Why Are You So Comfortable Telling Me What I Feel Represented By?
It’s never too late to learn something new about yourself. A passion for sumo wrestling, a talent for backgammon, a hitherto undiscovered identity.
In my article, Wait, Isn’t Everybody Non Binary?, I pointed out that I’ve never “identified” as a man. I’m not at the extreme end of the manliness scale by any measure (at least not while The Rock is around). I have no “deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender” as the WHO describes it. For me, gender doesn’t “feel” like anything at all.
Which must mean that I’m non-binary!
Laurel and I have a long, edifying chat about my new identity.
Laurel:
If people really believe that it is this gender identity movement that perpetuates gender roles, they are clearly blind to the elephant in the room.
We are just tired of being controlled by expectations - and we will be anyway - so we might as well apply expectations to ourselves that feel the most comfortable.
I used to share this view with you that I should not abandon womanhood, for maybe I could fit womanhood into my own identity. But this did not serve me. I felt very mis-aligned with myself, like something was deeply missing. Not everyone is nonbinary, no. Womanhood and manhood can be defined by whoever feels represented by those terms. Gender is not a series of stereotypes, but gender and gender stereotypes are locked in a partnership that will not budge from one another. Thinking that a woman enjoying football will destroy gender stereotypes displays extreme ignorance to the larger structures at play.
There's more that can be said about this, of course, but I don't want to rant for too long. I have articles about this topic on my blog if anyone is interested in knowing the difference between being nonbinary and "not feeling like a gender".
Steve QJ:
Womanhood and manhood can be defined by whoever feels represented by those terms.
Fine, then as I can only speak for myself, by this definition, I'm non-binary. The article was actually me asking whether everybody else felt the same way. Going by the comments, it seems as if a lot of people do.
I've never felt "represented" by "manhood." I accept the label of "man" because it's a descriptor of my biology. Pretty much everybody on Earth will look at me and without hesitation describe me as a man. And as I don't allow this descriptor, or the expectations that come with it, to "control" me, I just kind of shrug and say that's fine. I fell the same way about the label "black".
But that said, I do understand that the experience is different for women. Women face a whole range of expectations and pressures that men don't. I'm not trying to put words into your mouth, because you didn't say this exactly, but let's say that wanting to find a way to escape those expectations seems like the most natural thing in the world to me.
I guess I'm just wondering how effective this actually is in practice. Does saying you're not a woman really stop people from perceiving you as one? Do you escape misogyny because you tell people to use different pronouns? If you're saying you're not a woman because you don't "identify" as one, what exactly are you identifying out of except the stereotypes? What "larger structures" am I missing?
“let's say that wanting to find a way to escape those expectations seems like the most natural thing in the world to me.”
If you cast your mind back a couple of months, you’ll remember this conversation about the desire to escape gender expectations. Growing up male, I’d never fully appreciated the pressures and expectations some women (and especially teenage girls) have to deal with.
I still don’t fully appreciate them, of course. That’s one of the many reasons it would be ridiculous to claim that I’m a woman. But let’s just say I can see why the promise of opting out of those pressures is appealing to so many young women.
If only a shiny new set of pronouns were enough to do the trick.
Laurel:
In terms of being “represented” by a gender, I made that term purposefully ambiguous because that tends to mean different things for different people. By accepting the label “man”, you do feel represented by that label in some capacity, even though it is not something you dwell over much - probably because you are cis. You do not have to worry about your gender identity because there is no misalignment between your identity and your biological sex. You just don’t know what it’s like to feel detached from it.
Men and women both have expectations - the expectations are just different. And everyone is certainly controlled by them, but those who already feel comfortable with their biological sex and the associated gender roles are not bothered (and maybe not even aware) of the ways those roles determine certain aspects of their reality. When I say control, I mean we are controlled in the sense that the heavy conditioning and implications attached to our biological sex will determine a multitude of outcomes and experiences in our lives.
The “larger structures” you inquire about have already been answered earlier in our responses. The gender dichotomy, in short, is the root of the problem. We will inevitably make assumptions about others due to how we perceive someone’s gender - and our inclination to make those distinctions and assumptions based around gender is not something we were born with.
Your point about the effectiveness of trans-ness in practice is admittedly troubling. Because at the end of the day, my gender identity is both personal and social. Especially when it comes to being nonbinary, it is most beneficial when I’m surrounded by people who respect my pronouns. In broader social settings, however, it is very difficult and frustrating to know that many people will perceive me in a way that I find to be very unfitting. In fact, when I’m around family members, for example, I am extremely feminized and feel that I am playing a character because of this. But if I did not transition to nonbinary, I would have to play that character all the time. Even the most aware people cannot undo their conditioning around gender.
So, my “woke” friends would still place me into a role I’m not comfortable with if I didn’t come out as nonbinary. Words are actually quite effective. Using a gender neutral pronoun, I believe, creates a real association between gender neutrality and the person being referred to (in the minds of those who accept and understand). Same goes for male and female pronouns. I see it as hijacking our conditioning. Because even my own conditioning is the thing that makes me feel detached and untethered from womanhood. My conditioning inevitably affects my perception on my own gender identity, and the only thing I can do about that is embrace being nonbinary and let myself be happy.
Sadly, it seems that most people do not understand nor do they want to. Most people are going to see me as a woman, but it is extremely rewarding when people do not see me as a woman once I tell them I am not one.
Just because you feel your gender identity does not affect you does not mean that the same goes for everyone else. (I apologize for the length)
Steve QJ:
By accepting the label “man”, you do feel represented by that label in some capacity
This is one of many things I find so fascinating about this issue. Why do you feel so comfortable telling me what I do and don't feel represented by, or with informing me that I'm cis, yet equally comfortable telling me that I can't know anything about your experience?
No. I don’t feel represented by the label “man.” I know that when some people hear that word they imagine all kinds of things that have nothing to do with me. I know some people like to throw around terms like “man-spreading” and “man-splaining” and “toxic masculinity” to reinforce their assumptions that I must be some entitled, misogynistic caveman. The key point is, I don’t care.
Accepting a label is as least as much about how much you care about labels as it is about your sense of identity. If somebody makes a bunch of assumptions about me because I'm a man, just as if they make a bunch of assumptions about me because I'm black, the problem is theirs.
I could expend what seems to be an enormous amount of energy trying to force people to refer to me in specific ways that are tailor made for me, or I can be myself and let people figure our what that is. I can stop trying so hard to control people's perception of me with labels and let my actions speak for themselves. If I meet somebody who is incapable of seeing beyond their prejudices about my skin or my sex or anything else, I'm fine not being friends with that person.
I can't control how I see you. Thousands of years of evolution put that firmly out of my control. And, of course, what "seeing you as a woman" even means will vary wildly from person to person. But I try my best to see everybody as an individual and react to them based on their actions and attitudes.
You're right, society makes that difficult. But I'd argue that far more difficult is convincing people that a new pronoun turns you into something else. What happens when society applies its stereotypes to that new pronoun? As has already happened in some cases. Stereotypes can't be avoided, only transcended. And, at least for me, a large part of that is to stop worrying about labels.
p.s. No problem about the length (though I appreciate you being considerate about it. I once received a reply that was over 2000 words long😅). I really am interested in learning about different perspectives even if I don't completely agree with them. So I’m glad you expressed your thoughts fully.
Laurel:
Well, I assumed that your claim to be nonbinary was facetious, but correct me if I’m wrong. I was only elaborating on the information you gave me, which was that you don’t mind the label of “man” despite its implications. I do understand that you don’t care, but you seem to at least accept the label and what may come with it, even if you don’t relate to it yourself. Most people do not relate to their gendered label to its full extent. Just because you don’t care about being subject to stereotypes does not mean that everyone will feel that way about it. Some people, especially those who are gender non-conforming, are negatively impacted by gender stereotypes to the point where identifying with their assigned gender at birth is more psychologically harmful than being trans.
You can know as much about my experience as I tell you about it, and the same goes the other way around. I was just trying to interpret the information you gave me the best I could. However, when someone has the privilege of identifying with their assigned gender at birth, it is typically more difficult for them to understand people who are less privileged in this regard because it involves a struggle that is completely unknown to them.
Like I said, gender identity is both personal and social for cis and trans people alike. Most assumptions people will make about you are subconscious, and they do determine things about your identity, even in just an isolated, subjective sense. The fact of the matter is that everyone is conditioned to have prejudices they may not even be aware of. That is simply the neutral consequence of existing in our society. If you intend to truly escape prejudice, you would basically have to be friendless and live in some sort of isolated vacuum in which you cannot be perceived by other humans.
For trans people, it takes enormous amounts of energy to pretend to identify with their assigned gender at birth. So, the extra energy it takes to transition and push others to respect our pronouns is usually worth it. Especially the latter when we are surrounded by people who don’t require any convincing.
You cannot control how you see me, but that is more at the fault of social structures than evolution. However, belief and understanding goes a long way. If you did believe that trans people were valid, it would actually be quite easy to change how you view them (our brains are adaptable) - but maybe not completely. It is natural to be aware of their assigned gender at birth, but that is different from believing that their assigned gender at birth defines them when they say it does not. The perceptions people have towards women do vary, but only to an extent when our culture has put constrictions around what womanhood consists of.
A lot of times, the new stereotypes around new pronouns are actually beneficial. The point is finding a place in which we belong among members of our society, feeling welcome in a generalized group, and feeling comfortable identifying with certain loose attributes that come with a label. It is human nature to conform. Binary trans people feel the need to conform the same way that cisgender people do. Nonbinary people have less conventional standards to conform to, but it still requires conforming to some degree. These stereotypes are actually the key - changing the stereotypes one conforms to actually does turn you into something else, in this context. Gender roles and identities are subjective, at the end of the day. If you establish an identity, and a group of people can agree to validate that, it is actually enough to establish that identity as truth. That is typically how subjective things, such as morality, work in society.
I think the main thing we disagree on here is the last point you made in your argument - you believe that stereotypes can be transcended, but I believe that they can only be reclaimed. Sure, they can be transcended in a culture-less vacuum, but as I’ve explained, that is unfortunately impossible to achieve. Once again, that is how subjective concepts work. They are fluid in some ways and concrete in others, depending on what humanity chooses to agree on. Since humans are creatures that find comfort in conformity and categorization, the most logical solution to the problem of unfortunate gender roles is to allow fluidity in gender identity.
Also, I must note that we can still push to accept people deviating from gender roles while still identifying with them (i.e a man wearing makeup and dresses), but that will also be viewed through a lens that differs from, for example, a transgender woman. Therefore, I would still argue that transgender people and gender non-conformity among cisgender people can exist in tandem. That being said, transgender people are also welcome to participate in gender nonconformity. I could elaborate on that as well, but I think this response has outdone my last one in length. Whoops!
P.S. Thank you for being kind to me when discussing these delicate, complex topics with me. I hope it is understood that I approach you with complete respect for you and your experiences. I simply mean to share my own experiences in this thread while also possibly coming to some consensus here.
“Thank you for being kind to me when discussing these delicate, complex topics with me.”
Pop quiz: when’s the last time somebody thanked you in real life just for being kind during a conversation?
It’s so sad that this basic human standard is even slightly noteworthy on the internet.
Steve QJ:
For trans people, it takes enormous amounts of energy to pretend to identify with their assigned gender at birth.
This is a particularly interesting point to me. Again, I don't identify with my assigned gender. But I am my assigned sex. I don't consider myself to have been “assigned” a gender, as nothing was imposed on me by the doctor who delivered me. Gender is a set of behaviours and societal expectations that I am able to conform to or not.
So when you say it takes trans people "enormous amounts of energy to pretend to identify with their assigned gender," how is this different from saying that it takes enormous energy to conform to the stereotypes expected of them (or not expected of them)?
For example, women are expected to wear make up and be feminine and wear flowery dresses. At least by some people. But many women choose not to do any of these things. I'm sure this requires energy sometimes. Society undoubtedly puts pressure on them to conform. But they're not trans. They're women. Just women who say, "I will do what I want, thank you."
This just seems so much more feasible and healthy than constructing an identity that requires the whole of society to change the way they perceive males and females. And, as we discussed, many people simply won't be able to perceive you in the way you want them to.
Because, no, I meant evolution, not societal structures. A baby can tell the difference between a male and a female after a few months. This is very useful information evolutionarily speaking. Both from the point of view of threat assessment (males are more dangerous than females), as well as which people are potentially able to feed you (mothers are a baby's primary food source after all). It's why concepts like "passing" exist. We can do amazing things with plastic surgery. But I've heard even extraordinarily feminine looking trans women say that when they look in the mirror, all they see is a man. Without the makeup and hormones, it's extremely hard to fool people about what your sex is.
I also want to be careful about differentiating non-binary people and trans people. Non binary people are gender nonconforming, but that's quite different from people who have gender dysphoria. For example, you talk about a man wearing a dress being different from a transgender woman. This is true. But it's only true because a transgender woman has gender dysphoria. Otherwise the two are absolutely identical. There's an awful lot of "concept creep" when we discuss trans issues which only make these converstaions harder and more imprecise. Nonbinary people might be under the trans umbrella. Who can say. But they're not transgender people.
As for stereotypes being reclaimed vs transcended, this might be a semantic problem. What do you mean by reclaimed? And reclaimed by whom? What does this reclamation look like in practice?
That was the last I heard from Laurel, which is a shame. I was curious to hear her answers to my closing questions.
Despite my occasionally argumentative nature, my favourite conversations are those where we’re not really trying to change each other’s minds. Where we’re not bickering about objective facts, but rather trying to learn about each other’s experiences. Where the goal isn’t to “win,” but to understand how the other person thinks about a “delicate, complex topic.”
No doubt Laurel is still living a prosperous, non-binary life somewhere. And I’m as unfazed as ever by the fact that I’m an adult human male. Neither of us was about to upend our lives as a result of this conversation. But the great promise of the internet, before we decided it was for porn and cancelling people, is the ability to discover perspectives you’d never hear otherwise.
Who knows what will happen with non-binary people. Maybe, in a few years, we’ll look back on them the same way we look at goths and punks and hippies. Or maybe they’re a sign that the next few generations will take those pressures and expectations I was talking about seriously.
But whatever happens, I think it’s important to talk about it. Even if we don’t learn something new about ourselves, it’s always valuable to learn about other people.
I go for hours at a time, even days, without reminding myself that I'm male. It falls well below being gay, and not even that would be in the ten words I'd choose to describe myself. Which makes me really wonder why some people feel obliged to bring up their "gender identity" every ten or fifteen seconds.
All this talk of societal gender expectations also makes me wonder ... if a few tens of millions of people just emerged from suspended animation; it seems to me that they're like those stranded Japanese soldiers who thought the war was still on decades after it ended. The whole "Ward and June Cleaver" gender role thing seems to have faded out decades ago. I mean, find a picture of Benazir Bhutto when she was living in America, wearing jeans even as she met the requirements of Muslim modesty. Wanna talk about oppressive societal expectations? Behold her elegance while meeting them.
It hit me reading your article above ... what is this really about? Those societal impositions are largely imaginary. Women can stay at home and do the Küche-Kinder-Kirche thing if they want to or they can drive trucks or terrorize an office. Men can wear makeup, and many do. So let's stop honoring these claims of oppressive social expectation, they are bullshit.
Pronouns? Forget about "they," not gonna happen, full stop. But ... when we are in the presence of anyone of whatever gender or pretense of gender, there is only one pronoun, and that is "you." We don't even have thou/thee anymore, more's the pity. I live my life in Vietnamese which doesn't even have pronouns but need to choose from among dozens of substitutes when I talk to someone, though at my age I can safely use "em" with just about everyone.
But the whole controversy is over the third person, how we refer to people *when they aren't even around to hear it*! JFC! And then it hit me that what is really underlying all this gender fad horseshit is not some social revelation or liberation, it's just plain self-consciousness. Anyone in the "trans" camp who isn't actually gender dysphoric is piggybacking to feel important, to get special attention. While most reviled minorities just want to be left alone, these minorities have long lists of demands for the rest of us to follow: "cis," "they," just for starters. They do NOT want to be left alone, they want each of us to be deeply involved with and attentive to each of them. Let me give the briefest and most succinct possible answer:
No.
Genuinely dysphoric people deserve our respect and understanding, at least the attempt. Non-dysphorics claiming the same don't deserve those, and "non-binary" is just an insult to our intelligence. Kicking a door that isn't locked. Don't want to conform to societal pressures (that don't really exist anymore)? Then don't. But anyone who mentions "my gender identity" several times per minute is going to find himself talking to air.
Would you want to work with this girl? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFjUjSJplfs&t=2s Getting harangued every day? Exploding in rage and tears?
I've never met a "nonbinary" person face to face, the fad began after I left and Vietnamese don't do that stuff. But nearly every one I have encountered online or heard about sounds like a total pain in the ass.
Goths and hippies didn't turn every conversation around to being goths and hippies.
Steve this is probably my favorite conversation I've read on here about trans/gender ideology. Kudos! Kudos to both of you actually, although I didn't agree much with Laurel. I think I just appreciated the genuine quality of the debate. This is what debates should look like. Laurel thanking you for being kind was also rather heartbreaking... it made me consider what they must face regularly when trying to have these sorts of conversations.
Anyway...
Laurel: "Since humans are creatures that find comfort in conformity and categorization, the most logical solution to the problem of unfortunate gender roles is to allow fluidity in gender identity."
This basically sums up my beef with this movement. It ignores literally decades of feminist and gay rights activism that led to, in my own jaded Gen-X estimation, the beginning of something good when it came to gender roles: the 90s. At long last it felt like it was okay for women and men to consider themselves women and men while still flouting stereotypes about what women and men were supposed to be like. So many supposed "feminine" men expanding the idea of how men were supposed to be. Kurt Cobain. So many supposed "masculine" women expanding the idea of how women were supposed to be. All those Riot Grrrls. Maybe I'm just locked in the past or something, but back then it was incredibly freeing to be a man and call myself a man and still personally reject what was supposed to be manly behavior. And the same thing went for the women in my life. And we also had trans people in our lives, but I'm almost afraid to sound too old-school here, because these trans friends were people who literally wanted to (and often did) change their gender because they felt they were in the wrong body. Not because "trans" meant fighting against gender stereotypes, which is where me and non-trans friends were coming from.
The changes in the past decade when it comes to gender and gender stereotypes are both frustrating and mind-boggling to me because it appears to ignore all of the work done previously that sought (successfully, I once thought) to upend gender stereotypes.
I realize that this is a typical anti-woke argument when it comes to the new gender essentialism that appears to be a part of the non-binary movement( and no doubt I'm literally repeating what I've said in past posts), but reading this conversation brought it all back.