it’s so funny how people get upset that gender is a social construct? EVERYTHING is a social construct??? go ask a frog what day of the fuckin week it is, he doesn’t know
“if you ask a frog about gender they’ll know what to say”
I decided to get to the bottom of this and asked a professional frog for its thoughts on the matter.
There ya go.
There are frog species that transition when they need to breed and there aren’t enough males or females to go around. So, gender fluid frogs laugh at your silly fucking binary.
Being female-assigned, female-presenting nonbinary on International Women’s Day just highlights how much our language fails people with liminal identities.
There aren’t easy words to describe people whose identities are tied together by our external experiences. We’ve got acronyms– FAAB or AFAB– to describe our physiology, but that feels blank and statistical, and assuming external experience is associated only with physiology is flawed and gender-essentialist in its own way. “Woman” and “female” both belong to people who share an internal identity I don’t share. Female-presenting centers the absence of identity, makes me feel as if the only way to describe myself is as an empty facade. Femme is inaccurate; femme is a word that belongs to a different type of identity that I don’t inhabit.
Self-describing “as a woman” not only erases my own nonbinary identity, but also does a great discredit to transgender women by suggesting that “woman” is a descriptor tied to physiology or external experience rather than identity or expression.
What we don’t have is a word that ties together all of us who share an external experience based on how we are perceived because of our gender assignment and/or perceived presentation. That’s not womanhood, not for all of us, and it’s not the only kind of womanhood. Womanhood, our understanding of womanhood, needs to belong both to women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned female and women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned male.
I share a kinship based on experience with both cis women and trans women, and some things I share more with cis women, and other things I share more with trans women, and some things I share with both and other things I share with neither. But we have no language that lets me relate simply and accurately, because my internal identity isn’t theirs, and we have words to describe internal identity, but none to describe experiencing the same things as a group without truly being part of that group– none that feel right, none that feel inclusive rather than sidelining ourselves by definition. And it makes it hard to claim and relate experiences, even in places where I feel welcome, without feeling in some way deceitful or erased.
I want a word to describe internal identity, another to describe physiology, another to describe external experience, because all of those are valid things to identify with and to talk about in regard to their commonalities, but it needs to be very clear in our language that they’re all different things, and that they’re not mutually inclusive in the way our society still generally implies they must be.
So, anyway. I’m feeling very much on the outside looking in, feeling strong solidarity but no way to express it with the words I’ve got access to. But thanks to all the women out there and all the people our world defines as women for being yourselves and for doing the work you do.
oh my fucking god, thank you for writing this. mom called to wish me a happy 8th of march this morning and i felt like a total fraud. on the other hand, women’s right to vote, to abortion, to contraception – in short, everything that concerns me as someone assigned female and with a ‘female’ on my ID still concerns me and will possibly concern me for a very long time.
that’s the problem you get if you generalise and scream how only women’s experiences are valid in feminism – what about people who get some of the women’s experiences because we are assigned female?
In case you hadn’t heard, SUE, the world’s biggest and most complete T-Rex skeleton, has come out as non-binary. This is both exquisite news and relevant to my interests so I had to draw something to welcome our new and righteous leader to the NB community. Apologies if it’s not 100% anatomically accurate,I had to simplify it a little bit so some details were lost (Would people like stickers of this?? I kind of want to make stickers of this.)
Doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I just hope I manage it without a full-blown panic attack. Or an argument about gender. (Semantics are important. I’d have grumbled but made a binary choice if they used the word “sex” with that stupid fucking binary, despite the fact that it’s inaccurate. But they asked for gender and gave me a binary choice. Which I crossed out and filled in accurately instead.)
I have also given in and started reading @deadcatwithaflamethrower‘s Swung By Seraphim. And managing to at intervals record things to happily yell about in comments when I get to the end. Usually when I’m giggling too hard to parse the next bits.
(Also, as expected, my HP muses are blinking awake and I am going to have to go poke at some of the older unfinished fic and see if I can finish some. Or even just write more in some particular AUs. Like White Rose, perhaps. Or City of Magic, or Friends and Brothers, or Avery Women. Or if I’m really lucky, Gray Ships.)
Hugs for everyone, and I hope you sleep well when you get there.
(The post got long, so the anxiety word-dump is under a cut.)
Have to adult tomorrow. Specifically, I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, and the anxiety is in fine form tonight, spinning out all the horrible ways this could go, and how it’s not like any doctor is going to listen to me and all they’ll tell me is lose weight and everything will be fine, or that they’ll decide that I’m just there to get high.
Which, brain, what the ever-loving fuck, with how zealously I tend to avoid pain medication of any sort, even over-the-counter, and all the rest of my issues regarding medical shit, how the hell do you even decide that’s a thing?
… Oh, right, because I’ve read a bazillion and one stories and articles about how the medical industry fails women and female-presenting and generally anyone they decide is a woman or girl, and how it fails people with chronic pain, and people who are transgender, and people who are fat to any degree whatsoever…. all of which are applicable. And any one of which is a potential problem with anyone new, much less someone who is supposed to be helping me with this shit.
Eh. One thing to add to the things to be proud of today – I actually wrote down and articulated one of the things that has been a problem for twenty years and I spent most of trying to repress the thought. That I do have a certain amount of dysphoria about my body. Namely, the floppy bits of fatty flesh on my chest that I didn’t want when they showed up instead of muscles (and then tried to forget that I didn’t want them, because that’s what you’re Supposed To Do, right? Not question what you’re given, and accept the gender you’re told you are? … I have been a long time getting to the point where I can say and believe that that sort of thing is bullshit).
Even the internal organs don’t cause as much dysphoria (trouble, yes, and irritation and frustration) as the external bits. I just want it all gone, though. Internal reproductive bits that I have no desire to use and never have and only cause a desire to destroy everything. Boobs, because they get in my way, and were never supposed to be there according to my internal map of life, and I’m tired of pretending that I’m fine with them and they’re not an issue.
I’m tired, full stop, honestly. Just. I want my body to function well enough to complete tasks of daily living on an actual daily basis. I want my brain to stop trying to kill me (and trying even harder in the winter, and with more gusto one week out of four). I’d be ecstatic to be able to do it without pain meds ever. But realistically, I’m going to need at least something for the worst days (which, right now, with my habits, would be maybe a handful of days out of the year).
Anyway. Bedtime. Twelve hours and fourty-five minutes until show time.
:OOOOOOO do those 4 nonbinary genders have names? ive head of culture-specific genders like two spirit but never this !!
also ur right nb people have been around since forever
HEY HI HELLO I AM HERE TO TALK ABOUT MY FAVORITE TOPIC JEWISH NONBINARY GENDERS
ahem
yeah so we have 4 nonbinary genders!!! or. like 4 trans genders. 2 are binary but 2 are nonbinary
androgynos: sort of controversial as to who can and can’t use it, as it refers to someone who is biologically male and female. i personally don’t think non-intersex ppl can use it because it seems to be intersex-only, but im not intersex, so any intersex ppl who wanna comment on it can totally correct me.
tumtum (thats me!!!): cutest name ever, to begin with. second of all, has a “hidden” gender. really hard to explain but the tumtum is p much just “yeah you can do whatever you want”. they have the choice of presenting male or female and it can change and stuff. its somewhere between genderfluid and agender.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 