just like it’s important that we let people embrace and be flamboyant with their gender, we must allow people to have gender be a nonimportant part of their identity. a cis woman can love being feminine and claim her womanhood loud and proud, just like another cis woman can just be ‘whatever’ about it. a trans woman can be hyperfeminine and proud, while another can just say ‘yeah i’m a woman’ without it being a gigantic deal to her. a non-binary person doesn’t have to be constantly torn up about their gender identity to be non-binary. all experiences of gender are unique and valid in their own way.
If gender makes no sense to you, you are allowed to just give up and ignore it
when people try to make their (shallow at best) feminism sound inclusive to nonbinary people but accidentally let slip their prejudices in the process. “men aren’t pretty, women and nonbinary people are pretty.” “fuck men, I only like women and nonbinary people.” and ofc the classic “safe space for women and nonbinary people, no men allowed.” like damn that’s crazy. can’t wait until you find out about nonbinary men too though 😑. or, can’t wait until you find out about masculine nonbinary people in general tbh, cause I know they’re not who u have in mind with these statements. by choice and not there’s nonbinary people out there who look and present exactly how u imagine binary men do, of all ages, and maybe you need to wrap your cute little head around that before even attempting to speak on “nonbinary rights” or whatever.
like, if ur including 18 yr old she/they demigirls who don’t want to go on T but always wear pronoun pins in your activism, that’s great. but if you want to speak on nonbinary people as a whole group, you’re also speaking on 30-something year old he/him men who’re already balding, who have full beards, who are stealth as cis men (if not cishet men) in their workplaces, who aren’t twink-y and who might not own a single piece of make-up, and who may or may not be physically transitioning. And when they say they’re nonbinary they’re just as nonbinary as the first example I gave.
this is why “men vs non-men” doesn’t work. some people are both. some people aren’t both, but by your prejudice standards might cross the line. ffs some nonbinary people are a woman and ALSO a man. there is no secondary binary you can salvage out of this. and if you don’t reframe your nonbinary activism to include these people and support these people too, you are a bad activist and frankly being transphobic – not only towards masculine nonbinary people, but also towards the feminine/androgynous nonbinary people who you’re not so subtly trying to simplify to “woman-lite”.
My favorite John Green fact is that he did an absolute creepy move in order to get his [wife] to go on a date with him that any person in existence would call creepy but he sees it as a fun anecdote. She turned him down a ton, so he sent a bunch of emails to her and friends to see a movie as a group, asked everyone not to show up, and tricked her into going with him alone. Any other person in the world saying this would be seen as a scary fuck, but he wrote some bad books.
video description: a tiktok by @weezerroll. a person is clumsily and hesitantly playing a bass guitar, until the camera person places a white and brown rat on the bass player’s head while firmly saying, “Ratatouille.” their playing suddenly improves while the rat shifts its footing on their head. end description
