You shouldn’t be treating nb people like the secret sexy 3rd gender. Nb people don’t look like a mash of male and female, they’re not sexy androgynous twinks
white skinny androgynous nb people reblogging this and saying shit like “Well this is what I look like! So I feel represented!” Are literally part of the problem. I’m not saying that no nb people are white/skinny/andro, I’m saying that those are the only type of nb bodies that get represented
its nice, isnt it, when nonbinary people are visibly distinct from binary people? its easy, isnt it? you can remember to use “they” for people who have no visible breasts or beards, right? no need to challenge the notion of male vs female if nonbinary people have their own look, isnt that right?
its time to step the fuck up and really understand that nonbinary looks like anybody. nonbinary looks like you. nonbinary looks like your family and friends and it looks like the strangers who you thoughtlessly call “he” or “she” because of their appearance.
really supporting nonbinary people means understanding that theres no visual tell – you wont recognise all of us as nonbinary on sight. you have to actually LISTEN to us. you have to BELIEVE us. and it means challenging your assumptions about gender, starting with the assumption that youre an ally to trans people while youre still doing puerile shit like gendering body parts and clothes.
NONBINARY LOOKS LIKE ANYBODY. ANY BODY CAN BE NONBINARY.
Tag: gender
Get a new gender from the Genderator!
I was inspired by @Glumshoe’s sexuality generator. I’m not a doctor or any kind of medical professional. If you’re having issues with your gender please try turning it off and on again!
Please tag with your gender and as always feel free to send me some more! Representation matters!
Industrious Worm that Gnaws in the Night
Dirty voidgender
all right. gloves off. i’ve never seriously contemplated doing this before because of fear. i’m done being afraid of hypothetical assholes.
here’s my deal: i transitioned, and then i did it again. when i was 15, i realized i was a guy. so i did that for about a decade, including various medical interventions.
in my early 20s, i encountered more nb people and, particularly, nb people who used to identify as binary trans, including ones who had gone the medical route. this opened up uncomfortable possibilities i promptly repressed (and was a huge dick about. im sorry).
at 24 my health, already flagging, broke down completely. housebound in a basement studio apartment for 8 months in an icy northern city, to put it simply i lost my mind. when you are alone with yourself like that 24/7, in pain and no end in sight, no answers, no friends, not knowing if this thing inside you might kill you… well, that’s a really great time to have a crisis about your gender apparently.
so that took me to some places. eventually it all shook out to where i am now. i’ve arrived at a point where my gender is fuck you and my gender expression is whatever the fuck i want and i prefer not to think about it.
but i am going to talk about it now, like it or not, because someone has to. someone who has been there and been somewhere else too and not regretted it. someone who is not brandishing their experiences to support violent terf rhetoric. i have seen one or two people allude to similar experiences but i am here to start a conversation. i’m done feeling alone. i can’t be the only one and i don’t want others to feel like they are, either.
most importantly: every way of being trans is right and good. binary, nonbinary, even if you eventually realized that you aren’t or never were trans, or not the way you thought at first. just do what’s right for you. i regret nothing. i lived the life i had to live and i went through the places i needed to go. i was who i was and that was real. now i am who i am and i am better than ever.
if you feel inclined to reblog this, feel free. i feel like there was more i wanted to say but i need to post this now or i never will.
there is nothing wrong with exploring. there is nothing wrong with trying different things. there is nothing wrong with changing your mind. there is nothing wrong with who you are changing, or realizing something different fits better. there are no rules. make the life that works for you and don’t look back.
it is also ok if you do have regrets. mistakes are a thing. metal illness is a thing. if you want to talk about it. im here. but don’t use your regret as a weapon against innocent people.
and let me make one last thing clear: do not come to me or onto this post with any terfy garbage. i am specifically, completely against that and my story will not be used to support anything that hurts trans women, or anyone else for that matter.
“Gender, Transition, and Ogbanje”, by Akwaeke Emezi (The Cut, 2018)
[Image description:
“The possibility that I was an ogbanje occurred to me around the same time I realized I was trans, but it took me a while to collide the two worlds. I suppressed the former for a few years because most of my education had been in the sciences and all of it was Westernized — it was difficult for me to consider an Igbo spiritual world equally, if not more valid. The legacy of colonialism had always taught us that such a world wasn’t real, that it was nothing but juju and superstition. When I finally accepted its validity, I revisited what that could mean for my gender. Did ogbanje even have a gender to begin with? Gender is, after all, such a human thing.
However, being trans means being any gender different from the one assigned to you at birth. Whether ogbanje are a gender themselves or without gender didn’t really matter, it still counts as a distinct category, so maybe my transition wasn’t located with human categories at all. Instead, the surgeries were a bridge across realities, a movement from being assigned female to assigning myself as ogbanje; a spirit customizing its vessel to reflect its nature.”
End image description.]
Honestly I feel like a lot of nonbinary people are uncomfortable with the way alignment language is pressed on them and uncomfortable with the fact that a lot of people who are not nonbinary are using that terminology as a means of misgendering us for their own ease and gain (because thinking of all nonbinary people as woman-aligned or man-aligned is easier for them than having to actually consider that there are nbs who don’t fit into that binary and they can’t be bothered to actually put forth the effort to change their world view and politics to include us) but are wary of speaking about it because they feel like by doing so they’re somehow invalidating or insulting the nonbinary folks who use this terminology and find it useful for describing their identities.
But like, these things are not mutually exclusive.
We can acknowledge that nonbinary people are being pressured both inside and outside of our community to use alignment terminology
and we can acknowledge that the hyper-focus on being aligned to this or that that’s going on right now can make ‘unaligned’ nonbinary people feel alienated in nonbinary spaces
and we can acknowledge that people who are not nonbinary are misusing these terms in very nbphobic ways
and we can also acknowledge that there are nonbinary people who use the terms for themselves because they want to and because they’re useful to them.
We can (and should be) discussing all of these things because none of them cancel each other out and it’s fully possible for nonbinary folks who feel that they are harmed by alignment terminology to speak about that without disrespecting or dismissing nonbinary people who do use those terms.
People Have Had Non-Binary Genders for THOUSANDS of Years
TeenVogue still kicking ass and taking names.
ALSO: The Bugis people of Indonesia have five genders, one of which is neither male nor female.
http://www.insideindonesia.org/sulawesis-fifth-gender-2
You’ll find examples of nonbinary and GNC people being accepted all over the ancient and non-western world. It’s almost like sex and gender are actually spectrums and heteropatriarchy isn’t normal.
They were not, and are not, nonbinary. If you’re going to put violent and Colonial language on precolonial people’s and their identities, do it off of my dash.
Using Western terminology to understand other cultures’ gender variance might only result in perpetuating that harm and erasure.
I wouldn’t necessarily even call it “gender variance”, within a gender system where it’s…just how some people are. As a part of that gender system.
Varying from commonly imposed Western systems and allowable genders, sure. That’s not the same thing, though.
theres this awkward disconnect when well meaning whites use genders from other cultures as an argument for respecting nonbinary ppl.
like if you are saying “other cultures have these 3rd genders so thats evidence nonbinary is real thing” that doesnt really work because those genders arent nonbinary, they exist out of the context of the western gender binary, theyre part of a different system of genders. cant be nonbinary if theres no binary to begin with.
but if you are using this as an argument for “the gender binary is a western construct thats been pushed on other cultures and also is completely arbitrary and thats why you should respect nonbinary people” then THAT is a prfectly sound arugment..
THANK YOU it’s so fucking difficult to get this through people’s heads.
Don’t tell Native butches to cut their hair short.
Don’t comment on their hair at all tbh. Whether it’s long or short or shaven or braided or any mix.
It is callous and unneeded. You do not need to understand how hair plays into our gender expression and culture.
Being female-assigned, female-presenting nonbinary on International Women’s Day just highlights how much our language fails people with liminal identities.
There aren’t easy words to describe people whose identities are tied together by our external experiences. We’ve got acronyms– FAAB or AFAB– to describe our physiology, but that feels blank and statistical, and assuming external experience is associated only with physiology is flawed and gender-essentialist in its own way. “Woman” and “female” both belong to people who share an internal identity I don’t share. Female-presenting centers the absence of identity, makes me feel as if the only way to describe myself is as an empty facade. Femme is inaccurate; femme is a word that belongs to a different type of identity that I don’t inhabit.
Self-describing “as a woman” not only erases my own nonbinary identity, but also does a great discredit to transgender women by suggesting that “woman” is a descriptor tied to physiology or external experience rather than identity or expression.
What we don’t have is a word that ties together all of us who share an external experience based on how we are perceived because of our gender assignment and/or perceived presentation. That’s not womanhood, not for all of us, and it’s not the only kind of womanhood. Womanhood, our understanding of womanhood, needs to belong both to women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned female and women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned male.
I share a kinship based on experience with both cis women and trans women, and some things I share more with cis women, and other things I share more with trans women, and some things I share with both and other things I share with neither. But we have no language that lets me relate simply and accurately, because my internal identity isn’t theirs, and we have words to describe internal identity, but none to describe experiencing the same things as a group without truly being part of that group– none that feel right, none that feel inclusive rather than sidelining ourselves by definition. And it makes it hard to claim and relate experiences, even in places where I feel welcome, without feeling in some way deceitful or erased.
I want a word to describe internal identity, another to describe physiology, another to describe external experience, because all of those are valid things to identify with and to talk about in regard to their commonalities, but it needs to be very clear in our language that they’re all different things, and that they’re not mutually inclusive in the way our society still generally implies they must be.
So, anyway. I’m feeling very much on the outside looking in, feeling strong solidarity but no way to express it with the words I’ve got access to. But thanks to all the women out there and all the people our world defines as women for being yourselves and for doing the work you do.
I’m rather fond of the phrase “persons/people passing as women” to refer to people who aren’t women but who are treated by power structures and societal dynamics as if they are.
I can’t find one particular discussion I was thinking of right now, but one friend has also described it as being sociologically that gender.
Distinctions like that do seem very useful, as many layers as there are to this stuff. Confusing enough even if these very different aspects weren’t getting lumped together so much.
Yes, Non-Binary People Experience Gender Dysphoria – The Establishment
This discussion is important – absolutely nonbinary people experience dysphoria. But I also want to say that:
a) dysphoria comes in many different forms (social, physical, emotional, mental),
b) you do not have to experience dysphoria to question your gender, feel your gender does not fit your assigned gender at birth, etc.
c) experiencing dysphoria – and/or degree of dysphoria – should not be used as a measuring stick for who does and does not deserve care (hint: everybody deserves care)
Yes, Non-Binary People Experience Gender Dysphoria – The Establishment
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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