Before you choose an option on our survey (foot of page) let’s hear from this week’s opinion ranter: Anna Kamari.
EDITOR: Hi, Anna: Can you briefly summarize why you don’t agree that there is a gender called Non-binary?
ANNA: Basically, ‘non-binary’ is an expresion of your personality…not an expresion of gender.
If you are a person who feels no affinity for masculinity and femininity as currently expressed in our society then that does not mean that you are a whole new gender… it simply means that you are a person who feels no affinity for masculinity and femininity as currently expressed in our society.
There are many words for this feeling, from ‘androgynous’ to ‘non-binary’ to ‘bigender’ – and they are all valid as statements of your feelings about gender… but they are nothing more than a statement about your feelings, personality and politics.
So if non binary can’t be a gender…what can? In other words, how do myou define ‘gender’?
There are only two genders – male and female – and we have clear linguistic, biological and legal rules about how we denote them.
Primarily, gender is decided in the womb and you are born male or female. However, if you suffer from gender dysphoria and are transgender then you can go through various legal and medical steps to change your gender to male or female. That is ‘gender’ in a nutshell – male or female – there are only two and not the 987 of them that exist on transgender Tumblrs and wikis and blogs.
But why do you care so much… if someone feels a certain way about their gender then why can’t they construct their gender identity around that?
I care because I am a transgender woman and I feel that it is things like being a bigender, nonbinary pansexual AMAB that confuses and alientaes us from the ordinary people of this country whose support we are trying to win over.
The current pick n’ mix of genders just plays into the whole alt-right and transphobic narrative that the trans person chooses their gender on the basis of how they feel on a particñuar day. When you get non binary people saying that on Mondays and Tuedsdays they go to work as Eric and on Friidays as Teresa…it makes a whole mockery of gender and makes us look capricious, incvoherent and disrespectful of basic human realitioes – social and biological.
But isn’t non-binary kind of present in biological nature. Look at intersex people.
While it’s true that biology throws up exceptions to gender clarity such as intersex individuals, that’s the nature of biology. Just because some people are born with four fingers we don’t change our categorisation of humans as a five-finger animal. Similarly, we don’t let gender anomnalies allow us to change the entire system of genders. There are only two of them. It’s an either/or. You’re male or female.
What you can’t do is create a new gender or meta gender or no gender. We all understand what it means to feel you’re no gender or both genders or above gender, but just as feeling Pakistani but having an american passport doesn’t make you Pakistani, having a feeling you have no gender doesn’t equate to literally having no gender.
There are many teens who have a stringer affinbity with the culture of trap musdic and the Afron American
NUltimarely it’s a misdirected impulse and people should direct it properlyon binary as a political position
I have a lot of sympathy for the feeling of being non.binary, I just think it’s non sensical. However, I do see a lot of sense in non binary as a political and social vision. A person can believe that the asignation of gender and resultant social conditioning of male and females is basd for society and a cause of gender inequality and a society that doesn’t fulfill its true potential.
This beliefs leads the non binary person to hold the idea that we need to forget gender completely and transcend it. They then propose that we get past the problem of pronouns by inventing new ones or useing they. The person sees themselves as onr of the first pioneers in this new approach to gender and d3scrives themselves as ‘non binary.’
The problem with this is that this is a political position. Having a political position is fine…but forcing people to change the pronouns they use is shoving your politics right to the forefront of every conversation be it asking if someone wants a cup of tea or a chat with your boss. It is not normal to make every conversation and every sentence politically charged in thisx way. Alsdol, .. it also might violate or offend the interlocutors politics.
Whether I’m socially conservative or aor a Taqoist who ses the need for male and female energy in the universe, UI might find it extremely important for my politics that gender binary exists…so who are you to start dictating the way I talk about gender?
and when you forced people to use your prefewrred pronound and you refuse to identify
