vertiginouswing

for nearly a decade we've been embedded in internet circles who don't bat an eyelash at the term "nonbinary." (not only that, they know exactly how to interpret a journal message containing the first-person pronoun "we," and could possibly direct you to blogs like these if you don't. but that post is coming.)

that doesn't mean that everyone's idea of what it means to be nonbinary is the same. it's a bit like the philosophical quandary about whether people with full color vision all see the same color when they see "blue" (which, we've just learned, may have an actual scientific answer, in the negative.)

we think a major ingredient in this is that if one knows a lot of nonbinary people, the range of experiences one will have around them is likely to feed back not just into one's formal definition of the term, but particularly into the informal, fuzzy feels one gets around the word. knowing a lot of nonbinary people tends to make one feel super comfortable throwing the word "nonbinary" around.

we're nonbinary in multiple senses: in the sense that our default state is a set of multiple consciousnesses to which applying a single gender is like saying a subdivision has a front door; but also in the sense that when compelled to play singlet and construct that silly front door anyway, we've often chosen, e.g. at board game tournaments and at tech events, to paint it nonbinary. some of our individual consciousnesses are personally agender, too, feeling uncomfortable with either binary gender, although this is not consensus.

implicit in that last bit: there's tons of spaces where we can be a "they," but not a "we." it's a lot easier to explain, relatively speaking. but that doesn't make it easy. people's only real popular-media reference point for nonbinary anything has generally involved some sort of obligatory epicene physical presentation. (literally this past weekend, sam smith helped make it a little easier, though.)

particularly in the south, people do manage to be genuinely concerned and even frightened about how they're "supposed to" interact with us. we came out at a tech event and things were immediately and permanently awkward until we partially sorted things out in some 1-on-1s. some people didn't know how to use they/them pronouns and were genuinely too afraid to ask. they thought they were supposed to somehow know how to use them already. here we were, offering ourselves up for free practice. we don't know if they thought the thought police was going to come get them or something but by and large they didn't take it.

it appears that large majorities dislike dealing with 'political correctness.' if you interview them and ask them what they dislike, it's feeling like they're on the defensive and don't know what the right thing is to say. in the examples cited in the atlantic, people often professed to be worried about alternatives that were, in fact, generally equally fine. while we wouldn't be surprised if some respondents uncorked some legitimate racial slurs and the atlantic just chose not to print them, we don't think 80% of people actually want to be allowed to hurt people consequence free. they just feel like they don't know what the hell's going on and at this point they're too afraid to ask.

in a sense we know what's going on. we are nonbinary in multiple senses; we have friends and acquaintances with perhaps 10 different sets of pronouns and many ways of looking at gender. but every one of those people, we suspect, has a somewhat different idea of what it means to them and their friends to be nonbinary than we do.

being nonbinary has, in that sense, some things in common with intentional political stances, with -isms, with citizenships and group memberships. but it has more in common with color perception. there is something there, underneath the affinities -- a strong set of feelings and emotions and reactions that would be there whether or not a label was attached to it. it's the particular boundaries of the label that are in flux, and resist pinning down, and make us resort to explaining nonbinary in terms of what it isn't (binary gender) because pulling all the possible threads together regarding what it is would be a sewing project that even even kill la kill's grand couturier nui harime would find challenging

p.s. "nonbinary," "epicene" and "agender" are all rejected by dreamwidth's spell checker. (as is "dreamwidth" itself.)