I get that you can't talk about a binary normative system without recognizing that there's a reification of a binary happening that materially affects people, but idk, i just really fucking hate the term "opposite sex" or "opposite gender". I'm sorry to get argumentative about that, i know that people here are more or less on the same page, but i really think it's good if we just phase that term out of use and be mindful of not re-introducing binary reasonings when we discuss trans issues. Like you said, it's probably worth typing some things out just for the people who are only reading along.
So let's say that yes, ofc patriarchy doesn't give a fuck if people are nonbinary. Because clearly, it doesn't. Even then, trans and nonbinary gender presentation still subverts and breaks these distinctions down in practice because it means we so often do not neatly fit into these two boxes anymore, whether that's intentional or not. What about people who are genderfluid or about pluralities who include personalities of different genders in the same body and reflect that in their presentation? What about people who do not want to be either femme or masc presenting at all because they are agender or greygender or xenogender? Even for nonbinary people like me who are clearly and consistently aligned towards one of the binary genders, i don't think it really works in all cases. Some people clock me as trans, to some i pass as a butch cis woman, some are absolutely convinced to see me as a gay man, some just get a stack overflow error when they try to read my gender. Idk how i do that, but these are things that happen to me regularly, they're just part of my life. Less often now as i progress in my transition, but it's still not always a clear picture and probably never will be, because the better i pass, the more liberties i take with queering femininity, being more butch and enjoying androgynity. And this uncertainty that we give people affects how we experience gender-based discrimination - when people read me as feminine, they are more likely to violate my boundaries and touch me without asking, they are less likely to take me seriously, they are more likely to start making unsolicited sexual advances. When they read me as trans, they act extra weird in ways they don't when they read me as cis. When they read me as a queer man, i'm subjected to an entirely different set of prejudices and get completely different kinds of stares (i've come to tell apart a very large number of unique stares from "i want to punch him" to "she can't wear that" to "omg i can't make up my mind if i would fuck them"). And that goes for a lot of trans people, because passing isn't this reliable either-or thing for many people, but highly dependent on who's looking. Like, the entire TME/TMA discourse, that doesn't work for a large number of the AFAB trans people i know because they're usually or at least frequently read as and misgendered as women and are regularly subjected to the full gamut of mysogyny, and when they say they are trans, that quickly shifts into transmysogyny because people have this "trans = trans woman" assumption. At the same time, they are also confronted with the host of transmisandrist stereotypes like "you just want male privilege", "are you sure this isn't a phase, i've also really struggled with being a girl when i was younger", "don't you want to have kids at some point, is it really necessary that you medically transition when you can just live as a masculine woman", "you're so pretty, do you really want to ruin that with hormones and surgery" and so on. There's often no either / or of what kind of transphobia AFAB trans people receive. To me, it seems to generally be a pretty big part of the trans experience that we confuse and overwhelm people just by existing, that the way we live our lives make the gender binary ache under its internal contradictions and that is reflected in the weird and unpredictable ways in which we are treated.
And honestly, what is "opposite gender" even supposed to mean in my case? I'm a nonbinary trans woman, according to your line of thought the opposite of that is a nonbinary trans man. And that works in a lot of ways - when i talk about dysphoria with nonbinary trans men, their triggers tend to be the polar opposites of mine, for example. And a lot of their other experiences are like mirror images of mine, too. But then, we also share that we're both trans, that we're both nonbinary, that we are both trans and nonbinary and in spite of being nonbinary claim a term for a binary gender for ourselves, and that means that a lot of our experiences are not the opposite, but the exact same. We face the same transmedical ideas about not actually being our gender before bottom surgery, we both get impostor syndrome and ask ourselves if we're even allowed to call ourselves nonbinary and so on. So under that perspective, when i try to find the opposite gender for ALL of my mentioned labels, that polar opposite of my gender would be binary cis man. And yeah, i can get behind that, that's very unlike me in all the ways possible. But it also is supposed to be the opposite gender of binary cis woman, and then we have the inverse of all the things i just got into, that binary cis men and binary cis women take up opposite ends of the binary cisnormative spectrum, but have all these aspects of binary and cis privilege in common. And you could argue that binary trans woman is in some ways an opposite gender to mine, or that binary cis woman is, or that these two are opposite genders to each other and so on and so forth. Framing things in a way were genders have just one opposite just doesn't strike me as particularly productive when i get into the day to day experiences in the communities i'm active in.
I get that you can't talk about a binary normative system without recognizing that there's a reification of a binary happening that materially affects people, but idk, i just really fucking hate the term "opposite sex" or "opposite gender". I'm sorry to get argumentative about that, i know that people here are more or less on the same page, but i really think it's good if we just phase that term out of use and be mindful of not re-introducing binary reasonings when we discuss trans issues. Like you said, it's probably worth typing some things out just for the people who are only reading along.
Fair. I agree.
I also don't really disagree with the rest either, the problem is that it's not very conversational to write too much, and that necessitates generalisations with the expectation that people reading will understand they're only generalisations to make communication easier. I could individually go through each and every single difference on the spectrum of gender for inclusivity but what I'd end up with is an absolutely enormous wall of text that ends up communicating less effectively because fewer people engage with it. On the offchance this is misinterpreted I want to emphasise this is not a dig, I do not mind reading large amounts of text, I'm just explaining why I try not do it.
I get that you can't talk about a binary normative system without recognizing that there's a reification of a binary happening that materially affects people, but idk, i just really fucking hate the term "opposite sex" or "opposite gender". I'm sorry to get argumentative about that, i know that people here are more or less on the same page, but i really think it's good if we just phase that term out of use and be mindful of not re-introducing binary reasonings when we discuss trans issues. Like you said, it's probably worth typing some things out just for the people who are only reading along.
So let's say that yes, ofc patriarchy doesn't give a fuck if people are nonbinary. Because clearly, it doesn't. Even then, trans and nonbinary gender presentation still subverts and breaks these distinctions down in practice because it means we so often do not neatly fit into these two boxes anymore, whether that's intentional or not. What about people who are genderfluid or about pluralities who include personalities of different genders in the same body and reflect that in their presentation? What about people who do not want to be either femme or masc presenting at all because they are agender or greygender or xenogender? Even for nonbinary people like me who are clearly and consistently aligned towards one of the binary genders, i don't think it really works in all cases. Some people clock me as trans, to some i pass as a butch cis woman, some are absolutely convinced to see me as a gay man, some just get a stack overflow error when they try to read my gender. Idk how i do that, but these are things that happen to me regularly, they're just part of my life. Less often now as i progress in my transition, but it's still not always a clear picture and probably never will be, because the better i pass, the more liberties i take with queering femininity, being more butch and enjoying androgynity. And this uncertainty that we give people affects how we experience gender-based discrimination - when people read me as feminine, they are more likely to violate my boundaries and touch me without asking, they are less likely to take me seriously, they are more likely to start making unsolicited sexual advances. When they read me as trans, they act extra weird in ways they don't when they read me as cis. When they read me as a queer man, i'm subjected to an entirely different set of prejudices and get completely different kinds of stares (i've come to tell apart a very large number of unique stares from "i want to punch him" to "she can't wear that" to "omg i can't make up my mind if i would fuck them"). And that goes for a lot of trans people, because passing isn't this reliable either-or thing for many people, but highly dependent on who's looking. Like, the entire TME/TMA discourse, that doesn't work for a large number of the AFAB trans people i know because they're usually or at least frequently read as and misgendered as women and are regularly subjected to the full gamut of mysogyny, and when they say they are trans, that quickly shifts into transmysogyny because people have this "trans = trans woman" assumption. At the same time, they are also confronted with the host of transmisandrist stereotypes like "you just want male privilege", "are you sure this isn't a phase, i've also really struggled with being a girl when i was younger", "don't you want to have kids at some point, is it really necessary that you medically transition when you can just live as a masculine woman", "you're so pretty, do you really want to ruin that with hormones and surgery" and so on. There's often no either / or of what kind of transphobia AFAB trans people receive. To me, it seems to generally be a pretty big part of the trans experience that we confuse and overwhelm people just by existing, that the way we live our lives make the gender binary ache under its internal contradictions and that is reflected in the weird and unpredictable ways in which we are treated.
And honestly, what is "opposite gender" even supposed to mean in my case? I'm a nonbinary trans woman, according to your line of thought the opposite of that is a nonbinary trans man. And that works in a lot of ways - when i talk about dysphoria with nonbinary trans men, their triggers tend to be the polar opposites of mine, for example. And a lot of their other experiences are like mirror images of mine, too. But then, we also share that we're both trans, that we're both nonbinary, that we are both trans and nonbinary and in spite of being nonbinary claim a term for a binary gender for ourselves, and that means that a lot of our experiences are not the opposite, but the exact same. We face the same transmedical ideas about not actually being our gender before bottom surgery, we both get impostor syndrome and ask ourselves if we're even allowed to call ourselves nonbinary and so on. So under that perspective, when i try to find the opposite gender for ALL of my mentioned labels, that polar opposite of my gender would be binary cis man. And yeah, i can get behind that, that's very unlike me in all the ways possible. But it also is supposed to be the opposite gender of binary cis woman, and then we have the inverse of all the things i just got into, that binary cis men and binary cis women take up opposite ends of the binary cisnormative spectrum, but have all these aspects of binary and cis privilege in common. And you could argue that binary trans woman is in some ways an opposite gender to mine, or that binary cis woman is, or that these two are opposite genders to each other and so on and so forth. Framing things in a way were genders have just one opposite just doesn't strike me as particularly productive when i get into the day to day experiences in the communities i'm active in.
Fair. I agree.
I also don't really disagree with the rest either, the problem is that it's not very conversational to write too much, and that necessitates generalisations with the expectation that people reading will understand they're only generalisations to make communication easier. I could individually go through each and every single difference on the spectrum of gender for inclusivity but what I'd end up with is an absolutely enormous wall of text that ends up communicating less effectively because fewer people engage with it. On the offchance this is misinterpreted I want to emphasise this is not a dig, I do not mind reading large amounts of text, I'm just explaining why I try not do it.