They/Them pronouns but gender conforming

[WorkEvent]

Can anyone explain to me why someone would choose (or not choose?) to identify as ‘non binary’ but then outwardly appear to conform to the gender stereotypes of their biological sex? Like, what part of you is non binary if you are a biological woman who dresses in traditionally feminine clothing? Surely in order for this to be ‘a thing’ you have to buy into some nonsense about male and female brains being different? Isn’t this idea inherently sexist? Am I missing something?

Gender is all about one’s inner life. So there would be no visually observable outer difference. Might as well ask what is the difference between a Jewish woman and a Christian woman?

Yes, take one for the team. Or join the armed forces, they actually prefer females to not wear make up or heels. Fresh faced with combat boots is the uniform.

Gender is all about one’s inner life.

In which case, why this requirement for other people to affirm it?

So there would be no visually observable outer difference.

So why expect others to behave as though there was?

Might as well ask what is the difference between a Jewish woman and a Christian woman?

The Jew would not expect the Christian to refrain from eating pork in her presence and the Christian would not expect the Jew to bless herself with holy water on entering the church as a guest at the Christian's wedding.

Gender is all about one’s inner life.

In which case, why this requirement for other people to affirm it?

Affirmation is a form of support. Why wouldn’t you support another’s right to an inner life?

So there would be no visually observable outer difference.

So why expect others to behave as though there was?

Requesting different pronouns is not asking other behave as if there were an observable outer difference. Just like a woman requesting to be called “Ms” has no visible outer difference compared to a woman requesting to be called “Mrs”, but still we respect their wishes to be called how they prefer

God almighty you talk a load of crap @Discovereads

Inner life of a woman who uses they/their pronouns? Do me a favour.

And comparing it to Judaism is frankly offensive.

Why wouldn’t you support another’s right to an inner life?

Your inner life is nothing to do with me. I am not your support human.

Ms, Mrs are courtesy titles referring to women. Pronouns are descriptions of what the speaker observes. By insisting that I pretend that I have seen a man when the person I saw was female, you are insisting that I lie.

You know how address this?

By being good at my job and utterly professional whilst being a woman. Being gender non-conforming hasn't affected my career in the slightest, but being female (not feminine) has its impact. I've also suffered sex discrimination and maternity discrimination. Can't identify out of that. So I stood up for myself instead and tried to change the system for future employees. My sex has affected my earning, my hairstyle and work wear hasn't.

Being 'non-binary' is rejecting your sex. If you accept your sex we are told again and again you are cis. Non-binary is outside the 'male/females' binary. If you accept your sex and reject sex stereotypes that does not make you non-binary.

Do you think the difference in experience between a femme lesbian and a butch lesbian really amounts to persecution, in the UK? Can you opt out of homophobia by growing your hair and wearing some heels?

Your last paragraph is just bullshit. Women who don't want to do those things don't want what those things are offering - otherwise they'd go. Women aren't cast out of society and crying alone in their caves if they don't live a certain way. They just do things their/a different way. Parent and teacher meetings aren't a female thing, what is a stereotypical female conversation? Examples please? If being gender non-conforming means not going to toddler and baby groups than by christ we are giving women a tiny tiny tiny tiny box to be 'conforming' in. Give me strength.

Ive never worn make up at work, never worn heels at all in my life (cant walk in them) dont wear jewellery, Im not particularly 'feminine'

Ive never felt discriminated against or put down.

Im a woman because Im female

Being gender non-conforming hasn't affected my career in the slightest, but being female (not feminine) has its impact. I've also suffered sex discrimination and maternity discrimination. Can't identify out of that. So I stood up for myself instead and tried to change the system for future employees. My sex has affected my earning, my hairstyle and work wear hasn't.

They have both affected your earnings. It’s called intersectionality. Both your sex and being gender nonconforming have had an impact.

Being 'non-binary' is rejecting your sex.
No it’s not. It’s separate from sex. You are fundamentally not understanding gender.

Do you think the difference in experience between a femme lesbian and a butch lesbian really amounts to persecution, in the UK? No. not what I said.

Can you opt out of homophobia by growing your hair and wearing some heels? You can reduce the risk of being a target.

what is a stereotypical female conversation? Examples please?
Children, career, men, clothes/shoes, patriarchy, uselessness of husbands, children, MILs, busy-ness competition, gossip on colleagues at work, hair, nails, holidays, the endless cycle of housework and cooking, periods/menopause, pregnancy/childbirth war stories. Pretty much scroll through Mumsnet. It’s all very typical female topics.

Funnily enough, the entirety of Judith Butler’s work in gender was on how gender is only ever performative, and never anything else.

Amazing how gender ideologues use Butler as a poster girl but her work on gender was actually the very opposite of the “gender is all in my innate identity” ideology.

Neither they nor her seem to mind, though; mainly because the whole ideology is so completely inconsistent, so full of conceptual holes and so self-contradictory, that you can say any old thing is either regressive or progressive and as long as you wave the gender flag at the same time, it’s all good.

You are fundamentally not understanding gender.

Ah, do tell us, then, is gender all performance? Social? Not performance at all? Innate in the brain? Innate in the soul? Innate in something else? All in the conforming or non-conforming to other people’s ideas about gender? Conforming to sex? Separate from sex? Slightly linked to sex? Not related to the body? Confirmed by the “right” body? Assigned? When? What’s the difference between gender identity, gender expression and gender roles? Is it a mood or a feeling? Are there only two genders? Thousands of genders? Is cakegender just as “valid” a gender as masculine? Is being catgender just exactly the same kind of thing as being feminine? Are there differences between male catgender people and female catgender people? Masc or femme catgenders? Can you really just make up genders? Are there any xenogenders that you think aren’t really real? Why? Or why not? Why does no-one in the “trans umbrella” agree on any of these things? Please explain! So that we can all understand how we can understand “gender”!

Seems pretty odd that if I’m a fourteen year old making up a xenogender for myself (“new gender just dropped!”) I get to say who I am and no-one can challenge my lived spaceferretgender experience.

But the boring old middle aged women somehow “fundamentally don’t understand gender”. Despite having been women for years and years and definitely not being space ferrets. Funny that!

Gender is a social construct so it can be anything society wants it to be. It can be inner, performative, many or few, fluid or fixed, stereotyped, used to oppress, and so on.

So, in regards to @Tooforsicksohjuan saying that “being non binary [gender] is rejecting your sex” such a statement does indeed show a lack of understanding the fundamentals of gender. In the not so distant past, gender nonconforming women were diagnosed as insane and committed to insane asylums, because their gender nonconformance was seen as an unnatural rejection of their sex. To society then, there was only one gender for women, and non conformance was insanity.

Gender= social construct, limited only by human imagination
Sex= biology, limited by scientific reality

Ah - so if gender can be anything one wants it to be, then no-one is by your own measure understanding gender wrong as you claim.

Except - it isn’t true, is it, that a social construct can be anything you want it to be, because social constructs are limited by material, as well as social, realities.

Money is a social construct, but my imagination can’t magic more into my account.

Many scientific theories are social or intellectual constructs - there are very serious academic arguments for example that large parts of mathematics are constructs - but despite the fact that much of probability theory may be a conceptual construct, there aren’t more than two sides to a coin flip.

Art and literature is a an imaginative construct, but I don’t get to argue that the French impressionists influenced medieval iconography, or claim that I wrote Anna Karenina. I also can’t just think great poetry out of my head onto the page, which ought to be more than possible if social constructs can be anything you want them to be.

Law is a social construct, but if I murder someone I can’t imagine my way out of a murder trial; or claim that I don’t recognise the legality of the Crown Court because I’m an anarchist and get off scot free.

Nation-states are social constructions, but somehow I don’t get to imagine my way into being an American, or get to get on a plane to China without a passport and visa because the imaginative possibilities of nationhood are limitless.

We could go on with these basic examples of how something being a social construct doesn’t mean that it’s some kind of limitless made up imaginative potential.

If gender is anything you want it to be, then it ceases to have any particular meaning. So why would anyone be complaining if they’re misgendered or not? Because logically you could just say anything about gender and so could anyone else, and as such my view of gender is just as valid as anyone else’s, so I don’t have to care a jot what theirs is. And neither can they complain about mine.

I mean, sounds great; but it seems like the gender ideologues actually care quite a lot about defining what gender is and forcing everyone else to agree.

what is a stereotypical female conversation? Examples please?
Children, career, men, clothes/shoes, patriarchy, uselessness of husbands, children, MILs, busy-ness competition, gossip on colleagues at work, hair, nails, holidays, the endless cycle of housework and cooking, periods/menopause, pregnancy/childbirth war stories. Pretty much scroll through Mumsnet. It’s all very typical female topics.

Seems like you read a whole different set of threads on mumsnet than I do, because I generally read the ones on politics, legal cases, religion and theology, is there life after death, finance and economics, Labour and Conservative party issues, medical issues, house buying, plumbing, and so on. All things which are traditionally “masculine” topics.

Seems like you have a rather old-fashioned view of gender roles yourself, which is getting you into some of these odd conceptual knots. Do you really believe in 2022 that “female topics” define either sex or gender? Is my gender masculine because I like reading about “stereotypically male topics”?!

I didn’t say gender can be anything one or you wants it to be, I said gender is a social construct so can be anything society wants it to be, not the individual. So, that sort of derails most of your post.

Yes, you can fundamentally misunderstand gender if you are confusing it with sex, which @Tooforsicksohjuan was doing.

I think you are also a tad confused about what a social construct is in reading your examples regarding money, literature, law and nationality. You seem to be under the impression that a social construct is not real, when it is real. It’s an intangible reality constructed by society and as such still is bound by the conventions of said society. You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding social construct = individual fantasy.

It's very confusing. I know someone who is VERY stereotypically feminine (long hair, dresses, makeup, nails, straight as they come) but she identifies as non binary and is exceptionally precious about it. She uses 'she/her' pronouns, but has an absolute fit if a server addresses a group she's in as 'ladies', for example. To be entirely cynical, I think her non binary identity is a very handy way to get people to walk on eggshells around her and to get people to do what she wants. She also has a fear of being seen as just a normal, basic woman and so I suppose this is a way to be different? I know this isn't very charitable, but I literally don't understand how she's different from me (and I'm actually far more gender non confirming than her, and I'm not straight).

But she identifies as non-binary (prefers they/them pronouns but not offended by she/her) as she doesn't feel she identifies with society's expectations of women so would rather not identify as a specific gender.

You see, this makes me cross. It's a cop out from doing political work. It simply is individualistic (and this in terms of the feminist movement, selfish, ad not political activism).

I come from a generation of women formed as teenagers in the 2nd wave, and still aware of the ways in which girls and women were oppressed. I can remember seeing the news reports of the establishment of equal pay. I had teachers who ha to leave teaching when they became pregnant. And so on.

If you want to challenge "society's expectations of women" then you fucking challenge them as a woman, and you show how stupid the restrictions are.

Simply to decide that you're not going to participate in the struggle, by adopting behaviour that pretends the struggle does not exist is not good enough.

What are you on about? You asked me for feminine stereotypical conversation topics and I gave you the stereotypes. All because we were talking about gender nonconformance. This has fuck all to do with my personal views or what threads I read.

I didn’t say gender can be anything one or you wants it to be, I said gender is a social construct so can be anything society wants it to be, not the individual. So, that sort of derails most of your post.

Ah, you see (and now we reach the point): if gender is what society wants it to be, then it is performative, no? You’ve argued your way into the very opposite of what you were castigating a poster for upthread. (Plus most gender ideologues these days also claim gender is not social but innate - a purely internet “psychological phenomenon” as one on this very board put it the other day.)

You also are the one confusing sex and gender (you’re repeatedly using “female” in posts when you seem to mean “feminine”, for example). If you don’t know what you mean by gender, why are you telling other posters off for not understanding it? And you kept claiming I’m misunderstanding gender when I’m actually repeating your own arguments back to you!

I’m done for the night, the whole thing as usual is a pile of poorly thought through inconsistencies and circular logic full of slippages between sex and gender and conceptual incoherence.

So instead of the perfectly logical conclusion being to get rid of the outdated gender stereotypes and accept that women are just adult female humans all with a different personality, you'd rather go down the batshit route of making up endless bloody genders so that 'woman' remains the sexist stereotype bullshit you typed earlier.

You quite literally wrote above that a social construct was “limited only by human imagination”.

And here:

Gender is a social construct so it can be anything society wants it to be. It can be inner, performative, many or few, fluid or fixed, stereotyped, used to oppress, and so on.

Well, it can’t be all of those things, can it, because if someone says gender is innate they are saying it isn’t social.

So if it is a social construct to imagine gender as not social, you are effectively saying that view of gender is a delusion. FWIW, I agree with you. You’re essentially saying here that some people’s ideas of gender are social delusions of it being innate. I agree totally that the idea that gender is innate is actually a form of social contagion, a social construct that is essentially wrong, because the delusion of gender ideology is that gender is not social.

But that means we’re saying that gender ideology is just false, no? I certainly agree, but is that really what you meant to argue?

*Internet in my post upthread should read internal! Bloody auto.

@theclangersarecoming

Yes gender is limited only by the human imagination, as in humanity because as I stated gender is a social construct so can be anything society wants it to be.

This doesn’t mean gender is anything any one individual wants it to be or imagines it to be.

Social constructs are a collective agreement on reality.

if someone says gender is innate they are saying it isn’t social.
Not necessarily. Gender can be simultaneously both innate and social. There’s no reason why it cannot.

So if it is a social construct to imagine gender as not social, you are effectively saying that view of gender is a delusion.

No, I’m not saying that at all. Social constructs are not delusions. If an individual has a view of gender that is unique to them only and counter to society’s view (the social construct), the individual is nonconforming. Now as to whether their nonconformance is an act of resistance(sane) or a delusion(insane), depends on society’s definition of sanity/insanity.

Isn't this a bit like those vegetarians who eat sausages?

Also, if gender identity is (allegedly) not the same as gender expression and/or gender roles - is gender identity just ..... pronouns?!