So what *is* non-binary?

[BareBelliedSneetch]

Not being goady, honest!

But I got myself lost in this tweet

twitter.com/sophierunning/status/1049552156402077696?s=21

It’s full of people saying “that’s not what non-binary means” and “maybe you should do the listening” but no one actually explaining it.

It seems that non-binary has nothing to do with gender conformity. And you can be an adult human female, and present as femme. And still be non-binary. Which just confuses my little head.

Can anyone help?

(And help me make it clicky?)

This is science. It's supposed to be science! Not gender politics. I expected more. And they had a (real) typo in there.

raises hand guilty.

Me too ALittleBit me too.

If I were twenty-something now, I would totally be identifying as non-binary and thinking I was ever so special and so much more enlightened than the dull cis hetero-normative fools I was surrounded by. Thank god I grew out of being (a) an idiot and (b) a judgemental cunt towards my fellow women.

I don't know - we just wore what we wanted, had our hair cut how we wanted, drank what we wanted, studied what we wanted...

There was a shit load more freedom for young women in the 1980s and a lot less identity angst.

How can you be non-binary without first enforcing a binary.

All these terms are just meaningless, made up words. Nobody in the real world gives a toss, because they're like, getting with life and making ends meet etc.

Wellcome are a little bit sorry. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/10/womxn-row-companies-worry-word-women-excludes-transgender-people/

Your explanation sort of makes sense Fermat (not 'makes sense' meaning a sensible thing to believe, but meaning I can sort of see how people can come to that conclusion).

If people are brought up with strong expectations that they should meet the gender stereotypes of their sex, and the inevitable happens and they find that they don't, then:

• if they feel like they mostly meet the gender stereotypes of the opposite sex then they conclude that they are trans
• if they feel like they are roughly 50:50 on meeting each set of gender stereotypes they conclude that they are non-binary

If you've been brought up to believe that gender stereotypes are absolutely valid, then it must be quite difficult to break away from that indoctrination to realise that they are bullshit. And in their youth they often don't have the world experience and mental maturity to make that leap.

Gender stereotypes really are the root of all evil. Things were going in the right direction back in the 1980s. Which bastards undid all that? Is it solely down to marketeers and their blue,/pink crap?

Do non binary people claim to have gender dysphoria? Are they suffering mental anguish due to their internal "mind" not aligning to their external body. But instead of the opposite sex they don't feel their internal being fits with either sex.

Or do people make a conscious choice to not be constrained by gender stereotypes, which lots of people have done forever both consciously and unconsciously, but now they give themselves the special little label of non binary to make themselves feel important.

Most I have seen seem to be the latter.

So, ‘non binary’ is basically not wanting to conform (completely) to gender stereotypes, and/or, in the case of women, challenging sexism. Both things you can do, as a woman, or man. By trying to redefine yourself, surely you are reinforcing the very stereotypes you claim to disown.
Seems to be a completely self absorbed, western, privileged, individualistic way of looking at things. Very teenage.

non binary = the most narcissistic special snowflake it's possible to be.

It is very teenage. If this had been a thing online when I was a teenager, I'd definitely have been non-binary, if not trans.

The thing with non-binary, is that there don't seem to be any rules. You might suffer from dysphoria, or you might not. You might want to change the way you dress, you might not. Basically, non-binary means different things to different people. This is what I learnt when I went to 'educate myself' as we are often told to do. Non-binary can mean anything, so it means nothing.

I'd say that most posters here are non-binary, but I also learnt from Stonewall that nobody else can tell you what your gender identity is, so I won't.

The thing with non-binary, is that there don't seem to be any rules. You might suffer from dysphoria, or you might not. You might want to change the way you dress, you might not. Basically, non-binary means different things to different people. This is what I learnt when I went to 'educate myself' as we are often told to do. Non-binary can mean anything, so it means nothing.

This could also be said about trans. As you I longer need dysphoria or to have transitioned.