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QuestionTo former they/thems: what made you change your mind?
Background: I'm feeling kinda discouraged right now because I recently moved and checked out the feminist bookstore in town and found a large contingent of "they/them" women. I get that a lot of women identify as NB because they don't identify with the regressive gender norms and roles imposed on them. However, shouldn't these women at the feminist bookstore know better? I don't get it. A big part of the feminist project is to liberate women from these regressive gender roles instead of saying that since I don't like regressive gender roles, I'm not a woman? Is the fact that I don't try to compel other people to call me they/them or dress like Peewee Herman (it's like a fucking uniform for those people), I must like and identify with patriarchal femininity? These are the people supposed to be fighting for women's liberation? This is so reactionary! How do people not see this? Ugh.
Anyway, I've never identified as NB. I'm pretty GNC but I'm older (35) and haven't been super-online. I was also raised by lesbians who were GNC so I grew up thinking it was normal. I grew up seeing people harassing my mother's butch partners by asking if they were men or women. Now, I guess that's supposed to be "inclusive."
If you have identified as NB in the past, why did you and why did you stop? Did you have a political awakening or did something happen?
I was on the precipice of identifying. Circa 2015 I distinctly remember thinking "I could identify as a gender fluid nonbinary person!" I thought better of it because I figured I'd have to start talking about myself more so people understood my identity (I'm a rather private person), and I imagined envy me getting angry more often (misgendering! microagressions! scary!) and I was like yeah no. The nonbinary version of myself in my mind was an insufferable person, and all of this gender stuff seems like a lot of extra work and brain power for me. I can just carry on being a GNC female and simply not play the gender game, so I went with that. I don't feel the need to tell people how to perceive me.
The nonbinary version of myself in my mind was an insufferable person, and all of this gender stuff seems like a lot of extra work and brain power for me.
That genuinely sounds like an impressively high level of insight and prediction considering you hadn't peaked at the time.
I have the very woke circle I ran with at the time to thank for this insight. The gender people in the group were just starting to grate on my nerves, for sure. Planted the seeds for a peak years later.
Yup. In Wokeville you're led to believe that if you don't like a particular group, it's because you haven't been exposed to them enough. I was totally fine and supportive of trans people until I worked a job that had a ton of them. They were all easily offended narcissists and that was when I learned that I dislike the alphabet soup crew.
I really, really found the pronoun thing to be an imposition on others that made me feel like an ass, so I stopped that within 2 months of declaring my identity. I just stopped. Didn't even bother to put a "she/they" just why? Why add confusion?
After I stopped that, the self-reflection just lead me to realize nothing changes for women if I identify outside of womanhood in a bid to be accepted for my differences. So I pretty much had a mini peak about this while still had a "live and let live" about all the gender identity stuff (before I fully peaked with the aimee chanellor, jessica yaniv shit)
ETA: my total time IDing as a nonbinary lasted no more than 4 months. I'm so thankful my SO was patient with me and never argued (or was overly enthusiastic), I think he knew it was a temporary logical error that I would find my way out of on my own. I got out of it and was like "lol that was dumb sorry."
I really, really found the pronoun thing to be an imposition on others that made me feel like an ass, so I stopped that within 2 months of declaring my identity.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a really long time: it takes a certain kind of person to identify as NB (in the long term), because most people don’t want to burden/inconvenience others. Like most gender nonconforming women in this day and age, I’ve questioned my gender. In fact, I faced so much bullying in uni for being ‘cis’ that it was not lost on me that I was one simple identification away from making my life a lot easier for myself. But I just couldn’t get past the idea of asking people to alter the way they speak about me, knowing that it would take a lot of conscious effort on their part and make them trip over their words and so on. In spite of the instant social currency it would afford me, I just couldn’t do that to other people; it felt mortifying.
That reasoning, I think, is why most gender nonconforming people ultimately decide against identifying as non binary, even if they go through a period of doing so or questioning doing so. That’s why I’m always on my guard when I meet people who request they/them pronouns or neopronouns. If it’s something they’ve been trying out for a few weeks or months, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they’ve simply been brainwashed, but the ones who stick with they/them pronouns years after graduating uni? In most cases, they’re very very self-involved and lacking in empathy.
Agree, nothing to add from me. Just had to say:
dress like Peewee Herman (it's like a fucking uniform for those people)
I died, lol.
I noticed this from a NB TikTok account I saw yesterday. Those clothes! LOL
I started ID'ing as nb as a teenager while I was being groomed by my adult male "friends." I developed early and did modeling work so I was extremely hypersexualized in general. It was a coping mechanism - so that if I told the men who were sexualizing me that I wasn't a woman maybe they'd stop and think about what they were doing for a second. Really I just wanted an inkling of control over who I was and how I was perceived when I felt I had none.
I stopped ID'ing as NB around my sophmore year of college - when my life was a little more stable and people were interested in knowing me beyond being like a hypersexy baby teen. I was comfortable with being a woman and realized the way people treated me I couldn't particularly opt out of. I didn't really peak until I was 22 and I realized how taken advantage of I was.
I'm sorry you were put through that. You don't have to answer, but I am curious, did your parents understand the reality of young girls in the modeling industry and male predation and think it was still worth it, or did they genuine believe this was a huge opportunity and never thought you would be unsafe? My tween has started talking about wanting to get into acting and I have offered to enroll her in out local theater arts school as an extracurricular, but would not let her start auditioning for jobs.
My parents didn't really know what was happening. I would have other people who were working on the shoot pick me up and drop me off. They knew I was getting some jobs but not the extent of it. I love them very much and they are kind people - but my parents are not the most intelligent and it was very easy for me to convince them I should be doing exploitative things that I thought would be good for me. They did everything they could to make me happy even if it wasn't actually the best thing to do.
As someone who went to a performing arts high school who now has a full fledged degree (that I don't use) in theater arts, I would highly recommend telling your daughter that it's okay to keep it as a hobby and avoid monetizing it. This includes even the "safe" options like tech (costumes, lighting, sets etc). The industry is very very difficult to break into if you can't afford to take very low paying jobs your first few years of working. Feel free to message me if you have any questions!
Didnt change anything on the misogyny i experienced. Also noticed other women felt exactly like me on “feeling like a woman.” No woman “feels” like a woman. That’s a solely tim experience. But then i peaked around 2013/2014
LMAO at PeeWee as a "fucking uniform for those people."
I identified as nonbinary because I hated my breasts but I didn't want to be a man. I also didn't care when people mistook me for a guy (which obviously meant I wasnt cis, according to all the trans people I knew).
The way I stopped was a bit complex. I was sick of the overtly sexual nature of trans spaces and Google something like "why is everyone so sexual?" I found /r/detrans, then the GC subreddit (which I'd always avoided thanks to the propaganda machine). I read that lots of women hate their breasts, and that that didn't make me trans. It just made me a woman who happened to hate her breasts.
Now, granted, I was never full blown NB. I had spent my teen years on more edgy parts of the internet, and I actually kind of thought being NB was a made up attention seeking thing until I identified as it lol. So I snapped out of it really quickly (after less than a year), no hormones or surgery, etc. I never even really changed pronouns because I truly did not give a shit. I still have some issues with dysphoria though, but I've been working on accepting myself rather than looking at surgery or something.
THIS: It just made me a woman who happened to hate her breasts.
I hate that a "symptom" of being nonbinary that people use a lot is if you hate your breasts.. I got a breast reduction because I hated them and I'm still a woman
I don't think I ever specifically went by they/them, but I did identify as NB for a number of years in my "gender journey" (🤢)
The thing is, if you're actually trying to "just get along" with the trans ideologues, the vast majority of us are NB.
There are two concurring views of the world:
Paradigm A, there is no such thing as gender. We're all either male or female.
Paradigm B, there is such a thing as gender, and the fact that the vast majority of people do not have a gender identity means the vast majority of people are agender/NB.
These are the two possible outcomes. We either end up in the first timeline, were we revert to the traditional definitions of sex where woman = adult human female.
Or we end up in the second timeline, where we reidentify as "agender/NB female-bodied people" and fight for our collective rights as "female-bodied people."
The thing is, right now the TIMs are denying us rights based on either vector. If we can't have rights "as women" where "woman" equals "adult human female," at the very least we should have sex-based rights and protections as females. But they're trying to deny that "female" even exists at this point.
Before anyone tries to accuse me of "capitulating" by suggesting we might want to consider organizing as "agender female-bodied people," it's not an outcome I want either. But if the alternative is a complete lack of sex-based rights and protections, I do think it's a point we should start making.
I've spoken briefly before about being an earlier-in adoptee of NB about a decade ago. I was raised in a very conservative environment with an unstable, abusive household that was in deep poverty. I also had undiagnosed ADHD that would only get treated in my thirties.
Oh! And I'm bisexual. With the classic GNC behavior of the gays.
It's estimated that kids with ADHD recieve 20,000 more negative messages about ourselves than other kids our age by the time we're 12. A lot of mine were about how I was a failure at this whole 'girl' thing. Then the concept of NB came along, and my young internet-addicted bi ass was like yes okay, because by sheer value of not telling me I was going to burn in hell forever the LGBTQIA+ community were Awesome People who Knew What They Were Talking About.
So I had a name for what people had always been saying about me! And that gap between what I was supposed to be and what I was and my feelings of shame and failure and oh the body dysphoria that came with being a CSA survivor! Woo-hoo!
Just, then I learned a lot about women's history through my investigative reporting bent, while researching generational trauma to understand what happened to me. And I came to understand why the women in my life growing up were such terrible people. And the systems that made them.
That more than learning about the trans issues made the concept of woman something I could begin identifying with. Before it was something I saw through the lens the patriarchy gave me. After I could begin putting together my own view of a group of people who had been historically enslaved.
US based info : Things like when women got to have credit cards (the 1970s). The number of states that require standardized testing for all kids who are homeschooled (9) vs the age of marriage with parental consent (usually 16, some with no guideline, one that's /12/). Put it all together and you can get a girl with no education married with no opportunity to say no to a man twice or three times her age. By 21 she can have three kids and if she does try to get out she's shunned by her community. Even ignoring the police and judges being from that community, supporting the children alone can lock her into an abusive situation...
Stuff like that. That changed it for me. People talking in granular detail about the horrible realities of the class oppression of women.
I think undiagnosed autism is another factor.
Undiagnosed and diagnosed. I think there's a general lack of understanding in the gender critical world of the sheer amount of 'something is wrong with you' messaging that these kids have gotten from society (with a fair amount around being GNC) before they clock on gender as the what.
or dress like Peewee Herman (it's like a fucking uniform for those people)
I instantly recognized this...spot on. LOL
The thought I could be "genderqueer" removed a lot of pressure I felt to be more feminine, so I considered being a "they/them", but when I pictured myself asking/expecting people to refer to me as "they", it felt pretty stupid. I'm glad I never actually told anyone about it, I'd have felt pretty embarrassed. This was 2012/2013, I was in my mid twenties, which makes it even more stupid. I just liked androgynous aesthetic, but also realised it's very rare to actually be unsure about someone's sex, and I'd keep being treated as a woman and dealing with misogyny anyway.
Back in like, 2017 I started learning about trans ideology and was starting to think that maybe my lifelong experimentation with androgyny was explained by the concept of “gender fluid”.
The only person I told was the hairdresser when I went to get my short hair cut to match my new “identity”. I didn’t ask to be referred to by different pronouns, I was trying to explain to her that I wanted a masculine style lineup in the back and just decided to tell her why I wanted it that way to test out telling someone about the whole identifying as “gender fluid” thing.
With purple hair and tattoos I thought she might be someone who was on the gender ideology train that would give me all my UwU validation I was expecting, after having seen that as the typical outcome when someone tells someone else how they “identify”, but thank goodness this woman was not down with that and responded in a negative, discouraging way.
I can’t remember what she said exactly, but I remember how she clearly expressed that she thought the concept was ridiculous and juvenile, how she seemed somewhat annoyed by it, kind of like “oh no you aren’t into that nonsense are you?” and how her response made me feel embarrassed for bringing it up, which I believe ultimately led me to question the whole thing sooner than I would have had she said nothing or worse, praised me like I was expecting her to do.
I am still so grateful to that woman for not going along with my BS. I wish I could thank her, but this was at a random Great Clips that isn’t even in business anymore.
Thank you for asking this, I'm quite interested in hearing people have to say on this as well.
Non-Binary was the straw that broke the camels back to me when I was a huge libfem at 16. It just didn't bloody made sense to me at all, and the more I tried to understand the more that it confused me. I understood it as a political rejection of gender norms but other than that it sounded crazy and anti-science.
or dress like Peewee Herman. Holy shit that made me spit out my drink, legit all of my 'non-binary' friends from high school. Bowties and all.
Former NB here (didn't force any pronouns though). As is alluded, I didn’t feel like a “woman” due to what that label entails, and therefore how I was viewed and treated. I thought that “woman” feeling icky and wrong meant that I wasn’t one - in part due to the echo-chamber friend group and twitter sphere I was in. I thought I was so woke about trans stuff (though didn’t personally identify with the “trans” label at the time as an NB). All of this is probably unhelpful but hey, that was my experience!
I never did either and got judged and had my libaby friend comment when I said "she or he, never they, you know who I am ans I'm not multiple people"
Her response was that it might be because I wasn't American.
"However, shouldn't these women at the feminist bookstore know better?"
Most younger women do not actually understand what feminism is. Even not so young women don't even know. We are not taught about it. We are not taught about women's history.
And for about 25+ years (at least that I know of), the word feminism has been extensively bastardized to mean all sorts of things that it doesn't.
These young women are most likely getting bombarded with claims that feminism is about doing anal with anything that moves, claiming you are anything but a woman and punching lesbians in the face when they refuse to have sex with a TIM.
I wouldn't be surprised if that feminist bookstore had shelves full of books that entertain this.
You’re totally right. On top of that, young people in general seem simultaneously more sensitive and less intellectually inclined (in the US at least), so they aren’t really capable of considering a deeper political critique of things that are inherently personal (sexual behavior, wants, identity) in a way that goes beyond simply reacting emotionally. There’s an “if you can question it, you must not have experienced it because if you’d experienced it you’d get it like everyone else” sort of vibe that comes up whenever I have any sort of analysis of porn, for example— and this is coming from women who openly say they hate men.
It’s funny you should say that, given how much Zoomers, in general, love to teach—I mean, ‘educate’—other people. I can’t stay on TikTok for longer than 15 minute intervals, because there are so many teens answering questions in a long-winded, smug, and strident manner. Meanwhile, they have no idea what they’re talking about. Obviously, the gender cult and the kink community=the worst offenders. The Dunning–Kruger effect is very real.
the rise of idpol makes everyone take everything personally, i've noticed. it's gotten to the point that young girls who don't wear makeup are relentlessly mocked in the name of feminism, because obviously NOT wearing makeup or feminine clothing could only ever be performative and done solely for male attention.
I think a lot of us have become lazy from social media. Everything is so fast nowadays, we just expect Google to explain everything in like one sentence.
It drives me insane how often you hear things now like “I’m not a feminist! Feminism is awful! Like why would be angry because a man holds a door for you?!”
Oh sweet child….
Ugh ! It is beyond insulting !