this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
30 points (96.9% liked)
Nonbinary
735 readers
34 users here now
An inclusive place for members of all stripes that don't fit into our culture's binary categories of gender.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I wish people would just describe the specific groups they're talking about (e.g. binary trans) rather than try to redefine and gatekeep a broader term (e.g. trans). And also be able to have even a crumb of empathy for others whose experience doesn't map 100% cleanly to their own.
yeah, realistically I think there is a bit of mainstream culture thinking terms like "trans" and "transgender" mostly means people who medically transition that influences this. I think that's where the hurt can sometimes come in when people who are perceived as not taking the same risks are using the same label.
It's sorta silly, really - the literal terms were created and perpetuated precisely to avoid this problem. And the people who were so insistent on gatekeeping made terms like "transsexual" so toxic that we no longer even feel we can use language to accurately describe "trans people who medically transition" as different than "trans people who don't medically transition". Now it's like "transgender" has just come to mean the same thing as "transsexual" for most people, and now non-binary people don't feel welcome with the term (despite the existence of the term literally being about inclusion of other gender non-conforming groups like drag queens, crossdressers, non-binary folks, etc.).
It also puts me in a weird spot as a nonbinary trans woman
Ha, well - that should be pretty much natural, tbh
IRL I find a lot of otherwise binary trans women use "she/they" pronouns and adopt a non-binary identity while otherwise fitting the typical arc of a binary trans woman. I notice many of them struggle with imposter syndrome and I sometimes wonder if that's part of the reason for their non-binary self-conception, or if it's a way of understanding and relating to when dysphoria doesn't match the extreme stereotype of a trans woman, e.g. if they don't have much or any bottom dysphoria, etc.
I actually avoided transitioning for many years by adopting a non-binary identity, I figured my dysphoria wasn't bad enough to justify anything like medical transition (and at the time I didn't know non-binary people were considered trans, so I thought I was "non-binary and not trans"), so I often think about how I struggled with self-awareness and identity and just assume others are going through the same thing.
Sometimes it can be hard to communicate - e.g. talking about a transfem enby, there is a huge range of what that covers ... there are basically-binary, medically-transitioned trans women who identify as non-binary, there are agender folks, people who feel like they are both male and female, and so on. It's very hard when so many people are lumped together, when I talk about "enbies" there is little that can be said is true of all or most of them (this is true of trans people generally, tbh).
I guess in my mind the paradigmatic transfem enby is Jacob Tobia, but I don't know a single person IRL who is like them. Most transfem enbies I know IRL are not that different than the binary trans women I know, the enby identity doesn't differentiate much. One transfem enby I know IRL takes a lower dose of estrogen and they are the closest transfem enby I know to not being basically like a binary trans woman. I don't know a single person IRL who uses only they/them pronouns. The one person who did use they/them for a short while was a trans man who was struggling in their transition and finally changed their pronouns to he/him.
So what it means to be non-binary is pretty open, at this point I usually just try to learn what the person themselves wants and how they understand their own gender, and then I just respect and try to see them the way they want to be seen.