5 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Do non-binary identities reenforce gender stereotypes?
I've been deeply involved with friend groups that were majority nonbinary for over ten years, and this is not how anyone has talked. Those people you've spoken to are small-minded and judgemental, and they're pushing a gender issue that doesn't have to exist.
Everyone I know is firm that nothing describes your gender except you. I know people who move through the world while fully assumed to be women by everyone else, and despite this they personally feel unaligned with that gender. What others think or feel about their self expression doesn't matter, because they and the people who care for them respect their identity.
A man can wear a dress every day and still be a man, a nonbinary person can wear a dress every day and still be nonbinary. What matters is respecting people and not caring about choices that have no impact on our own lives.
Comment by poli_trial at 12/01/2025 at 09:58 UTC*
15 upvotes, 3 direct replies
To me it's clear that people who choose a nonbinary label intend to do so from with the purpose of creating more expansive/accepting forms view of self-expression. However, I don't think it has that effect. The better choice would be to frame expression that present greater possibility and fluidity within existing frameworks, giving them more complexity. In creating new "nonbinary" categories, you necessarily takes a more a deterministic and essentialist view of what it means to be a gender by virtue of stating that to express yourself, you need to step outside of it altogether, leaving those who don't choose to do so on the other side of the fence.
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Another example I want to evoke as a vignette about how this works. A queer woman I dated repeatedly asked me "how are you not queer?!?" since a lot of my worldviews are quite flexible and my way of expressing myself (outside of dress) is not shaped by expectations of sex roles within society. For her, open-mindedness was inherently tied to alternative gender expression.
In the early 2010's, before nonbinary/queerness became more common, I got a lot of interest from people who presented as what we'd call queer now despite dressing pretty vanilla. At the time, those communities cross-pollinated with regular communities quite a lot. These days, I'm mostly filtered out as a cis-white man, both on dating app and in-person interactions. The only interest I seem to spark is if someone gets to know me personally, through friends of friends or something like that.
To me, it's clear the direction things are going and it's not towards more expansiveness or openness. We're categorizing/labeling ourselves and others, siloing ourselves from others in the process.