This is a thread that I’ve been meaning to get up the courage to post and finally got tipped over the edge by the fact that similar questions started getting raised in the pit.
This is a very sensitive topic so I want to start with a number of disclaimers:
First and foremost: THIS IN NOT THE THREAD TO DISCUSS WHETHER NON-BINARY IDENTITY EXISTS OR IS REAL. IT DOES AND IT IS.
Second, I recognize that as a straight CIS male what I’m asking may be akin to a fish asking someone to explain drowning. Its not something that have ever experienced or will ever experience so there may be little room for common reference. Third I recognize that internal feeling regarding identity are beyond dispute. If someone says they feels they are non-binary then they are non-binary that settles it. I don’t need to understand something in order to accept it. If at any time in this thread I seem to be challenging someone’s assertion regarding their identity, then that is not my intent, most likely I am just trying to clarify what they are saying. Which brings us to the final caveat which is that I am still retraining my instincts regarding all of this and may accidentally cause offense. If I do please let me know so that I can do better.
Now on to the question itself:
In trying to explain transgenderism people would use the analogy, “well how would you feel if suddenly you turned into a woman”, to which my initial reaction was that my wife would be very upset, I’d need to get a new wardobe, and it would lead to some complicated explanations to family and friends, but I wouldn’t be suicidal. Now of course never having had to confront such a situation (as a non-drowning fish) I may be fooling myself, but my general feeling was that most of my gender identity came from the fact that I have been socialized to be a male for my entire life, and that if I had been born differently I’d be perfectly happy identifying tomboy lesbian
So my model regarding gender identity is that there is a spectrum some people strongly identify as male, some people strongly identify as female, while others like me are more in the middle, and that transgender people where those who were generally near the ends of the spectrum and whose strong feelings of gender identity mismatched their assignment at birth. For those in the middle however, they would probably naturally default to their assigned gender because its easier. This model clearly falls flat when it comes to non-binary. These don’t appear to be people who don’t have strong feelings about their gender identity. They do. They are willing put in significant effort accept significant risk to defy societal convention and assert their non-binary status. In political terms they would appear to be radical centrists.
There are a few more models I can come up with to account for this. First is that the model above is more or less correct but those who Identify as non-binary are more in tune with their middle status than I might be, and are less willing to just go with the flow, and so want to positively assert its existence. Second model is that they feel strongly about their gender identity but in different ways in different aspects. For example, bodily they may feel strongly male but socially they may feel strongly female. Third model, they strongly feel the need to experience both aspects in their life. So to use a food analogy, those who identify as male only like pizza, those who identify as female only like tacos, I don’t really care but eat pizza because that’s what I’ve been fed all my life. Non-binary really likes both pizza and tacos and couldn’t imagine having to only eat one or the other. Fourth model is something else I haven’t thought of.
Of course also each person is an individual so making a blanket statement about how non-binary people feel is probably a mistake, but I was a good model or analogy to help describe what many or most non-binary people are feeling I would be very interested.