Not Trans Enough?

People often post about times when they've been misgendered disrespectfully.

I, too, often have my identity disregarded in a hurtful way. Here's a taste of it. This is from one of the many Facebook groups I've joined. This particular one is specifically NOT a safe space so I think people can live with what they've said and have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

A handful of comments disappeared as people erased what they had posted but there's enough here to provide a taste of the interaction.





CONVERSATION

Allan Hunter: I'm new here. I'm genderqueer (a term I prefer instead of transgender for myself), and more specifically a gender invert. Radical feminism was the bright spotlight that let me see gender politics and to question that "how it is" is necessarily how it has to always be. Like many trans people I experienced a discrepancy between my morphological sex and the sense of identity, the sense of which people I considered to be "like me", and ended up concluding that I was a male gal. (Unlike the stereotyped life-trajectory for transgender people, I did not then reject my morphological sex. The male-ness is no more wrong than the girl-ness). I don't like to see the schism between radical feminists and transgender people and I'm not enamored of the kind of political correctness that says "we already decided what all the right answers are, so either get on board with them or be branded an oppressor". I am ponderously serious and tend to be painfully earnest and all the in-jokes go right over my head.

Kxxx O'Axxx Oh, so TLDR you’re mentally ill, good to know!

Bxxxe Hxxxxy No need to be a dick right off the bat.

Allan Hunter: How'd you know I was also a psych rights activist & all that? (checks shirt for activist slogans)

Kxxx O'Axxx You said you were GQ

Allan Hunter Indeed. I seem to qualify. The identity predates the terminology. I came out in 1980. Didn't know WTF to call myself but I had the concept down.

Kxxx O'Axxx It’s a joke. Everyone in this group is mentally ill lmfao

Allan Hunter Kxxx O'Axxx Tolja I'm humorless and earnest

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx How does being genderqueer affect yr daily life

Allan Hunter People "altercast" other people — they assign them identities inside their heads, have expectations etc. One of the largest social determinants of how you get altercast is whether folks sort you as guy or gal, and the way THAT tends to work is that they don't distinguish between the body architecture you've got and the basket full of generalizations about personality and behavior that we all know about — hence if you're perceived male you're also expected to exhibit masculinities. Then there's a second-tier fallback set of generalizations about exceptions to the rule, which tends to invoke sexual orientation as well as some ancillary expectations (for example, in the case of sissy-femme male folks that they wish they were masculine instead but somehow can't pull it off). How being genderqueer affects me daily is that I'm constantly perpetually slamming into those expectations and assumptions crossways and find it frustrating. And at one time (like for a decade or so from 10 to 20 years old thereabouts) internalized a deep fear that there was something WRONG about me.

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx Can you give me an example of what "slamming into expectations and assumptions" means

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx do people call you a f*gg*t or something?

Allan Hunter Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx Yeah. Oh definitely that one, that's common. But also let's say someone female intuits that I find her fascinating or attractive — she will often tend to automatically assume that I will be forward and pushy about it which can lead to wariness (even fear) or it can lead to her waiting for me to DO something of a sort that is no more my courtship-responsibility than it is hers. Or the same behavior pattern will be perceived differently either because I'm sissy instead of masculine or because I'm male instead of female.

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx right....


Allan Hunter Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx No, left. See, assumptions!

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx I don't know if women being wary of you because you look like a man is like....a material condition put on genderqueer people....

Mxxx Axxxn So would you consider yourself a GNC male/man?

Allan Hunter Don't know the term GNC. I don't consider myself to be a man of any sort. Male, yes.

Mxxx Axxxn Means gender non conforming. Like a feminine Male or a tomboy for example.

Allan Hunter Mxxx Axxxn Oh! Yeah, I used the word "sissy" for a long time, by which I mean the inverse of tomboy.

Allan Hunter If I'd known this group to be THIS lively I would have waited until a time when I could hang out for hours. I sort of can't at the moment but please don't take my disappearance as evidence of my not wanting to have these conversations. Thanks to all of you for speaking your minds!

Jxxn Mxxxxy Bahana keep posting. this is how you get terfs

Exxa Rxxxxxxn That's it I'm a TERF now

Nxxi Mcxxxxxx get castrated bb, you will feel so much better.

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx “Cut yr balls off it’ll be great” -Mahatma Gandhi, 1908

Jxxxxxa Kxxxxn i... can’t wrap my head around the mental gymnastics and instead i’ll just bring popcorn

Allan Hunter: Clarification question for Zxxx Zxxn and Yaxxxxx XN, both of whom have said that my described experiences are akin to theirs, the experiences of a person who doesn't fully match other folks' gender expectations and stereotypes, and both of whom have proclaimed me to be a cisgender man.

(I had described myself in an intro post as genderqueer, as a male gal or male femme, and not cisgender and not a man)

I'm curious to know whether you consider there to exist SOME people whose gender does not match their sex but who are not modifying their sex to match their gender (but that I do not fall into that category); or if instead you do NOT consider that there are any such people (me or anyone else).

I am familiar with the vantage point that is often called "truscum" -- and I am in partial agreement with it. Transgender people of the male-to-female and female-to-male variety spent years raising public consciousness about their situation, and it is them that people think of when they hear the term "transgender". I can readily see why they would not appreciate diluting the meaning of the term to include people like me. Hmm, that makes it sound like my reasons for not calling myself "transgender" are all altruistic or something. They're not. From my standpoint, it is misleading to refer to myself as "trans" because if I do, everyone assumes I *have* transitioned, *will* transition, or at least *want* to transition, and that my concerns and issues probably focus on access to hormones and surgery, the politics of bathroom access, and discrimination against identifiably trans people. I don't feel included in the term "transgender", I feel ERASED by it and hence do not use it.

The two of you seem to be dividing the world into cis and trans, telling me that I'm not trans, and therefore I am cis. Is that correct? Am I misrepresenting what you're saying? (I'm not doing so on purpose).

To me that's kind of like Carlos Montoya saying "I'm a brown person. I don't identify as white" and then being told "You are not black. Therefore you are white". It sort of depends on how you define the categories, if you see what I mean.

Exxxyx Hxxxx There are certainly trans people that exist who are not modifying their sex due to one reason or another. I know transwomen who don't take HRT for medical reasons, and transwomen who don't take HRT for personal reasons. These people are still trans because they experience dysphoria of some king, social or physical.

If you do not experience dysphoria of any kind and being seen as your AGAB is not distressing you are cis. End of story. You can be gender nonconforming, you can be a cis nonbinary person too. But you cannot be transgender.

"I don't feel included in the term "transgender""
Because you are not. Nor should you be. And that's ok. You can be cis and GNC and there is nothing wrong with that.

"The two of you seem to be dividing the world into cis and trans
Because the two terms together make up the entirety of human civilization. Cis people identify as the gender they were assigned at birth. Trans people do not.

Allan Hunter I'm not transgender. I don't identify as transgender. I have not said that I am transgender. I'm not. It's something else. I'm genderqueer. I could claim a form of dysphoria but if so, it is social and has nothing to do with my morphology (although it has everything to do with people's attitudes and expectations that are based on it).

Exxxyx Hxxxx Genderqueer is often synonymous with nonbinary. I'm a nonbinary trans girl, and I am taking steps to transition so that dysphoria does not have an impact on my life. I was literally suicidal every day from the start of puberty till when I came out at 25. It severely impacts my life. I know other nonbinary individuals who are not currently medically transitioning but are still trans because they present differently than their AGAB (binding, wearing "clothes of the opposite sex", using different pronouns, etc) who would also certainly count as trans.

However there are also nonbinary cis people. For instance someone who was assigned male at birth may identify as a "demi-boy" meaning they have only a faint relation to being their AGAB. Such people are still cis because they mainly identify with their AGAB and there is nothing wrong with that. It sounds like to me you are just a cis nonbinary person and that is fine!

Allan Hunter Exxxyx Hxxxx I do use "nonbinary" although I prefer genderqueer as an umbrella term. When I want to be specific I say gender invert (gender being the opposite of the expected one for my sex in the binary two-identity system). So I guess that makes me nonbinary, you can't say you're male but a femme instead of a guy within a two-options-only (binary) system. Some genderqueer people are genderfluid, some are demigirls or demiboys, some are agender, and so on; I am not any of those other things but the way that I *am* -- gender inverted -- would certainly seem to qualify as genderqueer.

Jxxx Ryxx Allan, you appear to me to be a person who is gender-nonconforming, and there is nothing wrong with that. It does not however, indicate that you suffer from gender dysphoria (although there are some who do suffer from dysphoria and are able to find a degree of relief through a non-conformist lifestyle.)

Personally, I am willing to call you transgender if you like, but the definition of that term is really so vague today to have lost any real meaning. Many of us have re-claimed the term transsexual because the term transgender no longer has any real relevance to our experience.

Allan Hunter I'd rather NOT be referred to as transgender because I think it is misleading. I do have social-political issues ... whether you call me genderqueer or nonconforming cis or whatever is far less relevant than understanding that my life was made miserable by the mismatch between folks' expectations and how I actually was. As for presentation, I wear garments and adornments that symbolize femininity but which aren't directly anchored in being designed for a female body architecture. In other words skirts yes, brassieres no.

Jxxx Ryxx Well then it seems that we are "on the same page." I do think that you are unusual today in your desire to NOT be referred to as transgender. Many in the genderqueer/NB community seem to have similar/the same social-political issues with gender (and seemingly no gender dysphoria) yet demand to be referred to as trans.

Allan Hunter Jxxx Ryxx Yeah I've seen that too. Also a lot of transgender activists are quite welcoming and keep pronouncing me transgender whether I like it or not. I hate to seem ungrateful, I think their intentions are sincere, but unless we go back to using "transsexual" to refer to M2F and F2M, it seems kind of silly to turn "transgender" into this Big Tent thing that means every conceivable way of being gender variant, from cross-dresser to gay femme to butch dyke to god-knows-what.

Zxxx Zxxn Just to clarify Allan Hunter, what you call yourself is up to you, and I have no desire to "proclaim" you anything. I am personally skeptical of the entire notion of "genderqueer", because I think it rests on essentialized notions about gender. That's just my opinion, and not an indication that I want to change you.


Allan Hunter OK I'm cool with that. Folks who can be skeptical but not dismissive are the best listeners; they aren't going to "believe" stuff until and unless they understand it. And I don't need people who are ready to accept that I'm a pine tree if I say that I'm a pine tree, you know?

Nxxi Mcxxxxxx I don't understand what makes you not a man.

Nxxi Mcxxxxxx its ok to be a feminine man.

Nxxi Mcxxxxxx admirable even

Axyx Mxxx-Gxxxbn some of us view manhood as a state of mind and maleness as sex characteristics

Nxxi Mcxxxxxx if you live as a man, and society treats you as a man, you a man.

Axyx Mxxx-Gxxxbn No lies detected!

Mxxxxxxe Axxxx You can be cis or you can be trans. There is no gap left by the definitions of cis and trans for anyone else. Either your gender identity aligns with your birth sex or it doesn't.

You say it doesn't but you don't want to change anything about yourself, neither your appearance or your identity and you want the rest of the world to throw out everything they think, all of the helpful stereotypes that allow them to navigate the world every day so they can take you at your word that you're actually a little girl.

You're delusional.

Lxxxa Hxxxxn It’s pretty entitled to state that:::

A:
a heterosexual male uses a gay slur to ID. Aka **queer

B:
gender oppresses women and girls, so gender isn’t breaking down or dismantling the male hierarchy BY males who benefit from it.

C:
Cis is a misnomer for women and girls.

ANY woman or girl, heterosexual,
bisexual and lesbian,
reading, short hair, not wanting children, using BIRTH control, abortion, driving, wearing jeans, OR even VOTING.... etc.

Is already gender non-conforming in many societal cultures AND theological beliefs.

What exactly are YOU doing that IS gender non-conforming as a male?

What makes any man...
“Less” male?

Lxxxxe Lxxxxxxe I didn't take the time to read everything you posted cuz admitelly it's a lot, but I do think your usage of the term "genderqu**r" is offensive.

Lxxxa Hxxxxn Bored heterosexuals wanna seem WOKE by looking “Queer”.

Allan Hunter Lxxxxe Lxxxxxxe I'm offended by your offense at the use of "genderqu**r". Which I didn't use. I used "genderqueer". Get those damn asterisks out of my identityword.

Mxxxxxxe Axxxx Allan Hunter you're a straight man calling yourself a gay slur. If you get knocked the fuck out for using a slur against homosexuals it isn't oppression against men who identify as little girls. You just fucking deserve it.

Lxxxxe Lxxxxxxe That's it, I'm screenshotting

Allan Hunter Mxxxxxxe Axxxx I've been called "queer" all my life. Been queerbashed for it too. I didn't have to prove an attraction to males in order to get in on the homophobic action. I'm as entitled to reclaim slurs as you are.

Mxxxxxxe Axxxx I'm not entitled to reclaim gay slurs. I've been called the t slur my whole life. Doesn't give me the right to reclaim it. It's not mine to reclaim and the q slur isn't yours.

Allan Hunter Tell me about being called the t slur your whole life. Genuine curiosity. When I was growing up I never heard any kid call any other kid by what I presume is the word you call the t word. Could be generational; I don't think we were aware of it.

(no answer)

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Different Strokes

I'm with my Mom in her hospital room. Her body flung a bunch of clots into her circulatory system; one of them wiped out some brain functioning, mostly motor and sensory stuff but some cognitive functions are messed up too; the worst of them plugged up her femoral artery and it cost her most of her left leg, so she's in bed with no knee or anything below it on that side; yet another tried its best to claim her other leg as well, but the surgeons sliced deep into her calf muscle and removed the clot, and after a few iffy days she had enough circulation in that foot that they stopped saying they might have to remove her right leg as well.

It's a huge insult to body integrity; it's almost impossible for me to be here without identifying with her situation and recoiling from it in horror, thinking life would not be worth living, that I wouldn't want to continue like that, and of course she does feel and express a lot of that (to everyone else's dismay). But she wants out of the hospital and to regain control of her life, since dying doesn't seem imminent. She sent me downstairs for a grilled cheese sandwich, bypassing the hospital dietician's tasteless pablum (and ate half of it, which is more than she's been eating off the hospital trays), and then asked me to help her sit up and swing her legs over the side of the bed (this is something physical therapy has been working towards, but my Mom is pushing the issue; she wants maximum mobility and she wants it now).


She and my Dad both fall into that difficult-to-explain middle space when it comes to understanding and accepting me as genderqueer. On the one hand, they've never rejected or made an issue of my femininities. Didn't seem bothered by my lack of interest in sports or my preference for girl playmates when I was a little boy. Didn't join their voices to those of other adults — relatives, neighbors' parents, people from church and school — in questioning why I wasn't more like other boys. And there's no way it wasn't brought to their attention, so they had to have dismissed these concerns as immaterial and irrelevant. The way I was was fine with them. They even suggested a career in nursing back when I was in my early 20s.

On the other hand, I've been out and have tried to be vocal about it since 1980, taking a public stand as a male feminine person, explaining it as a social issue, but their reaction has consistently been "Why do you want to talk about that? That's a personal matter, it's private and nobody else's business and it isn't polite to bring it up". In short, they're OK with me being a male person who happens to have some feminine traits or to have made some choices and decisions that are viewed as appropriate for women and girls, but not so OK with me defining who I am in those terms. They don't like me distinguishing myself from other identities, from straight, from cisgender, from transgender, from gay, in order to explain that my identity is different, that it's something else.


My reading material this week has been Hida Viloria's Born Both, an intersex memoir. Once again I'm finding the thoughts and experiences of intersex activists to be very topical and relevant to my own even though I'm not intersex myself. A great deal of the focus of Born Both is the distinction between viewing one's self as an (otherwise) ordinary man or woman with a physical (medical) intersex condition, or viewing one's self as an intersex person, a person whose body is intersex (not male or female) and whose gender is hermaphrodite (not man or woman). That definitely resonates with me, kin as it is to the distinction between viewing myself as an (otherwise) ordinary male guy who has some feminine traits and behaviors or instead as a gender invert, a male girl or male femme.

Late in the book Viloria writes about her discomfort with the formulation "cisgender": it is a term that sometimes been defined as that state where one's gender matches one's birth sex, and sometimes instead as that state where one's gender is consistent with the gender assigned to one at birth. The problem for Viloria (and for intersex people) is that in the case of the first definition for cisgender, a person who identifies as intersex would be cisgender (the birth sex is intersex and so is the gender identity), which is misleading, and in the case of the second definition, intersex people would be labeled transgender instead because virtually no one is assigned "intersex" — but that's misleading too. The possibility of "intersex" gets erased by binary assumptions that are built into transgender versus cisgender definitions.

And again I find myself nodding with recognition, because I often feel erased by the same definitions. In my case, I have a body, which is male, which was assigned male when I was born, and which continues to be assigned male by anyone who views it. So my sex is cisgender, right? Well, I have a gender too: girl, or femme — definitely not guy or boy or man. Yet my assigned gender, both at birth and as an ongoing act of assignment-by-others, is perennially boy, guy, man. So my gender is trans. The problem for me is that there is a very lazy distinction between sex and gender in the definitions of cisgender and transgender. Those definitions erase the possibility of someone having a current sex that does not "match" their current gender. In other words, they erase me.


Viloria also identifies as a "hermaphrodyke". Her gender is hermaphrodite, her sexual orientation is towards women, and she thinks of herself as a lesbian, not as a straight guy. She of all people would not be inclined to box in everyone as either male or female, and hence as objects of attraction to her as either one orientation or the other; but although in her book she describes times when straight women were attracted to her as a straight guy, and gay men to her as a gay guy, her own appetite seems linked to those set of morphological characteristics that make up classical female body structure. That is true for me as well. There do exist viewpoints among people within the LGBTQIA communities to the effect that no one should have a morphological preference. That it is transphobic or chauvinistically binary to go around requiring that the people to whom one is attracted be in possession of a standard-issue penis or that they own a conventionally defined vagina or whatever. Reciprocally, there is a suspicious mistrust for people whose sexual interests are expressed specifically towards transgender people. Trans women and trans men often find it creepy and objectifying in a fetishy and dehumanizing way to encounter folks who want to become sexually involved with a trans woman (or man) when they themselves identify as women and men, not as trans women or trans men.

But among nonbinary people there has emerged the term skoliosexual, i.e., "to be attracted to transgender or non-binary/genderqueer people". Not all non-cisgender people are people whose identify is anchored in the binary identity opposite to the one they were born into (or assigned to at birth), and as a consequence some of us actively prefer to connect with people who are affirmatively attracted to us as we are, for what we are, for our configuration. Viloria proudly described partners who found her intersex body intrinsically attractive and relays similar tales and experiences from other intersex people she's compared notes with.


My mom is an attractive woman. She has nice curves, nice female shapes even at 82. I'm seeing a lot more of it than I'm accustomed to — hospitals are like that in general, and in her case she keeps feeling so hot that she can't get comfortable, so she's almost become a naturist here. There's a first-tier reaction of turning away from it, embarrassed by proxy. She's from an era and a culture where you kept yourself covered up, especially if you were a woman. But being attactive, being perceived as attractive, is a part of her identity, part of how she thinks of herself: she brushes her hair here, and puts on makeup: blusher, powder, lipstick. She isn't seeking to be attractive in order to prompt active sexual behavior from anyone (she's got that situation handled; she's got my Dad), but because it is woven into her concept of who she is. For me to find her so, on the other hand, is inappropriate, disturbingly so to most people. It's supposed to be so taboo that it would be impossible for me to see those contours in sexual terms. We've put a lot of energy into supposed to when it comes to sexuality. As a culture we invest in shoulds and should nots and leave little room for people to feel what they feel, alleged sexual revolutions beside the point. Poke at this particular one and you'll see that under it is the hidden notion that male people can't help acting on any sexual feeling that they experience. The #metoo movement says that's bullshit. I do too. The attraction is there because my mom is female. Not because I'm imposing a litmus test that says I can only find someone attractive if they're female. I'm pretty sure I'm not imposing much in the way of shoulds here if you see what I mean. I can also state with confidence that finding her attractive doesn't make it likely that I'm going to climb into her hospital bed and commit acts of sexual assault. People don't recoil in quite the same way at the notion of a daughter seeing her Dad as a sexually attractive man. But that's because there's a preconceived notion about what male sexuality is like, one that lots of folks hold in their heads without being fully conscious of it.


The difference between being a guy who has some feminine attributes and being a male girl is the same as the difference between being a woman (or man) with some sexually ambiguous characteristics and being an intersex person. It's the difference between noun and adjective, it's the declaration of a phenomenon, a thang. Before 1980 I knew myself to be a male person who had more in common with the girls than with the other boys; I was aware that that made me subject to being classified as a fag, a sissy queerboy, which wasn't right but neither was it right to say that no, I was a regular guy, a straight boy. After 1980 I knew myself to have an entirely separate gender or sexual identity, something just as different as being gay, but not that, and not being male-to-female transgender either. Something else. Something folks hadn't heard about yet, weren't talking about, had no awareness of. It was a sense of identity instead of a box of attributes. It converted the attributes into normative aspects for a male girl instead of peculiar aspects for a guy. It explained my experiences in political terms instead of implying that character defects on my part had brought my experiences upon me. It made a huge difference in my self-esteem.

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Fitting In, or Not

Hi, I'm an Yshkovwschkvitk! My pronouns are dvv, dvvke, dvvxze'oe in the nominative, dvvesh, dvvkei'sh, dvvze'oesh in the dative. Possessives take the 'mmsh at the end.

No I don't expect you to memorize that and use it. Meanwhile, sincere apologies to everyone who does specify a set of pronouns: I respect you and I promise I'm not mocking you. I will use yours as per your preference as soon as I'm made aware of your terminologies. This isn't about mocking you. It's about me not fitting in. I always feel like a Martian. My identity never seems to mesh with anything already established, so that I could say "I'm one of THOSE folks", however marginalized and minority-ized they may be. I wish it wasn't so. I have always yearned for a recognizable label, a part of town, a stereotype, an Us-hood I could be a part of, a commonality of experience.

I've confronted the possibility of being a regular cis het boy, of being a gay fellow, of being a transgender male-to-female person, of being bisexual, of being genderfluid, of being agender, and always I keep coming back to the same mantra: "No, that's not it. No, that's STILL not it. It's something else".

I do identify as genderqueer. My identity doesn't seem so outlandishly strange to ME, really: My body is male, who I have always been is one of the girls or women, and I'm attracted to the female folks 'cuz I like their body configurations. I'm a sissy, a femme, a male who is attracted to female folk, a femme who likes both butches and femme female people, a male who is attracted to female folk, a sex role nonconformist who likes feminist theory, a dyke tyke, a neohippie embracing nonmasculine nonaggressive modes of how to be a male person, etc etc. All seems unremarkably commonplace to me except that somehow I ended up alone in this endeavor. The hippie malefolk weren't as centered on abandoning masculinity and were often into male confrontational macho aggressive shit, the sissy femme folk were most often lusting for male sexual attention and weren't good conversational political company for a femme guy into girlish bodied folks instead, the feminist activists weren't very interested in males trying to participate for their own non-chivalrous reasons, and the dykes weren't into folks in male bodies.

Do I need an aggregate identity? Can I just be my own weird self and enjoy that? Well, I don't need a vote of approval, that's for certain. Don't need your endorsement in order to feel legitimate in my identity, you know? But I'm lonely, politically speaking. I say politically speaking 'cuz I've had the good fortune to establish personal solutions, yummy loving people with yummy skins who like who I am and like the body I'm equipped with and have the body I like to touch and be next to and all that. Which is, incidentally, relevant: yeah, lots of gender-variant peoples' coming-out is a mating call, which doesn't make it NOT political because as feminists taught us the personal IS political, and damn right it's political to make an issue about the social difficulty of establishing a personal solution. But even after the personal sitch is appropriately handled the political doesn't go away, OK?

I never thought about pronouns. It wasn't a thing in 1980, nor was the possibility of identifying as genderqueer. People see me, they say "he" and "him". People hear me on the phone they say "she" and "ma'am" and "miss". None of it is right. I like the lack of consistency but I don't have preferred pronouns really.

I'm not joining up. I mean yeah, I join the Facebook groups for transgender and genderqueer and nonbinary folk and gender nonconformist and so on, and participate, but I'm not window-shopping for some other folks' sense of self that I can embrace. Or... OK yes I am, I just haven't found it yet dammit. Yes I am. I want that sense of belonging, who am I kidding?? But I'm willing to continue to be a misfit among misfits up until I really find people whose tales and self-forged identities resonate with me. So far, that hasn't happened. I think there's an "us" but we aren't collected under a label yet.

OK, or alternatively maybe I just dislike the social politics of aggregate identity. We've decided who We are. We've chosen the following terms, and picked the following existing descriptions to find offensive, in order to raise social consciousness about us and realize what we go through. Yeah, that stuff. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's illegitimate or anything, I just don't want to join into an aggregate voice unless I feel like it is saying exactly what I'd say on my own, or else where I feel listened to and included and somewhat understood in the groups.

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Beyond the OTHER Binary

Binary thinking is either/or thinking. In our own gender-variant subculture, when we say "nonbinary" or "binary" we're referring to the gender binary, of course--the notion that either you are male, and hence a man, or you are female, and therefore a woman.

But I've encountered a lot of rigid binary thinking among people who ought to know better, binary thinking that isn't necessarily the same familiar gender binary but still rooted in that same kind of either/or, and that's what I want to write about today.

To get started, let me relate to you a pair of conversations.

Conversation One

X: That's a nice jacket patch you've got there. 'Radical feminist'. Is that your sister's jacket you're wearing?

W: Thanks! No, it's mine.

X: Well, men can't be feminists. They can be pro-feminist, or feminist supporters but feminist voices and feminist actions and the faces of feminism, well, that has to be women, speaking for ourselves.

W: I don't identify as a man. I'm male but I'm not a man.

X: Well, that's good. Reject that identity. But you still can't speak as a feminist as a male person. Our oppression is oppression as female, and feminists need to be female. Because when a feminist opinion is represented, if a male spokesman gets to do that representing, it isn't feminism any more.

W: Across campus is Dr. Thorensen. He lectures and writes books for a living and he drives a BMW and lives in an impressively big house. He identifies as a Marxist, a socialist. I wouldn't say he's working class.

X: That may be a legitimate point, but that doesn't mean feminism has to follow that route. You are male, you are treated as male, therefore you are privileged as male.

W: Well, I'm not trying to do a chivalry thing here. Patriarchy as a social structure prohibits me from stepping outside of what it defines as masculinity. Behaviors and personality traits are demanded of me that aren't who I am, and as a person who doesn't fit that, I'm oppressed. I see what you're saying about the voice and face of feminism needing to be female, but what do we call it when I'm doing this for my own political reasons?

X: But that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. You're not oppressed as a man. Patriarchy is the oppression of women, by men.

W: Well, what am I oppressed as? A sissy femme? If I was gay I could talk about homophobia. Should I call it femmeophobia?

X: I'm saying you shouldn't call yourself a feminist.

W: When I start explaining my situation to people, I'm going to end up using concepts that feminists put into words. If I use their terms, "feminism" is what they call this perspective and this politics. If I invent my own terms, it's going to be like I'm stealing feminists' ideas and not giving them credit, isn't it?

X: You shouldn't do that either. Feminism is ours. Go find your own cause, you can be supportive of feminism but you can't really be a full-fledged participant.

W: But this is my cause.


Conversation Two

Z: That's an interesting jacket patch you've got there. 'Radical feminist'. Why would you want to have anything to do with them?

W: Radical feminists were first in challenging biological essentialist ideas about males and females being fundamentally different and having automatically built-in sex roles they were supposed to conform to.

Z: Are you kidding? They're the ones who won't let trans women into their midst. They say trans women aren't real women. If that's not biologically essentialist, what is?

W: Some of them have that attitude. Most radical feminists have a more complicated view of transgender women, though. It's not that they don't recognize that a trans woman's identity is woman, and female, it's that they're saying trans women's experience isn't the same as the experience that they're organizing around.

Z: No, they say we're not women. They say "hey everybody, we're organizing as women" and then they say "no, not you, you're not welcome".

W: Well, if they said they were organizing as people who were female at birth, would you be more OK with them saying you don't really belong at their meeting?

Z: I've always been female. When I was born I was assigned male, but that's because the cisgender world has an ideology to support. We need to get past focusing on the ideology of there being two body types that define gender. And that's what those radical feminists are doing, they're making everything be about the binary.

W: OK, so if they said they were organizing as people who were assigned female at birth, you'd be more OK with them saying you aren't really welcome at their meetings?

X: But that's personal information, and it's no one's business. There shouldn't be any distinction between whether you're trans or cis. You're a woman and that's what counts.

W: Well, aren't you organizing as transgender men and women to form support groups and hold rallies for your rights?



In both conversations, there are participants who get caught up in the notion that there is a Category and either you're in it or you're not. Either/or. Binary.

If we value being able to get past the familiar binary of gender, we should examine other binaries when we encounter them and see if we can get past that kind of either/or thinking. Rather than a person being or not being a woman or a feminist or whatever, acknowledge the ways in which a person is and the ways in which that same person isn't, accept and embrace the contradictions and the fragility of definitions.

This is a real-world concern. Just the other day, a new member joined one of the Facebook "Nonbinary and Genderqueer" groups that I participate in. This person had never come out, had never put a name to the felt sense of difference and the confusing and peculiar sense of identity, and bounced in introducing themself and asking questions: "It's like this for me, is it like that for some of you other people in here too?" This person used some terms like "heterosexual" and "lesbian" and referenced their own physical configuration to explain what they meant, and quickly a barrage of posts from the group's existing membership came in to correct them. "If you're saying a person who doesn't have that configuration isn't heterosexual you're using binary thinking and that's offensive in here and maybe you don't belong here". The new person asked questions and made additional explanations, more or less like the two conversations I recounted above, but the response continued to be "You are saying bad things, things that are wrong. You're using categories in a bad way and you need to learn better or leave". So the new person left.

Our spaces aren't the safe spaces we pretend that they are. Too often we have enshrined a set of definitions and terms and become very rigid, very binary, in how we react to other people's language and how they express themselves. Too often we aren't listening, we're just litmus-testing people to see if anything they're saying is reminiscent of a politically incorrect belief or attitude that we've already decided is unwelcome here.

I don't think that's at all a good thing. I think we need to prioritize communication, and a good way to do so is to say "There are some ways in which what you just said is problematic for people in here, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways in which it makes an important point. Let's discuss both".

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