Ditto. I have a friend who identifies as non-binary whose preferred pronoun is she. Do I understand it? No. But thankfully that isn’t really necessary. But I can certainly see someone scratching their head wondering how someone who says she’s a she can be non-binary.
This is where I am in my understanding. I think I get what nonbinary is, but I don’t really get how a nonbinary person chooses “he” or “she.”
I also think but I’m not entirely sure I understand what “genderqueer” means.
There is a trans man who does porn but did not get any surgery below the belt. Can’t recall his name.
Buck Angel?
Yeah, I’m not really sure I get the whole nonbinary gender thing either. Not trying to be judgmental or anything. I’m just trying to understand the concept here.
So you have people who are born biologically male or female.
You have people who are gay or lesbian who are sexually attracted to people who are of the same biological sex.
After that, I get confused.
Like what qualifies someone to be a transvestite? A man simply dressing up in high heels, women’s clothing and makeup seems to me to be a fairly arbitrary affectation of culture. As would be adopting traditionally feminine or masculine mannerisms.
Like what makes Elliot Page a “man”, instead of a woman who prefers sex with women, wears her hair short and doesn’t like wearing makeup or feminine clothing?
That’s reasonable. But I feel it’s also reasonable to suggest there is the unfortunate possibility of a break up.
My point has been that we’re talking about possibilities. What I have objected to is the certainty that a poster has been expressing in their posts when there is no basis for that certainty. And the claim that anyone who disagrees with their certainty must lack their understanding of the subject.
I don’t really get this either, but, on the other hand, I was born in the “Free to Be You and Me” era when girls were told they could be and do and like whatever they wanted, and not fifteen years later, when every single toy and clothing item for children was gendered, and the “for girls” versions were universally and aggressively PINK. I really wonder if there’s a connection between the rigidity of the gendered expectations people experience during childhood, and their tendency to identify as something other than their biological sex later on.
From what I’ve read, the former was the case for Morris and Tuckniss, which helps explain why their marriage was so successful even through its legally mandated dissolution and subsequent concealment.
Buck Angel sounds right .
I don’t know. I’m not sure what era you are talking about where there wasn’t pretty defined expectations on what “women” and “men” looked liked, acted, etc.
It creates some odd questions too. Like if I thought Elliot page was cute in Inception when he went by Ellen, does that make me “gay”? Physically it’s still the same person.
Or in the episodes of Always Sunny in Philadelphia where Brittany Daniels played a transvestite, who eventually had an operation to change “his” gender to biological female. The in-show joke is that Charlie Day’s character starts questioning his own sexuality because he is attracted to a transsexual who convincingly looks like an attractive woman. Of course, the reality is that the actress actually is a woman, regardless of what the script says. I’m just wondering how this is different?
I mean, it has to be more than just about pronouns. I can inisist people start calling me “señor msmith537”, that that doesn’t make me Spanish.
I was born in 1976, so when I was a kid, Lego ads aimed at girls were like this. Nowadays, they are apparently like this. I take your point that there have always been gendered expectations about appearance and behavior, but the level of intensity and rigidity has ebbed and flowed over the years.
Some people are more comfortable with singular pronouns. Some people are trying to make things easy for their older relatives. And just like sexual attraction is a spectrum, so is gender identity. Sometime can feel they don’t completely identify with either gender, but lean close enough to one side to use those pronouns.
Yeah, i, too, grew up in the “women can do anything” era, and I benefitted from that. I’m a non-gender-conforming women, and as a girl, i was always allowed to do boy stuff, and rarely forced to do girl stuff. I think it’s one of the reasons I’ve never had any strong gender dysphoria.
One of my good friends is a mid 20s year old woman who had strong gender dysphoria when was a teen. She decided to stay as a woman, but I never thought that she was ‘acting like a man’ or anything. She was a woman who liked to cut her hair short, wear boots, and go on nature hikes. I sometimes wonder if something happened which reinforced some stricter gender norms in the 00s.
Granted when I was in high school in the 90s, there definitely could be people who felt they were more the other gender, but just acted less gender conforming rather than questioning if they were the right gender (which was much less acceptable then).
The answer is that there are different, but interconnected, elements in play here:
Gender identity is the gender a person internally identifies as. In trans people this is different from their “gender assigned at birth” (which may in turn actually differ from their chromosomal makeup, but that’s a whole other subject).
Conversely, gender expression or gender presentation is (to borrow the Wiki definition):
Gender expression is the external presentation of gender (as per local gender stereotypes) and typically aligns with one’s gender identity but not necessarily or always. Broadly speaking, transvestism can be an example of gender expression at odds with one’s gender identity.
And of course sexual orientation is a different thing altogether, having to do with one’s attraction to other people.
So Page’s gender-at-birth is female, their current gender identity is non-binary, their current gender expression is…I dunno, actually - female in film roles but I don’t know how they normally present themselves IRL - and their sexual orientation is to be attracted to women.
And that’s okay, even if it’s admittedly a lot of keep track of. People are weird in all kinds of ways, and that’s okay too.
One could argue that the weirdness isn’t in Page, but in our insistence that Page has to fit into particular categories. Humans always want the world to fit into nice, neat labeled boxes, but that’s just not the way the world works. We start by making boxes labeled “male” and “female”, but then find that those don’t always work. So then, instead of discarding the boxes, we make new boxes, labeled things like “transgender”, or “intersex”, or “nonbinary”. But no matter how many boxes we make, we’re never going to be able to fit all of reality into them.
When I say “people are weird”, I mean everyone. But yes, labels can be extremely unhelpful.
From a google search, Page generally seems to dress in a unisex manner (and mostly in black), wearing jeans or pants, except for awards and events in the past, when he has worn a dress. His wife Emma Portner actually presents in almost exactly the same way, wearing black outfits (maybe with a short skirt) or jeans and sweatshirts. Neither seem to dress in “feminine” clothes.
Right, my bad.
Although I’m not entirely sure what you’re looking for here…
Pronouns are about gender identity, which is a social construct. Calling transmen “men” isn’t the same as saying, “transmen were born with a penis and an XY chromosome.” It’s saying their gender indentity - their place within society, how they relate to others - is as a man. That’s my understanding of things.
You’re starting to see why labels and binary categories don’t work well. Or as Chronos says…
This was a critical realization for me that helped me understand non-binary. I remember being a little frustrated when I first encountered the term - “look, I can accept people as whatever they want to be considered, but pick one!” But after a little introspection, I realized it was my hang up, not theirs. There was no reason I had to be able to classify them as man or woman. And that lack of classification was very freeing for the person in question.