Guest post: Stuck in the boring box
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on You’re going to have to.
What exactly do “nonbinary” people believe themselves to be? They are still men or women, male or female, aren’t they? They can’t be “neither.” If they’re rejecting the stereotypical, sexist roles that society has historically tried to box men and women into, then bravo, they can knock themselves out. But am I nonbinary because I do not conform to many of the stereotypically masculine, sexist, gendered preferences and behaviours that patriarchal society expects men to adopt? I don’t drive. I don’t follow sports. I don’t drink beer. I do some cooking and housework (though still not half). I consider myself relatively gentle and sensitive (but that’s a judgement best left to those with whom I interact). Does that confer nonbinary status in the current usage? I’m guessing not. For that, I would have to put on a dress.
Jeffrey doesn’t want to smash the gender binary, he just wants to step a little bit outside of it. He doesn’t want to save anyone but himself. He only wants his own personal liberation. How can he be free if he has nothing to be free from? Jeffrey’s exciting, brave, and interesting non-binariness depends upon the rest of us poor bastards being stuck in the dull, cowardly, boring box he’s so cleverly escaped by putting on a bit of lippy and a pair of earrings; by becoming a tourist, visiting the other gendered box. Those of us relegated to binary prison are expected to center and celebrate his heroic eschewal of all we are too thick and stupid to avoid.
Well said.
They are narcissistic and so are entirely lacking any theory of mind*. They have to demand to be seen as special, as in ‘to be admired’, because it is unbearable to them to be special, as in ‘having special educational needs’; and everything that they see around them is telling them that they aren’t what is seen as ‘normal’ so it has to be a lack in other people.
*Autistic people don’t lack a theory of mind; we just develop a different one. Every autistic adult I know, myself included, learned very early that we cannot know what someone else is thinking or feeling, any more than they ever manage to know what we’re thinking and feeling. And every autistic adult I know, myself included, were astonished at the discovery in adulthood that people who aren’t autistic g
I saw this and thought, “That’s beautifully put, excellent comment, maybe suggest it as a guest post”, then I realized it is a guest post and I’m reading it. Nice job, YNNB, especially that last paragraph.
Damned phone, posted as I was editing.
*that many people who aren’t autistic genuinely believe that they actually are able to know what someone else is thinking and feeling, and that is why they get so very angry with us when they get it wrong.
Thank you Sackbut!
Absolutely true, YYNB.
The thing that most disturbs me about non-binary palaver is the way it ignores all the work women have been doing to tear down gender as a construct. All the legal work against gender discrimination, the work to have women value their bodies’s biological functions, the work to free people from rigid roles – never needed to happen?
“But am I nonbinary because I do not conform to many of the stereotypically masculine, sexist, gendered preferences”
I’m far from convinced that anyone fully conforms to all of the gendered stereotypes applied to them, and if we are all non-binary to some extent, then the term is meaningless.
Bingo. So many female enbies are just the Woke version of Not Like The Other Girls.
I mostly agree with this, but I do know a couple of people who have worked hard to erase any part of themselves that might be considered “feminine”. They embody the masculine stereotype so thoroughly that few people can actually stand to be around them. But it did require work for them. I know this, because they are in my family. I watched the process by which an ordinary boy, my older brother, became a walking cartoon of masculinity, leading to some incredibly stupid, self-defeating behaviors.
It’s just too bad that they can’t find some way to be “special” and “different” that doesn’t depend on keeping everyone else locked into categories and expectations they find as objectionable as our NB snowflakes do. As has been pointed else elsewhere, they’re really just talking about “personalities.” Everybody has one of those, and from their perspective, that’s the problem.