@nepeta — yes, exactly. Your post made me think of two things: the first is that we all (as just ordinary people) know that nobody “conforms” to gender roles anyway in practice: hence the large amount of social policing people do of children and adults.
And so much of “gender conforming” is a form of play-acting, performing and putting on, even leaving Judith Butler out of the picture — we all know about “dressing up” for special occasions, putting on makeup and jewellery, shaving, perfume and aftershave, “nice” clothes, uniforms, different clothes for different activities, and so on. We also (though it’s rarely mentioned in these debates) are hugely aware that “gender roles” are heavily class inflected. So it’s normal that people confirm to “gender expectations” in some ways, within their own social groups; but that often these expectations are disapproved of by adjacent social groups.
Just think of the number of behaviours and forms of dress thought of as gender conforming by one social class in British culture, but thought of by other social classes completely differently — eg. clothes or behaviours thought of as feminine or female coded for working class communities but as “masculine” for middle class communities and differentnagsin for the upper middle or upper class. So without even bringing in queer theory or anything else, we all know that what is coded for different genders is very variable but also not performed all the time but often only for specific occasions.
The second thing I was thinking of is how much the idea of being “nonbinary” draws from a kind of misunderstood poststructuralism, in which it’s imagined that “binaries” are de facto bad and oppressive. But actual poststructuralism is careful to stress that “binary” terms, in language and in concepts, are never stable — they are always shifting and collapsing into one another — but they also can never be “got outside of”, because if you try to, you always end up at another pair of binary terms or another set of binary oppositions. Paired ideas and opposites in our language like light/dark, white/black, up/down, open/closed, positive/negative, all sort of reproduce themselves whenever you try to think without them.
So if you try to “get outside of” a binary like man/woman, you end up creating another binary (nonbinary/binary). So (a) you’re at another binary again, just a slightly different one. And funnily enough it maps onto positive/negative connotations just like before (nonbinary as positive, binary as negative). Just like our familiar old set of genders, man/woman, which are also coded positive/negative, and also map onto light (man, sun) / dark (woman, moon) and knowledge (man, rationality, surface, learning, the European, the powerful, the coloniser) / unknowability (woman, mysterious, depth, ignorance, the East, the subject, the colonised).
And (b) when you generate a new binary of nonbinary/binary you simply reproduce the inside/outside binarism, the term and the non-term, and so on. If the new adherents of “nonbinary” really did know their queer poststructuralism, they would be aware that you can never get “outside” of a binary to somewhere new outside of language — even the idea of inside/outside is itself a binarism, of course.
In the end, the idea of being “innately” nonbinary is daft - since how could you be innately a negative term to something else that only exists in social norms?
The whole ideology of it is completely full of holes and incoherent bits of pseudo-theoretical jargon, badly used. (I wouldn’t mind so much if it was well used, but it isn’t.) I can even get gingerly on board with some of Butler’s original ideas about gender, since those at least had some coherent thought behind them. But even she has merrily jettisoned these for woke points and rarely makes coherent sense any more. “Nonbinary” as an idea is completely contradictory to her own earlier work, which would suggest that you can’t perform a non-conformance with something, only varying degrees of conforming to it.