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/

Personally I do feel like a woman. I like being a woman and I'm glad I'm not a man. The older I get I can see the differences in their ways of thinking, their lack of empathy, their self absorption, sense of entitlement and proclivity to violence. And I don't believe for one minute that it's all down to nurture.

Is it all part of the hyper-vigilance* that trans people have to live with?

*hyper-vigilance = being ready to hear insults and take offence at all times?

good question!

Oh, I see that @TransParentlyAnnoyed has flounced on the pretext of having manufactured a sense of deep personal offence rather than because they have no sensible answer.

Let's be honest, no-one was expecting to change that poster's mind here.

But logical reasoning works in strange ways and you never know when someone's going to wake up in the middle of the night asking themselves the very questions they tried to pretend they couldn't even comprehend at the time.

It's a logical argument type called reductio ad absurdam. If the argument you are making is sound, it would work for this obviously absurd example too. We all know the obviously absurd example is absurd. Therefore there must be a flaw in your logic or assumptions.

But she is wrong. She wore men's shirts and shorts skirts. So clearly she should feel like a nonbinary! Silly goose 😁

To me, it's a rather creepy enjoyment of just saying the words out loud.

As I said, weird af.

I found TransParent's posts unsettling. When asked to explain her child's feelings about gender, she explained her own. The child remained a mystery.

And in January the poster had three children, and the trans child belonged to another family member entirely.

The centering of themselves and their feelings in every post is a dead giveaway, in my opinion, that there is no trans child.

it's long been noted that trans activism needs 'trans children' in order to justify adult male cross dressers. Invented them, in fact.

Nonsense, the trans child ballet danced at Covent Garden with her his hair in a perfect bun styled by her his father.

That proves it.

Edited to fix my misrepresentation of what we were told. I think.

Just a musing, but I wonder sometimes whether just as 'trans' is perhaps the new, or a different, version of anorexia (there are lots of similarities I feel in teen girls), trans is also a way in which parental muchausen's by proxy shows itself.
(That is categorically not, by the way, saying that that is always, or even often, the case. Just that I don't see any reason why munchausens by proxy should have disappeared since the media last showed an interest in it, at a time when 'trans kids' weren't in fashion)

Surely it would be much better and far healthier just to be who you are and not make yourself into some kind of outlier by demanding 'pronouns' and the external validation of a special identity. We all have a unique character and combination of characteristics that is unknown to strangers.

'Cis' is a made up term. There are males and females " in the world" We call the young females - girls and we call the young males - boys.

'Gender' is just the contemporary, and unnecessarily confusing, word that is being used to describe any individual tastes or preferences that don't align 100% with sex based stereotypes.

Who conforms to all stereotypes, though? Nobody does. That doesn't make us 'trans'.

You just seem to me to be embracing, without question, the lexicon of gender Ideology - and using it to describe the very typical things that children and even adults experience or feel.

Some years ago, parents used to say they had 'an indigo child'. Everyone thinks their child is special and/or unique ( and they are). We really don't need a new term for that.

It does sound as if transparentlyannoyed's mother has a lot to answer for here, with her continual demands for expressions of 'femininity'.

Re: indigo children, this sentence jumped out:

Many children labeled as indigo children have the same identifying criteria as those children who have experienced being raised by a narcissistic parent, and are considered to have been emotionally abused.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_children

Children are frighteningly liable to think that adult bad behavior is their fault, not the adult's, and that they need punishing or fixing.

There was a thread recently by a woman who said she had an ‘orchid child’ - delicate and empathetic and far too special to be able to do any kind of boring office job, as far as could make out. What used to be know as being a bit of a wet lettuce.

I suppose an indigo orchid would be quite decorative to have around the house.

TransParentlyAnnoyed Trans/nb people live with a great deal of hypervigilance, which is very debilitating. They have to be hyper-aware of threat because anti-trans violence is common and, in many people's eyes, completely socially acceptable.

I'm very late with this post, sorry, the thread moved on fast and I'm only catching up. I think TPA has already left?

The 'hypervigilance' of 'trans/nb people' [two separate groups, why are they lumped together? why not trans/nb/and women, since violence against women is much more common] is artificially maintained by activists making exaggerated claim about anti-trans violence, using terms like 'literal violence' and 'genocide', and organising Days of Remembrance in countries where there haven't actually been any anti-trans murders.

Keep the pressure on, keep the temperature up, keep the hyperbole on the boil - that's how to manufacture an 'oppressed' and 'most marginalised minority', and use those baseless claims to justify the use of law-breaking and even violence.

Oppressed people do eventually turn to law-breaking and even violence - my own family did, a couple of generations ago, because centuries of asking nicely hadn't worked.
But the trans movement bypassed the years of discussion, negotiation, peaceful demonstrations, campaigning, politicking, and turned quickly to aggression and violence - which they justify by claiming they are fighting for their literal lives.
Or something.

It's a tactic, and it's cruel to people who believe it - young people in particular, but of course not exclusively them.

So @TransParentlyAnnoyed's daughter was into pink and sparkly until she came out to Mum when she was 11. However, this trans-identifying girl has long hair and sometimes wears a dress and makeup. Sounds like a weapons grade wind up. Well done that girl.

Yeah, I'm beginning to think she's really got the measure of her dad/mum.

Okay, okay, I'm traaans alright! But I'm going to work today in this skirt an lippy. You know, because men can be non conforming, amirite?

WTF? How did you read paedophilia into that post?

She's talking about physical reality and controls vs mental identity, and showing the flaws in your arguments (though thry are not even arguments really, just unevidenced and unexplained assertions) by applying the same framework to another meaningful physical difference that creates different social risks and needs.

But thank you for such a perfect demonstration of the "avoid a hard question" playbook.

The playbook:

The scenario:

A gender critical person makes a clear point, in this case the utter incoherent of your claim that your child's identity as a "boy" based on attributes only she knows, that have no connection to any other social or physical meaming of the word "boy" is nevertheless an absolutely authorative claim on "boyhood" and all that comes with it, extremely clearly.

The problem:

The Genderist can't answer at the level of the content and argument without exposing a logical contradiction, a moral hypocrisy in claiming to value self-definition, respect and inclusion but actually only extending these to those who identify as trans, or betraying underlying sexism in the definition of gender.

Oh no! 😱

The best course of action:

The Genderist should pick at the post with a fine toothcomb for any comment than can be spun into an accusation that the gender critical person has claimed "all" trans people are perverts, are mentally ill, or that the gender critical person is uncaring about/actively encouraging violence towards trans people or trans self harm. The Genderist can then reply stating their shock and horror at the this turn of events and that the poster's terrible bigotry means the Genderist cannot possibly carry on the conversation.

And there it ends, at least until there are enough posts to reenage without making it obvious the Genderist was just dodging the question, or until next time when the groundhog day resets, a new thread starts and the Genderist can come back with the same old debunked claims as if all comments made to them on the previous thread had never happened and it all starts again.

Fin

So goes the specific Genderist playbook that starts with "oh my lovely trans friend/child", proceeds through "I don't have to explain how my child is a boy/girl and what if that is true it means for all the other boys/girls in the world and how they know themselves, he/she just is and that's enough for me and it should ne for you too" to, well the pantomime above.

Because they got nothing else.

And they know it.

I think the reason these people smile when you use “their pronouns” is not due to validating their identity (whatever that means) but because they’ve exercised control over you.

I'd never heard of this man before arriving on Mumsnet. But this is yet another example of sex realists creating and then attacking a false motivation for a group of people. In this example of sharing an abhorrent ideology in users typing a prefix/word.

I'd heard the term 'cis' in the gender context was coined by a trans man in Europe. Others say it was a trans woman in the early '90s with a background in chemistry.

I don't use cis. It didn't exist when I was going through this, but I understand how it works and don't have an issue with people who do use it. Obviously they are not followers of the church of Volkmar Sigusch.

Im confused (i might be thick) how the pronoun thing works. If you talk to a person you wouldnt need their pronoun because surely you'd say hello <name> , how are you, do you want to go for a coffee etc ....and not need to use he/she/they etc

You'd use they/them, or he/she about the person to others....although you could still insert their name. There cant be that many chances for it to be an issue....can there...?

I do know a couple of people my age (mid-late 40s) with NB or trans kids and they refer to them as "they" on social media and have announced their new names. The trans child started as NB and the mum when she spoke to me, referred to her as "they".....but the child in question wasnt there so they wouldnt know whether we used the correct pronoun or not!

Actually tbf the first person I met, who had a trans child, agreed to use the new gender neutral name to the child, but still referred to them by their name and sex, when talking about them with others and felt they were being persuaded to re-write their childhood to something none of the family recognised as fact.

This scenario is entirely inside of your, and apparently other sex realists' brains.

And can speculate on motivations.

Obviously, something sex realists excel at.