#everyone gets the resources they need when they need them with no hangups or catches

[kitteneyejo]

so mad at the way shit works in the world rn i think it should all change drastically immediately with no negative consequences or periods of upheaval

[danieljgrouse]

Nonbinary isn’t a stopgap measure

Yesterday ContraPoints made a twitter thread about her feelings about questioning his gender identity, the possibility of being a trans woman and what being genderqueer means to him. It was a great thread talking about things that will feel very familiar to many fellow nonbinary/genderqueer people. It was thought provoking and talked about many gender issues with care while raising some important questions. I encourage everyone to go read it, sharing these thoughts was brave and generous of Contra.

What made me sad, however, were some of the responses I saw. To Contra’s I think I might be a woman sentiment many people responded with stuff like recounting their own experiences of having identified as a nonbinary gender and later realising they were a binary trans person and expecting Contra’s journey to be the exact same, other were telling her they were expecting this all along or that they’ve been noticing the change lately or that they weren’t surprised. To a what amounted to I’m not completely sure about my gender many responded with It’s ok you can be a girl if you want.

Those responses are troubling to me. That’s why I’m writing this, to help myself better understand all the ways in which such behaviour, which can seem well meaning and positive, is harmful.

Let me start off by saying that I completely understand people who used to identify as one thing and later realised the label doesn’t fit. Sometimes we have hang ups, sometimes we find new labels we didn’t know existed. It is a normal and healthy part of self-discovery and I suspect most of us went through that at some point.

Where it starts being an issue is, however, the moment you start assuming the path you took can be seen as a universal experience that applies to everybody. There are many binary trans people who consider nb genders to be that thing people identify before they are finally willing to admit to themselves they are a “proper trans person”. This also comes with the narrative that identifying as a nonbinary or genderqueer person before realising you’re trans comes not from a place of slowly exploring your gender, experimenting, realising things and accepting yourself but from a place of fear. You need to be ready to accept you’re trans, to stop being afraid. This makes being nonbinary the safe option. The easy option. To which I can only say… No, just… no. Yes you can have hangups, yes you can be affected by society’s pressures and yes it might take some time and experimentation to find out who you are, but that doesn’t make nonbinary existence some sort of a watered down easy mode safe option where trans people go before they are ready to shed away the fear of the horrors of fitting into the gender binary.

Some people’s response was that they knew all along/for quite a while now and were waiting for Contra to catch on as well. Now, I don’t know about other queer people but personally, I find the Oh I know/it’s obvious/I was waiting for when you finally say this answer to talking about my identity to be rude at best, insulting and straight up scary at worst. Insinuating that you know someone better than they do, saying that you understand the struggle of self-discovery better than them, that all of the doubt and suffering could have been skipped if only they asked you instead, isn’t a good response. And for those of us who are forced to stay in the closet for out own safety, it’s an immensely troubling and terrifying response. Coming out, or even just talking about your feelings about your identity is a deeply intimate difficult thing to do, it means opening up and being vulnerable. You saying “Of course, what else is new?” trivialises all of that, diverting attention away from how difficult it can be to start a conversation about these things.

On a related note, it is very troubling that people see a genderqueer person becoming more comfortable with femininity and their response is “So you’re a girl now?”. People only humour you and accept you being nonbinary as long as you perform a certain level of androgyny, once you fail, you need to sort yourself into one of the two neat boxes. Not only does this come from a place of a lack of understanding of and erasure of the nonbinary experience, it also perpetuates the most basic and obvious gender stereotypes out there. And on an even more insidious note, if Contra were experimenting and getting more comfortable with masculinity the tweets would be “You’re just a cis guy faking it to invade queer spaces”. Personally, I have very little patience for attitudes that enable The Discourse.

Gender identity and gender expression aren’t the same thing. How you feel, what gender you are and how you like to present are two different things. You can be a woman using *he/him* pronouns. You can be a genderqueer person presenting completely as the gender you got assigned at birth. You can be a nonbinary person that aligns themself with a binary gender. You can be a cis guy who likes to wear skirts. None of the ways we express our gender are inherently gendered, that is something we buy into, we give the things we do the power to be an expression of our identity. And we don’t all have to project the same expectations on the same behaviours/objects. Just because you might view high heels as a feminine thing doesn’t mean they don’t make someone else feel like a manly man.

It is ok to be a woman. And it is ok to be a man. But it’s also ok to be nonbinary/genderqueer. I think it is important for people to hear this, that it is ok to be whatever gender they are. However, maybe a genderqueer person pondering the nature of their identity isn’t the best moment for you to talk about how great it is to be a woman. Whatever their conclusion ends up being, whatever answers they find in the end, you can’t rush that. Everyone has to figure this out for themselves. You can listen to them, offer support and resources, ask questions, but you can’t provide any answers. If you want to reassure someone who’s obviously struggling with their gender, trying to figure out where they fit in, maybe telling them “It is ok to be a woman, you can be a woman. And it is ok not to be one. You can not be a woman if you want. You can be feminine and not be a woman if that is what makes you happy” is a better approach than just scooting them towards the binary.

To me being genderqueer/nonbinary means buying into the notion that the binary view of gender is fundamentally broken and that it is ok to refuse it. At this point, I am not even completely certain binary genders exist in the first place. I’m pretty sure most people just experience the world in a way that is vaguely similar enough for them to willingly sort themselves into two neat boxes. If you at any point realise that your experience is close enough to what the people in those boxes are going through, it is ok. If you just one to hang out near one of them, great. If you don’t care for those two boxes at all, awesome. Be whatever you want to be. What feels right. Experiment. And never assume that your experience applies to anyone else.