Also known as: “It must be so nice to be comfortable in either social role (even though you say you aren’t)” and “I don’t care about non-binaries enough to find out what things are like for you, so I’m going to make snippy digs about how I have it worse and therefore don’t have to care about non-binaries”.

This conversation happened on facebook in a conversation about passing: Person1: “I don’t really identify as female. I identify with both sexes. It’s kinda hard to explain.” Person2: “okay, then why would passing as male as opposed to female be an issue?”

Non-binaries get this all the bloody time. I don’t know what Person1’s exact gender is. If Person1 is bigender, a lot of bigender people have the problem that they don’t enjoy passing as either all the time. If a bigendered person is currently a werman, he won’t enjoy being called a woman any more than any other guy (of course, having the other half of his gender denied is aggravating as well). It can be just as painful. Bigendered people get the distinction of, somewhat literally, switching from trans to cis without any real control over it. With current medical technology and androgyny acceptance, it’s fairly difficult for bigendered people to get a body/presentation they’re comfortable with all the time. In other words: No, being bigendered doesn’t mean you’re happy when you don’t pass. It means it’s even harder to figure out how to pass unless you have Androgyny Powers (what I call being able to switch from passing as male to female and back fairly easily, or just passing as androgynous).

And that’s with people who are literally both. The rest of us still get these snide comments about how we can be happy in either social role. News Flash: I CAN’T. I’m not comfortable in either role. Binary gendered people, visualize something for a moment. If you’re trans- this should be easy. Think back to the last time you were misgendered, for whatever reason. If it happened often, think about how that felt. Think about the pain when no one saw you as the correct gender. If you didn’t pass easily, think about how aggravating it was to work to look like who you know you are and have it be ignored. Now remember this feeling, and expand it to feeling like you would be misgendered no matter what you were called. If you’ve never been misgendered- imagine how it would feel to try and convince anyone what gender you are, and have none of them believe you. For complete strangers greet you with the wrong option out of “sir” and “ma’am” and just looking confused and disbelieving when you go to correct them. Just imagine that anyways.

The entire world can flip a coin- heads is werman tails is woman or vice versa- every time someone sees you and it comes wrong all the time. You will never be called the right title, pronoun, or gender by a stranger (it’s touchy on friends and loved ones) no matter what you do. Even painting a giant sign saying “I go by [pronoun] and my gender is _____” will just get skeptical looks and laughed off as a joke unless you’re in an extremely trans and queer friendly environment. Even when your pronouns and gender fit the binary, people will react with confusion when you tell them your pronouns. It can be even worse with less accepted pronouns.

When you don’t fit into the binary, the closest to being correctly gendered most people get in this world is a stumbled “Ma’a — si — ah…?”. Which isn’t necessarily what non-binary people want. And that is not easy to achieve because people don’t like androgyny. Small amounts- some people think it’s cool or cute when a girl acts is a tomboy and acts like “one of the guys” (but not completely, she’s still a girl, she can’t be treated the same as guys!). Some people compliment a boy for being sensitive (within reasonable limits, a boy who cries too easily is just “a sissy”). But in those cases- you can still tell who’s a man and who’s a woman. You can still assert your sub-conscious “right” to constantly know what genitalia every stranger you meet has.

But proper androgyny, where you genuinely can’t tell? People don’t like that. It makes people confused and uncomfortable and even angry because it’s unknown to them. It throws their life views into question. When you’re walking the line between what society sees as a “werman” and “woman”, people seem to become hyper-aware of every little gender-tell and unless you have the right combinations, they’ll slap a label on you, and sometimes they’ll be more fervent about that label when you point out it’s wrong (or not entirely right), as if constantly misgendering someone will make that false-gender real. Some people are content with a close-to 50/50 split of what you’re being read as, but that really is about as good as it gets, and is difficult to get with friends and family and people who know you as a certain gender.

The idea that we can deal with misgendering any better just because being correctly gendered is so hard on binarists (and I know quite a few trans people included in that description) is insulting. Our gender is just as valid, our preferred pronouns are just as valid, misgendering isn’t any more acceptable than it is to misgender a woman or werman. Our dysphoria (social, bodily, or otherwise) is just as real. The habit so many people have of dismissing, denying, and erasing non-binary experiences is problematic. So often the assumptions people make about non-binaries are directly disproved by actual non-binary experiences, and even when this is pointed out the speaker doesn’t seem to care.(sometimes they do, but I’ve seen too many who don’t)

So, yes.

Misgendering does matter. Even when it’s applied to me.

I’d like to start this off by saying that I’m new at this – not only to genderblogs but to blogging in general. I read blogs, but I’ve never – strangely enough – felt compelled to comment or join the dialogue until finding this blog, which is wonderful. Thanks to all of you who write and participate here. You create a really unique and open space for discussion. Having said that, earlier today I found the website for the National LGBTQ Equality Story Summit, which I hadn’t heard of before, and it’s really neat. If you haven’t heard of it, I recommend taking a look at their site. The stories are really touching, to say the least. And as I listened to one individual speak about gender identity, and about ‘being in between and feeling comfortable there,’ I started to mull this concept over very deeply, even though I have conversations about gender frequently and hear statements of this nature a lot. And I really like when this happens, because there is always learning to be done, and new ways of thinking to discover, especially in such a complex and fluid subject as identity. So I’d like to keep thinking out loud more critically, and hopefully hear your thoughts about, what we mean when we talk about being in between, or in the area outside of, or independent of, the prescribed and narrow male-female gender binary. I doubt there are answers to this, per se, other than people doing what they need to do to feel comfortable and fulfilled – I’m just looking for different perspectives about this. And solely for the purpose of coming to a more dynamic, informed understanding of ‘in between’ that feels right for now.

So, here are the actual statements that spurred my thinking around this (and you can see the video and others at www.nodumbquestions.org).

“I don’t particularly like being a girl, but I’m no more a boy than I am a girl. I don’t like to identify as female or as a woman, but like obviously on forms with bubbles I will, you know, check female because that’s the one that makes the most sense to me. Um, but if I have a choice for – well if it says ‘sex’ I’m pretty comfortable because I know what I am there. But if it says gender, I’m like well I mean I’m somewhere in between, don’t they have an androgynous box? So I came to that conclusion that I’m not trans, I’m not happy with being female, but I don’t think anyone is especially happy with 100% of their gender characteristics. Everyone complains about something…”

I guess what I can’t wrap my mind around is what it really means to feel one way or the other, or in the middle, specifically in terms of gender identity and expression. For example, I don’t understand what it means to ‘feel like a woman,’ or not. I know this can certainly mean different things for different people, and I’m not talking about knowing that your birth sex is not representative of who you are or how you feel inside. But, we are bombarded from before we are even aware of it with societal and cultural prescriptions for sex, and for gender, and the behaviors and roles that supposedly characterize them, and there’s no doubt that those messages get internalized. I was born female, and I identify as a queer woman. I’m very comfortable with my sex. I’m less comfortable, however, with my gender identity and expression and struggle to align them all in a way that feels representative of who I am and how I feel. Whether this has to do with comfort level or my personality, or it’s something more, I don’t know. But considering all of these things together makes me wonder if it’s the societal prescriptions we try to evade in determining where in the universe of gender we belong, or if it is something more inherent in ourselves, or perhaps probably a complex combination of both? I know that I feel comfortable with the parts I was born with, and with my body and how I feel inside of my body. But I don’t know what it is that makes me a woman, or what being a woman feels like or should feel like. Really, there are as many gender identities as there are individuals, and perhaps the problem is in thinking that being a woman should feel like anything in particular. Is there so much emphasis on our gender and sex in our experience that we can’t see or make sense of any part of ourselves without it there?

Stuck in Loneliness

April 15th, 2009

The gender binary is the idea that human gender exists in two forms: masculine and feminine. The term also describes the system in which a society divides people into male and female gender roles, gender identities and attributes. Gender role is one aspect of a gender binary. Every known society has used the gender binary to divide and organize people, though the ways this happen differ among societies. A universal aspect of the gender binaries is that women give birth. Gender binaries exist as a means of bringing order. Certain notable religions are often used as authorities for the justification and description. Islam, for example, teaches that mothers are the primary care givers to their children and Catholics believe only males may serve as priests.

Exceptions have widely existed to the gender binary in the form of transgendered people. Besides the biological identification of intersexuals, elements strictly of the opposite sex have been taken by people biologically female and male such as two-spirited Native Americans and hijra of Indians. In the contemporary West, transgendered break the gender binary in the form of genderqueer, drag queens, and drag kings. Transsexuals have a unique place in relation to the gender binary because they transition from one side of the gender binary to the other.

The terms androgyny, intergender, bigender, multigender, third gender, neuter/neutrois/agender, and gender fluid may also be used to describe where one lies on a gender spectrum or in gender spheres outside of the normal binary genders.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_binary