Am I gender non-conforming?

[literalviolence]

Gender non-conforming is bandied around as if it's a meaningful statement. But what does it actually mean? I am not trans. I believe in biology. I don't think there is any value in trying to divide society according to an increasing number of gender identities. I don't believe that many people actually have a gender identity. I do get very angry when people term themselves gender non-conforming as if everyone else is gender conforming. But I thought it might help to ask people who say such things to explain what gender conforming actually means and to tell me how many non-conforming characteristics someone needs before they are non-conforming.

I know women in their eighties who have always been housewives, don’t drive, cook, attend church, etc., but don’t have particularly “feminine” personalities…they’re blunt, they take no shit, they are far more commanding than most men are. That’s always been true! Why genderists think otherwise is beyond me.

I read something on Twitter the other day that stated this was not GNC as such, but it was “northern working class”. So if you have any of these traits and are female, not not northern and working class then you are either GNC, transgender, trans class or trans northern

From the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy

Oh dear. Another document which excludes huge numbers of women from being a woman.

Hahaha that’s hilarious. Have any of them ever met a middle or upper middle class woman over 60? (The ones I’m thinking of were northern, but very middle class!)

Some of the most ferocious and blunt women I have ever met have been extraordinarily posh and not at all “gnc” in clothes, background etc. Half of the diplomatic service and the British Council was basically run by these women who were often the power behind the throne, as it were.

It’s also clear that none of the genderists have ever read any novels from earlier than about 2000. Olivia Manning, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, even Woolf (aside from Orlando) - too many to list here, but the complete failure of historical imagination is astounding.

I must out myself though as cisnorthern (though I pass as trans-southern - though on occasion my flat vowels come out and give me away 😂🤣)

Yes. We are people. Gender woo says because we are women we should be passive, enjoy self sacrifice and pink skirts. This is obviously utter rot. Gender is made up sex stereotypes, not nature.

Depending on the conversation it can be a thing people talk about quite reasonably what it isn't is a special status that conveys additional rights or something you would ever have to tell people you are.

Legit example
"X area police have decided to increase visible police presence in the area after a number of attacks on gender non conforming men leaving local clubs"

Appears attention seeking/ entitled / clueless
teenage lad in jeans t-shirt boots and no make-up. "I am a proudly gender non conforming transwoman lesbian."

Because gender nonconforming people were historically persecuted and even today can be socially excluded and shamed.

It was a typo ☺️😆 with humorous result.

By, definition the majority of people are gender conforming at any one time for their culture and age.

Also gender conforming/nonconforming has nothing to do with gender identity. So gender nonconformity doesn’t equate to transness or being trans.

Yeah and isn’t even about gender nonconforming.

Personally I don't give this nonsense much thought or attention. I find it's the best way

It’s only really useful in sociological and anthropological contexts.

Is the pink skirts bit compulsory only I've got ginger hair?

I don’t think you have much training in either history or sociology. This is a hugely anachronistic statement. First of all, gender in the sociological context means the social performance of sex roles - everyone is always performing these all the time, and no sociologist would suggest that the majority of people “are conforming”, because gender is something that is socially produced and not something that you “are”. You’re reifying what is a long-studied and developed sociological concept for the past seventy years or so into an anachronistic formulation that doesn’t take account of the complexity of sociological work on gender for all of that time.

Second, since the performance of gender roles is always contingent, there are plenty of ways in which people have always historically adhered to them, or not, throughout history. The idea that “gender nonconforming people were historically persecuted and even today can be socially excluded and shamed” is extremely reductive and, largely, just not true. What’s your historical evidence for this? Were we flogging bluestockings in the village square? Publically shaming men who read novels?

Because it’s socially produced, “gender roles” varied constantly, across even contiguous eras, and is always highly inflected by class, race, locality, and even within the same person, may be performed in different ways from day to day. For every example in history you can find, there’ll be a counterexample right near by. Real people did not behave like a TV series or a book or even a historical chronicle. It would make more sense to say that the vast majority of people throughout history have been “gender non-conforming” apart from a very few.

If you truly approach the question of gender as a historian or a sociologist, you will find that variation, difference and change, the odd lumpy weirdnesses of history, are far more important (and interesting) than anachronistic ideas of “conformity”.

Imagine saying that “the vast majority of people throughout history conformed to their national identity”. What does that mean? What were nations? Was the idea of a nation state the same in 1500 as 1700 or 1900? Did they really? How could we tell? Whose ideas of national identity were those that they supposedly “conformed” to? What were their private thoughts? Did they really think “Englishness” was something innate? Did they believe in any of it or was it just a performance? Does it matter what monarch was on the throne? Were republicans “nationality non-conforming”? You can quickly see that the question doesn’t really make sense or look adequate to the complex ways in which society and social performance and ideas are intermeshed. Try it with other ideas like religious belief or identity categories like race, and you’ll soon come up against similar problems. In each case, you will find you dramatically misrepresent the past by trying to force it into reductive contemporary notions that don’t really fit.

How can that be the case nowadays though when most people are GNC?

I would say I was GNC as a teen. Evidenced by the fact I was regularly called a lesbian in school and in the street (I’m not btw).
I know most people are non conforming to gender stereotypes in some way but for some of us it is quite terrifying to imagine if we had been born later. Me at 14 in 1990 was just fine GNC (did not give two hoots that boys in my class called me lezzo) but in 2023 goodness knows what pressures I’d experience to define myself as trans or otherwise.

Finally, just to return to your statement:

Because gender nonconforming people were historically persecuted and even today can be socially excluded and shamed.

Tell me why this isn’t better put in the more useful and historically accurate terms we are already familiar with from decades of feminist sociology and history, say like this:

“Because women have been historically oppressed as a sex, the social enforcing of gender roles served as a way of regulating and policing women’s social behaviour and sexuality (and often also that of men who had sex with men).”

This.

@literalviolence indeed

lets be tolerant and inclusive of GNC people is kind of missing the point,

it was once shocking for a woman to wear trousers to church, now it isn't. It might once have been shocking and unacceptable (in the sense of not getting the job when you went to interview etc) for a man to have long hair, then it wasn't.

If society doesn't mind / punish a behaviour it does fall within acceptable bandwidth of behaviour tolerated from persons of your sex.

Hmm. Maybe this is part of the reason for persecution of red heads? You don't wear enough pink.

Kidding. Turquoise and purple are also acceptable in these modern permissive times.

Well by todays standard most are not when using that definition. There’s no need to label everything.

Sorry, but gender nonconforming is not new. It is a sociological and anthropological term that has been used since the 1980s, including frequently by second wave feminists.

The dictionary definition of it is “exhibiting behavioural, cultural, or psychological traits that do not correspond with the traits typically associated with one's sex.”

Your statement is lovely, but it doesn’t adequately illustrate the concept of gender nonconforming.

“If society doesn't mind / punish a behaviour it does fall within acceptable bandwidth of behaviour tolerated from persons of your sex.”

Exactly. So the I’m a woman and I don’t wear skirts or like pink that’s not gender nonconforming in todays society and the culture here.

Brilliant! I’ve always wanted to be Northern and now I can be. TransNorthern it is then, Yay!