The concept of visibility is one of the corner stones of the gay rights movement. The basic idea is that homophobia propagates more easily when people don’t have positive examples to draw from in their daily lives. If you don’t know that your cousin, or co-worker, or that nice clerk down at the supermarket is queer, it’s easier to believe lies about queer people being predators or sickos. The more queer people are out, the harder it is for those lies to gain purchase. So a big focus, particularly early in the gay rights movement, was stuff like PDAs - doing stuff in public that visibly marked you as queer, so that people would see how many queer people there really are in society.
With bisexuality, there’s the added issue that most people assume your orientation based on who they see you partnered with. A bisexual guy holding hands with a woman is going to be seen as straight. The same bisexual guy holding hands with a guy is going to be seen as gay. It’s much harder to something “naturally” that would identify as specifically bisexual. And there is a non-negligible amount of prejudice directed specifically at bisexual people, particularly within the larger queer community - stuff like “bisexual people are really gay and just in denial,” or “bisexual partners will inevitably leave you for a hetero relationship.” Bisexual people who want to be visible have to take extra steps to be explicit (so to speak) about their orientation.
Or, on preview, what Buck_Godot just explained perfectly in two sentences.
I don’t think that sounds at all asocial or curmudgeonly. I just think you’re blessedly self-contained. As a person who is constantly anxious about what people think of her and how she is perceived, I am intensely jealous. I’m very self-conscious, very attuned to other people (even strangers,) and kind of weird-looking. It’s a difficult combo.
I won’t say I get non-binary genders but I get why people want to be referred to in the manner they wish. What I don’t get are people who use she/they or he/they pronouns. You’re already using she or he so why not just use her/him? Don’t get me wrong, it’s no skin off my nose if they want me to use they instead of she or he, but I don’t get it.
Yup, probably. Remember that one of the main features of majoritized-group privilege is not needing to know or care about identity expression, because the expression of your own identity is AUTOMATICALLY taken care of by your societal environment.
You don’t particularly care whether somebody “recognizes” you as a man, mostly because that recognition is overwhelmingly your default experience. You are, as you note, a cisgender unambiguously male-presenting man who is constantly assumed to be a man, and interacted with as a man.
If you had gone through your life being constantly mistaken for a woman, you might like to think that you wouldn’t care and you wouldn’t insist on your real gender being recognized or “proclaimed from the rooftops”, because you’re secure in your own identity and why should you care what other people think about you and yadda yadda yadda. And maybe that’s so.
But just bear in mind that the confidence you feel in your gender identity, and your self-perceived indifference to whether other people recognize it, most likely spring from the fact that you’ve never had to deal with other people challenging it. Majoritized-group privilege is a helluva drug.
My (tentative) take on that is that, for instance, “she/they” pronoun preference basically means “I identify as female but I don’t object to being referred to in a gender-neutral way. If you default to using non-gendered pronouns for everybody, I won’t be insulted by being called ‘they’.”
However, for some people it may mean that they identify sometimes as female and sometimes as nonbinary. I think you’d have to check with the individual in question.
“She/they,” means they’re okay with the full sets of both feminine and non-gendered pronouns. It means, “she/her or they/them are both acceptable.” It doesn’t mean, “I only accept nongendered pronouns when referred to in the transitive or possessive sense.”
I dunno. I have a deep enough voice that I’m often “sirred” over the phone. Dressed in winter gear and picking up food my husband ordered, I’ve been “sirred” in person. I’ve seen people write stories about me on Facebook using “xe” and “they” pronouns. I never correct anyone. When the restaurant clerk said, “here’s your food, Mr Smith”, i said “thanks” and handed him my credit card.
Granted, i don’t feel especially secure in my gender identity, but I’m pretty indifferent to whether the person I’m interacting with thinks I’m female or male.
I appreciate both your answers. Starting last year, we turned on a feature that allowed employees at work to plug in their preferred pronouns into their employee profile as part of our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Most employees who updated use the standard she/her or he/him, but we have a few who just use they or a more traditional pronoun followed by they.
Likewise, but I’m not sure that the experience of accidental misgendering is exactly the same for women, who are in many ways a minoritized group.
Being mistaken for a man can be a bit like “passing” for white: kind of liberating because just for this brief moment there’s suddenly so much underlying bullshit of entrenched assumptions and prejudices that you’re simply not going to have to worry about. (Of course, if the person misgendering you is a drunk guy challenging you to a fight for looking at him funny, that changes the equation again.)
I also wonder if it’s that a woman being mistaken for a man will laugh it off, but a man being mistaken for a woman will be more likely to become hostile.
And, whether or not you don’t, are you puzzled that many men would object to being called “she”?
– if your answer to the first is “no”, I think you’re unusual. And if your answer to the second is “yes”, then it seems to me that it isn’t only enbys who puzzle you, but humans in general.
But if you don’t want to be called by female pronouns, and/or if you understand why many men would object to being called by female pronouns, then you have your answer. The particular person in question presumably thinks that, for them, both the female and male pronouns are wrong, and they therefore don’t want to be called by them.
I apparently present as female whatever I’m wearing, due presumably to the shape of my body. For me this is no problem because I also feel strongly that I’m a woman; but if I didn’t I’d be really annoyed at anybody who thought I needed to have major surgery in order to use different pronouns.
And people of any gender can like dresses, frippery, long hair, and/or jewelry. Why should they have to stop wearing such things, if they like wearing them, in order to use different pronouns?
The person may be signaling that using gender-neutral pronouns as a general default is fine with them. This may be especially useful in situations in which people rarely see each other, such as on message boards or in some types of work situations. I’m fine with she, and I’m fine with they if you can’t remember which I am or if you want to use neutral forms for everybody, but I don’t want male pronouns applied to me (if by accident on a message board it’s not a big deal, though I’ll probably mention it.)
I’ve also read that some people feel sometimes gendered and sometimes not, and may therefore feel that different pronouns are more accurate at different times; though unless they specify at a given moment I don’t think others are supposed to guess which is accurate when.
Much of what makes me unhappy about it is that I’m often misgendered by people who can’t see me when I’m doing something coded male. People are addressing a farmer, or a person asking about tractor parts, or a planning board member, or the head of the household – and they use what I call the “default male”: they think of the person doing such things as male, so they assume that I am. I want the right pronouns not just for me personally – I want the right pronouns in order to point out that yes, women do these things too.
It’s less of an issue than it used to be, but it still comes up.
If they’re just assuming that a woman won’t mind being called a man, but a man will mind being called a woman – that’s a different sort of problem. But it’s still a problem, and I think an even larger one: it assumes that being male is essentially better, and/or that women are and ought to be too deferential to others to complain.
Any given individual, of course, may have simply guessed wrong for other reasons.
If you were enby, you would likely constantly feel uncomfortable, othered, or like you didn’t fit in when called he or she. You would likely see clear as day that gender is not a continuum. That’s just some very short-sighted metaphor that attempts to translate the richness and variability of human experience down to an unnecessarily restrictive 2D geometric model.
You would also notice how often people are gendered, or split into genders, for no good reason. How often, in school, e.g., when the class needs to be split into 2 groups, does the teacher just say boy in this group and girls in that group? Or greet an audience as ladies and gentlemen rather than just people.
And if someone didn’t just use a wrong pronoun, but actually treated you as a woman, I suspect it would matter, and you’d care. You’d be seen very differently if you acted as yourself while being perceived as a woman. And people would respond to you very differently.
I also agree with everything Thorny just wrote, and would add one thing.
As far as being enby and having a feminine presentation, lots of people present strongly as what they are not, before coming out. They may love looking and dressing that way, or they may not. Some people come out, then begin to transition, while others start transitioning, then come out. There’s no one right way.
As others have pointed out, you are misunderstanding the pronoun preference. It could be a way to dip their toe into trans waters, or it could represent being an ally, or it could represent some form of enby or genderfluid identity. MTX.
I have a problem with trying to apply a metaphor to it – I feel like that’s part of the problem. But, for example, all the stars in the sky. Discontinuous and nonbinary.
Yes, I mostly meant not a linear continuum, and I agree with multidimensional. And I’m not being facetious when I say I’m uncomfortable using a metaphor. We’re so used to speaking in these kinds of visual metaphors that we don’t realize when it’s the metaphor, or the visualization of it, that is restricting our thinking on the subject.