in general I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea that standard gendered categorizations and scripts are unfair and coercive in damaging and illigitimate ways that can end up being essentially culturally supported gaslighting of gnc and nb people who's identities and agency aren't...
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supported by the standard "male" and "female" social boxes. And saying "though their is information to be known based on my ASAB and gendered presentation, the things people often expect to be true of women/men cannot be expected from me - some biological things (eg weird...
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So i'm confused by this - I don't know what 'female box' is supposed to do. Like, I am not very feminine. I have a pretty masculine brain, androgynous interests. I feel like 'boy' is a much better match for my internal world. But I look like a girl and this shapes a lot.
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When people view me as a girl and don't know me, they're missing a huge amount about who I am. Is this the sort of thing that nonbinary people are trying to fix?
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yeah, I think so? in general it seems like Society as a whole leans on gender really hard as a predictor of behavior, and as a means of *prescribing* behavior as "allowed" or "wrong" based on how your gender is percieved - I think many people and systems do this to such a...
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strong degree that it's harming even cis people a lot of the time, but trans and nonbinary people seem to feel this difficulty strongly enough to do something about it. I would predict a world with much much weaker gender norms would have less people actively identifying as...
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nonbinary, because being seen as your asab before being seen as a Complete Person would happen much less. binary trans people don't like being treated as or having the attributes of their natal sex, but do enjoy the attributes of the other. nonbinary are in a similar situation...
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but find *both* options feel "wrong" in some ways, and take steps to alter how they're percieved, treated, and how their body looks and feels and behaves. (I personally take fem HRT because physiologically I feel much better with girl-hormones, even as the girl box has issues)
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(note: this is likely an incomplete typology/explanation for all nonbinary people, but is the current best understanding I have for my own motivations and the general reason for the larger trend of doing so. I'm sure some people would give different reasons)
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Why does this apply only to gender? We put people in categories constantly, which serve as sort of rough prediction tools in absence of more information. Race is a big one - race does predict a lot about a person most of the time, but often doesn't.
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Stuff like height, attractiveness, even basic stuff like where you're from or what school you went to or if you went to school - all that seems to do the sort of thing that gender does, though maybe to slightly less an extent.
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A lot of people get things very wrong about me on first glance because of the apparent categories I belong to. I usually interpret me as being a "category violation", or a surprise, and this has been integrated into my character identity.
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