Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
You can, kind of broadly for ease of understanding, categorize non binary into a few different types.
Static identities vs fluid
Absence of gender vs mix of gender
Trans identifying and cis or ar least non-trans identifying
Political or aesthetic versus psychological need
To explain absence and mix are basically what it says on the tin. For some people they want freedom from any cultural or physical gender aspects to the best that can be reasonably achieved or they desire a grab bag from both male and female cultural or physical phenotypes. This doesn't always nessisarily look like or have perfect androgyny as a goal.
Static identities do not change over time. Often these folk either experience a desire for an absence of sex characteristics or see themselves as a simultaneous mix male or female or as a specific other category.
Fluid identities change over time. This could be daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. A fluid person might alternate only between agender (ie no gender) and a binary gender or experience the full spectrum of male to female. Their needs change over time.
Political and Psychological are kind of another slider. For some Non-Binary represents a range of coping mechanisms to deal with gender euphoria or dysphoria. It can be a philosophy that is used to seek a sort of individual path, accepting a middle place ir an extremely nuanced situation where one's birth gender is a problem... But the solution isn't leaping to the full other side of rhe spectrum. For others Non-Binary can be a purely cultural third category. Gender abolitionists exist who find the repressive gender expectations they were subjected to did them harm. They might resent cultural gender rather than having any particular strong feelings about their bodies. Genderfuck or Genderpunk are outgrowths of movements that blend or subvert people's cultural expectations. The establishment of pink and blue boxes is a prison and they want nothing more than to burn it all down.
Transness or "Non-trans Non-Binary" extends from this division. Non-Binary identities fall under the Trans umbrella in the LGBTQIA+ but not every Non-Binary person is comfortable claiming transness as a label. Sometimes it feels to some enbies like they are claiming stolen valor or that they don't intend to physically transition so it doesn't apply (though it's worth mentioning that binary trans people also don't require an intent to physically transition as a gatekeeping item that prevents one from being trans ) others are functionally more cis identifying because their issue is cultural and not physical.
It's a very big tent of different people.
yeah its all kind of silly to my wife and I. I mean we sound non binary by the one persons thing of it but like gender roles have pretty much been thrown off after the hippie era in modern societies. I feel like making all these little boxes is like tacit approval of gender roles in general. Like it feels like a step backwards. Not liking guns or cars does not make a dude less of a man and not liking dresses or dolls does not make some gal less of a woman. They can be what they want. I feel like its all a kind of labeling.
Not... Really? That's a very culture and expression forward veiw of gender which as more questions get asked widely is seen as a very cis centric veiw of gender.
Like we haven't really nailed everything down and a lot of Non-Binary people don't like this take because a lot of them find it invalidating but the trans and cis aspect of gender are very different. The more we inquest into how the average cis person experiences gender the more we find the majority of cis people are all kind of "Non-Binary" they don't feel implicitly like their role holds any super deep meaning and feel like if their body flipped to the opposite sex then that isn't horrifying. The idea that cis people have a built in gender compass that aligns with a single set of sex characteristics is taking a trans lens and assuming that's how it works for everyone whereas if a big room full of cis people actually talk to each other about whether they have any kind of innate feeling of being male or female aligned you start realizing that premise of actually having any massive non-cultural preference one way or the other just isn't the norm. Cis people just don't have to interrogate their gender the way trans people do.
Basically it's like the brain's most common configuration is it's wired to accept whatever outcome of puberty and be flexible enough to adapt.
The trans aspect of gender (and a minority of cis people) is entirely different. We react to our sex characteristics intrinsically outside our control not as having neutral value but as having either negative or positive value. We are internally reinforced to react either with rewards like joy when our bodies are reflected back to us as matching our pre-settings oe punishes with stress, jealousy and depression when sex doesn't align. Like a body expectation switch got stuck in one position and anything other is abhorrent.
For trans folk gender expression and cultural reinforcement is just a mirror that causes other people to reflect our bodies back at us. Gender expression becomes a tool like technology to communicate needs. Indeed a lot of trans people have issues with having to overperform gender not because they want to participate in the culture but because we are steering people to avoid seeing our bodies, scanning and verbally reporting back to us their physical assessment of our sex... that hurts us and so we have to perform the most readable cultural expressions of gender to get strangers to understand at a glance how to help avoid our poisons and to treat us in ways that hit the built-in reward trigger.
Yeah I think there is just an understanding thing that is harder. I can barely parse this but I see a lot about ones body but then there is this general modern take that gender and sex are different that just was not the case for folk like me growing up. But if they are different and its about ones body then its about sex no? Is it the physical being or the social norms? If its the physical being then what does it mean as a thought experiment if someone was in the same condition with the technolog of a thousand years ago but the advanced socially beyoned today. Is it a medical thing that needs treatment or is a something one can come to terms with without altering themselves? Is it a medical condition or a personal choice. Granted these alternatives are not as easy as they appear. The idea of nature vs nuture is a debate as old as time.
Well I believe we are living at a point where we have not really figured things out. We have pieces. Gender theory is being treated as a monolith of ideas that is dominated by a cis veiw of gender as genre.
This is incompatible with trans needs because trans people's primary focus is physicality and are using the cis language of gender as technology to do something entirely different to change the way other people interact with their own physical nature.
So gender is bullshit made up by humans but to trans people its useful and nessisary bullshit
See I don't feel gender is bs but I think I may get what you mean. To me gender is just another term for anotomical sex or such and sorta bridges to nicety titles like mr or mrs. I assume you mean the idea of women being like x and men being like y which is really just stereotypes. I mean I don't think sterotypes exist for no reason. My peoples are known for drinking and if you go to a wedding or funeral for my family there will be nothing to make that stereotype less valid. But I don't drink much at all. So little it is going to be at a minimum months apart and more often than not years apart. Likely have one within a decade. My wife and I buy something and have it years later. Its kinda funny when the doc asks if I drink because its like yeah but by most peoples standards no. Then still many cultures are known for drinking and those that are not still drink a lot on all sorts of occasions.
From a philosophy standpoint - it is way more complicated than that.
Gender is sort of like a book genre. People made it up. It groups a bunch of ideas around physical sex that don't really have anything to do with it directly. It's sort of like stereotypes but it's also an amalgamation of history and how people express. You can have a culture where gender has hard rules or soft ones. You can have a gender expectation what a culture rewards people of a specific sex for doing or punishes them for not doing. Gender expression where there is a way of culturally displaying gender to others based on a cultural idea of what those sexes represent and how people think they differ : clothes, the way you act and so on.
The thing is these things are all not set in stone. They are all just cultural baggage.
Sex is just the thing gender chooses as it's centerpoint of creating all this fiction.
I just never though of it like this. When I talked with people saying male/female or man/women or dude/gal was kinda all the same. Sorta just depended on setting from clinical to casual. All the cultural things were sorta stuff just lopped on top. Its meaning kinda dependent on the individuals with some folks seeing them as some sort of law of nature and others as tendencies. I find the higher denisity the place one lives the less one is likely to go the law of nature route.