Confused on the concept of non binary

[ireallycantthinkofaname]

Please be nice, i am not the sharpest knife in the box under normal circumstances and I'm running on about 6 hrs sleep over the past week at the minute.....

But something I've been trying and failing to understand re. the concept of 'non binary' in the 'gender movement' (or whatever it is/ought to be called) is that on the one hand, people who subscribe to that philosophy are saying they reject the traditional idea of explicit male/femaleness (because if "trans women are women" then they have swapped for instance). But then if you have 'non binary' individuals isn't that pretty much saying oh yes, actually there is a binary - and some people don't subscribe to it?

I do acknowledge sex =/= gender but not all NB people are intersex/have DSD

<<thoroughly discombobulated>>

Yes, a woman is a woman regardless of how she perceives her ‘essence’.

It’s a biological fact. Undermining that truth leads to the attack on women’s rights and women’s spaces that we see every day.

Non binary is a fluff concept which betrays women in order to feel ‘different’ or promote an idea about ‘essence’.

Ok? We aren’t talking about lesbians. We are talking about the fact that most feminists are gender conforming and you don’t have to be gender noncomformimg to be a feminist.

Of you want to talk about lesbians, you don’t have to be gender nonconforming to be a lesbian either.

You have confused sex with gender identity.

So you haven't seen the huge push towards making “misgendering” socially unacceptable and the often violent reactions to this? NB is just like any other gender identity in its imposition on the rest of us.

No, no. I really haven’t.

Strangely I keep arguing that there aren’t essences, and people keep trying to tell me there are male and female essences and innate gender identities.

I used to have a large number of trans/NB friends and acquaintances. I would go to social events where a sizeable proportion of the room did not go by sex-based pronouns. On a couple of occasions we were joined by someone who used neopronouns.

Because I didn't (still don't) like hurting feelings, and because I didn't want to be ostracised from a hobby I loved, I tried very hard to use the preferred pronouns. Even the ones that were complicated. And, considering I have both a neurodevelopmental impairment and a religion that condemns untruthfulness, I did pretty well and managed to keep my friends.

It wasn't until I left the group that I realised how much cognitive energy it had been absorbing, and how stressful socialising with them had been. I had a sudden, huge improvement in my mental health.

Was there no imposition there? There was certainly an enormous social pressure to go along with it and get it right.

Only trans activists argue this. You can’t seem to argue consistently.

I’m being imposed upon every time someone tells me that I have to relate to them based on their self-perception, not based on my perception of them. That’s not how healthy relationships work, that’s how coercive relationships work.

Being rude will always be socially unacceptable and can provoke escalations.

I thought I did.

But according to you, I very much do not.

So, as you have all the answers, could you please educate me?

No. You keep talking about essences and we keep saying there is no essence, and the idea of gender identity is nonsense.

Why is it rude to describe someone as the sex they are? Why is it not rude to make me describe someone as not the sex they are? And what escalations are justified in your eyes?

Unless you are a bot, you know this.
I haven’t said you do not know, not even once.
I have said (for the 3rd time now) you do know.

But what does "thinking you are female" mean?
Being female is not a thought

So you agree that this is imposing on people.

I don't understand why you then said this
Unless you are going to prison, you’re not being imposed on.

Hate speech laws apply to everyone.

The concept of gender and the belief that it is "assigned" to a child at birth is not a new one. Feminist Simone de Beauvoir write as much in her 1949 book The Second Sex. The notion is that baby girls undergo a process of "girling" that results in the adult woman. Althusser tells us this is an unconscious process or perpetuation of social conditioning "patriarchy", if you like.

It stands to reason then, that one could "girl" a biological boy into a "woman"; a point of feminism that has not been missed by the trans movement. Prominent Feminists such as Helen Cixous indeed called for a kind of gender essentialism: she called it ecriture feminine, a form of exclusively female discourse "Women write through their bodies, they must... Break[ing] that famous thread which acts for men as a surrogate umbilical cord".

You said gender at first, now you have swapped it for sex.
Mis-sexing isn’t misgendering.

You can go to prison for hate speech.

It’s rather rude to tell me that referring to someone according to their observed sex is bigoted.

Is it like the Mermaids Barbie GI Joe scale? And MN users (especially those on FWR) are all pink Barbies?

“Some people, let’s call them NBs, think that everybody else has an innate sense inside their mind/soul of either being male or being female,”

That isn’t right. People think everyone has self awareness / consciousness, not that self awareness / consciousness requires a soul, or an innate essence.

That being said, some religious people do think everyone has a soul, etc.

Who told you that? Wasn’t me.

[___] fill in the blank.

“Being female is not a thought”

Thinking you are female is though.

You are asking what a thought is. What’s consciousness?