My gender is nonbinary.
I don’t mean that in the “I identify as nonbinary”, “my gender identity is nonbinary” or what have you. I mean that in the standard “sex is the anatomy of your reproductive system, while gender is the social roles generally associated with particular anatomies” sense.
Strangers mostly see me as male, until I open my mouth, in which case I’m usually read as a gender-non-conforming female. Most of my acquaintances don’t know what my assigned sex at birth is. (I don’t exactly make a secret of it, but they have no reason to care, so why would they bother to keep track?) My friends are carefully selected for people who either see me as nonbinary or are very good at pretending.
Of course, I’m cognizant of the privileges that allow me to live as a nonbinary person. My partner is happy to support me financially, which means I don’t have to get a job with people who misgender me. I have a remarkably trans-positive social circle, one in which I can find many people who see me as my gender. I have physical features that make it relatively easy for me to appear androgynous (which include, of course, my privilege as a naturally thin person). I am a very lucky person, and if a couple of things hadn’t gone as well as they did I wouldn’t be in the situation I’m in now.
But it’s still true: I don’t live in the world as a woman or a man. I live as a nonbinary person. And I am so thankful for that every day.
I guess this is what they mean by “gender is a social construct”– that is, gender is a thing that exists because people believe it exists. Of course, most social constructs aren’t very amenable to changing via someone wanting it hard enough: it’s not practical (nor desirable) to convince everyone that money is meaningless or the government doesn’t exist.
But.. if I claim loud and long that I’m nonbinary, then people come to believe I’m nonbinary and then I actually am. Through nothing but the power of my will and other people’s goodwill, I can bootstrap my way into being nonbinary. I glared at society hard enough and it socially constructed me a gender more to my liking.
It’s a heady feeling.
Thing of Things 
This was a really cool read. I’m happy for you. Everyone should be this lucky, shouldn’t they?
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I ought to preface this by saying I’m a cis guy. So this piece may not have been written “for me,” and my thinking on the topic of gender might not be as deep or personally informed as it is for trans people, despite my contact with trans people.
This seems to converge on my own thinking about gender, which I term in my head “the voluntarist theory.” Basically, it’s a social constructivist view of gender. How we apply gendered terms is a social activity, and therefore under our collective control. It’s entirely our choice who gets called a man, who gains access to men’s spaces, who is named by masculine pronouns, etc. Therefore, we ought to collectively recognize gender in ways that maximize human flourishing—because why not? You can’t derive an “ought” from an “is.” There are biological realities, e.g. chromosomes. However, these realities don’t have any force to compel us to classify people certain ways. The way biological reality *is* doesn’t tell us how we *ought* to classify people. There’s no “deep” fact of the matter about who is “really” a man, woman, or nonbinary person. There are only people people with certain chromosome-anatomy profiles; people who identify as men, women, and nonbinary people; and societies which recognize and affirm peoples’ identities (or don’t, if they’re shitty societies).
And I don’t think gender is ontologically unique in this way. I think we’re always carving up our Umwelt in ways that suit our faculties and needs. To repeat myself, this isn’t to deny objective reality—I am a firm believer that everything is reducible to particle-fields in spacetime which exist independently of all observers. I think that this was true before we classifiers came along, it’s true now, and it will be true after we’re gone. But the concepts by which we navigate material reality are always shaped by our capabilities and desires. For example, post-Darwinian biologists admit that drawing the borders between species (between wolves and coywolves, for example) can be ad hoc. This isn’t to say there aren’t objective facts about whether or not animal populations share a genome or common lineage; it just means that species classifications are always made out of convenience.
https://newrepublic.com/article/124453/whats-species-anyways
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@Joseph — +100. That is exactly right.
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“Gender is a social construct” doesn’t mean “my gender is whatever I say it is” — unless the people around you think it does.
(*weird sun voice* The statements whose truth values depend on the number of people who believe them.)
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According to that definition of gender, pretty much everyone would be “nonbinary”. Which is probably true in some sense. I’ve never, ever seen a person only expressing the stereotypical characteristics of one gender – and most people I know don’t even try to. I sometimes (tongue-in-cheek) refer to myself as “male, but not very”, even though I’m pretty sure I’d count as cis by any sensible definition.
To me gender looks like a continuum. The distribution of people on it seems to be strongly bimodal (as evidenced by the observation that I don’t have any trouble categorizing most of them), but that doesn’t exclude the possibility of some being caught in the middle. Which should not be a problem at all, but still seems to be a huge deal for a lot of people. I guess I’ll never understand why so many hate things that don’t fit into their neat little boxes.
(Ironically, this view seems to be *less* prevalent in exact sciences. If you can learn one thing from looking at nature, it is that it usually tends to almost, but not quite fit into any system of boxes you can think of – and you just get used to it and try to make your boxes fit nature a little better instead).
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Has pretty much everyone socially transitioned to a nonbinary gender? That’s astonishing! I keep meeting all these people who identify as men and women; maybe it’s a Bay Area thing?
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Mea culpa. It seems that I missed the part of your definition where one refuses to identify as one of the blobs in the distribution – most people probably do that, if only for convenience 🙂
But even with that in mind – the more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you. And this is a distinction that serves a lot less purpose than many others (Openness and Extraversion are way better predictors of whether I get along with someone than gender is). It just found its way into passports for some weird reason…
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Hard to recall, but I think the proximate reason that I was ok with people getting to choose their pronouns was that I had to correct a lot of “Walt”s and “Wally”s in my youth. My thinking was that if I get to pick my name, so should other folks, and name + weird pronoun is not a huge extension of this notion.
Nuff bout me. Good on you that people around you respect you. Finding people like that is a big part of arranging your life like you like it. Takes a while, but worth doing.
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This seems like a contradiction, unless you never interact with strangers.
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I want this for myself. Thank you for showing it as a possibility. (I am 100% serious. I am at the end of a heterosexual marriage that has felt constraining for years, and looking to start living in a way that’s better for me.)
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>…it’s not practical (nor desirable) to convince everyone that money is meaningless or the government doesn’t exist…..
This was arguably part of Solidarity’s actual strategy for resisting the communist regime in Poland.
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