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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I think a lot of the problem for understanding "nonbinary" as a term is that it can mean a lot of different things, both as an umbrella term and as a mess of categories that aren't that clear themselves:

  • Clownfish-nonbinary, in the sense of taking different gender roles depending on outside stimulus. That can be social, in the strict sense that clownfish only turn female in a sausage fest, but it can also be role-based (eg, male at work and female at party), group-based (eg, female among one social party, male among another), or through different times (eg, some weeks male, some weeks female). Genderfluid usually means this, though I've seen a few exceptions.

  • Whiptail-nonbinary, in the sense of taking a role that doesn't normally make sense within the male/female lines. I use whiptails as an example not because they're lesbian, but because they're lesbian in a way that can have hormonal layout take 'male' or 'female' courtship and mounting in the same coupling regularly, in ways that increase reproductive success'. In humans, this usually doesn't turn into becoming the non-genetic-but-physically-relevant role for reproduction (and even most people that fetishize that don't do so in a nonbinary framework), but the 'so dyke she answers to sir' is kinda the low end of this particular wading pool. These people aren't (usually?) trans in the surgery-sense, and even stuff like laser hair removal or hormones might be more in the aesthetic framework than the dysphoria ones, but there's some point where it's useful to be able to distinguish from mere 'gender-non-conforming' (... sometimes...).

  • Hyena-nonbinary, in the sense of having a mix of traits consider mainstays of male/female. No one is archetypically male or female, not least of all because each of these have contradictory and/or impossible, but just as there's a level of bro or stacey that can't shut up about being it, there's eventually a point where people can't shut up about how they're not.

  • Worker-ant-nonbinary, in the sense that talking about gender in any sense but the chromosonal is kinda missing the point. Neuter or neutrois are the more extreme bits, here, but there's a dark mirror to the 'cis-by-default' concept that's kinda the opposite of it, where someone doesn't hugely care about gender but also doesn't get any reason to act toward their default role.

  • Landmine-nonbinary, where they just really don't want to deal with any gender stuff publicly, and want to make it your problem.

  • Peacock-nonbinary, where there's a bunch of really complicated social signalling stuff that doesn't (seem to?) have pragmatic impact.

  • and probably some other groups I don't know about.

the 'cis-by-default' concept that's kinda the opposite of it, where someone doesn't hugely care about gender but also doesn't get any reason to act toward their default role.

I strongly suspect that this is the majority of people. I am baffled by someone describing the experience of 'feeling like' something as abstract as a Gender.