Not too long after I came out as nonbinary to T, he gifted me a nonbinary flag. I brought it to my office and hung it there, where occasionally it would elicit a question from a coworker.
It's the only consistently visible way in which I'm nonbinary, and now nobody has seen it in a year, except the cleaning staff who presumably continue to clean my vacant office.
I also started buying some nonbinary-themed t-shirts, that I'd started wearing to the monthly spanking parties, and maybe to some other social events. There was no effect on the spanking, or on anything else. Some short conversations about being nonbinary, nothing more.
As I don't care about mandating my personal pronouns, for reasons I've written about before, there's really been little to make of my coming out as nonbinary except that I've come out as nonbinary. I think I'll be able to change my gender on my driver's license when I get it renewed. Recently on an anonymous survey at work I had the option of choosing nonbinary as my gender in the demographics section.
The spell check as I type this tells me "nonbinary" isn't a word, LOL. OK, I just "added it to the dictionary". That's better.
It's been zero-drama for me coming out. And zero-effect.
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It seems for many people it's a more difficult process, driven by dysphoria and resisted by family & friends. For example, a person assigned the female sex at birth but they experience dysphoria from having breasts and periods. A person assigned the male sex at birth but experiences dysphoria when their romantic partners gaze upon them as "male" so having sex is difficult. But all I really know about these difficulties is what I see on the Internet, I don't know any other nonbinary people in person, I don't think. Sometimes I saw people on Metro or elsewhere who I thought, "that person looks nonbinary!" My main exposure to other nonbinary people was at the GaymerX cons I went to with T. A lot of them dyed their hair unnatural colors.
There's a stereotype that nonbinary people must find a way to express themselves that is androgynous, somehow distinct from either male or female fashions. But I've always liked to keep things simple in a way that falls easily within the masculine circle on the Venn diagram of gender styles. Short hair, beard but trimmed, t-shirts and shorts. I have a hairy chest and exercise regularly, including with weights, so I end up with a standard masculine physique.
I guess I've experienced dysphoria at having to wear suits and ties. Until now I never said it like this, using the word "dysphoria". For my entire life I've HATED wearing suits and ties, to the point that it probably limited my career options. I do have to wear a suit and tie a few times per year in my current job, but not daily. Thank Goddess not daily. I'll wear one when I have to, like when I was Moose's Best Man at his wedding. But otherwise, NO!
But I don't want to wear dresses either, yuck.
I also don't like being referred to as a "husband", which T does rather often, even though we aren't married. I guess I could apply the word "dysphoria" to that. But I'm not a "wife" either, yuck. But I'm not concerned enough about the words people use to describe me to bring it up. Whatever.
This idea of dysphoria feels strange to me, though. In a high falutin way. Did we really need to invent an entirely new identity with new vocabulary to describe how some of us don't like conforming to society's expectations?
Well, I'm also gender non-conforming. Like I don't want to wear the formal clothes of either gender. I don't want to play the role of spouse or parent of either gender.
I'm still generally attracted to men for sexual purposes, however. But as AMAB this is definitely gender nonconforming.
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It's the dysphoria stuff that kind of bugs me about nonbinary culture, such as it is.
If you were born female and don't like wearing your hair long, then don't. Don't like wearing dresses, then don't. But elevating these matters to the point of "dysphoria" sounds weirdly clinical to me, like a vocabulary overreaction.
Also, there's so many things that so many people dislike about the world. I'm not sure where to draw the line between "throwing a tantrum because you can't have things your way" and "dysphoria so I'm nonbinary".
I've always had more body fat than I want, but this doesn't seem to have anything to do with gender in the US, so it doesn't feed a nonbinary identity, instead we call this feeling "body dysmorphia" which seems like a subset of dysphoria. So dysphoria feels like a bigger concept than a motivation for choosing a nonbinary identity.
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But then the issue of "choice" is itself politically fraught! When I was reading that stuff about banning "anti-trans" writers, one alleged form of transphobia listed by the anti-transphobia movement is stating that choice is involved with respect to LGBT identities.
I think choice
is involved, I always have thought this! I've been in arguments with people before about whether being gay is a choice. We may not choose our sexual impulses, but we definitely choose what to do about them, and there are definitely men who have sex with men who do
not choose to identify as gay.
I was troubled to see that discussions of choice with respect to LGBT identities are supposedly a form of transphobia that could bring the pitchfork brigades to my doorstep. I've been out as LGBT for 30 years, I think I have some expertise in whether, for some people, choice is involved.
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So, here I've been writing to you this morning
as a nonbinary. It feels weird, both because it is still relatively new for me, and because I don't feel qualified to speak on behalf of
the community. But then, who ever is qualified to speak on behalf of their community, how does that work, especially on the Internet where everybody is self-appointed. It's not like there's an elected office: Speaker for the Nonbinary Community, or Speaker for the Gay Community, or whatever.
I remember years ago I had an LJ friend who was a title holder in the Gay Leather community, and so he saw himself as a legitimate spokesperson for that community, but these titles are not exactly the result of a democratic process.
So, I think we should be skeptical of people who claim to speak for their community. The self-appointed activists who have the most followers on Twitter and have their essays published on the more partisan websites.
What used to unite the LGBT communities was that we were all gender and/or sexual outlaws, literally. But as we've altered the laws to become more inclusive, now we find ourselves standing partially inside the dominant culture, and partially outside. And this has created hierarchies of political correctness within our movements -- now that we have
some power, our movements are corrupted by the
taste of power. Instead of defining ourselves outside of the law, now we're starting to identify with the law and trying to oust our perceived enemies as outlaws.
For somebody like me, who has been around a long time, it feels like our LGBT communities are turning upside down or inside out, trying to
become the cultural arbiters instead of trying to avoid them. And, as I've been starting to say out loud, I think I preferred it the other way around.
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I think I've always shared a certain type of dysphoria with
Henry David Thoreau:
"I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,"![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
