Comments on: contamination is the companion of categorization

contamination is the companion of categorization

mittens — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 10:23:27 -0800

"One consequence of this series of coinages and definitional shifts is that the cisgender/transgender binary has a gaping hole in its middle. If, in the past, gender variance—epitomized by the queen—was the definitional center of homosexuality, now, in a historically shocking reversal, homosexuality has become gender-typical by default. [...] So what has happened to all the gender variants who do not desire transition? Put differently, what are the contemporary fates of those who would have been fairies, queens, and butches in the past?" Kadji Amin with a deliciously complex argument on how we get to our current moment, We Are All Non-Binary: A Brief History of Accidents.

Editorial Note: I want to quote the WHOLE THING. But I won't. But just a taste more, because not everyone has time to read big gender theory papers during their lunch break. "In keeping with the trend toward divergence as a strategy for managing taxonomical tensions, the cis/trans distinction has birthed a third term, nonbinary, which, unlike its seldom used predecessor, genderqueer, has caught on like wildfire in a few short years. Initially, nonbinary—an umbrella term for all those who identify as neither men nor women—offered a much needed home to all those orphans at the fuzzy edges of the cis/trans binary. But increasingly, nonbinary identity is being claimed by people who look and behave in a manner indistinguishable from ordinary lesbians and gays, or even ordinary heterosexuals." "One precondition for the universalization of nonbinary identity is the trans idealization of cisgender. [...] Keep in mind that cisgender is not and has never been a social identity. Like heterosexuality, cisgender is an opposite fabricated out of thin air. This is not to say that there are not people who are not transgender, in the sense of people who do not desire transition. [...] Strikingly, cisgender (and "officially" transgender) is now defined as a matter of "personal identity" alone. But how is a gender-typical person to go about developing a relation to their gender identity? In a context in which most gender-typical people have never had to think about their gender identity, when they look within to find some felt relation to it, they may well draw a blank. When they do find feelings about manhood and womanhood, these feelings are likely to be extremely ambivalent--how could they not be, since these terms are artifacts of patriarchal gender expectations and racialized civilization distinctions? While they may have heard trans people talk about gender dysphoria, they will search in vain for the feeling that indicates cisness. For there is none. The reason is that cisgender--the notion of an alignment so exact between one's personal sense of identity and the gender role assigned to one that there is no rub, no ambivalence, and no sense of constraint--is and has always been a fantasy. Nobody has ever felt that way. We trans people invented the fantasy of cisgender as the opposite to the extreme gendered and sexed discomfort we have experienced. We are the ones responsible for the idealization of cisgender, and it falls partly to us to undo it." "I propose that we throw a wrench in this identity machine. It may be necessary to generate new identities, given that nonbinary is not a true social category but rather a vast umbrella with no positive social content. However, we can abandon Western binary and taxonomic thinking by refusing to create a fictive opposite for each new term. We can drop the notion that gender is purely psychic and work instead toward creating a livable, valued, and legible social category for feminine male-assigned people (given the high cultural and erotic value of masculinity, a space for masculine femaleassigned people will likely always exist). Most importantly, we can stop idealizing (and attempting to name) some version of normal gender, and we can refuse to use the misleading terms binary and cisgender altogether. For just as there has never been a heterosexuality without homosexual desire, there has never been a cis- or binary gender free from cross-identification or gender atypicality." (spotted on this tweet from nathan duford)

By: HearHere

HearHere — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:00:43 -0800

how has nonbinary become a ubiquitous category that could seemingly apply to almost anyone? computation [wiki] read: anyone (human)

By: wicked_sassy

wicked_sassy — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:34:15 -0800

This line irks me: Put differently, what are the contemporary fates of those who would have been fairies, queens, and butches in the past? There are still people with various gender identities and expressions (cis as well as trans) who identify as butch, though with some racial and socioeconomic stratification. So that line has a bit of the old tired where have all the butches gone TERFy hand-wringing and I don't like it. Also, found this Reddit thread about the essay that may be interesting. Thanks for linking, mittens. Might add more later when I've had a chance to fully digest this dense but intriguing essay.

By: Ignorantsavage

Ignorantsavage — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 14:00:33 -0800

"I would wager, no heterosexuals who have neither experienced nor acted on same-sex erotic desire, even if only in the form of aggression or play." As a man a couple of months away from his half-century mark, I want to tell the author that this a wager they would lose. There are those of us who are exclusively heterosexual in our desires. We may be a minority at one end of a spectrum but that doesn't make us any less real than someone who is exclusively homosexual in their desires, another who is completely asexual, a pansexual, or population who do not feel that any of these labels is appropriate to their identity. That the vast majority of the population exists between ends of various spectra is not a reason to argue that the ends do not have any validity any more than the idea that the ends are the only things that are 'real'.

By: metaphorever

metaphorever — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 15:01:46 -0800

This is particularly true since non-binary identity costs very little. All that is required to be nonbinary is to identify as such, and nobody will be attacked, imprisoned, thrown out of their home, or discriminated against merely for identifying as nonbinary Really? I think a lot of folks would like to be transported to the fantasy world that the author seems to be living in. Or is this a motte and bailey where 'identifying' is this ephemeral thing that you think about while you sit in the closet and it's only the real material things like saying "I'm nonbinary" that get you discriminated against? Or maybe the author thinks there is no social consequence to being openly nonbinary at all? What is socially relevant is transition—a shift in social gender categories, whatever they may be—not identification—a personal, felt, and thereby highly phantasmic and labile relation to these categories. Announcing your identity to the world is a key aspect of social transition. There's nothing "highly phantasmic" about it. Identities we hold inside our head may be so but if you are in the position to complain about too many people saying they are nonbinary it seems like those identities are no longer in people's heads and have moved into the realm of social transition. Gender identity is envisioned not as derivative of but as autonomous from the social, to the extent that it may entirely contradict one's actual gender performances (the popularization of femme AFAB [Assigned Female at Birth] nonbinary identity is one case in point). Just call them "Theyfabs" -- dressing up your contempt in fancy language doesn't make it any more respectable. God forbid a nonbinary person has a gender presentation that contradicts your expectations of how they should be presenting. There is truly no gender presentation that nonbinary people won't be gender policed about from some angle or another. Maybe there is something useful in this essay but I am have trouble finding it. Can someone who doesn't see red while reading this explain what the worthwhile part is? The part that nonbinary people can apply to their lives to be better understood or be treated the way that they would prefer to be treated? Maybe I'm just hit dog hollerin' and I am just too invested in the middle-class transgender hegemony of identity to understand the value of this serious materialist analysis. I don't say that I am nonbinary because I am in love with the ephemeral internal identity. I do it because it is the least bad / most useful way to communicate how I would like to relate to the world through the lens of gender. I don't see anything from the author offering a better solution just an admonition to stop it and a hope that some day there will be better categories. I should stop commenting when things make me angry.

By: brook horse

brook horse — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 15:49:19 -0800

As an old-fashioned genderqueer, I don't think Amin has learned anything about nonbinary people since his 2021 interview where he and another not-nonbinary person talked to each other about how they don't get nonbinary people. He did say there that he does believe someone announcing themselves as nonbinary and asking to be called they/them doesn't count as any kind of transition:

I think that transition is often a practical decision and I think what puzzles me in contemporary discourse is that it does away with that phenomenology of what it means to be in the world with other people by replacing it with a notion of the sovereign self: I decide who I am, I know who I am inside and then I tell people. I say I'm nonbinary, or trans, and I go by they/them, and that's supposed to be the final word. People call me they/them and that's the end, as far as the public story goes. Maybe that's a political way of disturbing the gender binary, or of changing people's minds about the inevitability of binary sex and gender, but it's unclear to me what that means on a phenomenological level.

Anyway having identified as nonbinary and they/them for a year in a rural Wisconsin hospital job (because no one would fucking understand they/he transmasc butch genderqueer), the discrimination for simply using they/them pronouns was UNREAL and started before I even met anyone because my introduction to the unit e-mail referred to me as they/them. I actually got to meet a nonbinary person who moved into the workplace after me, who prefers they/them but gives people the option to use he/him and everyone is wildly less hostile about it! Despite the fact that they're much more aggressive about asserting their gender and I tried to make mine take up as little space as possible (and we pass about the same). There were people on that unit who refused to even acknowledge me and were open to other staff about why. People I chickened out on ever verbally saying my pronouns to! They/them in my signature line alone was enough to trigger a concerted and obvious shunning coordinated by the charge nurse (she went on pregnancy leave and suddenly some of her cohort were willing to talk to me). I'm seriously like, are you fucking kidding me, I could have just been tits out pre-everything telling people I was a binary trans man and they would have been like "okay dude"? I won't say they wouldn't have iced me out of the unit, but they sure as shit did it when the only thing I did was tell them I used they/them pronouns and identified as nonbinary, because I didn't feel safe enough to transition the way I wanted to and I thought leaving it at "nonbinary and they/them" would protect me. It did fucking not. So yeah, try using nonbinary as a shield for a year and see how that goes for you. I have other thoughts but I've got to go eat risotto made by my #actuallynonbinary partner. Be back later, maybe.

By: GenjiandProust

GenjiandProust — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 16:43:15 -0800

There's some interesting thinking here, but I think it's kind of ridiculous to assert that nonbinary isn't a category. There's clearly a spectrum from "extremely invested in a binary gender structure" and "not at all invested." I've met people along that scale, cis and trans, and, assuming they weren't all maliciously lying to me for clout or whatever, that they know their own minds and exist. The idea that hetero and cis don't really exist is kind of interesting, and the former is quite true, because, in Europe (which is what I know best), for most of history, sexuality was not something you were but something you did. BtW, fine penetrating men being ok, regardless of whom you are penetrating... medieval European sodomy laws would like to have a word with you.

By: BungaDunga

BungaDunga — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:28:53 -0800

The reason is that cisgender--the notion of an alignment so exact between one's personal sense of identity and the gender role assigned to one that there is no rub, no ambivalence, and no sense of constraint--is and has always been a fantasy All I can offer is that, as one of those newfangled "indistinguishable from... ordinary heterosexual" ones, the cis type of gender discomfort and nonbinary gender discomfort are, uh, qualitatively very different, having experienced both. And would you believe it: stuff like pronouns can alleviate the latter but, I'd wager, not the former! In short: bollocks. (and I also find nonbinary a kind of awkward category to use as an identity, I think genderqueer has a much nicer ring to it, but that's neither here nor there)

By: mathjus

mathjus — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:44:25 -0800

Sometimes smart people will encounter a dissonance and develop a whole worldview around never engaging with it. Gender identity and sexual orientation are not the same; his argument is full of dissonance because it continually places "non-binary" on a line somewhere related to "heterosexual" and "homosexual" as though there's a relation that's always the same. This culminates in the weak suggestion that because plenty of straight-identifying men have sex with other men, gender might have a corollary "impurity." Because he's a thinker and a writer, the very same paragraph asks the reader not to believe they're implying there is a "symmetry" between those two ideas. However, that's an admission -- they *are* implying it. The dissonance Amin's running away from is that defining a thing A generally means, absent other evidence, that A isn't B. This can have consequences. Of course gender is expressed via constellation. A doctor can't wave a wand and diagnose a syndrome -- they have to eventually decide the "constellation of symptoms" amounts to something known. Good doctors never pretend to have the last word, either. They say "the patient *presents* as ..." It makes exactly as much sense to say "non-binary people don't exist" as it does to say "straight people don't exist." While straight people's lives aren't at stake because Kadji Amin thinks they might be faking it, it's still a failure to humanize, spurred by a relatable (but wrong) desire to make the categories simple - consonant - and not the messy mirror of human consciousness that they really are.

By: mittens

mittens — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:07:30 -0800

Ah, the two genders: Me, and everyone who hated this essay. I wanted to mention why I liked it so much, but then I ran into mathjus' line: "Good doctors never pretend to have the last word, either." But like, not only is that wrong, it's how we got into this mess in the first place! Medicine is one of the key technologies we use to create these populations, to delineate us, to snatch us from our natural home and make diagnoses of us. And you can't push back against that, because good doctors always get the last word. They literally create these cultural binaries out of thin air, and are handsomely rewarded for doing so. But that's one of the things so interesting about the essay. Creation of a pathologized category necessarily implies the category of the healthy and good and normal...and this leads inevitably to the realization by the healthy, good normal people that they don't feel quite as healthy, good and normal as their shiny new category implies. Look at how 'neurotypical' people react on being told they're neurotypical! Nobody is neurotypical because it's a made-up category to try to express that someone ELSE's mind is not healthy and good. The artificiality of these categories is important to point out, to press on. Otherwise they press on you, they constrict and deform. "Nonbinary" is pointless if it's just another category on a binary. But more importantly--and I think the great interview brook horse mentioned above makes the case more strongly, but the essay points it out too--we need more room. There are ways of being, outside of the Pathologized Category and the Healthy Category, that aren't legible enough; other people can't see you, other people can't learn from you or feel a commonality with you because of that illegibility, that lack of room to maneuver. There are whole hosts of configurations you simply are not allowed to have; they do not exist in the cultural imagination. And to have that said, is a deconstriction to me, and that's why I liked this so much. This essay was like a double-dose of xanax, like a hand leaving my throat.

By: mersen

mersen — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:23:16 -0800

I thought it was an interesting article, and framing of the interplay between gender and attraction and how labels/identities are formed... and I'm not against a different classification system per se. But by the end, my gut reaction was: pal, I am over forty years old and will not be embracing any label that requires a goddam dress code. "Nonbinary" didn't seem like something devoid of positive content to me, it felt like a viable option, a decent shorthand for "don't care what's on my paperwork or what my body looks like, I will not be performing for you." (Whereas "genderqueer" seems more like actively engaging with and playing with gender?) I felt like the author really really wants a visual classification system where you can walk into a club and immediately know how everyone sorts themselves. And to borrow mittens' word: I am not interested in being legible in that way? I don't feel a strong need to be able to read Miley Cyrus either, it's fine.

By: brook horse

brook horse — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:51:29 -0800

Unfortunately the complexity of the article is the problem. It's rife with examples that either don't represent what he claims or are flat out incorrect. I don't know if that invalidates the whole argument, but some of these include: The convergence model, which was dominant until roughly the 1990s, held that local forms of raced, classed, gender- and labor-differentiated homosexuality were, nevertheless, all homosexual. For instance, the widespread agreement, during the 1960s, that street queens (male-assigned people who dressed in drag full-time), drag queens, ''hormone'' queens (male-assigned people who took estrogen), effeminate gay men, and butch gay men were all homosexuals might retrospectively be understood as a convergence model Not remotely true; see Chauncey's Gay New York--prior to WWII only queens (of various flavors) and effeminate gay men were considered in any sort of queer category, and this was explicitly linked to bottoming. Masculine men who did not pursue "queers" but accepted their advances and topped were not considered homosexual in any fashion, they were referred to as "trade" or a "real man." The convergence model didn't appear until post WWII. The fact that he starts with the 1960s was the first flag for me--it's very common to entirely ignore pre-WWII history but it was radically different from how queerness was understood in the 60s and beyond and you can't handwave that away if you're claiming something was the dominant model until the 90s. Why he acknowledges the "real men having sex with fairies weren't considered queer" concept later--citing Chauncey directly!--but still still claims this is baffling to me. I suppose that's because he considers it "pre-history." I don't. uneven social stigmas of the ''covert'' homosexuality of butch gay men, who were capable of functioning in the straight professional world and the ''overt'' gender-variant homosexuality of drag queens and street queens, who were forced to rely on gay and ''street'' economies. This is implying a dichotomy that, again, did not exist pre-WW2. It was perfectly common for men to dress in drag/effeminately at night and go back to their masculine jobs in the daytime--the term was "letting your hair down," that you would embody this effeminate queer identity in your gay social life and then go back to your masculine professional setting without considering this contradictory or repressive. This category of man far outweighed those who were full-time "real men" or "fairies/queens." Fun note: giving another man hints that you were gay in a professional setting could be referred to as "dropping pins" (as in hairpins). The open declaration of homosexuality by otherwise gender-typical men changed the face of homosexuality during the 1970s—not least for gay men themselves. Far less dramatic than described here, there was a slow shift of masculine men having always asserted themselves separately from feminine men. "Queer" came from flamboyant men who nonetheless wanted to distinguish themselves from the overtly woman-identified "fairies," and "gay" came from men who wanted to distinguish themselves from the flaming queers. This had already happened far before the 1970s; the term gay meant "interested in men but not necessarily feminine"! Put differently, what are the contemporary fates of those who would have been fairies, queens, and butches in the past? Butches, in fact, remain common, due both to the high value of masculinity in lesbian culture and to the overall ill fit between female-assigned people and the hegemonic history of sexuality. The real question, then, is what has happened to the fairies and queens? ... Given the erotic and cultural value of masculinity among gay men, feminine gay men who do not desire transition have become something of a paradox. Stereotypically gay, yet rarely considered desirable within gay male culture My man needs to climb down out of the ivory tower of academia. It is screamingly easy to find queens and butches at your local LGBT center/nonprofit org. You know where you won't find nearly as many? Highly image-conscious settings, such as social media, many bar scenes, and yes... academia. His description is very much drawn from upper-class and/or professionalized gay culture--and doesn't remotely describe most working class LGBT community settings. There's frankly a lot that supports his argument, there, but asserting it as a universal truth rather than a product of a very specific setting undermines the point. Tellingly, not a single ''tribe'' on the gay sex app Grindr names feminine gay men or those who might desire them; ''trans,'' by contrast, is a named tribe. Feminine men have become erotic nonentities, desired, more often than not, despite rather than for their femininity. None of the Grindr tribes refer to masculinity or femininity--they are largely about body type and amount of hair, which is entirely distinct from any other gender presentation. A bear is not equivalent to a traditionally masculine gay man, and bears are devalued in the community. A jock is defined by his athletic prowess; you can be a jock in heels and a crop top. Etcetera. You can't consider any of those categories to be specifically about desiring masculinity unless you also stretch the definition of twink to mean "feminine gay man." How did this come about? If, in the early 2000s, genderqueer was an almost unimaginable category understood to apply to almost no one, how has nonbinary become a ubiquitous category that could seemingly apply to almost anyone? The lack of use of genderqueer was not due to genderqueer being unimaginable. It was, one, partially due to the difficulty of spreading new terminology in the pre-internet age, and two, because the genderqueer community started closing out, among others, people of color, femmes, "passing" trans people, and heterosexuals. Before this it was actually considered trendy, so the claim that it was an "unimaginable category" doesn't hold up either. While they may have heard trans people talk about gender dysphoria, they will search in vain for the feeling that indicates cisness. For there is none. The reason is that cisgender—the notion of an alignment so exact between one's personal sense of identity and the gender role assigned to one that there is no rub, no ambivalence, and no sense of constraint—is and has always been a fantasy. Nobody has ever felt that way. I have met so many cisgender people who have carefully examined their gender and decided they "feel" cisgender. Many of them are not gender normative. They still feel cisgender. If a nonbinary person identifies as neither man nor woman, a binary person not only does identify as a man or woman, but they (by connotation) do so in a ''binary'' way, that is, without any cross-gender feelings or identifications. Almost no one, trans or cis, identifies as binary or finds this term a useful descriptor for their experiential relation to gender. Binary does not mean "without any cross-gender feelings or identifications." A trans man can be a flaming queen and still be binary. I'm not sure if Amin has been to a local transgender support group lately, but tons of people identify with the term "binary" and use it usefully to describe their experience. Contemporary nonbinary discourse holds firmly that nonbinary might ''look'' any number of ways and need not find external expression in choice of dress, hairstyle, pronouns, or any other social marker of gender. This tenet likely emerged as a way to counter the reflexive binary gendering even of visibly gender-variant people, given the difficulty of appearing uncategorizable as either a man or as a woman to those accustomed to classifying everyone in this way. As a response, nonbinary discourse has doubled down on the notion of gender as an internal, psychic identification, adding the corollary that nonbinary identification is ''valid'' regardless of outward expression. While many nonbinary people do seek to modify their appearance to counter binary gendered expectations, with the discourse of gender self-identification, more and more do not. Also true of contemporary trans(gender/sexual) discourse. You can still be considered a trans man or a trans woman regardless of your external expression. This did not start with nonbinary people by any stretch--it was a rejection of transmedicalism and applies across the entire transgender community. It also was not as a counter to "reflexive binary gendering" but as an acknowledgement that trans people should have access to the wide range of expression that cisgender people do. Trans women in suits and ties are still trans women; transgender men in dresses are still men. In fact this emerged almost in opposition to nonbinary identity--it was a re-assertion of binary identity. it is radical to be nonbinary and normative to be binary, then more and more people are choosing and will continue to choose nonbinary identity. Leaving aside whether the first claim is true, the second absolutely requires support. By definition most people will not choose the more radical option. This is particularly true since nonbinary identity costs very little. All that is required to be nonbinary is to identify as such, and nobody will be attacked, imprisoned, thrown out of their home, or discriminated against merely for identifying as nonbinary. See above. Today, a list of people I have encountered who identify as nonbinary would include: a white female-assigned person who has studied Buddhism and decided that, ontologically, gender is not binary; a number of femaleassigned feminists who experience discomfort with patriarchal expectations; a number of transitioned trans people who wish to be ''out'' as trans and avow that their life history has not been within a single gender; a number of brown people who wish to decolonize the ''colonial gender binary''; a number of Black people for whom, due to a history of ungendering, blackness precludes cisgender status. Genderqueer originally encompassed all of these people as well, and they often called themselves such. Nonbinary identity is therefore not, as some nonbinary people would have it, a radical refusal of the colonial gender binary. For binary Western thinking has governed every step in the history of Western gender-sexual categories, generating an idealized opposite for each new category coined. The core binary that governs nonbinary thought, however, is less that between binary and nonbinary than that, foundational to Western thought, between the autological sovereign individual and the unchosen genealogical bonds of the social. It is therefore difficult to imagine an identity more provincially Western and less decolonial than contemporary nonbinary identity. He's correct on the colonial aspect of the idealized opposite, but not on indigenous identities necessarily being unchosen social categories rather than individual autological identities. Two spirit individuals do not describe themselves in the way that Amin does; they don't necessarily describe themselves in ways that fit nonbinary identity, either, but asserting that a decolonized gender must reject autological individuality necessarily asserts that the entire two spirit identity--which emerged in the 90s--is a colonial one. Is that an argument that could be made? Maybe, but not without seriously engaging with indigenous feminism and tribal histories, which Amin does not do--he drops it as an aside that we're supposed to take as prima facie true. there has never been a cis- or binary gender free from cross-identification or gender atypicality ... The question, then, is whether we can develop a tolerance for contamination and for the inevitable misfit of identity categories We already have this. Gender-atypical cis men and cis women still exist! That some portion of people who would previously have described themselves as genderqueer, then dropped that when they got kicked out of the genderqueer club, are now describing themselves as nonbinary, does not mean that cisgender people never experience gender atypicality. In fact for many people their cisgender identity only strengthens their gender atypicality! The most "fucking with gender" person I know is a cisgender guy who wears heels and shoulder-baring sweaters to work and uses any/all pronouns. Yeah, he has people assume he's trans, but no one who he's told "oh no, I'm a cisgender guy" has gone "are you sure you're not nonbinary?" Like, idk. This entire article feels like... skill issue, man? mittens: " But that's one of the things so interesting about the essay. Creation of a pathologized category necessarily implies the category of the healthy and good and normal...and this leads inevitably to the realization by the healthy, good normal people that they don't feel quite as healthy, good and normal as their shiny new category implies. Look at how 'neurotypical' people react on being told they're neurotypical! Nobody is neurotypical because it's a made-up category to try to express that someone ELSE's mind is not healthy and good. The artificiality of these categories is important to point out, to press on. Otherwise they press on you, they constrict and deform." The thing is, sexuality terms have followed the same exact same path as you and the author are describing. Accepting the premise of this article necessarily requires us to also reject queer, bisexual, or any other category term that seeks to expand the boxes. Please note that at no point does Amin explicitly say we should reject the terms "trans man" or "trans woman" because he believes those categories to still exist--only nonbinary. Consider why someone might make a direct analogue to, "We should get rid of bisexual because we're all attracted to multiple genders--but I won't claim we should get rid of gay and lesbian." I would really encourage you to take a look at George Chauncey's Gay New York because it was mind-blowing to me... and gave me a way to look at gender in a wildly more expansive way without going "and now we need to get rid of gender identity as a concept." It was actually instrumental in me dropping the label "nonbinary" (though I still use it out of convenience sometimes) for genderqueer, and I consider my experience to be quite different from nonbinary people's. It helped a lot with my feeling of constriction around binary vs nonbinary without requiring me to assert "binary and nonbinary identity don't exist." Amin brings up a lot of ideas that surfaced for me when I read Gay New York, but he connects them in ways that construe nonbinary identity as a threat to his own. It doesn't have to be. My partner's nonbinary identity was actually foundational in helping me understand my own--and it didn't require me to identify as nonbinary or binary, in the end. I can see this essay being very tantalizing if these ideas haven't been presented before, and walking through them with Amin's non-nonbinary perspective might present you logically to the conclusion he makes, but there are other ones that make just as much or more sense without the rejection of nonbinary identity.

By: brook horse

brook horse — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 19:43:58 -0800

One more thought. Many nonbinary identities are about inhabiting another social category, just not one that is "man" or "woman." Yet this category is often distinct and clearly telegraphed, even if it is illegible to many people. The social category my partner would describe themself as "transitioning to" would most closely be described as "creature." But they aren't otherkin or anything like that. It's hard to explain, but it's heavily influenced by their indigenous background involving an animist philosophy and cultural myths around entities in nature that are outside the tribal social categories for "men" and "women." As an example, the wilderness man in Anishinaabe tradition (associated with honesty in the seven grandfather wisdoms) is what white folks might refer to as a cryptid; it's referred to as a man but described as "it" and occupies an entirely different social category. And of course there are all of the animal characters, Wolf and Otter and Beaver... these are sentient creatures who occupy a distinct space from man-woman gender categories. In many communities "third gender" individuals were considered to inhabit a mix of man-woman gender categories; existing outside of them was something else entirely that may or may not have had a word to describe them. And you know. You know. There's something to be said about colonization and the violent separation of indigenous folks from their history and cultures. Part of my partner's experience is a sense of "outsideness" as regards their indigenity; yet at the same time they've felt this spiritual connection to the greater universe that is incredibly true to their tribal history despite never having been taught it. So identifying as something outside the social categories of the day-to-day tribe but connecting strongly with something closer to those mythical identities who feel far more familiar to them--as if they've walked with them all their life--than the native community they were physically separated from... well, that kind of makes sense, doesn't it. I think to claim gender identity is defined strictly by our human social bonds is its own kind of colonial despiritualization. But that's maybe an entirely different article, and not really my place to go in depth on. (I shared my thoughts on this with my partner who agreed and gave me permission to post them.)

By: metaphorever

metaphorever — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 21:19:31 -0800

I read the interview brook horse linked and in the interest of being nice I do agree with this bit from Amin at the end. What I've realized is that I believe that the matter of gender is practical and relational. It's not about who you are inside, it's more about how you would feel most comfortable in the world. It's not Who are you? but How do you want to live? This is great advice. Advice that I have given to other people and try to live by. I just don't understand how Amin doesn't see that words like nonbinary, the act of publicly claiming a specific gender identity, and using certain pronouns are tools that help people live the way they want to live. We use these terms to make ourselves legible because we don't have the shared semiotic vocabulary yet to reliably communicate genders other than man and woman visually with our bodies/presentation. If there was a specific silly hat I could wear that would make people consistently gender me correctly I would wear that shit everywhere. Would Amin judge me as hat-obsessed? Every nonbinary person I have talked to has a complex and "phenomenologically real" gender that they will tell you about if you actually care to listen and they also have a list of labels and simplifications that they have for making themselves legible to parents, coworkers, and others. That Amin only seems to have encountered the latter and not the former doesn't mean that it's not out there for those willing to seek it out.

By: eviemath

eviemath — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 05:45:41 -0800

"Nonbinary" is pointless if it's just another category on a binary. "A Binary" means two categories. If you have more than two categories, you do not have a binary category system. Binary numbers are base 2. Binary gender refers to the two categories of man or women. While not my local experience, I believe you that there are some communities where "non-binary" has come to mean some affirmative collection of gender expression or feeling rather than a catch-all of anything outside the conservative binary model. But that would make it a trinary or other category system. I think what you may mean instead of "a binary" is a discrete or fixed category system as opposed to something more open, such as a spectrum or space of possible identities?

By: eviemath

eviemath — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 05:52:52 -0800

I mean, maybe I am misreading, and you meant to critique the idea that people either fit into a traditional/conservatively-defined gender category (whether cis or trans) or they don't? And instead you were arguing that there were degrees of alignment with or lack of alignment with gender categories (regardless of how many of them there are)? That would be a binary meta-categorization ("fits in one of our bins" vs "other" - two options, with one defined as not-that), I suppose. And yeah, "fits in a bin" vs "doesn't fit in a bin" is an inescapable meta-categorization if one has discrete bins or categories in the first place.

By: wicked_sassy

wicked_sassy — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 06:56:16 -0800

@brook horse: flagged your comments as *fantastic.*

By: oc-to-po-des

oc-to-po-des — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 16:34:48 -0800

A lot of interesting thoughts to chew on in the article and the comments. I'm inclined to agree that the terms and categories we use for gender now are wildly lacking and cause a lot of unnecessary strife, but I also get the sense the author is feeling some discomfort with the broadness of non-binary in something of a..."I was in the club before it was cool" sense that makes some of the points feel a bit mean-spirited. I also think it's absolutely possible for cis people to actually think about their gender and still come down on the side of being cis--I have, and I think it would probably be beneficial if everyone gave that shit some thought, whether they stick with what they originally "got" or decide that something else feels better. This aside from the quoted part in the post, though, is really raising my eyebrow:

given the high cultural and erotic value of masculinity, a space for masculine femaleassigned people will likely always exist

I was a tomboy for a lot of my youth, and I'm friends with a lot of butch women now, and...I really would not say that people seen as women who are masculine are treated as though they have any sort of high cultural or erotic (especially to straight culture) value? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the point here but this just feels like a wildly off-base assertion to make.

By: brook horse

brook horse — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 17:03:22 -0800

That raised my eyebrows too. The devaluation of butches in the lesbian community and broader society is a widely known phenomenon. Femme lesbians are more likely to seek out another femme lesbian than a butch, and butch lesbians are also more likely to see out femmes. And the media representation skews that way too. His discussion of masc4masc culture without any similar acknowledgement that butch4butch is considered unusual-to-freakish seemed like a huge oversight.

By: polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice

polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 04:40:22 -0800

To quote a response to the 2021 interview, "please read this extremely long tract where me and someone else repeatedly affirm that our genders are binary and speculate about nonbinary people's experiences"