7 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Do non-binary identities reenforce gender stereotypes?
I feel like this understanding collapses though when you ask most people who identify as nonbinary things like whether men can wear dresses and women be breadwinners or other hard stereotype-breaking questions about gender expression and they’ll still say yes nine times out of ten. Most of them clearly don’t believe in the things you’re saying they’d have to believe in to make it make sense, so this framework seems inherently flawed. When I say I’m nb, it means everything to me but the self-evaluation I’m doing has nothing to do with and is not proscriptive to anyone but myself. Tbh I suspect a lot of what I’m trying to describe has no verbiage in the english language is all, and since that’s the only language I have, I simply can’t describe it clearly to you. The only word I have to describe the experience *is* “nonbinary”, and I couldn’t break it down in an understandable way very easily. If anything comes close I suppose it’d just be to say that I’m personally declining the categorization because I don’t see personal value in it, but I’m highly supportive of anyone who does accept it and molds it any way they choose. Like you say, it’s very hard to come up with hard gender signifiers that aren’t just stereotypes, so it comes down to asking myself which gender feels more right on some soul/ego/vibe level, and since no gender concept I’ve yet had presented to me feels right, I’m nonbinary. It may not be very helpful definitionally, but that’s how it is for me.
Comment by Important_Spread1492 at 14/01/2025 at 18:25 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
If anything comes close I suppose it’d just be to say that I’m personally declining the categorization because I don’t see personal value in it, but I’m highly supportive of anyone who does accept it and molds it any way they choose.
Plenty of people decline gender categories without viewing themselves as non binary, in fact a lot of them are on this post. Most people just define themselves as a man or a woman based on biology, and express themselves however they want to. There's no need to have a gender that feels "right," the idea that you even would innately feel right with a gender is a new concept that many people do not subscribe to.
Comment by bigboymanny at 12/01/2025 at 16:55 UTC
0 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Id look into jungian psychology to help you explain it a bit better. Man and woman are archetypes. A man is someone interested in pursuing that archetype and integrating it into the self and vice versa for women. A nonbinary person is someone disinterested in those archetypes or values then way less than most people. At least that's my opinion on it.