It’s true.
First, there’s the fact that no one can agree on which one of “genderqueer” and “nonbinary” is the umbrella term, and which one refers to people who identify specifically outside the gender binary (instead of as both men and women or whatever).
There are well-behaved words like “genderfluid” which have a fair amount of predictive power, insofar as I can expect a genderfluid person to have “girl days” and/or “boy days” and/or “nonbinary days”. These are, tragically, the exception.
There are words like “agender”, which seems to have at least two different kinds of people in it. There are agender people who don’t really care about gender: they just go “meh” and move on with their lives. And there are agender people who feel incredibly shitty whenever anyone calls them any gender or treats them like any gender. Those two groups seem, to put it lightly, like they have absolutely fucking nothing to do with each other whatsoever.
And then there are words like “bigender” and “trigender” and “pangender” and “androgyne” and “intergender” and shit, where people who clearly have different gender experiences are identifying as the same word, and people who have the same gender experiences are identifying as different words, and it’s a total goddamn mess and I can’t predict anything about how someone experiences gender based on what words they like.
And then Tumblr happened and a bunch of fourteen-year-olds started using extremely elaborate metaphors for their genders and deciding that they’re “voidgender” because their gender is so nonexistent it’s like T H E V O I D. This is very nice from an aesthetic perspective but doesn’t exactly help the “no one has any goddamn idea what they’re talking about” problem.
I’m not sure this problem is actually fixable. Gender feelings are, by their nature, very hard to talk about– I can’t feel exactly what you’re feeling, so how do I know if we’re experiencing the same thing or not? And the way we experience our genders is so influenced by our race, our disabilities, our sexualities, our class, where we grew up, our assigned sex at birth, our parents, our childhood friends, the books we read, and so on, that getting at the raw feeling itself is nigh-impossible.
I guess the take-home message of this post is that you cannot assume that someone is not dysphoric because of the words they identify with. If someone identifies as stargender, it gives you information about some things– for instance, that they probably have a Tumblr– but it doesn’t tell you whether they have to dissociate to get through sex, or whether they avoid mirrors because they can’t stand their body, or whether it feels like a icicle in their gut every time someone calls them “she”. You have to go with the base rate of those traits among people who use gender-neutral pronouns, which is “high”. The whole fucking situation is entirely too messy for anyone to conclude things about a person’s gender experiences from their chosen labels.
Thing of Things 
I am not so sure those two groups of agender people have nothing to do with each other, as I could describe myself as either.
On the one hand, most of the time my attitude toward gender could be described as “meh,” and I don’t mind people describing me with gendered words as a long as they are using those words in a sense where I can assume they just refer to a person with the sort of body I happen to have.
On the other hand, if anyone says something that implies that femaleness is in any way a part of my identity on any other level – that my femaleness MEANS something inherently more important than, say, having my brown eyes – I will feel extremely, extremely shitty.
Honestly, it seems to me it’s only a difference of what exactly triggers your dysphoria.
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Huh. I sometimes feel that way about maleness, but I thought that was residual shittiness from the time I spent in the-place-awful-psuedo-SJ-people-were-in-before-tumblr. Maybe that means something else, too.
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What’s the word for someone who wants to let the “text” of identity expressions “speak for itself” and wishes every would stop trying to label and categorize each other?
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“Gender abolitionist”, I believe.
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“People who have the same gender experiences are identifying as different words/people who have different gender experiences are identifying as the same words”: I feel like this isn’t a new problem at all, and is true of people on the male-female binary as well.
Like you said, lots of things other than the raw data of “I identify as male” (for example) influence what that means to any given person. I’ve definitely heard talk that many of the people who identify as trans men currently would have identified with other gender roles if they’d been born ten or twenty years earlier, like the various permutations of “butch”. You’ve got stuff like “boi”, which isn’t used quite so much now, but this definition on Wikipedia is enlightening in terms of just how much gender politics have changed and how fast:
“Boi could be used to mean someone assigned female at birth, who generally does not identify as, or only partially identifies as feminine, female, a girl, or a woman. […] they almost always identify as lesbians or MOGII.”
So you’ve got people who strongly identify as lesbians who don’t identify as female, which almost certainly still covers many people alive today. Yet that clashes violently with our current Tumblresque narrative of what a “lesbian” is: probably a TERF and intensely cis-female-identifying. From what I’ve seen, younger gendervariant people have almost exclusively abandoned “lesbian” as transphobic and limiting, leaving it to people whose identities are rooted strongly in binary womanhood. But up until very recently, many lesbians saw gender variance as an inherent part of their lesbianism. Stuff like that.
It wasn’t better in the past for non-binary words, either. What you basically had was one word, “androgyne”, which had to cover almost everything in the non-binary universe, and you definitely couldn’t get a sense of people’s felt gender based on it.
tl;dr, but I agree with you that this is probably intractable. I just think it always has been, and isn’t something that’s arisen with Tumblr; if anything Tumblr just made it more explicit how many of these previous words were pulling double and triple duty for so long. Really, I think the only way to understand someone’s sense of felt gender is to ask them.
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What’s sad is, this latter group, the non-lesbian-identifying trans-positive group are, in practice, every bit as transphobic as the TERFs.
(Okay, I exaggerate. But you know how you’ll sometimes hear a black person say they prefer the open racism of the outright bigot to the subtle racism of the white liberal. Well, this is like that.)
The thing is, the younger, “trans positive” queers have built a kind of AFAB only space, with all the cool pronouns and cool words and cool gender. They love trans folks — but only the “right kind” of trans folks. Which means AFAB. (And a few token trans women who are, well, UTTERLY TOKENIZED AND IT’S SAD.)
So yeah. Everything is terrible.
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how about a ‘gender code’ like the codes bears & geeks developed. one that explicitly states all the details about their gender. Asexuality is probably varied enough that it could do with one too.
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Good idea. The highly specialized language people use to talk about gender is approaching that point anyway. (I assume you mean something like [0]?)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code
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This idea intrigues me for some reason, so I threw together a first draft in a few minutes. It’s a bit of a mess and I think it’s missing some things, but, well, I did say “first draft”.
http://pastebin.com/DKsNNg0C
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Very good, but I feel a category between N & N- is necessary for people who have gender but do not react to contrary suggestions with vitriol.
Perhaps the next step with these codes is to implement a colour scheme and start making Raikoth-esque beads.
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Great idea! Would it be appropriate to add letters for romantic/sexual attraction to the gender code? There could even be category codes for common points of attraction other than gender, like how the geek code has categories for what type of geek you are. (I’m thinking on the basis that “orientation” is not limited to gender or sex; one can be oriented towards kink, or dom/sub, or other mental/physical properties, on as fundamental a level as many people are oriented to sex+gender.)
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Interesting idea. Maybe make separate letters for different kinds of medical transition? E.g. I’ve had chest surgery but never been on hormones, and some people have started and stopped (and sometimes started again) on HRT. And then there’s legal transition and etc…
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This could do with being infinitely extensible. On the other hand, it is possible that there will be a Zeno Tarpit type effect, wherein, as % of population that is inadequately described tends exponentially to 0, hairiness of code increases exponentially.
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Attempted to run it past other people, got the response “Kintype section makes me not want to touch with 10 foot pole”. My suggested response is to have “!!K” for that kind of reaction, or to leave it out of the final product entirely (given that kintype-gender interactions seem to be entirely a Tumblr thing that I haven’t seen any of outside Tumblr specifically).
Also, seconding the notion of a half-point between N and N- (or an extension of the N-scale in the negative direction) being necessary for people who have gender, really would prefer to be addressed as gendered, but wouldn’t react violently to people who initially use “they” or whatever.
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This is super Relevant To My Interests because my brain has decided that its latest reason why I shouldn’t try this ‘dating’ lark is that it’s not fair to do so until I can accurately describe what gender I am. In such a way that is clear and unambiguous and conveys real information.
I am dealing with a being of much cunning.
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@Acheman — On your dating profile, just indicate that you are uncertain how you feel about your own gender, but that you are “read as X.” That way folks will have some of idea of where you are coming from. Then perhaps you can talk about what you find attractive. (Try to avoid saying “I find skinny people attractive,” since most people do, so it 1) carries little information and 2) can be really alienating to non-skinny people. Use a similar approach to other marginalized identities.)
Anyway, let your potential partners know the score. Right now, there could be some human of a gender expression that you will like, with a personality that you will adore, who is looking for a person precisely like you OMG!!!!!
Maybe. It’s possible.
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“There are well-behaved words like “genderfluid” which have a fair amount of predictive power, insofar as I can expect a genderfluid person to have “girl days” and/or “boy days” and/or “nonbinary days”. These are, tragically, the exception.”
That’s a nice paradigm you have for genderfluid, would be a shame if someone were to..subvert it.
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I guess I just want to second the point that the words for binary genders are a mess in some of the same ways you’ve pointed out here. Take any two people who happen to identify as women, and their actual ezperiences and understandings kf thier genders may be totally different.
I do find your point about agender identities really interesting, in that it seems like it could be mapped onto a similar way that asexual people differentiate themselves – some agender people are gender-indifferent, while others are gender-averse.
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I’ve heard that one way to learn something is to say you’ve found a solution (which you know in advance is wrong) so that people will explain to you why you’re wrong.
So I’ll be doing that now:
It’s clear that there are a finite number of possibilities (with a lot of variation within the possibilities):
1. Cares a lot about their gender
2. Does not care a lot about their gender
Times
1. Identifies as male
2. Identifies as female
3. Identifies as sometimes male and sometimes female
4. Identifies as no gender
= 8 possibilities, now there just need to be words for each of the 8, and the standard is done.
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Eh, I’d argue that under “Times” there’s a 5. Identifies as something besides man or woman (either some of or part of the time). I’m a cis lady myself, but NB people I know can have gender feelings of “I identify VERY STRONGLY as something that’s neither “man” nor “woman”, and I’m trying to cook up language for this other genderthing I feel like.
Sorry if I’m getting this wrong, NB people! I have a lot to learn.
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And combinations of that, such as ‘sometimes identifies as something else and sometimes identifies as a woman’. So there are 8 options under ‘Times’, for 16 total.
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I am 5)! And given the confusions of language, I would expect that if we ever came up with a nonbinary gender with gender roles and everything, some 5) people would be like “yay! problem solved!” and some 5) people would be like “I DON’T LIKE THIS ONE EITHER.”
Also, genderfluid people aren’t just “sometimes man and sometimes woman”.
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@ozy, Do you think there are a small number of 5 variations?
Like, if we have 100 5s, how many nonbinary gender roles would we need for us to cover, say, 95 of those people?
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I have no clue.
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For any countable list of genders, someone will have a gender that doesn’t quite match anything on the list. Probably that someone is named Russell.
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Why the focus on subjective identities? As a person who has a complex and apparently not universally shared subjective experience, I find the focus on identities to be straining. I don’t like the idea that people think they can presume my subjective experience from any one single interaction or even a mere pronoun preference. Why not make the code about how a person wishes to be externally treated? Pronoun preference, courtship rules if you wanted to add dating norms, if it is okay to call a person male or female, maybe current biology if people want (..Listen, I personally want to signal to partners in a subtle non lewd way that it is totally okay and desired to approach me if they are interested in people of my birth sex. Most trans spectrum people have literally the opposite desire. Anything to politely communicate where my needs differ from most people would assume my needs are would be great, Somedays it’s literally “Treat me the exact opposite as you would a regular trans person of my birth sex”), how strongly a person reacts (I will get more upset if someone bravely defends whatever pronoun they think I should have and I won’t get very upset in general. If I get upset, it’s because a person is talking over me or insulting me which is something history has proven is not solved by proper gendering), if a person can talk about what they see on the bracelet or not. Overall I think grounding in external/material things will be helpful. A lot of people complain about not knowing how to externally treat a person who is non binary. We have certain social codes and people are honestly confused. Every confused person does not need to watch “The Operas of Opera, a ten play series about the life and times of Opera, the one who is both a fairy and a dyke” and really learn who I am and have been as a person to interact with me. (And also puts a stopper in -death- long signal games about who is the complex queer with the coolest name/tumblr side bar)
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“thevoid”
… bramble-shaped? https://www.wordnik.com/words/theve 😛
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