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I'm firmly in the camp of people who doesn't quite understand what a lot of "non-binary" people are doing with gender, despite being somewhat progressive and happy to exercise pronoun hospitality with such people. (I once heard an acquaintance describe their gender by saying, "if man is black, and woman is white, I'm purple - if you see me in monochrome, I'm more masculine, but really I'm not either of them" - and I was more confused than before I heard the analogy.)
I've seen various mottizens bring up the idea of "gender" being the latest subculture like goth or punk, and recently I stumbled across an interesting Tumblr post that accidentally circles around a similar insight. The whole thing is interesting, but I think you can get the gist from the following:
and
Now, I grant that the gender-as-fashion analogy isn't the only possible takeaway from this person's observations. I'm reminded of the "soul-editor" from the SCP Foundation Wiki that had symbols from every major world religion, as well as a few unknown ones. Who's to say that some phenomenological aspects of being human aren't so complex that no one set of vocabulary is capable of describing it all? Perhaps some qualities of human minds/souls/whatever are ineffable, or so unique and subjective that one cannot help but create a new label for oneself in describing one's personality?
But I have my doubts. Mostly, I often feel like people must be mislabeling something that I have in my "mental box" as well. (I've read accounts of genderfluid people who talk about "waking up feeling masc" some days and dressing the part, while suddenly and abruptly "feeling femme" partway through the day and wanting to change outfits - and I couldn't help but speculate if they hadn't attached special significance to what I label "moods" in myself.) I don't discount that there are many real human experiences that aren't in my "mental box." In a very real way, I can't do much more than guess what depression, schizophrenia, OCD or dozens of other seemingly real human experiences are like. If I'm being maximally humble about what a tiny part of the vast terrain of possible human experiences I occupy, I have to concede that I can't know that many people aren't out there experiencing "gender" in ways I never will.
My partner is a binary trans man, and many of my friends and acquaintances are part of the LGBT+ community. I still don't quite understand why someone in that extended friend group suddenly finds it very important to change their name, and let everybody know that their pronouns are "she/they" now - while changing nothing else about their appearance or presentation. I'm happy to use a new name for someone, if they don't make such changes too frequently for me to keep up with, but I often feel baffled by why they find it so important? It's not really a big deal to me, but I would like an explanation. Gender-as-fashion seems so tempting as an explanation, but I worry that it might be a false explanation flattening human experiences into something that's more comfortable to me - the same way, "that person who supposedly has ADHD is just lazy" might flatten a person with ADHD into a form more comfortable for neurotypical people, and not in a way that is very sympathetic to the person with ADHD.
I see it as a cope rather than an identity. The people who I have met who have called themselves non binary have been people who have failed out of their gender rather than adopted something else. Women who simply don't preform as women call themselves non binary instead of just admitting that they have few female secondary sexual characteristics and are far from any man's fantasy wife. The men who become non binary are often physically weak men who are lacking in male capabilities and virtues. Instead of admitting that they lack the attributes of their gender, they claim that they both male and female. Apart from certain superficial attributes, this is rarely the case. They are not doing lobster fishing on Saturday and dancing on Sunday. In reality, they are probably laying on their sofa scrolling tiktok.
We have a society obsessed with gender, yet we have less gender than ever. The same goes for asexuals, I have yet to meet one that I found highly attractive. I have never met an asexual man that gives an aura of having ravaged a women. My suspicion is that this is just a nicer way for incels to label themselves.
I don't know that "copes" and "identities" are mutually exclusive. Many identities, including some ethnic identities, are copes of some sort. A kid who identifies as Hui in China might well identify as Chinese if he moves to the US if the only other Asian kid in school is Han. Someone who never identified as a member of a group is more likely to do so when circumstances change. And, someone who is told or feels that he does not belong in group X or group Y is going to look for another group to identify with. And, an effeminate guy who is straight is not clearly in any particular prexisting group, so it is hardly surprising that he will end up identifying with a new group of similar people. You are describing >how binary gender identity develops more than you are undermining the legitimacy of the identity.
And, the people you describe -- women with few secondary female characteristics and men lacking in male capabilities and virtues -- clearly don't fit neatly in either gender and almost certainly have attributes of the other gender. You are basically acknowledging that some middle group with attributes of each gender exists, so it seems that you are mostly objecting to the name. And note that society already acknowledge that there are women with male gender (not sex, but gender*) attributes: they are commonly called tomboys.
*You err in saying "Instead of admitting that they lack the attributes of their gender, they claim that they both male and female" -- they lack the attributes of their sex, not their gender. Gender = a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex. By calling themselves non-binary, they are indeed admitting that they lack the attributes of the gender associated with their sex.
This is a poor example. The Hui in China are largely descended from Han Chinese who converted to Islam (in fact, the word it derives from - huihui - describes people who follow Abrahamic religions, not just Islam). There is no reason why they would not consider themselves Chinese, even if we go back centuries, even if they differentiate themselves from Han Chinese, as they're not exactly a people who kept a separate society which was then conquered by/did the conquering of China, nor have they ever tried to establish their own state and cultural history entirely apart from China (unless you count the Taiping, but then the Taiping were very much so Chinese nationalist).
You would be better served with almost literally any other minority in China, like the Zhuang, or the Miao, or the Manchus.
So is a gender a specific set of roles attributed to members of a sex in a given society?
Well, judging by this, the Chinese govt seems to think that they don't, or at least not as much as the govt would prefer. It quotes Xi Jinping as saying that “Cultural identity is the deepest kind of identity,” which tends to refute what I see as your implicit argument that identity must be based on genetic ancestry. And btw Wikipedia cites a source which apparently states that "Communist theorists used his argument to justify their early treatment of the Hui as an ethnic minority or ‘minority nationality’, resulting on the Chinese Communist Party identifying Chinese Muslims as a historically oppressed minzu rather than a religious group."
But, that is kind of the point: Identity is flexible, and what it means to be "Chinese" can change, depending on circumstances.
As I understand it, it does not make sense to refer to "a gender" in that way, though it seems that people might sometimes use it as shorthand for "gender roles." Our society, AFAIK, only has norms re males and females, and note that, as I understand it, someone who claims to be nonbinary is not saying that they are a third gender, but rather do not fit in either of the the two genders that society recognizes.
I am not exactly making the argument that ethnicity is based strictly on genetic ancestry, but that there has been no real Hui identity that is divorced from the civilizational project of China, which doesn’t exclude that they can be a minority, or segregated, or whatnot. This is the case even if we take for granted that the Hui are a separate people (minzu as in the Wikipedia article you linked). In that sense, then, I don’t see where the oddity is in a Hui person thinking themselves Chinese, unless you explicitly try to equate Chinese with Han.
This is not the case with the Manchu, for example, who have a long history as a separate people.
Your first sentence was saying that “a person who identifies as Hui in China might well identify as Chinese” seems to imply that a Hui person would usually rather not identify as Chinese, which is very odd sounding to me.
Regardless, it’s a minor quibble, no big deal really.
What exactly is the purpose of neopronouns and “they/them”, then? What exactly are the people (some of whom I know personally) who sometimes flip between “she/her” and “they/them”, and take it very seriously, doing? What about someone who decides to be “xe/xir”?
(One simple way to do away with all this is to just have unisex pronouns for everybody. Alas, that ship has sailed.)
Isn't the use of "they" or any other alternative to he and she consistent with being nonbinary? As for xe, that is apparently exactly what you call for: a unisex pronoun
Yes, now to get it adopted by the entirety of society!
The problem with the they and she thing was the inconsistency and the insistence on different ones at different times (as well as the rarity until recently of using they as a singular for a named subject in modern English); xe is also just not common - I had not heard of it before being exposed to someone who wanted to be called that, nor do I think people who insist on being called xe/xir in contradistinction to more traditional pronouns banking on the idea that having unisex pronouns stops all of this silliness. (Edit: I would be more amenable to going back to the singular they, as English I believe has a history of using it as such, but even then it still just sounds wrong somehow. Xe/xir or ze/zir etc also just look and sound aesthetically revolting, at least to me.)
What I meant was a language, like Estonian or Finnish, which lacks gendered grammar entirely. That sort of cultural and linguistic structure/norm probably isn’t going to happen without a great deal of time and who knows what else.
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