thedeltaquadrant | (no subject)

here are 6 things i learned in 6 years of being out as nonbinary (it was my 6th coming out enbyversary on the 3rd):

1. not all nonbinary gender is derived from male or female.

when i first learned of nonbinary, i thought the gender spectrum was a triangle with male, female and agender being the corners and people could slide around on the sides or in the middle. i learned that nonbinary is way bigger than that, which not only helped me with my own self-discovery as a maverique but also to understand other people's experiences better.

2. a lot of trans and nonbinary people are still very attached to gender-related binaries.

ignorance is bliss, this isn't something i was aware of until about 4 years ago. terms like male- and female-aligned used to be very common and were used in a binary way. people love categorising especially nonbinary people by AGAB. transmasc vs transfem is pretty much treated like a binary. and 2 years ago people started with the men vs non-men bs.

3. binarism doesn't describe a general antinonbinary sentiment, but bigotry against cultural genders.

we have the terms racism, classism, sexism & ableism, so binarism makes sense as a term for bigotry against nonbinary people, right? wrong. binarism describes the imposition of the western gender binaries onto cultures that recognise more than two genders. the -ism term for nonbinaryantagonism is exorsexism.

4. there are a lot of people who treat nonbinary as a blank slate to project whatever is convenient for their argument upon.

we disagree with you, we're evil men. we have our reproductive rights taken away, we're pure women. nonbinary isn't a single third gender but also nonbinary men and women don't exist because the only way to be nonbinary is to be neither. people can't make up their minds.

5. almost every single nonbinary term either gets a lot of hate or ends up being rebinarised.

people hate the word enby because then we can talk about ourselves using a noun which gives us the tiniest bit of legitimacy but that's reserved for men and women. people hate terms that describe attraction to nonbinary people because to them we're not a valid group of people to be attracted to. transgender used to mainly describe nonbinary people, now it has binary connotations and we're still pushed out of it. genderqueer used to describe people we would now call nonbinary but binary people decided a term that doesn't include them isn't inclusive enough. there are people who are trying to turn nonbinary into a set of beliefs that binary people can follow rather than an identity.

6. binary people will think you're a cringey weirdo no matter what, so you might as well prove them right.