#binarism

[genderkoolaid]

Again, that notion of family is so necessary or we are bone-lonely and suicidal if we’re that lonesome. And what helped, what always helped, was a word for family – tranny was one, and now we’re not allowed to say it. Another was, for a long time, transgender. But now – no, because there was a transgender tipping point, people in popular culture are examining the word transgender for those who made the tipping and those are binary-identified trans people. Trans men, trans women – there are men and there are women, great. But now that’s . . . they own the word transgender. What’s really great about this tipping point is that people acknowledge that it has nothing to do with genitalia or hormones . . . what genitals you have as a man or a woman, not important. What hormones you’re on as a man or woman, not important. It’s a matter of individual preference and ability to go forward in that. But what it’s done has taken another family word away from us – transgender. When we were starting to use it in the 1980s, well Virginia Prince coined the term. She was a cross dresser who wanted to live full time as a woman without hormones or surgery so she called herself transgender and we stole the word from her for which we never got forgiven – me and Jamison Green and Lou Sullivan and Les Feinberg. We started using transgender as anybody who fucks with gender – your family. So no matter the fights and the struggles, look – we’re all transgender together. Now that word has now shifted to a family term of trans and that still, to some degree, leaves out people who are non-binary or gender queer. Without invisibilizing those folks, I think trans . . . I say those folks, I mean me, trans includes, for the time being, non-binary and gender queer. So the degree we police our own language and say, “You get out of here, that’s my word,” we have to be careful that we’re not destroying family relationships, that we are chosen family. I would just caution going down that path and policing words like that.

— Kate Bornstein in this oral history from the Digital Transgender Archive

[rjalker]

"trans" and "nonbinary" are not mutually exclusive categories and it'd be fucking great if binary people could stop acting like they are.

[gigglingauspice]

nblm is not a progressive form of mlm. it is nonbinary [or enben] loving men. shocker, but nonbinary people can be women who love men. likewise goes for nblw. not all nonbinary people are whatever gender is gayest lite and not all nonbinary people are JUST one gender. You sure can clarify nbmlm. nbwlw. but y’know. Please stop forgetting that nonbinary people are /nonbinary/ and don’t necessarily fit into the boxes you want them to.

[nb-amourous]

Transmasc/Transfem, AFAB/AMAB, TME/TMA, Feminine/Masculine... All rebinarisation, and other enben engage in it. What happened to transneutrality, transxenity and transandrogyny? They must exist alongside transmasculinity and transfemininity, most enben do not find themselves aligned with just one binary gender. Do not rebinarise us into transmasc and transfem.

What happened to our AGABs not mattering? Yet wherever we go, people are itching to know what is in our trousers, what we had at birth, what we have now. What about intersex people who were not given an assigned gender, or had theirs revoked time and time again? What about bottom surgery? Binary bottom surgery, duosexual bottom surgery or nullosexual bottom surgery? What happened to disregarding the assigned sex? What happened to the lack of binary?

TMA/TME binary needs its own post, but many other enben have covered it beautifully on this site and others and I encourage you to seek them out.

I understand as a human who is programmed to binarise, it's hard to actually call everyone by they/them until proven otherwise, it is hard to stop categorising people as one or the other. But please, stop reinventing the binary. Stop forcing us to comply with binaries as genderqueers, as enben, as the multigendered, as the agendered. We are all not binary, it's in the name.

[giving-into]

tbh its almost not worth going on queer nsft tumblr bc of how stressful it is ??? so many posts have DNIs like wlw only or fems only, and so on. and like... I'm a queer person. my gender and sexuality are so fluid i barely worry about them. but every post i have to think "am i allowed to like this post? i come off kinda masc sometimes" or "will this person accept me as wlw?" and it's exhausting. i feel like at every turn im being told to either assign myself labels that don't fit quite right or get off queer nsft tumblr.

i notice misandry and transandrophobia a lot more now the more masculine i seem because of T. people considering me predatory instead of safe, which was actually my greatest fear when i started hrt. people saying "women and non-binary people" and wondering what they mean. maybe they're polysexual. maybe they're bio essentialist t erfs [turfs]. do they think enben, (non-binary people), are just "women-lite"? do they hate men? how do they feel about enben AMAB? what about enben who aren't androgynous? would they even accept me as non-binary because i've been on T for 4 years?

i know people have boundaries, and thats super important! but i wonder what motivates those boundaries, what logic underlies them. are they saying what they really mean?

[rhube]

Can't help but be bummed by this

On the one hand, King seems firm in his stance that trans women are women and he and JKR disagree on that, but he's still praised someone who has championed the dehumanisation of trans and non-binary people. People like me.

He sees it as a mere difference of opinion. But would he promote the work of an author who wanted laws to prevent black people using the same bathrooms as them? Gay people? I'm not equating these struggles, but the same dehumanising arguments are recycled by fascists again and again as a means of driving marginalised groups from public spaces.

Of course the Queen Bigot can have her opinions, but a) she does much more than have them, she funnels considerable money and power into the machines of political oppression, pals around with Nazis, and openly promotes the harassment of trans and non-binary people; b) promoting a book by a bigot is much more than letting someone have a different opinion! King is using HIS considerable power to increase her earnings and bring a book that communicates her beliefs to other people.

I know they say you shouldn't have heroes, but I don't think anyone can live like that. We all need heroes sometimes.

I own So Many Stephen King books. His writing isn't without flaws, but some of his works are as near to perfect (for me) as writing can be.

I stopped reading new works from him a while back as the quality went down, and I wanted to read more works by marginalised people. But lately people said his work was getting good again. I'm in a real reading slump. I have huge anxiety over starting new books. It's a real issue. I had to started to wonderful if cracking open a Stephen King - who used to be my old faithful - would be a nice, safe option.

And I fear this has made him unsafe for me again. That I wouldn't be able to read without thinking of this, and that would cause too much anxiety.

You don't always get to choose your heroes. They come into your life and sweep you off your feet. You can choose to set them aside, but it is hard.

I have set a lot of heroes aside over the last decade, but this one... it would be like losing a guardian of the beam, you ken? It feels like the Tower could fall.

It's not the end of the world. He still says HE supports trans rights. But this is a flaw in boomer liberalism. A misunderstanding of the tenets of freeze peach.

If you support trans writes, you got to show it with your actions, Steve. And this action? It did not support trans rights. It promoted someone who undermined them.

[nonbinaryresource]

Be careful of the #nonbinary tag! Seeing some terfs/radfems crop up in the tag with trolling/sea lioning gotchya questions. Block and move on! If you wanna do a takedown of their "question", I suggest just addressing it in your own original post. Don't engage. Don't boost their numbers.

Stay safe, y'all.

~Mod Pluto

[valentineish]

I'm going to let you all in on a secret. The gender binary and its expectations are exceedingly narrow.

As far as most people – especially bigots – are concerned? There is not an appreciable difference to those of us too far outside the bounds for probable deniability.

It does not matter if you are cis or trans, binary or nonbinary, intersex or endosex, gender conforming or non-conforming. You are different enough, and that is suspect. The people that hate our otherness will never bother to learn the distinctions between us. We're in it together.

[deliciousmicroplastics]

need to talk about the years of invisibility that came after coming out as nonbinary

[turtrose]

So tired of people calling other people "theyfabs"...

the misgendering that it's being used for

the biosexism that it's being used for

the reinforcement of the idea that "nonbinary" equates to "they/them"

It's fine and dandy and important to point out transmisogyny, but we don't do such things my making use of terms that are tools to misgendering and reduction to AGAB.

By the way, could we just STOP bringing up AGAB in every discussion to neatly put people into a binary again (not to mention that most people's usage of AGAB does not account of inter* people at all)?

[themadcapmathematician]

Honestly I've resigned myself to the fact that any post abt gender on this website is going to be binarist/exorsexist in some way 8 times out of 10, the only variable is the degree and the level of ignorance or malice

[rjalker]

things I realize while tying a ribbon to a shovel: Oh, the reason so many people misgender Murderbot and assign it a binary gender (almost always male, with he/him pronouns, because they're blatant and unapologetic misogynists ontop of the exorsexism), is because binary people view being nonbinary as a punishment.

Binary people view not being one of the binary genders as degrading.

They think that being one of the binary genders is a reward you get for being a person. They think it's something Murderbot should graduate to to overcome being treated like a mindless automaton.

That's why so many people insist that Murderbot is actually a man, or a woman.

Because they think being a "he" or a "she" is the only way to have any value as a person. Their entire worldview is constructed so that men and women, boys and girls, hes and shes, are the only ones with any value.

So when you ask them to respect someone who is an it, someone who is nonbinary, someone who is genderless, they have no fucking framework available to do that without it being an insult. Because they see our existence as an existential insult.

Binary people hate nonbinary people so much that they view our entire existence as a punishment. As a hate crime. As degrading.`

They think they're doing Murderbot, and the real people it represents, a favor by "rewarding" it with a binary gender because in their worldview, that is the only way to have any value.

To these people, if you aren't one of the binary genders, then you're worth less than dirt.

Binary people insist Murderbot is actually a man or actually a woman because they think anything else is the world insult you can come up with.

They insist they're doing it/its users in specific, and nonbinary people in general a favor by misgendering this explicitly nonbinary character, by insisting that they're giving it back its autonomy and "de-dehumanizing" it.

Even though by insisting that to be nonbinary is to be worthless and insulting, they're literally the ones doing the dehumanizing. They are literally the ones degrading this character, and the real people it represents, by insisting that our literal existence is a hate crime against ourselves.

It's disgusting. If you're reading this post and you do this crap, this is your sign to stop. And learn how to respect nonbinary people. And learn how to respect people even if you don't understand or relate to their experiences.

Murderbot is not a man. It is not a woman. Its pronouns are not he/him or she/her or even they/them.

Murderbot is nonbinary, and genderless, and its pronouns are it/its.

If you can't bring yourself to correctly and respectfully gender the nonbinary, it/its using protagonist of a series whose theme is "respect people even when they're different from you" then there is something deeply broken about your morals and you need to fix that ASAP.

[nb-amourous]

Also just to say, I was already aware that the gender binary is rooted in colonialism. With all the medical and therapy speak, the intersexism of AFAB/AMAB, the ideas of socialisation, the misconstruing of the purpose of TMA/TME etc, they were originated out of a binarist worldview imposed by colonialists that still live on today. They affect POC first and then spread out to everyone else, I did mention that in my post about how black boyhood and girlhood is very different to their white counterparts how how they vary culture by culture.

I am hurt by AFAB and AMAB, the assumptions people make about black boys and girls that then gets imposed onto me as i fit neither category even though i admit, i do "look" like a binary gender atm. I think I will put my race in my bio to avoid this sort of situation again. I do know what I'm doing when I make the distinction of binarism and exorsexism. Much of exorsexism is the effects of binarism and the aftershocks that hurt white enben, binary people, and how us EOC are still dealing with it and rediscovering our cultures and how it exists in the modern day.

And my blog name will not be changing. Well... not until i find a better one!

[man-squared]

Inspired by this post and a comment from @spoiled-forcolour .

In the comments / replies of the post in question, ze wrote:

"The idea that men are inherently dangerous and savage and violent whereas women are virtuous and pure is also partiarchical coding."

Feminism is looking at that and saying that it is bullshit.

Women and men (because feminism is still very binary - usually via man-lite and woman-lite conversations that place nonbinary people almost always as woman-lite unless the person portrays masculinity in a certain way, which we can talk about later*) are two societal categories (as well as female and male) that roles have been placed on so harshly and blindly on individuals as well as the overall groups that in a Western society (and societies influenced by Western society through colonialism and other pathways) believe it to be inexplicably true.

But feminism is and should be about looking at individuals as individuals and groups as groups and denying any sort of essentialism from happening. You being female doesn't make you weak, neither does you being a woman.

However, because we have been trained in every part of our lives (toothbrushes have genders -- they make separate the same item again and label it for men to sale more -- more on capitalism some other time, it's a big conductor of oppression and this discussion), everyone that is a part of these societies believes it in some way and has an increasingly hard time unlearning it. And then, we keep the system as is, we portray the system in progressive ways, or we switch the systems.

Feminism is not about any of those options.

Usually conservatives, people will continue to use these 'essential' ideas of gender and sex, believing that women are a subclass and under men.

Then, you have other groups, under the guise of feminism (I have almost always seen this from radical feminists and people who's understanding of feminism is shallow), push the conservative 'essential' values of gender and sex. Some of them are inclusive of trans people, and some aren't, but the important part of this is, they still play under the rules of "men are evil, but extremely and impossibly strong oppressors of the good, but impossibly weak women." In the same breath as "women are strong and amazing," they will shout how "we can live without men," or "we have to eradicate men" in order to escape the patriarchy. Hence, women will never escape their place as underlings.

Interlude: hey, you may not believe that is what you are saying, but it is. That may not be your intention, but it incidentally is. You are (however subconsciously) holding men on a inapproachable pedestal that women will never reach. I also have a little thinking exercise for you: how are you going to eradicate Men if they are so powerful and oppressive? End of interlude.

Lastly, we have the group of people (usually stemming and sometimes a part of the later group) that believe that these 'essential' roles should and can be or are switched. It's the people that unironically scream "gatekeep gaslight girlboss."

It's the people who look at the pieces of media where women are doing the exact thing that men do (and let's recognize, that most of the time the women get away with it), and they hoot and holler about how that is what the world should be like.

And what none of these groups understand is that women (even as a group) are not wholly good and weak and men (even as a group) are not wholly evil and strong. That, of course, is simplifying the message, but it is what all of this essentialism comes down to. And for that last group, they do not understand this message as well as the message that not all women are strong and not all men are weak.

All these groups fall for an avoidance of nuance and reality.

For the first group, they fail to realize that there are plenty females / women that could kick their asses. That there are plenty of women out there who can do everything they can, some of them more. That there are some women that may fall under their essentialist ideals, but even as a group, not every woman does.

The second group mostly fails to realize that they are perpetuating the same ideas they claim to be against. And if you ever want to see how far someone has fallen into conservative rhetoric about women despite being 'a feminist' or a woman, challenge them. I suggest bringing it up when they push for female separatism or bring up how bad all men are. These players love their victimhood so much, they are willing and bound to keep being such.

This last group fails by switching these roles, or at least seeking to. Men aren't weak, and traits that are deemed feminine do not indicate weakness. Being a supposed prey in a prey-predator situation (think sexual assault/harassment) does not inherently make someone weak, and also just because a man is 'prey' to a woman 'predator' does not make this situation suddenly okay. The end goal shouldn't be a Woman's Cisheteropatriarchy. It hurts men, and it will definitely hurt all the women who don't fit your ideal society (masculine women, multigender women, people who aren't women but aren't men or may be some form of men, trans women, women of color, etc.).

And all these groups tend to forget that women are as equally capable of abusing, hurting, and overpowering men, and their status as women does not protect them from the consequences of their actions, or for naming the actions for what they actually are.

Of course, I haven't covered every nuance of this, and of course not every person of the groups above believe everything talked about. However, it is a big enough problem to talk about and address, and the beliefs are a big part of oppressive ideologies.

*Bear with me with this part, it'll be wordy and possibly confusing because I'm not sure how to sucessfully tackle it. I'm basing this off what I've seen, experienced, and have been told from others.

People (you know, in general, since we are all susceptible to these beliefs) often see oppression and essentialism as a binary (even when they don't treat it like one). When inclusive, they see essentialism on the basis of presentation. A person who presents masculine (and keep in mind there is some nuance to this, this isn't every masculine person all the time) is likely to be seen as equal to man in this discussion and the same for feminine people (also notice the nuance there, which we would need to talk about in regards to sexuality, gender, and assigned sex as well to even remotely tackle the reality of these beliefs).

In practice, a masculine, nonbinary person could be coded as a big bad man regardless of assigned sex and their actual gender. This, however, depends on so many factors and can change from situation to situation. A masculine nonbinary person (usually if they were AFAB or perceived to be) could be categorized as woman-lite, or they could be categorized as man-lite. For example, if they speak up in conversations about women to point out how abortion isn't a women's-only issue, then they are likely to be perceived as man-lite, but in discussions about lesbian inclusion, woman-lite.

And from what I've seen from masculine nonbinary people who were AMAB, most of the time they are regard as man-lite, and then when they are erased, they are seen as trans women, or women-lite.

Of course, I would love to hear from others on this, especially the last part about nonbinary and genderqueer people, but the second someone is an ass about any of this, I'm shutting them down. We can have a discussion and even a disagreement without being an ass, and I'm not being an ass, so why should you?

[rhube]

Have y'all watched Philadelphia?

I'm mostly thinking about the younger folks, who didn't grow up in the 80s and 90s with the panic about aids. But not solely. I didn't see it the first time until long past that - it was history to me. Even though I was alive back then.

I'm watching it for the second time now and angry all over again about capitalism, ableism, the deliberate ignorance of the healthy, racism... and of course the homophobia.

It is oh so relevant to right now.

I chose to watch it because it's one of the few films I could find the stream that didn't look vapidly empty.

Not enough films of this caliber made anymore.

No AI would write this.

This is why we need to support the WGA strike.

It's also a good film to watch for Pride if you need something that acknowledges the reality of prejudice.

There is for sure a place for escaping that reality, but sometimes I need to hear that it's seen.

The intersection between capitalism and prejudice is brutally apparent in Philadelphia and I hate that... that I grew up seeing rich fucks as Stock Bad Guys as opposed to real actors causing active harm at multiple levels.

Fuck Scrooge McDuck and his pile of gold coins. I no longer want to swim in it. I resent that it was made to look appealing. I resent that they took Scrooge, that powerful critique of the rich, and made him... fun.

I need more films that actually MEAN something, OK?

I want films that my friends WANT to talk to be about on a deeper level.

I miss CARING deeply, passionately, prominently about the big films of the year. I miss not being looked like a weirdo when I do.

And I'm watching it now. Every shit that makes us sit with our discomfort. And I think you need to watch it. Especially if you've been taught to have a digust response to any kind of sexuality that isn't vanilla.

I know that response. I grew up with it. It taught me that women didn't masturbate and the fact that men did was gross. It hid parts of my own anatomy and desires from me. It made me a stranger in every room where thebgeber binary was assumed and I didn't fit.

It damaged me.

If you're a young person now exposed to it, it's damaging you too, and it will take you decades to unpick that damage.

We need films like Philadelphia that punch us in the face with the damage of disgust. Of capitalism. Of the precarious cliff edge we have all been edged out onto by rich folk who want to ensure more space, all for them.

Support the WGA because we need good writing.

Support trans and non-binary people, because what's happening now has happened before. It is the exact same playback from the 80s and 90s.

And please support the folk you know eho are sick, and so often are the first to be edged out of existence when the rich perceive others have something and they want it only for themselves.

The song has some pretty fucking powerful things to say too:

[scriptlgbt]

Hi!

Right now I'm (attempting) to write a sci-fi story centered around a human and an alien, and basically it would be the alien trying to get the human back home, all the while the human teaches them about Earth culture (what they know of it) and the alien reacting to it/other biological things humans have (a la humans-are-weird).

My plan was to make this human nonbinary (I've been thinking specifically bigender) as a way to explore both masc and femme ways of moving through society. Taking on both masculine and feminine traits to showcase to the alien how either would work back on earth. My thoughts on their gender presentation would be as androgynous as possible, and that people would be unable to tell if they're a man/woman but would believe either if they were told so. They would also go by they/them, with a pretty gender neutral name.

What's the best way to go about this? Is it insensitive to construct a nonbinary person that's split so evenly down the middle? I know, of course, that actual nonbinary people can have an array of presentations, but story wise I thought this would be the best way to showcase more of the human experience in one character. They're experiences as being nonbinary would be shown too, but I wanted an avenue to bring up different trends if needed.

This wouldn't be the only human character, but they would be the main one, and the one the reader gets introduced to first/know the longest.

Any advice you can give would be amazing! (And thank you for reading/responding this kind of got away from me).

Others will definitely have different opinions on this (I especially encourage replies here) but I take issue with nonbinary characters specifically existing within the plot as a teaching tool. When I was in high school, I was outed specifically so my "friends" could teach others about queer topics as though they had a right to share that information without my consent. So this one hits particularly subhumanizing for me, since I was seen as a teaching tool and not a person.

I realize that in this ask, I am only getting the relevant parts of your story to ask about, so that's all I have to judge off of. There are details of your characters that I am not privy to, where they are possibly written as whole fully fleshed out characters.

I think you should also explore your own fluency in teaching about gender from a nonbinary perspective, like your character will be doing. There are nonbinary people who aren't the same as me and who have different relationships to their identities, but I think about gender every day of my life in some way. When I first came to terms with it 11 years ago, I had to deprogram my idea of what gender can be from the binary way I was trained to, in order to accept that I am a real person and part of mainstream society. At least, that I deserve to be part of it.

I think a lot of people who haven't spent time around [other] nonbinary people tend to have not really decoupled their thoughts from the prescribed gender binary. Gender is not two pillars of "man/masculine" and "woman/feminine" and everyone else in relation to that. In the cultures that exist on earth, we don't even have the same perspectives on what either of those mean, if they exist at all.

And that's another thing - it is inaccurate to say that manhood and womanhood are inherently human in the way your nonbinary character would understand it. There are many human cultures who have 5 or 6 genders as the socially accepted norm. When we ignore these cultures and their genders when teaching about "human gender" in these stories, we are implying that those outside the colonial binary are not human. Even when womanhood (for instance) is a thing that exists in a given culture, that doesn't mean it translates to the colonial enforcement of a given gender. There are many Indigenous people I know of who specifically have said, "I'm kwe, which is different than what English-speakers mean when they say 'woman.'" Or who have said they identify as an Inuk woman, or 'nonbinary' if they have to use that framework.

It is not enough to say, "femme and masc" as though these are a new, more inclusive binary. They aren't, and femme (when used in English) is a very specific queer identity. It is not synonymous with feminine, and feminine doesn't mean woman-like either. At least to me, and the majority of trans people I know personally. And I'm not sure what exactly you mean when you say masculine or feminine traits either. How these things are defined is really, really subjective. And tbh, a lot of us unfortunately think of stereotypes around what these things mean. Maybe not when we think about it and how we actually perceive these things, but it's the kind of thing many just happen to more readily have words for.

Re: "Split down the middle" bigender. There's nothing wrong with having a nonbinary person have a specific identity. This happens sometimes.

Actual advice:

I don't think you should write this character to be a teacher of gender. I think it's okay to explain some stuff when asked and to make general statements with disclaimers, and have those general statements not imply that most people are men or women (because that only accounts for a specific cultural setting, and one where anything otherwise is persecuted in order to uphold certain systems of power, like patriarchy, colonialism).

Another thing you could do is involve a nonbinary co-writer to write with you from the perspective of this character. Or write their dialogue at least, which your writing responds to.

mod nat