As a non-binary transfeminine person, thank you. Another aspect of this bias I experience is the implicit biases in my own head telling me what I "should be" or "should do" in relation to what it means for me to be transgender. And it's so confusing and frustrating (and also frustrating trying to get across to people that non-binary != to androgeny). It's not just your bias from a binary standpoint,
it's my own fruatratingly binary bias as well having grown up in a culture that views gender as binary. And I would suspect a lot of non-binary folks experience a similar frustration.
Thanks again for another great, well sourced, and insightful article.
This is fantastic! I definitely saw how the cultural and scientific biases on transness gave me a fundamentally incomplete and flawed view of transness back in 2000 when I first started researching my trans identity. Even common words like "transsexual" at that time were (intentionally or unintentionally) exclusionary, but I didn't have the conceptual framework to see how.
As I aged, I continued to meet new people and try to constantly learn new things about transness and listen to people's experiences. Being in a support group that was 90% trans masc opened my eyes in a way that wouldn't have been possible in a transfem specific group, and once nonbinary people started joining the group I was forced to learn again.
I say "forced" because I was presented with new information. I couldn't ignore that information. Yet lots of people in the world do, all the time, because they're comfortable with the world being one set way. But I'm trans, and I figure that if I had given in to the "one set way" impulse, I wouldn't ever transition.
I find it fundamentally counter-intuitive to imagine a trans person, whose life is inherently about change and adapting to new concepts of gender, to be unwilling to adapt to new information about gender beyond their own circumstance. I understand why cis scientists and clinicians do it (not that it's right), but I don't understand why we do it. Is not growth beyond the norms inherent to being trans?
(Sorry if I'm way off, haha. I just get so tired of when I sometimes have to deal with enby exclusionists...)
No, you're not--and in some ways, the same troubles cut from the gender abolitionist stance that some enbies take. I'm sure you've heard those oddball takes that being binary, or even presenting in a generally binary way, is inherently oppressive because... reasons.
Any time a person calcifies their way of thinking about identity, it's gonna start getting exclusionary and damaging. The only people who get a say in their own identities is those precise people... but it takes one human brain to understand one human being. I try to be understanding to folks who are trying to learn and grow out of bad spots, as long as they're not hurting other people in the process.
Awesome article. Another way conceptual metaphor learning influences this is that until very recently, the absolute size of the typical sample pool available to most researchers would be pretty embarrassing, if it existed at all - even if nonbinary people have always existed, they frequently wouldn’t have the language to describe themselves, much less be willing respond to a call for study participants. The conceptual metaphors need time to spread to the people that need them, even after we figure them out. And oh boy is it frustrating to try to shift to a more complete modality when the majority of the population is still working on that initial conceptual bootstrapping…
Very much so, and especially given the history of really brutal oppression of every trans way of being other than the most brute force of binary transfemininity! Like, even if someone had wanted to perform such a study in the 80's or 90's, where would they have even FOUND participants?
For context, I am a trans lesbian, pinging the VU meter to the right against its stop.
About nonbinary people I'd like to offer that I accept their nonbinariness without reservation. I don't comprehend their gender dysphoria and so what, that doesn't matter. I also imagine that being enby would be so hard in our society in that as far as I know there's no way for me or anyone to assess someone in advance of their telling me. Maybe that also doesn't matter (to them) but I always love it when I'm gendered for who I am.
I'm also aware that the percentage of trans masculine people is much smaller than the trans feminine people, and I've wondered why. I assume that there's some sort of statistical curve that's roughly equal on both sides.
I've considered that AFAB people (who're trans masc) have a kind of advantage in that they're allowed to wear what are considered more masculine clothing and appearance with a shrug while AMAB people have much narrower lanes to stay within. And maybe for those AFAB people they don't carry much gender dysphoria (and thus don't identify or maybe even consider themselves as some flavor of trans) because, well, they just live their lives how they wish.
I identify as a lesbian and all of my best friends are cis lesbians. I've asked them about butch lesbians: might they be trans at heart? No, I've been assured, they are simply women who present themselves as they are, butch lesbians. Is there a similar and socially acceptable way for femme AMAB people to present? I don't think so.
Thank you so much for writing on this topic! I really appreciate you drawing attention to this.
I don’t meant this as criticism, in the negative sense, at all. But since the topic here involves poking at implicit biases, I thought tis might be fun and helpful to poke at. When asking readers to visualize a nonbinary person, you wrote:
“And that nonbinary person—which shade of bright neon color was their hair, in your imagination? Did you imagine a binder, just peeking out from a button-down shirt, visible enough for you to know it was there? Again, they’re definitely white, aren’t they? And definitely slender.”
Just based on some of the paragraphs that came later, I got the impression that you were assuming that this was a description that might possibly describe an AFAB enby, but wouldn’t fit an AMAB enby. With perhaps that mention of a binder being the clincher. But I’m an AMAB enby, and I’ve been on the fence about gender-affirming hormone treatments for quite awhile, because they represent a bundle of compromises for me, rather than a definite “yes” or “no”. One of the things that has me hesitating is because I’m “mostly sure” I don’t want to grow a chest. Which is a difficult place to be, because most of the literature I’ve read suggests that this would be kind of inescapable if I start hormones, no matter what combination or dosage I take, sooner or later estrogen = at least some chest development. And it’s not something I feel like I could readily discuss with a physician, for fear that they would conclude that my reluctance about having a chest would be reason to deny prescribing me anything at all.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that while I haven’t worn a binder yet, I have been reminding myself that they are an option, as part of my ongoing calculus of whether or not starting hormones might be the right choice for me. So one day, I could well be someone who fits your description. Maybe. I’m not so sure about the bright neon hair. : )
But part of the fun here, though, is where actually is the implicit bias here? I’m not sure if implicit biases fed into what you chose to frame into the description you wrote, or if the implicit bias was mine, in the assumptions I’m making about what I’d assume you’d assume about enbies. Maybe it was both of us? I don’t know! Haha. : )
Probably, it’s a hole all of us are falling into all the time, in different ways, often without fully realizing it. Or at least that’s my take away so far. Which is a good message, and one I appreciate how well you’ve discussed it here.
I love this! And the point of the exercise was to expose some of the many inappropriate expectations that are common, but far from universal, out there. The example, in other words, was *meant* to be ludicrously wrong, hopefully in ways the snagged on implicit assumptions many of us make without realizing it.
But yeah, the bottom line is exactly what you thought!
Very true! Unfortunately, there's not a lot of good research on them yet, used in this way, so I didn't feel it was responsible for me to include them.
I think the hardest thing is trying to push changes to gendered language (french) where i know that one of my friend who is non-binary but the any/all kind of, that also share my ideas that neo pronouns in french, while great for inclusion, are just ugly in how they sound (like users in french to be inclusive would be written as utilisateur.rices). Hard to change mentalities
Like in Icelandic, where you have three recognized terms to use as a modifier to a surname.
(parents name)-son, to denote male
(parents name)-dottir, to denote female
(parents name)-bur, to denote non-gender.
Since you can use the mothers or fathers first name was the first part of one's surname, you can have an Einar Thorason or Sigríður Thoradottir or a Regn Thorabur. (First names in Icelandic are officially gender neutral as well).
My images of nonbinary people are shaped by knowing a *lot* of them. And what I've learned by knowing all these folks is that any single image of what it means to be nonbinary is wrong, because the lives and experiences and identities of nonbinary people are so varied that no single image can capture that variety.
I'm a middle-aged binary trans woman, and my experience is nowhere near the norm. I live in a very queer area, I'm involved in several queer organizations, and I have a lot of queer friends. But the statistics presented in this article demonstrate that among teens, knowing gay and trans and nonbinary and otherwise queer kids is the norm, at least in areas where kids are free to express themselves and explore their identities (looking at you, red states).
A generation or two from now, conversations around gender are likely to be very different.
I usually say I have lived my life so far as a butch straight woman. I started out male identified in the 1970s when I had plenty of role models among cis AFAB scientists who "fit in" as one of the boys. Feminism gave me a way to see myself as a woman, and I wandered into marriage to a man who liked me being in charge. I had very meaningful experiences of my cis female body in childbirth and nursing. So yes, I have been able to wear masculine clothing and not shave my legs and live my life how I wish without the challenges that would push me to define myself as nonbinary.
I admit, I struggle at times with non-binary terms, particularly when the enby in question is presenting in a way that is more stereotypically masculine or feminine. Culturally we see too much of the binary in gender as the norm, and expression outside of that binary to be an outlier. And, David Bowie aside, androgyny is pretty tricky to pull off at times.
And there is pressure to "pick a gender and stick with it" at times, and that being an enby is a "phase" because you haven't decided yet what gender to fully present and identify with.
We know how much of gender is a spectrum, we face that spectrum every single day in ourselves, with varying levels of comfort or discomfort. My offspring described it once as a teenager in that "sometimes I feel like a boy, sometimes I feel like a girl".
How much does linguistic relativity constrain our worldview? That's a good question. Suzette Haden Elgin developed Láadan as a way of testing how much language can constrain a worldview (example, how many Western languages see the male worldview as the default), and how language can expand a worldview (Láadan having been developed expressly as a method of expressing how women see and express their world and perceptions thereof. Even here, we have that binary aspect through.
Lingistics isn't my field of science, but the question that comes to mind is how can we grow a language to encompass a more inclusive and less binary worldview, and do it in such a way that it doesn't feel like stapling non-binary aspects to a binary worldview??
In a nutshell, though, the idea of language constraining our ability to think or conceive is backwards from how cognition happens, according to our best research. Where a language lacks a word, term, or mode of expression that it's user's nerd or want, it either coins or cribs terms to meet that need.
Language, in other words, is best understood as a living, symbiotic entity that we coexist with, and whose coexistence is mutually beneficial. It can, and will, evolve as we need it to.
As I said, Linguistics isn't my field of science, (and what I do know is decades out of date at best). Ask me what forces and pressures cause a landscape to look the way it does, I'm your girl with a rock hammer. Ask me now to remove a binary worldview from a language, that's another thing....
It seems to me that language has to evolve AS the worldview and concepts change. "Newspeak" in "1984" seemed too simplistic to me, since all that removing and simplifying language so to block out "doubleplus ungood" concepts would do, is cause people to develop new words and terms for those very same concepts. Even a language as stilted and ritualized as church Latin has to evolve to meet new needs (after all, it's not like the Romans had helicopters and cellphones, right?)
Iceland is very serious about maintaining the purity of its language, (it's a core part of their culture and identity), but there they will go back into the language to create new terms with a historic root to identify new concepts and terms. I touched on how they're gradually evolving naming conventions to be more gender neutral as the culture trends towards full equality. This shows how language can evolve towards that mindset without losing its identity. (Contrast that to French, with L'Institut français trying to hard to maintain the ideological purity of the French language, that they routinely alienate other francophone countries and people)
You're correct, we coexist with language. And we certainly need to evolve it away from the gender binary to better reflect the wider range of how gender is perceived. The question for me is how do we break the internal habits in us, that cause us to fall back into that binary?
And the other thing to remember is that while gender is definitely not binary, most people are--and binary people's experiences of gender are, well, *binary*. Imagine someone who's red-green colorblind and then imagine they need to explain what red is in a way someone who isn't colorblind would understand it--the issue isn't in language, but in their very lived perspective. With heo and support, they could build a framework to deal with and understand redness, but it will forever be an acquired, not an understood, thing for them.
So too with binary people, cis or trans, who work with nonbinary genders. We have an inherent, perspective-based limitation. As such, while the language is an excellent first step, the really big one ought to be research teams made up of a mix of binary and nonbinary people, so the team as a whole has perspectives that allow it to research and understand more deeply what it is that they're researching.
That takes a lot of time and money to build, though.
Apologies for tacking on a reply months after this conversation ended, but rereading some of Stained Glass Woman’s lovely, lovely articles is making for a great distraction from the wider world right now.
I really enjoy the direction you two took this conversation in, even if I’m not sure if I correctly understood everything you wanted to say. But this resonated very strongly with me, as a topic, because it either is one of the same questions I’ve been picking apart obsessively since coming out to myself as nonbinary, or it at least superficially seems to very closely parallel it.
I thought maybe you’d enjoy in turn to hear my thoughts on this subject (maybe not, and that would be perfectly okay). So I tried to type something up. When I saw just how lengthy this message was getting, and I was nowhere close to having expressed what, in my own head, is fairly simple and straightforward idea, I was sure I was being overly wordy, unnecessarily so, and started a new draft. To skip ahead to the end, five drafts later and I still can’t figure out how to say what I was trying to say in less than several thousand words. Which in itself felt kind of telling.
All of my collective knowledge and experience about how to write well seems to keep subconsciously shouting “Without all these reams of context, no one will have any clue what you are trying to say. They’ll either misinterpret your message or write it off as wordy gibberish. If you want people to not only hear you, but actually understand you, you absolutely must include all of this context so that there’s no room for any confusion.” Which is objectively silly, isn’t it? Both my personal history and the public record are absolutely littered with examples of misunderstandings, no matter the medium or how carefully crafted any message might be.
Language is hard, just generally, I know. Which is likely why I’ve never before thought my own tendency towards being wordy might be associated with a gendered difference in perception. Maybe not. Maybe only partly or slightly. I have no idea for sure. Correlation doesn’t always imply causation, do I have that right?
None of which is even close to the thought I had originally hoped to express, but this reply is already ridiculously long.
It's okay, hun, and you're right about the difference between correlation and causation.
It's okay for gender to be complicated, and it's normal to have difficulties expressing things outside the binary--this concepts have been ripped away from us by the global colonial project. That's why there's so much work going on now to recover what we can and create anew what has been truly lost.
Thanks! It is, and it just affects so much, often accidentally by implication, which is partly why it fascinates me so much.
For example, when I introduce myself to someone new, I ask them to refer to me by she/her pronouns, even though what I’m actually most comfortable and affirmed by are they/them pronouns. However, it’s not that I think that she/her pronouns would be easier for other people to use. It’s because people make implicit assumptions about a whole host of other gendered terms and language, and decide which one to use based on what they understand your pronouns to be. (Symbolic thinking?) And there are a short list of gendered language for which the usage is much more significant to me than my pronouns. I love being seen as my mother’s daughter, for example, and I want that to be people’s go-to with their own word choices, not for them to wince or accidentally leap to my defense if someone else does use “daughter” instead of “child” as a label for me.
Telling folks my pronouns are “she/her” is just so much easier than trying to introduce myself as “my pronouns are they/them, but please use feminine language for me in cases x, y, z, p, and q”. Especially when the other person is someone you might only ever meet once in your lifetime, such as a salesperson for one of your employer’s vendors.
And I don’t really have a good idea what the underlying rules or logic might be, why feminine language is the best match for me for “x, y, z, p, and q” but agender language is the much better fit for the rest of the alphabet. I can feel out the difference through trial and error, but I can’t really extrapolate what might be best for me in anticipation of a new scenarios, because I only just barely understand the “what” but not the “why”. : P
Maybe one day some new language or term or convention might arise to fill these kinds of gaps. But I have a hard time imagining what that might actually look like, in practical terms. And that assumes that there are enough folks of the same flavor of nonbinary as me to both give rise to such a convention, but also see it widely accepted and understood by people in general, of any gender.
And that whole example is just a very small piece of a much bigger… concept? Idea? something. Blargh. Hahaha
I read the part about learning in rapid leaps rather than slow steps, and thought to myself, "Hmm, I have epiphanies, but I'd say most of my learning is more gradual..." (Scroll: Mae's webocmic) "Ah. Epihany is definitely my most significant way of learning!" :D
Also: It's hard to believe everything in my life has happened in one year!
You said that "the significant majority of all research is about trans women" - can you share where you got that information? Maybe it's apples to oranges, but when I look at gender studies programs or academic conferences etc. around transness in general I see so little representation of trans women, so it's curious to me that the research might outweigh the representation. Thanks!
So, there's a big gap between representation of trans folks in Women's and Gender Studies programs *as researchers* and our appearance as participants *in biomedical research*. Most, if not all, of the classic studies on HRT and trans behavior focused overwhelmingly or exclusively on trans women, to the exclusion of everybody else. Much other research that *was* gender-inclusive significantly overrepresented trans women to trans men, even when the researchers tried to be inclusive. This is a good example: 78 trans women are included, compared to only 44 trans men, an almost 2:1 disparity:
And it smashes right into several overlapping areas I've been thinking about for a very long time.
First - I'm guessing you've read TS Kuhn's "The Structures of Scientific Revolution"? It really blew me away as an undergrad to grapple with how messy science was, and how often for new theories to become mainstream, the previous theories' proponents had to literally die off.
So even people trained to empiricism still struggle with their own innate resistance to change in their chosen field. (And there are lots of arguably beneficial reasons why we as a species are reluctant to casually discard abstractions which seem to have been working "well enough". Abstractions are tools for survival, etc.)
There's also the lovely delusion we have largely embraced in pop culture, which is that our brain is a computer. When - sure - we can recognize new information and conceive of new models, but building that into a concrete, habitual, "lense" through which we perceive the world proceeds at the speed of chemistry and neural connection development rather than digital computer reconfiguration. So our professed knowledge operates in advance of our effective model, as the later is always playing catch-up.
Finally there is the fact that our of our models, all of our disciplines provide us with frameworks with which to model parts of the world, make predictions, etc. (Like a grid overlay in Renaissance perspective!). But each framework is limited. And virtually all of them, no matter how sharply it's boundaries are defined, overlap other frameworks (consider chemistry and physics, and how chemical reactions end up needing physics models at a certain scale for accuracy). But do we consciously study when it makes sense to switch frameworks? How to recognize when our ways of knowing break down as well as which "neighboring" frameworks is relevant, based on the particular signals of dysfunction?
When it comes to trans binaries and non binaries, I struggle myself. I would classify myself as a binary trans woman. And yet often I find it easier to communicate with people who call themselves non-binary. In my life, I've often found that perceived affinity was a clue that would lead me to greater understanding if I pursued it. But not always!
It could simply be that I share other qualities with NB people that have nothing to do with gender. I am both neurodivergent as well as transgender and at times I struggle to understand the entire idea that gender is a "binnable" quality. It seems to me much more that we all have varying traits and preferences, influenced by culture (I am aware of Julia Serrano's separation of presentation, inner identity, etc), which define both who we understand ourselves to be, but also how we perceive gender in others.
With that in mind, gender becomes something that can only be recognized in oneself. And conversations about how one individual perceives another individual's gender are really just dialogues between 2 separate conceptions of gender.
In many ways I dislike the term non-binary because it seems purely reactive. "Not-woman, not-man", when there must be as many ideas of gendered self as there are non-binary people, and they all deserve their own recognition.
This is not to say there is no place for study of thr transfeminine and transmasculine. Our culture is heavily biased towards the binary, and the interaction of all trans/GNC with that bias has enormous effects of our lives and our envisioning of ourselves.
If I would argue anything in this regard, it's that we might profitably study how trans presentation within and in violation of the cultural binary affects us, our health, our relationships, etc. How the success or failure of these attempts affects us. Why we attempt a presentation. Is it to be our true selves or to navigate a culture that we perceive as hostile?
My point is to ask questions like
"What is the experience of trans people presenting as feminine in a context where being feminine is accepted?"
"What about when it is not?"
"What if they succeed or fail?"
"What if they present in alignment with their inner self? What if not? What if it's mixed?"
"What if a trans person presents in a fashion which cannot be interpreted as fitting into any culturally defined gender role?"
Rather than "what is the experience of transfeminine people?"
Fantastic and very interesting articles. Do you have a source for that 9.2% of school children comment? I like to read it further and potentially cite it in other discussions
Our conception of self has moved from cis man (just effeminate, I swear), to bi-gender (both? How both?), to binary trans woman (riddle solved!), to plural transfeminine system (THOSE alters are non-binary, but WE'RE not), to now non-binary plural trans woman (okay yeah, that last parenthetical was silly). That last step "back" to non-binary was surprisingly hard. Our (purely anecdotal) guess is that it's related to this sense of always having to perform/prove our gender. To have landed on binary woman, and then expand outside those borders feels scary, because it feels like we left room to be called "not a woman." We're still a woman, but also faegender.
Also, thank you for the research paper on the intersectionality of being trans and plural.
Thanks for another thought provoking and informative article! I do feel the need to address a pet peeve. I know you were not trying to get into the whole ecology of gender terms and definitions - so I'm not directing frustration at your article. I am more generally frustrated with the term non-binary itself. Even if there is not a clearly accepted alternative, it can be helpful to at least name the inherent limitations of the term. We are defining a group of people by what they are not - that in and of itself reveals biases at play here and feeds a sense of conundrum or unknowability. We do need to keep working to build a term that embraces what "gender expansive/creative/etc" people are and communicates acceptance and a desire to see them in their beautiful wholeness for who they really are.
Yeah, that's the whole curse of imprecision of terms, whether it's nonbinary or transfeminine/trans masculine or even trans itself! Any time you want or need to talk about large, widely varied groups of people, the language *by necessity* gets so vague and mealy-mouthed as to brush up against meaninglessness or to call out a single thing that the larger group isn't as it's one common trait.
It's annoying every damn time. The worst part is that it's still usually the best way, out of many rough options.
As a non-binary transfeminine person, thank you. Another aspect of this bias I experience is the implicit biases in my own head telling me what I "should be" or "should do" in relation to what it means for me to be transgender. And it's so confusing and frustrating (and also frustrating trying to get across to people that non-binary != to androgeny). It's not just your bias from a binary standpoint,
it's my own fruatratingly binary bias as well having grown up in a culture that views gender as binary. And I would suspect a lot of non-binary folks experience a similar frustration.
Thanks again for another great, well sourced, and insightful article.
Ughhh, I can only imagine how frustrating that must be. I'm sorry you have to live with that.
This is fantastic! I definitely saw how the cultural and scientific biases on transness gave me a fundamentally incomplete and flawed view of transness back in 2000 when I first started researching my trans identity. Even common words like "transsexual" at that time were (intentionally or unintentionally) exclusionary, but I didn't have the conceptual framework to see how.
As I aged, I continued to meet new people and try to constantly learn new things about transness and listen to people's experiences. Being in a support group that was 90% trans masc opened my eyes in a way that wouldn't have been possible in a transfem specific group, and once nonbinary people started joining the group I was forced to learn again.
I say "forced" because I was presented with new information. I couldn't ignore that information. Yet lots of people in the world do, all the time, because they're comfortable with the world being one set way. But I'm trans, and I figure that if I had given in to the "one set way" impulse, I wouldn't ever transition.
I find it fundamentally counter-intuitive to imagine a trans person, whose life is inherently about change and adapting to new concepts of gender, to be unwilling to adapt to new information about gender beyond their own circumstance. I understand why cis scientists and clinicians do it (not that it's right), but I don't understand why we do it. Is not growth beyond the norms inherent to being trans?
(Sorry if I'm way off, haha. I just get so tired of when I sometimes have to deal with enby exclusionists...)
No, you're not--and in some ways, the same troubles cut from the gender abolitionist stance that some enbies take. I'm sure you've heard those oddball takes that being binary, or even presenting in a generally binary way, is inherently oppressive because... reasons.
Any time a person calcifies their way of thinking about identity, it's gonna start getting exclusionary and damaging. The only people who get a say in their own identities is those precise people... but it takes one human brain to understand one human being. I try to be understanding to folks who are trying to learn and grow out of bad spots, as long as they're not hurting other people in the process.
Awesome article. Another way conceptual metaphor learning influences this is that until very recently, the absolute size of the typical sample pool available to most researchers would be pretty embarrassing, if it existed at all - even if nonbinary people have always existed, they frequently wouldn’t have the language to describe themselves, much less be willing respond to a call for study participants. The conceptual metaphors need time to spread to the people that need them, even after we figure them out. And oh boy is it frustrating to try to shift to a more complete modality when the majority of the population is still working on that initial conceptual bootstrapping…
Very much so, and especially given the history of really brutal oppression of every trans way of being other than the most brute force of binary transfemininity! Like, even if someone had wanted to perform such a study in the 80's or 90's, where would they have even FOUND participants?
For context, I am a trans lesbian, pinging the VU meter to the right against its stop.
About nonbinary people I'd like to offer that I accept their nonbinariness without reservation. I don't comprehend their gender dysphoria and so what, that doesn't matter. I also imagine that being enby would be so hard in our society in that as far as I know there's no way for me or anyone to assess someone in advance of their telling me. Maybe that also doesn't matter (to them) but I always love it when I'm gendered for who I am.
I'm also aware that the percentage of trans masculine people is much smaller than the trans feminine people, and I've wondered why. I assume that there's some sort of statistical curve that's roughly equal on both sides.
I've considered that AFAB people (who're trans masc) have a kind of advantage in that they're allowed to wear what are considered more masculine clothing and appearance with a shrug while AMAB people have much narrower lanes to stay within. And maybe for those AFAB people they don't carry much gender dysphoria (and thus don't identify or maybe even consider themselves as some flavor of trans) because, well, they just live their lives how they wish.
I identify as a lesbian and all of my best friends are cis lesbians. I've asked them about butch lesbians: might they be trans at heart? No, I've been assured, they are simply women who present themselves as they are, butch lesbians. Is there a similar and socially acceptable way for femme AMAB people to present? I don't think so.
Thank you so much for writing on this topic! I really appreciate you drawing attention to this.
I don’t meant this as criticism, in the negative sense, at all. But since the topic here involves poking at implicit biases, I thought tis might be fun and helpful to poke at. When asking readers to visualize a nonbinary person, you wrote:
“And that nonbinary person—which shade of bright neon color was their hair, in your imagination? Did you imagine a binder, just peeking out from a button-down shirt, visible enough for you to know it was there? Again, they’re definitely white, aren’t they? And definitely slender.”
Just based on some of the paragraphs that came later, I got the impression that you were assuming that this was a description that might possibly describe an AFAB enby, but wouldn’t fit an AMAB enby. With perhaps that mention of a binder being the clincher. But I’m an AMAB enby, and I’ve been on the fence about gender-affirming hormone treatments for quite awhile, because they represent a bundle of compromises for me, rather than a definite “yes” or “no”. One of the things that has me hesitating is because I’m “mostly sure” I don’t want to grow a chest. Which is a difficult place to be, because most of the literature I’ve read suggests that this would be kind of inescapable if I start hormones, no matter what combination or dosage I take, sooner or later estrogen = at least some chest development. And it’s not something I feel like I could readily discuss with a physician, for fear that they would conclude that my reluctance about having a chest would be reason to deny prescribing me anything at all.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that while I haven’t worn a binder yet, I have been reminding myself that they are an option, as part of my ongoing calculus of whether or not starting hormones might be the right choice for me. So one day, I could well be someone who fits your description. Maybe. I’m not so sure about the bright neon hair. : )
But part of the fun here, though, is where actually is the implicit bias here? I’m not sure if implicit biases fed into what you chose to frame into the description you wrote, or if the implicit bias was mine, in the assumptions I’m making about what I’d assume you’d assume about enbies. Maybe it was both of us? I don’t know! Haha. : )
Probably, it’s a hole all of us are falling into all the time, in different ways, often without fully realizing it. Or at least that’s my take away so far. Which is a good message, and one I appreciate how well you’ve discussed it here.
I love this! And the point of the exercise was to expose some of the many inappropriate expectations that are common, but far from universal, out there. The example, in other words, was *meant* to be ludicrously wrong, hopefully in ways the snagged on implicit assumptions many of us make without realizing it.
But yeah, the bottom line is exactly what you thought!
One thing that you may want to consider is SERM(s). They're used to treat gynecomastia, and may be able to prevent breast growth on HRT.
Very true! Unfortunately, there's not a lot of good research on them yet, used in this way, so I didn't feel it was responsible for me to include them.
Yeah, fair enough.
I think the hardest thing is trying to push changes to gendered language (french) where i know that one of my friend who is non-binary but the any/all kind of, that also share my ideas that neo pronouns in french, while great for inclusion, are just ugly in how they sound (like users in french to be inclusive would be written as utilisateur.rices). Hard to change mentalities
I mean, that's why languages coin or crib new terms. Where there's a need, language will grow to meet it.
Like in Icelandic, where you have three recognized terms to use as a modifier to a surname.
(parents name)-son, to denote male
(parents name)-dottir, to denote female
(parents name)-bur, to denote non-gender.
Since you can use the mothers or fathers first name was the first part of one's surname, you can have an Einar Thorason or Sigríður Thoradottir or a Regn Thorabur. (First names in Icelandic are officially gender neutral as well).
My images of nonbinary people are shaped by knowing a *lot* of them. And what I've learned by knowing all these folks is that any single image of what it means to be nonbinary is wrong, because the lives and experiences and identities of nonbinary people are so varied that no single image can capture that variety.
I'm a middle-aged binary trans woman, and my experience is nowhere near the norm. I live in a very queer area, I'm involved in several queer organizations, and I have a lot of queer friends. But the statistics presented in this article demonstrate that among teens, knowing gay and trans and nonbinary and otherwise queer kids is the norm, at least in areas where kids are free to express themselves and explore their identities (looking at you, red states).
A generation or two from now, conversations around gender are likely to be very different.
I cannot agree more emphatically.
I usually say I have lived my life so far as a butch straight woman. I started out male identified in the 1970s when I had plenty of role models among cis AFAB scientists who "fit in" as one of the boys. Feminism gave me a way to see myself as a woman, and I wandered into marriage to a man who liked me being in charge. I had very meaningful experiences of my cis female body in childbirth and nursing. So yes, I have been able to wear masculine clothing and not shave my legs and live my life how I wish without the challenges that would push me to define myself as nonbinary.
I admit, I struggle at times with non-binary terms, particularly when the enby in question is presenting in a way that is more stereotypically masculine or feminine. Culturally we see too much of the binary in gender as the norm, and expression outside of that binary to be an outlier. And, David Bowie aside, androgyny is pretty tricky to pull off at times.
And there is pressure to "pick a gender and stick with it" at times, and that being an enby is a "phase" because you haven't decided yet what gender to fully present and identify with.
We know how much of gender is a spectrum, we face that spectrum every single day in ourselves, with varying levels of comfort or discomfort. My offspring described it once as a teenager in that "sometimes I feel like a boy, sometimes I feel like a girl".
How much does linguistic relativity constrain our worldview? That's a good question. Suzette Haden Elgin developed Láadan as a way of testing how much language can constrain a worldview (example, how many Western languages see the male worldview as the default), and how language can expand a worldview (Láadan having been developed expressly as a method of expressing how women see and express their world and perceptions thereof. Even here, we have that binary aspect through.
Lingistics isn't my field of science, but the question that comes to mind is how can we grow a language to encompass a more inclusive and less binary worldview, and do it in such a way that it doesn't feel like stapling non-binary aspects to a binary worldview??
Some of what you're talking about here is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it's a common line of fallacious thought on linguistics: https://linguistmag.com/problem-sapir-whorf-hypothesis/
In a nutshell, though, the idea of language constraining our ability to think or conceive is backwards from how cognition happens, according to our best research. Where a language lacks a word, term, or mode of expression that it's user's nerd or want, it either coins or cribs terms to meet that need.
Language, in other words, is best understood as a living, symbiotic entity that we coexist with, and whose coexistence is mutually beneficial. It can, and will, evolve as we need it to.
As I said, Linguistics isn't my field of science, (and what I do know is decades out of date at best). Ask me what forces and pressures cause a landscape to look the way it does, I'm your girl with a rock hammer. Ask me now to remove a binary worldview from a language, that's another thing....
It seems to me that language has to evolve AS the worldview and concepts change. "Newspeak" in "1984" seemed too simplistic to me, since all that removing and simplifying language so to block out "doubleplus ungood" concepts would do, is cause people to develop new words and terms for those very same concepts. Even a language as stilted and ritualized as church Latin has to evolve to meet new needs (after all, it's not like the Romans had helicopters and cellphones, right?)
Iceland is very serious about maintaining the purity of its language, (it's a core part of their culture and identity), but there they will go back into the language to create new terms with a historic root to identify new concepts and terms. I touched on how they're gradually evolving naming conventions to be more gender neutral as the culture trends towards full equality. This shows how language can evolve towards that mindset without losing its identity. (Contrast that to French, with L'Institut français trying to hard to maintain the ideological purity of the French language, that they routinely alienate other francophone countries and people)
You're correct, we coexist with language. And we certainly need to evolve it away from the gender binary to better reflect the wider range of how gender is perceived. The question for me is how do we break the internal habits in us, that cause us to fall back into that binary?
Well, that's why we're evolving frameworks like gender modality, isn't it?
And the other thing to remember is that while gender is definitely not binary, most people are--and binary people's experiences of gender are, well, *binary*. Imagine someone who's red-green colorblind and then imagine they need to explain what red is in a way someone who isn't colorblind would understand it--the issue isn't in language, but in their very lived perspective. With heo and support, they could build a framework to deal with and understand redness, but it will forever be an acquired, not an understood, thing for them.
So too with binary people, cis or trans, who work with nonbinary genders. We have an inherent, perspective-based limitation. As such, while the language is an excellent first step, the really big one ought to be research teams made up of a mix of binary and nonbinary people, so the team as a whole has perspectives that allow it to research and understand more deeply what it is that they're researching.
That takes a lot of time and money to build, though.
Apologies for tacking on a reply months after this conversation ended, but rereading some of Stained Glass Woman’s lovely, lovely articles is making for a great distraction from the wider world right now.
I really enjoy the direction you two took this conversation in, even if I’m not sure if I correctly understood everything you wanted to say. But this resonated very strongly with me, as a topic, because it either is one of the same questions I’ve been picking apart obsessively since coming out to myself as nonbinary, or it at least superficially seems to very closely parallel it.
I thought maybe you’d enjoy in turn to hear my thoughts on this subject (maybe not, and that would be perfectly okay). So I tried to type something up. When I saw just how lengthy this message was getting, and I was nowhere close to having expressed what, in my own head, is fairly simple and straightforward idea, I was sure I was being overly wordy, unnecessarily so, and started a new draft. To skip ahead to the end, five drafts later and I still can’t figure out how to say what I was trying to say in less than several thousand words. Which in itself felt kind of telling.
All of my collective knowledge and experience about how to write well seems to keep subconsciously shouting “Without all these reams of context, no one will have any clue what you are trying to say. They’ll either misinterpret your message or write it off as wordy gibberish. If you want people to not only hear you, but actually understand you, you absolutely must include all of this context so that there’s no room for any confusion.” Which is objectively silly, isn’t it? Both my personal history and the public record are absolutely littered with examples of misunderstandings, no matter the medium or how carefully crafted any message might be.
Language is hard, just generally, I know. Which is likely why I’ve never before thought my own tendency towards being wordy might be associated with a gendered difference in perception. Maybe not. Maybe only partly or slightly. I have no idea for sure. Correlation doesn’t always imply causation, do I have that right?
None of which is even close to the thought I had originally hoped to express, but this reply is already ridiculously long.
It's okay, hun, and you're right about the difference between correlation and causation.
It's okay for gender to be complicated, and it's normal to have difficulties expressing things outside the binary--this concepts have been ripped away from us by the global colonial project. That's why there's so much work going on now to recover what we can and create anew what has been truly lost.
Thanks! It is, and it just affects so much, often accidentally by implication, which is partly why it fascinates me so much.
For example, when I introduce myself to someone new, I ask them to refer to me by she/her pronouns, even though what I’m actually most comfortable and affirmed by are they/them pronouns. However, it’s not that I think that she/her pronouns would be easier for other people to use. It’s because people make implicit assumptions about a whole host of other gendered terms and language, and decide which one to use based on what they understand your pronouns to be. (Symbolic thinking?) And there are a short list of gendered language for which the usage is much more significant to me than my pronouns. I love being seen as my mother’s daughter, for example, and I want that to be people’s go-to with their own word choices, not for them to wince or accidentally leap to my defense if someone else does use “daughter” instead of “child” as a label for me.
Telling folks my pronouns are “she/her” is just so much easier than trying to introduce myself as “my pronouns are they/them, but please use feminine language for me in cases x, y, z, p, and q”. Especially when the other person is someone you might only ever meet once in your lifetime, such as a salesperson for one of your employer’s vendors.
And I don’t really have a good idea what the underlying rules or logic might be, why feminine language is the best match for me for “x, y, z, p, and q” but agender language is the much better fit for the rest of the alphabet. I can feel out the difference through trial and error, but I can’t really extrapolate what might be best for me in anticipation of a new scenarios, because I only just barely understand the “what” but not the “why”. : P
Maybe one day some new language or term or convention might arise to fill these kinds of gaps. But I have a hard time imagining what that might actually look like, in practical terms. And that assumes that there are enough folks of the same flavor of nonbinary as me to both give rise to such a convention, but also see it widely accepted and understood by people in general, of any gender.
And that whole example is just a very small piece of a much bigger… concept? Idea? something. Blargh. Hahaha
I read the part about learning in rapid leaps rather than slow steps, and thought to myself, "Hmm, I have epiphanies, but I'd say most of my learning is more gradual..." (Scroll: Mae's webocmic) "Ah. Epihany is definitely my most significant way of learning!" :D
Also: It's hard to believe everything in my life has happened in one year!
Knowledge-building is so weird. For a long time, very little happens, and then a whole lot happens very, very quickly.
You said that "the significant majority of all research is about trans women" - can you share where you got that information? Maybe it's apples to oranges, but when I look at gender studies programs or academic conferences etc. around transness in general I see so little representation of trans women, so it's curious to me that the research might outweigh the representation. Thanks!
So, there's a big gap between representation of trans folks in Women's and Gender Studies programs *as researchers* and our appearance as participants *in biomedical research*. Most, if not all, of the classic studies on HRT and trans behavior focused overwhelmingly or exclusively on trans women, to the exclusion of everybody else. Much other research that *was* gender-inclusive significantly overrepresented trans women to trans men, even when the researchers tried to be inclusive. This is a good example: 78 trans women are included, compared to only 44 trans men, an almost 2:1 disparity:
https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/272375/1-s2.0-S0091743521X00151/1-s2.0-S0091743522000366/am.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEOX%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FwEaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJIMEYCIQC472R57wezgPteagzjdMpidz3WASnT%2B7EG9HDxwFeLQAIhAKEv0VMR60bA3q4kgfs%2BOCEGE07p6Q3xkpNdlQITFlxMKrMFCB4QBRoMMDU5MDAzNTQ2ODY1IgxuqR124BGc7kAnKrMqkAWWQdGoOqowNSMcaWMUXaMexrQ%2FU2gbZycideGXLH3FYeuVWK4LCsUEWIYe18W7dPFWS8gaWRsuEI5uLsTW%2F3E2r1CwIqibGYZe2XK5TtkCLVM0y6wXskU%2BPugEoZ1j7MW0oa5K7%2BWd3bbo%2Bho4ygcpRusGEp5tIJH6QYKezoWUsbDROIRebvzcBLQkXUIOGxvKWsA1qkblkgJK5odO%2FVs3yKlXK31UkOvE83grguGoSLnfm98Ezh61dM5Yu4NoVu%2B4WmmP8ARONC6cuukMkolVO%2BWhJOdBUSKUH2g1rC2vLyljhCI3pug0aQXYnVz7tBbIGkManc%2B9PZjXXoqCIBeaLE0qjozOTsJOIGBp%2B7I6MrkNEzy6Dyrj4DMajyyn6Ul%2BGchJMwWsYJqfbV9fhm7jeZcCf8%2Br1KlxDPSKdkfqCtq9ug5xQBCurEeZqPafcs7qJD0j0ymAs%2FGuIpcAt6hnLFOHsq5xtwagdLfoK3s8alxtxxTv8%2FAkUgMdxmAoS0Fpc9o6Mmt%2B0E4d%2B447vq4%2BgyS%2FL%2FW%2FEychEvbjt9eO9gMXPGiGQp4944iKiT%2B3nPyc91%2FZ1SD1%2F38oqgR%2BKXgOtzQ0QlDS9brrWF3cMwpV3cH5M1Sio8h%2BNbvKqWWU0ciM%2FVEuGSf6AV9LzKI%2F1jQgOc7ttREB0K6cdBe8EHTRIzyBMq9l194hClnZ1JsVApZswmzBdoIIfg%2FoPsPz8UkZ0pArJy8gh0Wuw4kfN0TkBXLO3fTiI9D35ww17q%2FiwHScBxxVXVVPfP2MHKziAX2UMJrlR6gFCdSPv%2BR9OocEokYvTb8t7%2FWhLlZiTehk0IjA%2FPvzBjY%2BN5I7FIUDkI%2FivPZr4mqVZCDzqCsuxgQk9jC9qqK3BjqwAUwDW2dYV6bxl%2FP0YLitRHb685fGV8oXsj6BMtx0bXijyvsM2zLmvKpjEMZdP23z5WKDxSPlEOavd5L4DB%2FFkXrmvgF52%2BJTJHSE5xT7wI1pOjdtIX%2FQXwKwmqJZjn5vd0aEqw12sAVv95EUTS46KeRN3%2FZxVOgSfx9rkIe2YVEWHMvIzrzQ3KyICgoPnvjhs5IbEDt8fRo86NTaL2mOukok1IY3khqcK6MLJmdR4d5W&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20240916T210535Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYV3E7W2GN%2F20240916%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=9bc69e633e89ac1245800f49d2e56fd32aa38e685a97770b7368b8ce3aa61b31&hash=13c995afaf350ff51589473fe96beea0038afe848465925c3053f08e52260883&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S0091743522000366&tid=pdf-cdd40cae-4428-4eaf-905a-808fb0207bd3&sid=507ca908124b8644fa08d2e8ca427283603cgxrqa&type=client
I love it!
And it smashes right into several overlapping areas I've been thinking about for a very long time.
First - I'm guessing you've read TS Kuhn's "The Structures of Scientific Revolution"? It really blew me away as an undergrad to grapple with how messy science was, and how often for new theories to become mainstream, the previous theories' proponents had to literally die off.
So even people trained to empiricism still struggle with their own innate resistance to change in their chosen field. (And there are lots of arguably beneficial reasons why we as a species are reluctant to casually discard abstractions which seem to have been working "well enough". Abstractions are tools for survival, etc.)
There's also the lovely delusion we have largely embraced in pop culture, which is that our brain is a computer. When - sure - we can recognize new information and conceive of new models, but building that into a concrete, habitual, "lense" through which we perceive the world proceeds at the speed of chemistry and neural connection development rather than digital computer reconfiguration. So our professed knowledge operates in advance of our effective model, as the later is always playing catch-up.
Finally there is the fact that our of our models, all of our disciplines provide us with frameworks with which to model parts of the world, make predictions, etc. (Like a grid overlay in Renaissance perspective!). But each framework is limited. And virtually all of them, no matter how sharply it's boundaries are defined, overlap other frameworks (consider chemistry and physics, and how chemical reactions end up needing physics models at a certain scale for accuracy). But do we consciously study when it makes sense to switch frameworks? How to recognize when our ways of knowing break down as well as which "neighboring" frameworks is relevant, based on the particular signals of dysfunction?
When it comes to trans binaries and non binaries, I struggle myself. I would classify myself as a binary trans woman. And yet often I find it easier to communicate with people who call themselves non-binary. In my life, I've often found that perceived affinity was a clue that would lead me to greater understanding if I pursued it. But not always!
It could simply be that I share other qualities with NB people that have nothing to do with gender. I am both neurodivergent as well as transgender and at times I struggle to understand the entire idea that gender is a "binnable" quality. It seems to me much more that we all have varying traits and preferences, influenced by culture (I am aware of Julia Serrano's separation of presentation, inner identity, etc), which define both who we understand ourselves to be, but also how we perceive gender in others.
With that in mind, gender becomes something that can only be recognized in oneself. And conversations about how one individual perceives another individual's gender are really just dialogues between 2 separate conceptions of gender.
In many ways I dislike the term non-binary because it seems purely reactive. "Not-woman, not-man", when there must be as many ideas of gendered self as there are non-binary people, and they all deserve their own recognition.
This is not to say there is no place for study of thr transfeminine and transmasculine. Our culture is heavily biased towards the binary, and the interaction of all trans/GNC with that bias has enormous effects of our lives and our envisioning of ourselves.
If I would argue anything in this regard, it's that we might profitably study how trans presentation within and in violation of the cultural binary affects us, our health, our relationships, etc. How the success or failure of these attempts affects us. Why we attempt a presentation. Is it to be our true selves or to navigate a culture that we perceive as hostile?
My point is to ask questions like
"What is the experience of trans people presenting as feminine in a context where being feminine is accepted?"
"What about when it is not?"
"What if they succeed or fail?"
"What if they present in alignment with their inner self? What if not? What if it's mixed?"
"What if a trans person presents in a fashion which cannot be interpreted as fitting into any culturally defined gender role?"
Rather than "what is the experience of transfeminine people?"
Damn, it's been a long time since someone mentioned Kuhn to me. An oldie, but in many ways, still a pretty good perspective.
I share this phenomenon.
Fantastic and very interesting articles. Do you have a source for that 9.2% of school children comment? I like to read it further and potentially cite it in other discussions
The source should be linked where it's mentioned.
Our conception of self has moved from cis man (just effeminate, I swear), to bi-gender (both? How both?), to binary trans woman (riddle solved!), to plural transfeminine system (THOSE alters are non-binary, but WE'RE not), to now non-binary plural trans woman (okay yeah, that last parenthetical was silly). That last step "back" to non-binary was surprisingly hard. Our (purely anecdotal) guess is that it's related to this sense of always having to perform/prove our gender. To have landed on binary woman, and then expand outside those borders feels scary, because it feels like we left room to be called "not a woman." We're still a woman, but also faegender.
Also, thank you for the research paper on the intersectionality of being trans and plural.
I'm glad I could help you feel seen a little better. 💜
Thanks for another thought provoking and informative article! I do feel the need to address a pet peeve. I know you were not trying to get into the whole ecology of gender terms and definitions - so I'm not directing frustration at your article. I am more generally frustrated with the term non-binary itself. Even if there is not a clearly accepted alternative, it can be helpful to at least name the inherent limitations of the term. We are defining a group of people by what they are not - that in and of itself reveals biases at play here and feeds a sense of conundrum or unknowability. We do need to keep working to build a term that embraces what "gender expansive/creative/etc" people are and communicates acceptance and a desire to see them in their beautiful wholeness for who they really are.
Yeah, that's the whole curse of imprecision of terms, whether it's nonbinary or transfeminine/trans masculine or even trans itself! Any time you want or need to talk about large, widely varied groups of people, the language *by necessity* gets so vague and mealy-mouthed as to brush up against meaninglessness or to call out a single thing that the larger group isn't as it's one common trait.
It's annoying every damn time. The worst part is that it's still usually the best way, out of many rough options.