I want to preface this by saying that absolutely nothing I write in this post is intended for cis consumption and I won't welcome or tolerate input from anyone except other nonbinary people - and, because of the subject matter, the voices of woman-aligned nonbinary people of color will be centered.
There's been a lot of discussion in the trans community on the subject of patriarchal alignment among nonbinary people - that is, the way that we articulate our relationship to patriarchy and misogyny and how we relate to the experiences of men or women. I've mostly stayed out of it, but I think it's time I contributed.
Binary alignment among nonbinary people includes:
There's been a lot of discussion in the trans community on the subject of patriarchal alignment among nonbinary people - that is, the way that we articulate our relationship to patriarchy and misogyny and how we relate to the experiences of men or women. I've mostly stayed out of it, but I think it's time I contributed.
Binary alignment among nonbinary people includes:
- woman-aligned, or nonbinary people who exist under the class of womanhood, who identify with women, and who are directly harmed by misogyny
- man-aligned, or nonbinary people who exist under the class of manhood, who identify with men, and who have male privilege
- Dual-aligned, or nonbinary people who identify with both men and women
- Non-aligned, or nonbinary people who do not at all identify with the binary
So first of all, let's consider how we define alignment.
Obviously, being perceived as a woman or man is going to lead to either being affected or not being affected by misogyny.
Who gets catcalled? Who suffers under gendered wage gaps? Who is expected to be soft, sweet, and accommodating even when they're treated like shit? Who has to fear being murdered for saying no? Who is targeted by compulsory femininity, suffers disproportionately from sexual violence, has their body and sexuality policed from childhood, and is ignored, overlooked, underestimated, and not taken seriously in virtually every academic and professional field they participate in?
But on the other hand...trans men also suffer under gendered wage gaps and far more than cis women do at that, considering that not only do they have to worry about being paid less and dismissed in environments dominated by cis men while in the closet, but they also have to worry about being fired when they come out.
Men of color suffer under the wage gap - more than white women do. They're also expected to be kind and simpering to white people or they are perceived as threatening, intimidating, and violent.
And both groups of men have to fear being murdered if they say no - "no, I'm not a woman" to government officials and religious fundamentalists; "no, I'm not subhuman" to police officers and fascists.
But...trans women, woman-aligned nonbinary people, and women of color (respectively) all have to deal with the same things to an even greater extent because they are simultaneously oppressed under misogyny and racism or misogyny and transphobia. So it's not like trans men and men of color have no privilege at all.
Male privilege is an incredibly complex subject and is conditional for many men, but what remains is that alignment with manhood is something that grants privilege.
And, of course, there's the other end of the spectrum. Even if a trans woman doesn't come out until she's in her forties, her fifties, her sixties, even if she has spent most of her life being read as male, even if she has reached a position of wealth and power because of that, she still doesn't have male privilege.
Externally, it may look like she does, but how is it a privilege to hide one's true self out of fear? How is it a privilege to learn self-hatred from an early age, to constantly feel inadequately feminine but also be punished with physical, sexual, and economic violence if you perform femininity? To know that everyone sees you as a joke, a plaything, or a fetish? To swallow your fear and discomfort while listening to men talk about you as though you are subhuman and never being able to find refuge among other women because they think you are a predator?
Not to mention how humiliating it is, as a woman, to be told that you're similar to men. That you have man hands, a boyish body, that you dress "mannishly", that you're basically a creepy man for being a bisexual woman or a lesbian. It's seen as shameful for a woman to not come across as perfectly small, sweet, soft, and submissive. For us to not want children or not be able to have them. And trans women deal with that shame every day, whether they're out or not.
Not to mention how humiliating it is, as a woman, to be told that you're similar to men. That you have man hands, a boyish body, that you dress "mannishly", that you're basically a creepy man for being a bisexual woman or a lesbian. It's seen as shameful for a woman to not come across as perfectly small, sweet, soft, and submissive. For us to not want children or not be able to have them. And trans women deal with that shame every day, whether they're out or not.
Is the psychological toll of transmisogyny really worth the conditional safety granted by this ~male socialization~ that TERFs constantly screech about?
And trans women aren't the only women who are read as male.
I am, as a GNC woman-aligned nonbinary person. I've been called sir, young man, "that guy" when my hair was styled in a certain way or when I was wearing a shirt that obscured my chest. I've had people stare at my body and undress me with their eyes; it just bothered them that much when they couldn't tell because I deliberately didn't make it obvious. And when they found out my "real" gender, I didn't dare correct them no matter how much it hurt. Doing so would mean being outed, usually in an environment where the potential backlash against me would be maximized.
But the point is, yes, I have been read as male. Yes, that has occasionally protected me from unwanted advances and sexist condescension. But it sure as hell is not a privilege.
So clearly patriarchal alignment isn't determined by being read as male or female.
What else could determine it?
Well, the main reason I identify with womanhood is that I'm bi. Cishet women's experiences, after all, say nothing of mine. In fact, I think that if I were exclusively attracted to men and had been given a chance to explore my gender, I would probably have ended up not identifying with womanhood at all.
And that's something you'll hear a lot from LGBT people. I've met a lot of nonbinary lesbians and bi women who only align with womanhood through their attraction to women. Gay trans men who lived in denial because they were too scared to imagine a future with another man. Trans lesbians who figured out they were women because they were repulsed by m/w relationships and, even before they knew they were women, suffered under coercive heterosexuality and compulsory femininity.
Even though I presented feminine for safety reasons when I first realized I was bi, it didn't take me long afterward to start associating attraction to women with womanhood and attraction to men with manhood. There have even been times when I just...forget that straight people and m/w relationships exist, especially since I don't generally pursue men.
Like men, even bisexual men, will mention their girlfriends to me and I'll just be confused for a moment because girlfriends are for girls. Or straight women, women who've confirmed to me they were straight, will call another woman their girlfriend and it still takes me a moment to realize that no, they're not in a romantic relationship with another woman but are just entitled hets who either don't realize or don't care how terrifying it is for sapphic women to publicly call other woman our girlfriends.
Anyway. The reason I'm talking about this is because as much as we talk about how "gender, gender expression, sexuality, and biological sex are all very different things and totally separate from one another" and sure this is a good way to give The Cis™ a decent intro to gender, they are actually intertwined. Really, one of the only times in which I feel relatively comfortable living as a woman is when my reference point is other women, when I'm surrounded by women, when I'm friends with women, when I'm attracted to a woman.
With men, there's...there's more pressure to be feminine because of heteropatriarchy giving me no framework for what it would look like to be gender variant while in a relationship with a man (because of the pressure to please men), and also because of the whole misogyny thing, but I also don't as much think of myself as a woman in that context.
I am one in relation to patriarchal oppression, of course, and obviously interacting with women doesn't mean I still don't want to be treated as nonbinary by them...but, like, I would be somewhat more comfortable with a woman calling me her girlfriend than I would be with a man doing the same. With a man, I would be his datemate or his partner.
So part of the reason I identify the way I do is how I feel in terms of relationships: whether I picture myself as a woman, a man, or neither when I think about my future and the prospect of romantic and sexual relationships.
And neither...isn't really an option that's set up in our society's framework. Which is kind of my point.
Because there are gray areas to all kinds of oppression/privilege dichotomies. Like white ethnic minorities experiencing xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and misdirected racism but still being able to use white supremacy to their (our? Apparently being Italian puts me in this category but stigma around that is really not prevalent in 21st century, metropolitan America the way it would be in, say, an upper-crust, WASP-dominated area of England) advantage. Or straight trans people still suffering from state-funded institutionalized homophobia, even if it's misdirected. Or gender nonconforming and/or intersex cis people experiencing misdirected transphobia. Or the complicated, intersecting relationship between race and class.
Or trans and nonbinary people's complicated relationships with patriarchy.
Under patriarchy, though it doesn't work the same for everyone, we are all sorted into categories of oppressor and oppressed and no one can fully separate themselves from that.
I'm still formulating my thoughts on this, and of course as a white gentile I really don't know enough about culturally specific genders to talk about them, nor would I be entitled to an opinion on them even if I was more educated, but I'm becoming skeptical of whether it is, in fact, truly possible to be non-aligned or dual-aligned.
Gender as a whole is ridiculous and arbitrary social construct, but it's also a very powerful and important one. As long as gender exists, we will not be free of gendered oppression. Therefore, I would like to create a world in which gender either doesn't exist or is so arbitrary, economically, socially, institutionally, politically, and systemically, that it simply doesn't matter and anyone could just completely opt out of it at any time.
But that fantasy, unfortunately, isn't going to come true any time soon. We still have to live in this world and acknowledge our material realities, and our current material reality is that gender very much does matter.
To me, "nonbinary" not only reflects an experience of oppression under transphobia, but also and more primarily that:
I am, as a GNC woman-aligned nonbinary person. I've been called sir, young man, "that guy" when my hair was styled in a certain way or when I was wearing a shirt that obscured my chest. I've had people stare at my body and undress me with their eyes; it just bothered them that much when they couldn't tell because I deliberately didn't make it obvious. And when they found out my "real" gender, I didn't dare correct them no matter how much it hurt. Doing so would mean being outed, usually in an environment where the potential backlash against me would be maximized.
But the point is, yes, I have been read as male. Yes, that has occasionally protected me from unwanted advances and sexist condescension. But it sure as hell is not a privilege.
So clearly patriarchal alignment isn't determined by being read as male or female.
What else could determine it?
Well, the main reason I identify with womanhood is that I'm bi. Cishet women's experiences, after all, say nothing of mine. In fact, I think that if I were exclusively attracted to men and had been given a chance to explore my gender, I would probably have ended up not identifying with womanhood at all.
And that's something you'll hear a lot from LGBT people. I've met a lot of nonbinary lesbians and bi women who only align with womanhood through their attraction to women. Gay trans men who lived in denial because they were too scared to imagine a future with another man. Trans lesbians who figured out they were women because they were repulsed by m/w relationships and, even before they knew they were women, suffered under coercive heterosexuality and compulsory femininity.
Even though I presented feminine for safety reasons when I first realized I was bi, it didn't take me long afterward to start associating attraction to women with womanhood and attraction to men with manhood. There have even been times when I just...forget that straight people and m/w relationships exist, especially since I don't generally pursue men.
Like men, even bisexual men, will mention their girlfriends to me and I'll just be confused for a moment because girlfriends are for girls. Or straight women, women who've confirmed to me they were straight, will call another woman their girlfriend and it still takes me a moment to realize that no, they're not in a romantic relationship with another woman but are just entitled hets who either don't realize or don't care how terrifying it is for sapphic women to publicly call other woman our girlfriends.
Anyway. The reason I'm talking about this is because as much as we talk about how "gender, gender expression, sexuality, and biological sex are all very different things and totally separate from one another" and sure this is a good way to give The Cis™ a decent intro to gender, they are actually intertwined. Really, one of the only times in which I feel relatively comfortable living as a woman is when my reference point is other women, when I'm surrounded by women, when I'm friends with women, when I'm attracted to a woman.
With men, there's...there's more pressure to be feminine because of heteropatriarchy giving me no framework for what it would look like to be gender variant while in a relationship with a man (because of the pressure to please men), and also because of the whole misogyny thing, but I also don't as much think of myself as a woman in that context.
I am one in relation to patriarchal oppression, of course, and obviously interacting with women doesn't mean I still don't want to be treated as nonbinary by them...but, like, I would be somewhat more comfortable with a woman calling me her girlfriend than I would be with a man doing the same. With a man, I would be his datemate or his partner.
So part of the reason I identify the way I do is how I feel in terms of relationships: whether I picture myself as a woman, a man, or neither when I think about my future and the prospect of romantic and sexual relationships.
And neither...isn't really an option that's set up in our society's framework. Which is kind of my point.
Because there are gray areas to all kinds of oppression/privilege dichotomies. Like white ethnic minorities experiencing xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and misdirected racism but still being able to use white supremacy to their (our? Apparently being Italian puts me in this category but stigma around that is really not prevalent in 21st century, metropolitan America the way it would be in, say, an upper-crust, WASP-dominated area of England) advantage. Or straight trans people still suffering from state-funded institutionalized homophobia, even if it's misdirected. Or gender nonconforming and/or intersex cis people experiencing misdirected transphobia. Or the complicated, intersecting relationship between race and class.
Or trans and nonbinary people's complicated relationships with patriarchy.
Under patriarchy, though it doesn't work the same for everyone, we are all sorted into categories of oppressor and oppressed and no one can fully separate themselves from that.
I'm still formulating my thoughts on this, and of course as a white gentile I really don't know enough about culturally specific genders to talk about them, nor would I be entitled to an opinion on them even if I was more educated, but I'm becoming skeptical of whether it is, in fact, truly possible to be non-aligned or dual-aligned.
Gender as a whole is ridiculous and arbitrary social construct, but it's also a very powerful and important one. As long as gender exists, we will not be free of gendered oppression. Therefore, I would like to create a world in which gender either doesn't exist or is so arbitrary, economically, socially, institutionally, politically, and systemically, that it simply doesn't matter and anyone could just completely opt out of it at any time.
But that fantasy, unfortunately, isn't going to come true any time soon. We still have to live in this world and acknowledge our material realities, and our current material reality is that gender very much does matter.
To me, "nonbinary" not only reflects an experience of oppression under transphobia, but also and more primarily that:
- I did not consent to being assigned a gender at birth, am not comfortable with the fact that I was, and would be happier if I hadn't been
- I have a complicated, nebulous, nuanced, and fluid relationship with gender but still exist under the social class of womanhood
- I don't want to be socially gendered unless it's in the context of a relationship with a woman
- My primary connection to binary gender is through being attracted to women and especially through being a disabled, gender nonconforming bisexual woman
- My identity is heavily rooted in gender nonconformity and bisexuality
- I express this outwardly, i.e. through dressing in an aesthetically androgynous way, using he/they pronouns, using a name that is considered gender neutral, making my chest seem flatter, and medically transitioning, in order to feel more comfortable with the binary
What "woman" means to me is a member of the social class exploited and subjugated under patriarchy, threatened disproportionately by sexual violence, and expected to perform femininity. While I'm generally not comfortable calling myself a woman or even woman-aligned (binary alignment has been used to misgender me, so I prefer to stay quiet about mine usually).
I think the reason behind the fallacy that it's possible to just completely separate oneself from the binary or identify with both sides of it is cis feminism.
Liberals promoting a completely flimsy view of gender that doesn't hold up in real life, and uncritically squeal about "masculine privilege" and "femmephobia" and "weaponized femininity". Radicals, both deliberately trans exclusionary and not, describe male privilege, misogyny, and patriarchy in a way that only reflects the realities of cis women and do everything possible to alienate us and frame us as predatory.
So trans/nonbinary people look at this shit that the cis women who domineer feminist spaces are promoting and assume that because we don't experience misogyny or male privilege exactly like cis people do, we must either not experience either of those things at all, or experience both of them even though by definition they're mutually exclusive.
Again, I'm still exploring this and I'm also not going to dictate to others how they should identify if they're happy and comfortable considering themselves dual-aligned or non-aligned. I also don't expect anyone to use terminology they're not comfortable with.
My perspective as a white nonbinary person, especially a white gentile, is really not going to be significant or accurate when it comes to cultural genders. That's why I'm prioritizing the voices of woman-aligned nonbinary people of color, as well as Jewish woman-aligned nonbinary people - though, of course, I'm willing to welcome any nonbinary person's comments. Feel free to give constructive criticism if you want to and tell me your own perspective.
Again, I'm still exploring this and I'm also not going to dictate to others how they should identify if they're happy and comfortable considering themselves dual-aligned or non-aligned. I also don't expect anyone to use terminology they're not comfortable with.
My perspective as a white nonbinary person, especially a white gentile, is really not going to be significant or accurate when it comes to cultural genders. That's why I'm prioritizing the voices of woman-aligned nonbinary people of color, as well as Jewish woman-aligned nonbinary people - though, of course, I'm willing to welcome any nonbinary person's comments. Feel free to give constructive criticism if you want to and tell me your own perspective.
