fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3914 ]

[ SECRET POST #3914 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3914 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Smallville]

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[Riley, Julie's Greenroom]

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[Anne with an E]

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[Bojack Horseman]

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[Jeeves and Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 08 secrets from Secret Submission Post #560.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/16/drop-gender-stereotypes-we-are-all-non-binary

Thoughts on this? What's the line between cis and trans for you? Do you think gender dysphoria would exist at all in a society with no gender roles? Do you think a society like that could ever exist for a sexually dimorphic species like humanity?

I don't think that "everyone is nonbinary" is a remotely useful approach to understanding or dealing with the diversity of the human experience as regards gender, and I think it's mostly going to end up being used as a cudgel at least as much if not more as any other view that you want to take.

I didn't read that article, though, someone tell me if it's obviously dumb or not

Non-binary in that not one person fits perfectly into either gender role when ridgedly applied, in that no-one is 100% perfectly male or female in their behaviours? Agreed.

Non-binary in that because of those places were we do not fit perfectly it means we cannot consider yourself to be male or female since we do not fit into the platonic concept of male or female? Bullshit.

While I think everyone needs to express themselves in a way that's true to themselves, I don't personally think "nonbinary" is a useful category because I've never seen it explained in a way that didn't fall back on gender stereotypes. I've been told that I must be "nonbinary" because I don't consider my gender all that important, and while I recognize I've absolutely been shaped by my existence as a woman, I wouldn't say being a woman is an active part of my identity and I'd be fine waking up tomorrow as a dude. But that seems ridiculous to me, because it sets the expectation that everyone must be mentally obsessed with their sex or else they are clearly ~different~ in some way.

To me, it's different from trans issues, because for trans people, they are trying to either physically change their sex or at least live within a societal construct that is pre-existing. Since we don't have any pre-existing constructs about "non-binary" or whatever, I just don't see how it's useful. It seems like they're trying to create new categories, when we should be eliminating these categories completing.

Maybe we can just recognize everyone as individual and not their sex either way, and not make assumptions about how anyone should dress or behave. I'd rather we reduce the importance of gender completely, except where it relates to medical necessity, rather than draw more lines in the sand about what it means.

It might not be your gender identity but that doesn't make it invalid. Obviously, anyone trying to go in and tell you that you are gender-neutral is being a dickhead. And equally, I don't agree with the article OP linked about everyone being gender neutral. But you don't need to agree with either of those things to think that it might be true for some people.

And this whole idea that you have that caring about gender identity means being "obsessed with sex", and that ignoring gender identities are the norm - if you want to ignore them, I think that's entirely valid, and good for you. But they are these enormously central - while also being enormously complex and varied - parts of how we've defined our cultures, societies, and identities for literally millenia, and if people want to use them to orient their identity within that culture, I don't see why that's inherently harmful.

That you personally don't consider your gender important - however you want to interpret that for your own identity - doesn't give you the right to say that no one else should consider it important either.

Oh, for fuck's sake. We have nearly 200 years of recorded history just within anglophone culture of people who lived full time with fluid and intermediate gender expression. We just used rude names for that or looked the other way. That's not looking at the ethnographic diversity of nonbinary gender around the world.

I'll point out that queer gender is a legal and de facto reality as well. I've been been beaten, raped, turned down for jobs, fired from jobs, threatened, and harassed for failing to pass as my legal gender. And now that I can pass, I experience all of the ugly and life-shortening problems that come having a closet.

Maybe, the people holding you back from a mythical post-gender utopia are not nonbinary and genderqueer people who experience dysphoria at having to pass in a binary-gender world. Perhaps the problem rests with the employers, the doctors, the insurers, the bureaucrats, and the people on the street who violently enforce gender-binary expectations.

"Gender expression" is an obnoxious phrase because it implies that anyone who does not present how society expects them to present based on gender stereotypes is somehow queer. That's complete bullshit. People can act true to themselves and in a way that society doesn't expect, and not make up new pronouns for themselves.

No it doesn't. I use "gender expression" because while we have substantial documentation about people who cross-dressed or did androgyny for substantial parts of their lives at substantial risk and cost, history hasn't been kind to their own words and beliefs with a handful of exceptions.

The notion that recognizing nonbinary gender marks any form of gender nonconformity as queer is a ridiculous slippery slope. No, the existence of Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg do not make girls who game and boys who knit queer. Gender roles have some flexibility, but limited. GNC subcultures are flexible in different ways. Bornstein and Feinberg started talking about nonbinary gender having considerable experience with those limits.

The last time I saw a survey on the pronoun issue--unfortunately a convenience sample--singular "they" was the winner, followed by the classic neopronouns from the 1970s. I've seen little widespread support for "nounself." I tend to agree with Le Guin that not having a gender-neutral human pronoun limits what you can say about gender (a flaw of Le Guin, Leckie, and Banks.) Literary constraints aside, I see little reason to not respect a person's preferred mode of address if they're not being a dick about it. Bickering about preferred nonbinary pronouns sounds suspiciously like the bickering regarding changing binary pronouns. And now that both the GLAAD and AP style guide agree that "they" is acceptable in print for nonbinary people who prefer "they," it's a bit like being a dick over "email."

I am so fucking tired of the fact that when one part of the LGBTQ+ rainbow gets a little respect, the first thing they do is throw a more-marginalized group under the bus.

I'm an evil bisexual "for the attention" who is somehow making it harder for the "real gays and lesbians" to get their rights, and I'm a "special snowflake" who will somehow "ruin it" for the real trans people by my very existence.

The last time I engaged with "The Community" was when I was working in a No on Prop 8 phone bank. Since then, I've decided to focus my activism on other causes; mostly reproductive justice and, lately, to sticking it to the (Orange) Man.

've been told that I must be "nonbinary" because I don't consider my gender all that important, and while I recognize I've absolutely been shaped by my existence as a woman, I wouldn't say being a woman is an active part of my identity and I'd be fine waking up tomorrow as a dude.

i always thought that was the norm for people who aren't trans? like i don't think i know a single cis person who thinks all that much about their gender 90% of the time. that was why it was so fascinating to me to hear my trans friends talk about their struggles with gender because for them it is a big deal.

It IS normal for most cis people. Those adopting NB identities just aren't aware of it and think it makes them special somehow.

Not even wrong.

This is pretty much my experience as a cis person. Np one questions my gender or demands I prove anything, so I don't have to think about it.

yeah, the way my trans friend explained it to me was that as a cis person gender is just sort of background noise to you - it's a thing that exists but you never really think that much about it, whereas when you're trans it's something that occupies your mind constantly because you're always worrying about whether you're passing well enough or whether people will question your gender if you show your id. i'm a cis woman so i never have to worry whether people will see me as a woman, but my friend who is a pre-op trans guy always has to worry on some level about whether he'll be seen as/accepted as a dude.

I don't think cis and trans can be defined so rigidly as mental and social instead of physical. They all play a part this article either ignores or dismisses the physical dysphoria.

If you're a dude with boobs who feels like it's wrong that you have boobs, you'd probably still not want them even if everyone called them man boobs instead of boobs. Someone who identifies as non-binary may want to rid themselves of all outward physical markers of sex, and putting them in a green shirt doesn't really solve that problem. Saying they're not allowed to ID as NB because everyone is a little bit NB on the inside is ridiculous to me

I do think gender dysphoria would exist because some people genuinely, literally feel like they have the wrong bodies.

But I also think a society where we could stop ascribing styles, tastes, preferences and interests (four words that all mean the same thing?) to gender and instead realize that those things have absolutely zero bearing on what it means to be a man or a woman would be AMAZING.

THAT'S the reality I want to see.

Of course people's likes and dislikes aren't going to always fit perfectly into their stereotypical gendered mold and this should not be a revelation because concepts of gendered behavior are all culturally relative, anyway. Pink for girls and blue for boys is not some universal rule that has always been true everywhere in the world (someone once told me that it was the reverse in Victorian society, for example). That doesn't mean it's all meaningless, because we all grow up in a society that expects certain behaviors from us and we may take into account how we feel about those expectations when exploring our gender identity, but how well we fit into those expectations of behavior does not, in itself, determine gender identity.

Saying "Everyone is non-binary!" sounds to me like saying "Racial divisions are stupid! We ALL come from Africa originally, amiright?" because it just dismisses a lot of real shit that many people actually have to deal with in their lives.

A few good points leading up to a bulllshit conclusion. I've been falling back on this quote by Soloway, "I identify as trans, which means that I am not seeking to synthesise my appearance with the label assigned to me at birth and instead am opting to live in a space where a label other than male or female is used to define me."

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/21/transparents-jill-soloway-the-words-male-and-female-describe-who-we-used-to-be

See, to me that quote seems like a heaping pile of bullshit.

It's difficult to argue with a content-free response. But since I'm feeling a bit quixotic today...

Granted I run with an older crowd of LGBTQ people, but just about everyone I know who identifies as nonbinary or genderqueer has tried for years to work out an internalized sense of wrongness within a liberal gender "men/women can do that too." And while the parade of women from Anne Lennox to Janelle Monae rocking exquisitely androgynous but feminine suits and men from Bowie to Cumming doing androgyny on the stage is really, really, REALLY nice. It's still coding that androgyny as essentially masculine or feminine. The space for things to be gender-neutral doesn't really get expanded.

And none of that resolves the double-bind that:

1. Passing causes well-documented and measurable harm to some people. That's not a reality that's open to debate, anymore than the reality of climate change is open to reasonable debate.

2. People who fail to pass to a reasonable standard face a wide spectrum of discrimination, harassment, and violence. Nonbinary gender is therefore a de facto reality.

just about everyone I know who identifies as nonbinary or genderqueer has tried for years to work out an internalized sense of wrongness within a liberal gender "men/women can do that too."

This really resonates with me. When I grew up, in the 80s, I worried that the fact that sometimes I felt like a guy, to the point that my body felt physically wrong, meant that I was not just sick, crazy, a freak, and wrong, but also betraying my fellow women and feminism as a whole.

The funny thing is, my interests actually fit fairly well within the generally accepted range of "geek girl" interests. It's not my distance from the gender roles that make me genderfluid, it's the fact that I sometimes wake up to discover that my brain has randomly decided that I'm a dude, and is really not happy that my body doesn't match its expectations.

Learning -- at 39 -- that gender fluidity was an actual thing that existed, made my life suddenly make sense in a way that it hadn't, before. I wasn't just a lone freak, there were other people who had the same experience. Being able to put a name to my experiences is powerful, and I really wish I'd found out about all this stuff when I was a miserable teenager.

That quote is stupid, implying that "male" or "female" has an innate meaning. It does NOT, beyond the biological component. Call yourself what you want, but don't imply that people without dysphoria fall into gender stereotype categories and can be "labelled" unlike yourself.

It doesn't imply that "male" or "female" has an innate meaning. It does imply that those concepts have a culturally-mediated existence, against which we often identify ourselves, and within which we construct our identities.

don't imply that people without dysphoria fall into gender stereotype categories and can be "labelled" unlike yourself.

I don't think that anyone is implying that, and if anyone is, they're being a jerk. I certainly don't think that anything about the concept of gender-neutral or non-binary implies that.

SA

Well, I guess the article in particular is advocating that, but I don't think anyone else is, and cbarararara certainly isn't advocating that line. It's really not the generally accepted view.

No, it doesn't imply that. Male and female are also culturally constructed realities. But then again, so are national and state governments, and I make damn sure to care proper ID when I travel and don't badmouth law enforcement on the basis that their authority is an arbitrary social construction.

There's also this fucking bizzare idea that the de facto existence of nonbinary trans people implies anything about how cis people do or do not conform to gender stereotypes or choose to describe their gender. By all means, GNC cis people shouldn't be targets for discrimination, harassment, or violence either. The idea that nonbinary people are the problem for GNC cis people is just taking 1970s anti-trans rhetoric and moving the goalposts slightly.

[ SECRET POST #3914 ]

Everyone's nonbinary?

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