Comment by Accurate-Peach5664 on 12/01/2025 at 17:04 UTC

8 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)

View submission: Do non-binary identities reenforce gender stereotypes?

You’re right. It does re-enforce rigid gender definition lines. All of the current discussions do.

A boy liking dresses being told “you should probably become a girl, even do surgeries, etc” is re-enforcing gender stereotypes.

Telling him those are “girl things” rather than just accepting that he’s a boy….who likes dresses. And just moving on.

The way to truly re-define rigid lines would be to not care if a boy wore a dress. Just let it go and stop trying to shove everyone into a box, whether it be transitioning to fit into a different box, shove them into the “non binary” boxes, or whatever.

Replies

Comment by SydowJones at 12/01/2025 at 18:20 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I think the key detail to focus on in your comment is:

Being told to be X reinforces stereotypes.

That's correct. "You're a man", "you're a woman", "you're nonbinary" are not respectful things to say to people who disagree.

Consider:

• One person likes to wear dresses, and thinks of himself as a man.
• Another person likes to wear dresses, and thinks of herself as a woman.
• Another person likes to wear dresses, and thinks of themself as nonbinary or genderqueer.

In these examples, nobody is telling them what gender box they belong in. These examples are about their own self concepts. We don't need to know where their gender self concepts originate from before we can acknowledge that they have them.

How is this reinforcing gender stereotypes?