As a flying horse, I know it’s not just horses that get Streptococcus equi.
As a nonbinary person, I know it’s not just women who get endometriosis
She doesn’t know that though, because she can’t, because it’s not true. Of course it’s “just” women who get endometriosis, on account of how it’s women only who have the endometrium. Just as you can’t have a broken leg unless you have at least one leg, you can’t have endometriosis if you don’t have a uterus. Men don’t have them; women do.
Imagine going to a specialist doctor and looking around the waiting room to see everyone is a different gender to you. They’re all staring at you, wondering why you’re there.
On the posters, in the magazines, behind the desk, in the chairs around you – no one looks like you.
As a nonbinary person with symptoms of endometriosis, this is my reality.
The article is accompanied by a photo and she doesn’t look like a man. She doesn’t even look very butch. She doesn’t look “feminine,” but come on now, so don’t lots of women, and that doesn’t make them some baffling third sex.
Around the same time my periods began to incapacitate my normal day-to-day life – when I was in university in Boston – I started to realise I was nonbinary (not strictly ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ but somewhere in the middle).
How does one “realise” such a thing? By spending too much time on Tumblr?
Experiencing menstruation as a trans person is bizarre because all of the horrible experiences that some cisgender women claim ‘make them a woman’ are experienced by trans men and nonbinary people daily.
That’s because trans men are women and some “nonbinary” people are women.
Also women don’t “claim” that menstruation “makes” us women, we just understand that it’s women who menstruate.
Even some trans women get monthly period cramps after being on hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
They may get some kind of cramping, but it ain’t period cramps.
Her story is sad, but not because she’s “non-binary.”
Comments
12 responses to “They’re all staring at you”
To be fair, some women do… and those women drive me nuts too. Typically accompanied by comments about our ties to the moon mother or some such, and how magical it is that close women’s cycles synchronize (they don’t).
Part of her story is sad because she is “non-binary.” The delusional part is sad in its own right. Sad that she is wasting some of her life on nonsense.
I’m sorry the person suffers from endometriosis, but this “non-binary” thing just seems like she wants to make herself feel extra special. Her body certainly isn’t “not strictly ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ but somewhere in the middle” – it’s a woman’s body.
BTW, I found this and thought it was pretty good:
” Many Ukraine independentists may well be trying to position themselves within a sphere of values shared with those countries now pioneering post-biological conceptions of gender identity, but still, for President Zelenskyy, when it comes to fighting the Russians, a male is a male.”
https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/paradoxes-of-pacifism?utm_source=url
“Post-biological conceptions of gender identity”. Sums it modern gender woo so well. And the rest of the article is good too.
I really don’t understand her perspective on this. Isn’t it the central thesis of ‘non-binary’ gender theory that there are drastically more than two genders? In that world, wouldn’t it be very common to see people of a different gender to you, due to the innumerable number of genders each stranger might be? This only makes sense if ‘non-binary’ is a single gender, bringing the total up to three.
As for “They’re all staring at you, wondering why you’re there”: bullshit. they’re all in the waiting room wondering, at most, why she’s scanning everyone in the room while there. Maybe some of the penis-havers aka are checking her out inappropriately, seeing as how she’s an attractive woman. And they’re certainly not wondering why she’s there – it’s a gynaecologist waiting room. She’s there to see a gynaecologist.
Ahem, please review the copious evidence.
-Short hair!
-Outdoors!
-Pants!
-Sneakers!
-Little/no make-up!
-Dog!
Everyone knows women are cat people. Kindly expand your thinking by… judging all people’s appearances by how well they conform to the stereotypes.
/s duh
Yes, given description of the severity of her periods, and the fact that her non-woman feelings arose at the same time that they “began to incapacitate [her] normal day-to-day life”, I speculate her thoughts on gender are at least partly informed by a desire to escape her femaleness.
The question here is how does she know they are a different gender? Is she guilty of potentially misgendering them?
As for wondering why she is there, that’s wishful thinking. She wants to be stared at, seen as different, but it’s hard to be seen as different when you’re not.
How does she know? It seems appearances are everything.
Exactly. Is it asking too much that the genderists keep their story/stories straight? It’s like nailing fucking Jello to the wall of a moving target’s shifting goalposts. By some definitions, everyone is NB and/or gender non-conforming. Which would, alas, render our poor, discriminated-against, stared-at, not-represented-in-the posters/magazines/behind-the-desk, in-the-chairs-around-xer, put-upon snowflake slightly less special in the particularly special way she insists on being special. God forbid that she ever has to fall back on her actual individual personality. I mean jeez, everyone has one of those.
For her, gender is her own internal sense of self (which is not, apparently, being reflected back by anyone else in the room), but which xe gets to assume, pronounce, and project upon everyone else. Just like calling anyone “cis.” Gender is a one way street, the direction of which they have a monopoly on choosing, and changing, at whim.
Maybe everyone else can actually see the supposedly six foot tall invisible rabbit she insists is sitting there beside her. Any more meta and the fourth wall eats itself.
What are they doing in the waiting room of the gynaecologists office? Are they “transwomen”, i.e. men that think that they are women? Or are they waiting for a friend or relative to come out of the office?
Yes, I was thinking husbands/boyfriends, and hey why not also lesbians.
I’m trying to picture a doctor with a “deer in the headlights” expression because she sees that this writer is a non-binary and doesn’t know if she can treat a non-binary for a
*checks notes*
condition that only affects women.
And then there’s this:
“I was pleasantly surprised to see that the app – Frendo – didn’t mention womanhood. It’s tiny changes like this that ease gender dysphoria for trans people. They are often simple changes, but cis people don’t have to think about them, so exclusionary language slips by undetected if there are no trans people being consulted.
Everything you read when you research endometriosis focuses on it being a ‘women’s issue’ rather than a ‘reproductive issue’.”
I have no idea why non-binary people would have different reproductive issues, men’s or women’s, than anyone else of their sex, but they really seem like their dysphoria gets triggered pretty easily by any mention of a binary.
Perhaps because anyone with a male body doesn’t get endometriosis? And “reproductive issue” could also affect male bodied people (sometimes known as men)? Maybe because you are a narcissistic snowflake that wants to erase the needs of everyone else because you can’t admit you’re basically like everyone else? Just like everyone else is.
Seriously, should a “person who was born male and identifies as a male” be misdirected to a clinic dealing with women’s issues for the sake of this one woman who doesn’t accept being a woman?