(no subject)

[haptalaon]

One of my dear friends is like - my problem is thinking about gender in binary terms and not embracing the possibility of being non-binary. They say - I don't need to be either the most manly man whose completely transitioned, or re-identified as a lesbian separatist who's very into being a woman, I can be something in between.

These are true things, and i think they-re right. But also

I think the idea of being non binary is unappealing to me because it's a way of noticing and accepting gender discomfort rather than "fixing it"?

I don't like experiencing genderweird all the time; it's distressing and strange and alienating, both in terms of being alienated from my own body, being alienated from histories/communities/identities where I feel at home in one place, being alienated from the world and others in it. Being either Definitely A Man or Definitely A Woman is really comforting: an end to that rootlessness and foreign-ness, a coming-home to something permanent and fixed.

I am sure that many non binary people do experience their gender as a comfort and a home and a certain, "right" thing; I don't want to cut off the possibility that this can be a complete, permanent, destination gender for people.

But to hear someone say "you seem conflicted about your gendered desires and have done for years now, perhaps you need to accept you're non-binary?" kinda makes me feel cut off from my own longing to be a fixed thing. Like, if being conflicted and feeling strange about gender is what it means to be non-binary, then I don't accept that as where I want to be. I'd like...a pathway to diminishing that strangeness, please.

Comments

[ilthit]

A long time ago I used to take comfort in biological sex because it means that everything I am and do and like are "girl things" if I happen to like them, because I'm a girl. I don't know quite how to explain it... Like my rebellion was towards statements about what girls are, and are like, rather than being a girl. I still feel there is some freedom in that attitude but I am worn down by gender and I wish to have none, now. I would rather be seen as agender than have to keep inviting people to forget gender norms over and over.

There's an insidious assimilating force in the same assumptions coming back over and over, and in the subtle mockery of departure there-of.

[haptalaon]

<3

"Like my rebellion was towards statements about what girls are, and are like, rather than being a girl."

This is interesting & a true thing. Like, the impossibility of one's behavior not being politicised and almost...trivialised, by the attempt?

[ilthit]

I'm not sure how to read that sentence. Trivialized by the attempt to politicize the behavior?

[haptalaon]

In fact, right on time, tumblr serves me up this :
“When I was younger, someone said to me that in not shaving my legs I was “making a feminist statement.” Not to go along with an expectation, you are making a statement. I think we learn from this. Whether or not we make feminist points, whether or not we speak, not complying with codes of appearance is heard as speech, almost as if your legs are a mouth and they are shouting: look at me! I had not thought I was making a feminist point, though perhaps in not assuming my legs had to be shaved legs, I was living out a feminist assumption. But in a way, the ordinariness of girls having unshaven legs is what is rendered impossible. Any acts that are not in compliance with the order of things become an imposition of a feminist agenda on the order of things.”

— Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life:

[ilthit]

It goes around like that, doesn't it? I don't always feel like making a feminist statement but if I don't comply I've already made one. I'm too lazy for this shit. I compromise: I shave my legs sometimes in summer, but I don't shave my legs all winter, even when I go to the swimming hall.

I've been pushing my boundaries a bit lately. If I'm going to be read as female whatever, I might as well learn to do an Ivy League wave hairstyle, or get that undercut while it's still fashionable.

But it's all very tiring.