This might be a weird question, and I want to start by saying that I ask it in good faith. I teach cishet people about how to be nice to queer folk, and this is one of the things that's the hardest for me to teach well.
That subject is "being nonbinary".
I'm definitely binary. There has never been a waver in my belief, since I was old enough to express it, that I'm a girl.
So I don't get what it feels like to be nonbinary. Which means I can't kind of explain it to cishet people either.
So I'm asking my nonbinary friends here, do you feel like you have a gender, or is it really a rejection of gender as a construct? Or both? Neither? Eighteen other things entirely?
I'm trying to come in without known biases here, but I apologise if I've mistakenly said something hurtful.
Will someone be kind enough to educate your sister, so she can educate others?
@oldladyplays I went through a gradual progression from:
- My assigned gender is an incidental fact about me and holds no particular internal meaning. I enjoy when people mistakenly refer to me as a girl, and I don't understand the apologies that follow. Being a girl is awesome, why would that be insulting?
- I guess I'm nonbinary because I wanna wear cute femme things but I don't feel any particular connection to being a girl, or to being a boy.(con't)
- Having a binary gender would be really cool but that doesn't feel right to me. I'm demi at most.
- I'm on feminizing HRT. I can no longer deny myself womanhood. And I feel joy in it.
- I also feel joy in being a man, now that I know it doesn't limit me.
- I cannot be misgendered because I will internally adjust to how I am addressed.
- I guess I'm both binary genders?
- Identity, including gender, is a clay that I can shape at will. Each new shape holds its own unique joy.
