What is a non binary person?

[mummybear701]

Genuine question, this came up repeatedly in the Scottish consultation. All I could find is someone does not 'identify' as male or female. Transgender/transexual people are going from one gender to the other, often making physical changes whether through surgery or hormones. We've established a few don't but have stereotypical traits of the opposite gender they were assigned. They then want to be viewed as the other binary gender as far as possible, even if they never will be on biological grounds or in spaces women are at their most vulnerable.

Whatever way I could see it, is a non binary simply a man or woman who doesn't accept the stereotypes of either binary?

It's a middle class person with no other way of claiming to be part of an oppressed class.

that's the most self indulgent behaviour I've ever heard of

Quite!

Seems like a good way to have other people constantly centring you and your special feelings.

To me, it's meaningless. Who conforms to gender norms, especially in their clothing, all the time? As for those who say they feel more feminine one day and more masculine the next - well that just goes back to clothing again doesn't it?

The sooner we can do away with rigid notions of gender, the better. Then men and women can get on with dressing however the fuck they like without a special, trendy, "queer" label.

I discovered recently that a friend's husband was "non-binary" aka gets a kick out of dressing as a women. I couldn't help thinking there were a few better terms for that...

"so if she's in a shirt and jeans it's "he and him" and if he/she's in a dress or jeans and a girly top, it's "her/she"."
Which is just reinforcing gender stereotypes. And, of course, means that all of us butch dykes have just been signalling 'man' all along, lesbians like us 'just want to be men' all along, as all the homophobes used to say when I was younger, and as the TRAs say nowadays, when they 'comment' on how unfeminine people like Sheila Jeffreys and Linda Bellos are, they should 'obviously' transition ASAP, they're just poor representatives of womanhood (unlike the nice transwomen with better make-up) .

There is really something incredibly regressive and frankly insulting in this yes/no, off/on, male/female signalled by clothes (and decode and treat me differently based on it). Rather than what feminism was always about -- I'm a woman, and I can wear/do whatever the fuck I want, thankyou very much! My clothes do not define me, and my sex does not and should not define my clothing, lifestyle, or career choices (and the problems is your narrow view of what a female can be and can do). There is agreement here that the class 'female' is too narrow, but the solution to that is not to switch to something else for when the restrictions get too much, but to get rid of the restrictions!

It really does make me incredibly angry that after all our years of struggle and sacrifice, from the suffragettes onwards, who always tried to 'widen' what it was to be female (voting, education, taking a full part in civil society, not just a wife and mother etc etc), that the latest fad is to narrow it all back down again! The suffragettes, BTW, and those who followed Amelia Bloomer, would have disagreed violently with this, I am sure!

In my experience, non-binary people are in social spaces where it is pushed hard that it is not only important but vital to their own and other's well-being and lives that their feelings / personality / mood / whatever is put into an acceptable identity category. There are many places, particularly online, full on armchair identifiers who will tell you that not questioning yourself and putting these labels on means you will never actually be happy and that you're insulting and even sometimes risking the lives of other people like you by not doing so. If you're constantly surrounded by people who say these sorts of things and saying your whatever makes you non-binary, it is very hard to get out of that without a lot of other support and people to gently counter that message and right now a lot of what's going on in media and such does not really counter it very well.

I also think it's a real mindfuck for dysphoric people who either due to lack of severity or a bad experience with transitioning who get pushed into the non-binary box as a pseudo-explanation along with a bunch of other people which pushes the focus on this and the non-issues as a 'cause' of the discomfort and distress that comes from it which blocks getting access to other care or building other skillsets for coping.

If we could get the 'male and female are not feelings, but many people experience discomfort with their bodies and social expectations and feelings and there are ways to cope with that other than trying to fit into another identity box' more strongly held up on a societal level, I think it would do a lot of good but it's a struggle at the moment.

Someone who identifies as neither solely male or female. I don't get how that's so difficult to understand? They likely feel that 'female' doesn't fully define them and neither does 'male' so they're both/neither/something in between. I really don't get what's so confusing about this

But 'identifying' as male or female is solely based on external stereotypes which are bullshit anyway. Male and female are not things you 'identify' with, it's just what you are. You are one or the other, you can't be neither! We should be working on breaking down gender stereotypes without all this labelling crap.

And people like Travis Alabanza, who is very obviously a bloke, seem to be using the 'non binary' thing to gain access to whatever sex segregated space he feels like that day. Dressing it up as some sort of oppressed state of being just gives him the legitimacy to do that. He can wear what the fuck he wants, no one really cares (and I suspect that might be part of the problem for someone like him!) but he is absolutely male.

Gender dysphoria I do get. Non binary just seems to be a bit 'transgender is so 2016'.

Who decided gender was a social construct? I swear I've only heard this sentence in the past year and I'm nearly 40!

Didn't we all used to talk about gender meaning male or female? Ticking the male or female gender box, what's the gender of the baby etc...

Why does it matter? What specifically is the offence if I ask do you know the gender of the baby? It's obvious I mean is it a boy or is it a girl surely?

I'm hardly asking "do you know to what degree your child will have and enjoy stereotypical female traits?"

I can't understand why people are so bothered. I think it's an attention thing. What else could be the motivation?

It's ridiculous. You don't need a new label in order to not behave or look like somebody else's idea of what 'female' or 'male' should be. You can just be a woman or a man and like what you like!

By the rules of the Scottish government I could say I, a heterosexual woman, am non-binary because I don't "identify" with anything. There are things I am and things I'm not, anything else would be self indulgent in the extreme.

I deal with a non-binary student at work. I wasn’t allowed to ask their sex when allocating shared accommodation, so I had to ask if there was a gender they felt more comfortable sharing with. They said female. So then I had to approach the people who had selected female on the accommodation request form (still gender, not sex) and ask if they were open to gender neutral accommodation. Some yes, some no. All without knowing what sex anyone actually was (because of course, anyone who identifies as female, whether they are male or female bodied, selects F, not U.)
It’s all guesswork. While notionally a gender-friendly ‘female’ hall, the room could have ended up all male bodied, all female bodied, or have both sexes, because I’m unable to ask sex, just gender, and students are free to identify as whatever they want.
Listening to the contorted language, I find it very interesting. As a society we are used to picking up visual cues in order to address a group or an individual. When you know you are no longer allowed to do that, because people will take offence, the linguistic wrestling match is deeply uncomfortable. In one work conversation with a transwoman and a non-binary person, I was told both that it is offensive to use gender neutral terms (because the TIM is a woman, and using GN terms is a personal insult as it questions her womanhood) and that using female collective terms is unacceptable because it reduces the non-binary person to biology and they do not identify as either male or female.
Literal linguistic violence while trying to address a meeting without offending anyone.
I still don’t know wtaf I’m supposed to do. If anyone has any ideas other than avoiding any references to anything, ever, let me know. I can’t reconcile not being allowed to use gendered terms, or gender neutral terms. Effective communication in a group setting is virtually impossible. One on one, I know what the rules are.
(Dd2 is non-binary-lite. She doesn’t care what pronouns are used and gets both. I suspect strongly that once she enters a more stridently PC zone, that will change).

Empire it's been used to mean social construct for decades in the social sciences (20 odd years since I dipped my toe into the literature for feminism and the philosophy/sociology of science, and it was considered key to understanding what was going on to explain that sex - biological category - was distinct from gender, understood to mean the system of socially sanctioned roles and behaviours and occupations deemed appropriate by a given society for people of a particular sex).

In my experience, it's only relatively recently people have become too coy (for want of a better word) to use the word "sex" to apply to biological sex and have started to use "gender" instead. And more recent still since the word "gender" got given a secondary meaning to mean "an internal feeling of womanliness/manliness".

I have to admit my first encounter with binary gender was not a particularly encouraging one. It was a thread by a woman on here whose daughter talking about her daughter coming out as non-binary, and how much more laid back, less bitchy, easier to get on with the daughter was when she was in "boy mode." I couldn't help but read it with my jaw on the floor at the never-ending succession of negative sexual stereotypes about women as nasty, petty, bitchy, moody... I'm not surprised the daughter was trying to opt out of being a woman if that's how she'd been brought up.

This impression has not been improved upon by subsequent encounters which always seem to centre round a random rag-bag of the most ridiculous, over-generalised sex stereotypes, plus a desire to be more special than a mere woman who simply gets on with life in a pair of jeans and can parallel park, read maps, handle a power drill just fine.

Then it gets really dodgy when one gets into Travis territory - fancying yourself as a woman when the circumstances suit, where those circumstances seem to be the ones which will get you into spaces where women are undressing.

When encountering him/her, you address her with the pronoun she's dressed for: so if she's in a shirt and jeans it's "he and him" and if he/she's in a dress or jeans and a girly top, it's "her/she".

Strewth.

It's sexism on acid.

If pronouns and names relating to biological sex, change on the basis of what you wear, you are 100% buying in to sexist, regressive stereotypes.

The fact that they call it progression either means they live in a vacuum, or are not very bright.

mamaryllis that sounds so convoluted. Gendered accommodation sounds meaningless now.

And conflict of pronouns you can and can't use. Double wtf

I thought non-binary meant a rejection of gender stereotyping. Which I can understand to be honest. But some of the actions people describe above are reinforcing those stereotypes if anything.

mamaryllis what about the requirements of Muslim students or others who need sex-segregated accomodation?
I actually can’t believe you have to go by declared ‘gender’ and not Sex 😡
What happens if a young Woman is horrified to find out she’s actually sharing with a Male when she specified Female room mates?

A non-binary person is a dull person who wishes to appear interesting.

Why does it matter? What specifically is the offence if I ask do you know the gender of the baby? It's obvious I mean is it a boy or is it a girl surely?

We already have a perfectly good word to describe the sex of a human being - it’s sex.

The reason why people get frustrated when someone uses the word gender when they mean sex is because it’s the wrong word.

HTH

What happens if a young Woman is horrified to find out she’s actually sharing with a Male when she specified Female room mates?

She's a bigot and needs 're-educating'.

What happens if a young Woman is horrified to find out she’s actually sharing with a Male when she specified Female room mates?

How are organisations at all protected in these situations. If a female was forced into re-education and sharing with a male person against their will and a sexual assault or rape occurred would she have recourse to sue the organisation?

I would assume yes. Surely insurance policies are going to have to be underwritten for this eventuality?

If you truly rejected gender stereotypes you'd just be happy to say you were male or female. No discussion needed.

She isn’t sharing with a male. She’s sharing with a woman (with a penis).

In practice, we try to offer a different space. It isn’t always possible. And frankly, by that point we have already lost the trust of the more vulnerable student. We usually have enough people skills and humanity to find a solution.

My dd1 is at a different university and shares a 4 bed apartment with a Muslim friend. They all get on fine - the other girls understand they have to let her know if they are expecting male friends round so she can make sure she has her hair covered, and they know they have to wait to open the door while she disappears to her room in case it unexpectedly is a male. I am having to exercise fairly substantial compartmentalisation to keep my job, knowing the possibilities that our system allows. My supervisor is a sensible woman and knows I have reservations about our system, however at the moment it is what it is.
The gender-neutral housing system only works if you self-id as requiring GN housing. If you self-ID as a binary, we allocate on that basis.
Essentially, we rely on trans people flagging themselves as such on forms. They don’t always.
I find the form filling/ stats thing interesting - it used to be that institutions went above and beyond to collect stats on minorities in order to fanfare accessibility (and claim as much money as possible from the govt as a result). If self-ID is passed and organizations generally move to collecting gender and not sex, we lose the ability to track real accessibility. I find the whole thing frightening on any number of levels.

Apologies if ive missed it but someone has posted this article on another thread

aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison

Non binary means you identify as a special person, not one of those boring normal people.

Women don't have penises @mamaryllis

Fucking hell, this is a dystopian nightmare. My children are not going to go into halls if there's the slightest chance they might end up sharing with someone of the opposite sex

I completed this yesterday and I am, by the Scottish consultation terms, non-binary. I don't identify with a gender. I reject gender as harmful stereotypes that oppress both sexes.

To me - sex is biological, i.e. male (XY) and female (XX) and gender is masculine and feminine (or at least what the western world decrees suitable for boys/men - like short hair and football - and girls/women - like lipstick and romance novels). I am female but quite masculine I therefore don't "identify" as feminine as a gender construct.

Who'd've known I was non-binary? there was me spending the last 40 years thinking that I was just an individual woman, as unique as the next individual man or woman!

I think that fundamentally people are just confusing gender with sex. Probably because they don't want to say the "S" word Every time DS (10yo) says "gender" I correct him. What else can I do to try and not let him get caught in this rampaging narcissistic navel gazing that appears to be afflicting the younger generation?

Frankly it's a crock of shit.