Inside the mind of a non-binary woman

[RogueFemale]

This article popped up on Apple news this morning. A first person account of a woman's experience of feeling she is 'trans' / 'nonbinary'.

It starts off with her saying: "When my date used my correct pronouns, I felt a sudden surge of happiness. ... It was then that I realised how little my identity had been affirmed in my previous relationships with cis men, and how this simple act, which should be the bare minimum, felt monumental."

It was a startling insight into how these people depend so much on someone else's validation and others saying the right words (in this woman's case, "they/them") to support their fragile sense of self. (It's also unclear how pronouns would come up during a one-to-one date).

Anyway, just sharing because it's an honest and revealing account of this woman's mental state.

She's with a trans-identifying-woman now, and seems happy. Well, sort of. "Now, every intimate movement encompasses our transness, whether it’s a ‘no-chest’ day, or a day I feel most comfortable being intimate with a binder on."

It seems like a very roundabout way of being two lesbians.

metro.co.uk/2026/05/12/sex-a-fellow-trans-person-put-off-cis-men-life-3-28322552/

I appreciate your explanation, it makes a great deal of sense.

It also makes me sad that these girls were not supported when children to express the aspects of their behaviour which are on the more masculine end of the gender spectrum and accept themselves as normal women in the whole spectrum of what it means to be a "normal" woman.

Lots of us reject the stereotype of femininity without needing to convince ourself that we are not the sex that our genes dictate we are. I think you hit the nail on the head when describing it as a mean's of taking control of your life.

Thank god these people take each other out of the dating pool. The tedium.

It's nothing to do with stereotypes they say, while demonstrating in every origin story that it is all, every little bit, about the stereotypes. Both crude external ones (wtf every teenaged girl had DMs in the 90s!) and internalized ones.

The complete lack of looking properly at other people. I can't think of any of my classmates growing up who were the walking stereotypes she describes her own sex as. Can you?

As a child, I enjoyed both boys’ and girls’ toys, clothes and activities. I would wrestle with my dad before going to dance class with my mum. I wore Disney princess dresses with Timberland hiking boots underneath.
Describes every child ever doesn't it?

"I always knew I wasn’t cisgender. As a child, I enjoyed both boys’ and girls’ toys, clothes and activities. I would wrestle with my dad before going to dance class with my mum. I wore Disney princess dresses with Timberland hiking boots underneath."

The internalised sexism is writ large.

I swing between finding this sort of thing deeply sad (how have nonsense stereotypes ingrained themselves so deeply in someone's psyche / this would have been completely unremarkable when I was growing up - what's changed for this poor generation etc.) and deeply irritating (this is just another form of, "I'm not like the other girls" / this entrenches the nonsense sexism because you're agreeing that not subscribing to those stereotypes means you must not be a girl / what sort of opinion do you have to have of other women to think any of this makes you special and differentiates you from other women?)

Sometimes I despair.

This is something I have never got. If you have a daughter who thinks she is a boy, but at the same time know they are hyper vigilant and scared of violence, why in the past have the very parents who support this
encouraged them to go into places where only men congregate like men’s toilets and changing rooms?

I honestly believe that it makes the parents feel special and gets them and the child a lot of enjoyable attention. My mother would have revelled in turning me into a boy if that had been a thing back then.

(re my last - though I and my kids would be lacking in the stereotype-interest parents too)

And then of course you have the homophobe parents. Mermaids was establish by a couple where the father was a raging homophobe who didn't want an effeminate son.

I feel so sad for them (plural them, the women who feel like this).

The language they need to express themselves and make sense of who they are has been stolen, corrupted and sold back to them as something totally different, something that reduces and minimises them but that they are leas to believe they must support and believe or they are just a nasty bigot.

No wonder they can only feel seen and described by disassociate themselves from wonanhood altogether. They no longer have the normal simple words that name and own their inner selves.

Those words being, of course:

"Fuck off with your sexist stereotypes and feminine bullshit! I'm a woman just as much as any other person of the female sex and I don't like any of that shit you assume I should. I'm just me, a woman who likes what I like, and you can deal with that because I ain't changing!"

Susie Green didn't establish Mermaids. She joined later and ruined what was once a very conservative (small c), careful and nuanced organisation. Watchful waiting was their main approach. She destroyed what was once a supportive resource for very worried parents. She had to, to validate what she did to her son.

Aren't the perpetrators of a large proportion of violence against trans people their sexual/romantic partners? Who presumably use the "right" pronouns?

Ahhh this mindset drives me INSANE!

I'm so glad I was bought up in the 80s by parents who had no issues with me wanting Star Wars toys, a Batman costume, a Knight Rider car, and also played with dolls.

Where did it go wrong? My 6 year old DD comes back from school now somewhat sad because she is a girl but likes 'boys things'. I am having to constantly remind her that all toys are for everyone to play with.

This. 100%.

I can remember Stephanie Davis Arai of Transgender Trend, years ago saying that girls would be looking at the transgirl in their class, dressed up like Barbie on acid, and then look at themselves and think if that's a girl, then what the hell am I?

This ideology does such a fucking number on girls. They actually have to find a label to explain why they're not like a man dressed as a woman.

And yes, l vacillate between sadness and vast irritation, too.

That's even worse, how sad for trans people.

It went wrong when retailers realised they could milk twice the amount of money out of parents if they marketed everything along strict PINK/BLUE lines.

Totally.

I'm sure there used to be toys that were deemed more for girls or more for boys, Barbie dolls, Action Men (which of course are dolls).

But the sea of blue pink in shops like Toys "R" Us, which were virtually self-contained units, and never the twain shall meet, was something else entirely.

It was positively prescriptive.

Hard agree! And when social media made how people look/present themselves ALL THE TIME even more important to impressionable young people (and we thought it was bad when we were buying magazines and seeing massive billboards…), so many young people started genuinely believing that if they didn’t doll themselves up or looksmaxx it was because they were failures as women/men.

And after that it was easy to pathologise totally normal adolescent body discomfort and reluctance to adhere to stereotypes. Add in a bit of neurodiversity, same sex attraction and an online community hellbent on recruiting lonely kids into “belonging,” and our most vulnerable kids didn’t have a chance unless their parents recognised how bizarre and illogical it all was right from the start.

Women and girls live with a great deal of hypervigilance, which is very debilitating. We have to be hyper-aware of threat because verbal abuse and violence against women is common and, in too many men's and boys' eyes, completely socially acceptable.

Adopting a gender identity is not a guaranteed way to opt out of that sex-based experience. Diminishing and distorting the real risks that women live with by playing gender games instead of trying to protect all females is lazy and negligent.

Be a feminist, not a gender stooge.

There was an article years ago that mentioned most of this is a need to push everyone else into limited and rigid, unhelpful boxes, so that someone with gender beliefs can identify as not being in the box. Or being in a different box. Personal gain achieved through trampling and limiting others.

There is no one way to be a girl. Thank God I didn't have to have the anxiety and agitation of worrying about my identity as a child, or whether I was sufficiently in a box to be able to classify myself, or to make decisions on what I did based on my box and what happened if I got out of it. I just was allowed to crack on tree climbing and wearing princess dresses with boots, and to believe I could be anything I wanted as a girl. To just be me anyway that I wanted, inside a female body.

Its probably no accident that as the boxes have been sternly imposed on all in a vain attempt to soothe a very small number of distressed people, women's rights have nose dived and we're dealing with misogyny and VAWG climbing steeply. This has done huge damage to women and gay people, and their equality. It's profoundly selfish.

@DeanElderberry , @Datun I combined your comments into the pithy post I've been trying to write:

This ideology does such a fucking number on girls. They actually have to find a label to explain why they're not like a man dressed as a woman.

Be a feminist, not a gender stooge.

Are non binary men as equally tedious as non binary women with their incessant focus on themselves?

Just wondering.

Totally agree! And I think you summarised the whole nonbinary thing in your penultimate sentence. Essentially, it’s all about feeling special. Just about everyone THINKS they’re special. And some people need the whole world to participate in their delusion that they are SPECIAL.

Several people here are blaming companies for sexist marketing strategies, but I think social media also has a big part to play in this explosion of narcissism. It’s another tool that helps people to convince themselves they are special.

People like this reinforce negative gender stereotype.... its so ANNOYING.

Girls like dance ... Boys wrestle ... girls like wearing dresses .... boys like army fatigues.

All utter utter BS - doesn't she know men like to and can dance? women are in the military? ... there are women wrestlers? Is she so self absorbed she can't see the actual world around her?

and most importantly , doesn't this woman realise... she's just like every other woman? Wow.. big deal she wore Combat boots with a dress.... or she wrestled with Dad before going to dance.... That's just being a kid. Oh wow sometimes she likes wearing dresses, sometime she doesn't .... THIS IS JUST BEING A NORMAL PERSON!

I cna;t see how you can be a "non-Binary" man or woman..... isn't the point of n-b that you're neither a man or a woman... ? not part of that binary ...

don't ... and the aisle labelled "BOYS TOYS" and the one labelled "GIRLS TOYS"

#LetToysBeToys