Trans

So helpful, thanks Ada!

I think your definition of non-binary is similar to what I was trying to capture with my first account of non-binary as a third gender category (or in a "beyond the binary" model, as the only gender category).

What is interesting to me is that this account of non-binary relies on someone's experience of gender and on their relation to a socially imposed gender. This raises questions about all the variation, which you have brought up, and maybe this could result in different accounts of non-binary that still all fit under one umbrella concept.

The way I look at it, is that if a particular label is helping you navigate the world and your relationship with your own sense of self, then it’s the right term, and other people’s opinions on the “right” label don’t come in to it.

Yes, of course - I think the history of medical gatekeeping (like the Benjamin Rules) and the fact that trans folks are essentially gender outlaws, constantly under the threat of enforcement of a politically dominant gender hegemony, puts us on the defensive about our labels and identities.

In the context of our societies our identities are automatically questioned and doubted, considered fictional or unreal, and considered "wrong" or suspicious. In that context it makes sense to prioritize the authority of the individual to self-identify, and this is a smart move relative to our particular form of political hegemony, which is dominated by an ideology of liberalism which has a rich history of individualism to appeal to. We are able to weave our trans individual autonomy into the broader strands of individualism already present in our society.

To that point, I guess I will speak for myself and to my experience - I have watched myself take and let go of many labels, and it is interesting that the thing that changed was not so much me as much as my understanding, or more to the point, the meanings I had for words. I would have identified with a label like non-binary years ago, where I took that label to mean I did not perfectly conform with the gender I was assigned. The definition sounds very much like your definition, and yet I do not understand it now the same way I would have then. Living as a man then I was unusually soft and failed to conform to my gender in many ways, I would even wear a purse and refused to call it a hand-bag (as perhaps the example of my biggest and most persistent form of gender resistance, which most people found easy to ignore, asserting the binary role of man onto me with ease). Yet for all intents and purposes I lived as a man still and being non-binary was like a technicality for me, something that was true but irrelevant as I was living as a man. There is some amount of shame I experience now in telling this, as I feel I was living as a cis-gendered and cis-sexual person then. Now I have a much richer understanding of non-binary identities, and I know that the in-congruence I experienced before was likely a sign of being trans more than being non-binary (though they are often one in the same). And now as someone who has socially transitioned and would now be described as belonging to trans-gender and trans-sexual (i.e. medically transitioning) categories, I have come to see myself as potentially non-binary in a different sense. Rather than non-binary as a way to describe my incongruence with my assigned sex, now non-binary is a way to describe my incongruence with my chosen gender. I am probably in the ambiguous boundary between binary and non-binary space, and while for practical intents and purposes identify publicly as a binary trans woman, I think of myself as technically non-binary still. All these changes can be unsettling to one's sense of reality, and I have lost confidence in my ability to know my gender, so everything is left a bit open and ambiguous.

Even now I feel like I am still learning, hence why I'm here asking for new ways of seeing.

Makes sense, I think being an umbrella term makes it a rich environment for a wide variety of meanings. I guess it's not surprising then that we would end up with radically different accounts of what it means to be non-binary.

Sometimes it seems to me that "non-binary" as the broadest umbrella term might technically fit everyone, since there are always ways that people diverge from a strict set of gender norms.

Ah interesting, I think that might be like the political meaning of non-binary, someone who rejects the gender binary, but maybe for other reasons besides political reasons? The only reason I can think of is maybe someone just doesn't believe anyone can be binary, like that there is some kind of empirical fact of people's gender identities and none of them are binary.

That's exactly what OP did. No attempt to shove people in a box was made. There's no need to fly off the handle.

Not every inaccurate statement about nonbinary people is made in bad faith.

What's your definition for being trans?

Interesting, so there is this notion of non-binary as applying a spectrum to previously binomial things, like sex, gender, and sexuality.

It's also interesting that you position non-binary less as a label or identity but more as a fact about someone (that they may or may not know, or identify with). For example, a trans woman who does not want bottom surgery is considered less feminine, then, on the spectrum.

See, I wonder if you couldn't take the same distinction and apply it to even more refined categories. I think of Helen Daly's paper "Modelling Sex/Gender" (PDF), in which Daly proposes a "many strands" model of sex and gender, whereby sex or gender is not thought of as a set of categories whether binary (as man or woman) or ternary (as man, woman, or non-binary) nor as a spectrum between two extremes (man on one end, woman on the other, and "non-binary" being anything in-between), but rather as a set of characteristics that may be spectral or not.

This is suggested as a way to help policy makers navigate the complexity of sex/gender, for example when deciding whether someone qualifies to compete in men's or women's sports.

Personally it seems this thinking ignores the potential for policy makers to have a transphobic bias when choosing relevant characteristics to include in defining someone's sex or gender for the sake of a given decision, but what I do like is that it does give a helpful model for approaching contextually different notions of sex and gender.

So in a medical context a doctor could use the many-strands model to approach better care for their patients. Rather than focusing on whether a patient is a man or woman, they can focus on facts like whether a patient has a prostate or not, whether they have a uterus or not, etc.

So the question comes back that in what context would an otherwise binary trans woman need to be labelled non-binary for being no-op or pre-op?

The label can function various ways, but there seems to be something wrong with labeling an intersex or trans woman as somehow less feminine or less of a woman due to having the "wrong" genitalia.

I think this intuition probably comes from the weight we give to someone's internal sense of themselves, and that the brain and mind are the ultimate authority of who someone is and what their authentic identity is.

Anyway, I know you weren't attempting to foist the non-binary label onto binary-identifying trans women, but I'm thinking about the theoretical limitations of a model like that, which seems to impose that kind of meaning onto them regardless of how they experience gender.

I could also be wrong about my assumptions, I admit there might be an empirical aspect to these questions that is being left out (as dangerous or politically unsavory as that kind of biological determinism can be).

Interesting notions, it sounds like a lot of your notion of "non-binary" is similar to the second meaning I had in mind, basically the idea of being genderqueer or gender non-conforming.

I can really relate to some of what you are saying about not feeling awful being nominally gendered male by others, I had a sort of indifference to gender and felt like if people wanted to call me he/him that it was on them, not me. They were gendering me, so I didn't have to take it that seriously.

When I watched the Transition Channel videos, especially the Common Excuses to Transitioning video, I realized I might be more trans than I had previously considered (I thought of myself as nominally non-binary and "gender non-conforming" before, not really thinking of those terms as being trans per se), and most importantly that I might have been suppressing myself and ignoring dysphoria. It was a good coping strategy while growing up since transitioning was never going to be an option then, and it was unsafe not to conform to the assigned masculine gender.

Like Natalie Wynn and Mia Violet describe, I too found living as a boy not too bad. I didn't really have thoughts that I was a girl before puberty hit. Even living as a man wasn't that distressing as I could just ignore gender and dissociate to cope.

Anyway, your description of your gender reminds me a lot of myself before I transitioned (not that this means you will be like me, I just can relate to what you are describing). It's hard for me because transitioning is so difficult, there is still such a strong desire in me to ignore this problem and not prioritize it. I feel selfish for prioritizing it, and I also feel like it's a huge risk for something that I have been able to live without for so long.

That said, HRT changed the balance - I'm not transitioning so I can live as a woman primarily, I'm transitioning because repressing and having androgen dominance turned out to be impacting my mental health in ways I didn't know until I tried HRT.