with being cis female, it’s the way binary gender has seemingly gotten stricter?
Like to put it bluntly a lot if my gnc cis female friends are basically getting dysphoric because the narrative around womanhood has become more strictly about feminine women and placing not just men as “the enemy” but masculinity itself. “Male aligned” is now the enemy of women instead. Gnc women are gender traitors. We are not sorting by gender so it is somehow not transphobic.
It isn’t nonbinary people convincing ciswomen to not id as women anymore. It’s the other ciswomen who tell them they are not wanted in women’s spaces. That is the #1 reason I cannot be cis and I know way too many people (SOME OF WHICH ARE CISWOMEN) struggling with dysphoria because they HAVE to make rules on who is REALLY a girl and exclude SOMEONE. You cannot get mad that someone who was KICKED OUT of their assigned gender over not identifying as it anymore who the fuck is at fault with that.
“we have to say ‘women and femmes’ to be inclusive of non-binary people” ok, but obviously not all non-binary people are “femmes.” why are you splitting up non-binary people into two groups and then assuming that those you’d consider “femmes” belong with women and the rest do not? is this what non-binary people want? does this make sense? how and why?
Last night my little sister (5th grade) was making an e-mail account
She saw gender and went to click female when she noticed the “other” choice
She looked at me confused and I started to explain that some people don’t think they fit in with strictly male or female
“Oh! You mean like transgender and stuff like that. I was freaked out for a second- I thought they meant robots.”
Yet another example the kids are more open-minded than adults
the three genders: male, female, robot
Seriously. Kids don’t have the bigotries adults do until adults teach them. It’s incredibly easy to explain being, say, trans to a kid. They get it and move on.
Given the ammount of time the internet spends demanding to know your current robotological status, its an understandable assumption
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