He needs punching. :) He's famous/notorious here, but you probably don't know his name, which is a small mercy for you.
Saying non-binary, to me, acknowledges a binary
In my most snarky moods, I say that I'm outside the binary/non-binary binary. :)
I do believe that gender exists in that it's clearly important to a lot of people I know who have done the gender introspection whether they come out of that cis or trans (or something else), but it's not something I have any experience with.
But to call myself trans feels like a lie because, again, I don't have a relationship to gender at all.
I can understand that, even though I do call myself trans because I understand it as "my gender is not what I was assigned at birth" and while I think the problem there is assigning babies a gender, and not my particular one. Ideally I wouldn't have a relationship with gender except what I internally felt or deliberately chose, but that isn't the world I feel like I live in, because gender isn't only assigned at birth, it's ascribed instantaneously and subconsciously by every stranger I interact with. It has helped to be able to distinguish my gender identity ("no") from my desired gender presentation (which turns out to be pretty specific).
Calling myself trans feels like a lie to me more because I don't have a visceral negative reaction to my given name or pronouns. I don't expect to be subject to hate crimes. The medical gatekeeping I can anticipate (which is fierce in the UK) is no different from what I'm used to as a USian, as a poor person, as a disabled person, as an immigrant. I don't want to take away from the near-universal suffering of trans people but also I'm sad that our society has ensured that suffering is a shared characteristic of almost all trans people.
no subject
He needs punching. :) He's famous/notorious here, but you probably don't know his name, which is a small mercy for you.
Saying non-binary, to me, acknowledges a binary
In my most snarky moods, I say that I'm outside the binary/non-binary binary. :)
I do believe that gender exists in that it's clearly important to a lot of people I know who have done the gender introspection whether they come out of that cis or trans (or something else), but it's not something I have any experience with.
But to call myself trans feels like a lie because, again, I don't have a relationship to gender at all.
I can understand that, even though I do call myself trans because I understand it as "my gender is not what I was assigned at birth" and while I think the problem there is assigning babies a gender, and not my particular one. Ideally I wouldn't have a relationship with gender except what I internally felt or deliberately chose, but that isn't the world I feel like I live in, because gender isn't only assigned at birth, it's ascribed instantaneously and subconsciously by every stranger I interact with. It has helped to be able to distinguish my gender identity ("no") from my desired gender presentation (which turns out to be pretty specific).
Calling myself trans feels like a lie to me more because I don't have a visceral negative reaction to my given name or pronouns. I don't expect to be subject to hate crimes. The medical gatekeeping I can anticipate (which is fierce in the UK) is no different from what I'm used to as a USian, as a poor person, as a disabled person, as an immigrant. I don't want to take away from the near-universal suffering of trans people but also I'm sad that our society has ensured that suffering is a shared characteristic of almost all trans people.