- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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I don’t get it, sorry
It’s about not being on a list
They want to be honest and mark their gender as nonbinary, but it’s easier to go with “female” because binary genders are less likely to be invalidated. Even if they try to present androgenous, people often still put them into one category or another. If they’re on estrogen and generally look more feminine, it’s easier to just go with “woman” rather than fight to be recognized as nonbinary.
That was my experience at least when I experimented with nb pronouns in the past. I eventually discovered that I only want to be seen as a woman, but I still found it annoying how rarely people respected my gender back then. It’s a privilege to fit on either side of the binary, so I don’t take it for granted.
Man respect to the community and all that but goddamn I got people who are very visibly masculine at work who go with they/them and I’ve probably called them he so many times on accident.
Like I try to be conscious of it but sometimes it’s hard if I’m just chatting. My brain just assigns someone a he/she and moves on.
I firmly believe everyone should use whatever pronouns make them happy but growing up in a very gender normative conforming society (USA, maybe a little less so now) it can be difficult to make the conscious choice of using the proper pronouns someone told me.
I do try though and I’m not complaining. The people I’ve accidentally misgendered know I am not doing it consciously or maliciously, we’re work buddies. I just know it can be very easy to accidentally do that. Now people that do it purposely with malice - fuck those people.
You can be visibly (and otherwise) “of” the binary, and still reject it. I have put down “they/them” in the past, not because I have a preference for “they/them”, but because I literally couldn’t care less about what gendered words other people use for me. I personally live as a man, dress like a man, etc. because it’s the path of least resistance. I was born with a penis, socialized to be a boy, etc. With a few exceptions, men’s clothes are just better, easier to shop for, have pockets, etc. (Sorry ladies.) It’s just easier to live as a man in this place, and I won a biological coin toss.
I don’t care one iota about “being a man” or defending an idealized version of masculinity. I don’t spend any energy whatsoever on making sure that I’m “man enough for the man club”. I do things like letting my daughter paint my nails because it brings her joy, and you better believe I’m wearing those painted nails around the office the next day. If someone has something to say about that, great! They’ve just identified themselves as someone who can be discarded for their opinions, and it didn’t cost me shit! I know that it’s a privilege to be able to have this attitude. I try to make sure it doesn’t go to waste.
On the flip side, there are those who care very much about their gender, for whom it is very real, and I respect that, as one does. I love all my trans, enby, queer, etc. homies very, very much, and I make sure they know that. I wouldn’t spend so much cognitive energy on worrying about getting the words wrong. If you do make a mistake with it, admit your mistake and apologize. Just show that you do care. Don’t just brush it off, and definitely don’t double down. In my experience, a reasonable person, regardless where they fall, will forgive you and move on from it fairly quickly.
Oh yeah they know I’m not doing it purposely.
Honestly I’d be perfectly fine if nobody had a gender and we just did whatever and weren’t dicks to another but that’s a world with very different humans and society.
I very much hate social norms and all that bullshit but wear the mask I have to so I can have a job and provide for my family and not die in the street but yeah … I hate the weird obsession over what is in people’s pants. I hate the weird obsession over who and how people fuck. I hate the stereotypical “boy/girl” dichotomy as a thing because it’s boring and feels stifling for everyone.
So yeah I didn’t mean my comment as a “fuck dudes with beards or other traditional masculine look wanting to use they/them pronouns” more just like a look I try my best and we do live in a society after all. Of course I’m going to be influenced by my surroundings and upbringing to just default he/she and sometimes that just happens.
The thing that helps more than anything else, for me at least, is to spend a lot of time in a community where everyone is invested in getting pronouns right – because it can be hard if you’re doing it all on your own, against the current, so to speak.
Luckily for me my workplace has gradually become such a place, where we used to never volunteer our preferred genders, to now where the norm is to introduce yourself with your name and pronouns if you’re comfortable, put them on name-tags, and we all try to help each other remember people’s pronouns.
The thing that helps more than anything else, for me at least, is to spend a lot of time in a community where everyone is invested in getting pronouns right
It’s the main reason I ever sought out trans spaces: people dear to me coming out and me wanting to learn how to… I guess the most honest way to put it, at the time, was “deal with that”. I can’t say I was particularly understanding or supportive, initially, but I didn’t wanna be an ass to people I care about and figured it’d help me be respectful, at least.
It helped a great deal, not just with learning to be respectful, supportive and just accepting things I don’t understand or can’t relate to, but also with reflecting on my own identity and experience.
My workplace is like this too! There have been a couple times employees have been disciplined, even fired for a pattern of using the wrong pronouns or deadnames. And not just once. Once is a mistake, these people were doubling and tripling down. Idk where they got those people, but it’s always a pleasure when the trash takes itself out!
HR software, though, especially Microsoft products, are fucking terrible at managing name changes and pronouns.
A few months ago I had to work one-on-one with a colleague in another department who I hadn’t met yet. I ended up (unknowingly) addressing them by their deadname because that’s what was showing for me in MS Teams. I was absolutely mortified, and apologized profusely as soon as I realized my mistake. My co-worker was very understanding but sadly this was mostly because it had happened to them multiple times already.
Turns out a bunch of us had (and continue to have) this “display” issue where a wrong name or image is shown, and the only “solutions” are to have all employees simultaneously delete hidden local caches and hope for the best, which is absolutely ridiculous, or just wait indefinitely, do nothing, and the data will magically sort itself out somehow. MS, true to form, claim that their perfect software, sculpted by the hand of God himself, is “working as designed” and that these things are not a big deal.
It took months to get the person’s name change fully propagated everywhere. Somehow, their deadname STILL randomly pops up from time to time, like it’s being pulled from some unknown stale DB copy that didn’t get the changes, or stale cached data is flowing back into a DB somehow? Either way, a database containing employee data which is supposedly an authoritative store of truth, and mostly a collection of short strings, is not supposed to work like that, right? Since it’s Microsoft, though, they can just ignore the issue, gaslight us, and continue getting away with causing humiliation. ADP as well is not far behind when it comes to data handling competence.
I consider myself nb. The focus on “getting gender right” is actually more focused on gender in the usa than anything I grew up with. Now it feels like gender norms are back hard, for whatever reason, and have come on hard due to the desire to constantly name it and talk about it along with saying certain way of dressing and acting are gender coded.
We weren’t a gender focused society before as much as now it feels like. And we aren’t gender focused as much as most of the world as we don’t gender things like coffee pots. For me, the last few decades have really made me feel the opposite of what others insist. I feel like gender norms are forced on me and gender titles are forced on me from every single side.
I don’t care what people call me but I do like being called “him” when people don’t know what I am at first online. I’ve got big titties though idgaf when I’m called she, either. I wish we would quit talking about gender so damned much. The sexism is coming back due to it.
It has come back very hard, because it’s on the way out. It’s a last-ditch effort - the last gasp of the old ways. These dreadful people are lashing out like cornered animals because they know they’re about to lose.
I sincerely believe that, if we hold this ground, a post-gender society is right around the corner.
Yeah I do think we’re in a interesting period right now in the US, we’re past the “reflexively suppressed because it’s unheard of” part of things and into the “a small but extremely vocal minority of hateful people are attacking us precisely because we’re more visible and accepted” part.
Obviously things can and probably will get bad before they get better, but pretty much everything that has recieved this kind of moral panic backlash has only gotten more mainstream as a result. (See: rock music, D&D, kink, socialism, witchcraft, tattoos, etc.)
Oh, yeah, when i was identifying as nonbinary without being a girl, I would just be honest and say nonbinary/genderfluid in all the forms, now I usually put female but that’s because now I identify as a nonbinary girl. And it didn’t really affect how people referred to me in person, they would just assume based on appearance, and for online stuff they would always just respect whatever I put. But a lot of it was just demographic data collection and didn’t affect anything anyway.
The Author’s comment when they posted this on Bluesky:
Life of Lamb #26 - Closet
I hate that living in the USA right now has forced me to weigh being authentic about myself IRL versus looking out for my safety.
Same. It’s how I feel about any form that has the option to disclose things like my cultural background or anything LGBTQ related. Feel like it’ll end up being a target on my back if I answer honestly…
Exactly why I created a new internet identity when I joined the fediverse with the intent to be open about myself.
My usual web identities are too tied to my civil identity, and the socio-political context in France is not so good, while still better than in the USA.
Moreover, I don’t come from a very tolerant social background. I had to be really independant to begin deconstructing my previously learned biases. (A never ending effort.)
I am curious about enbies. I understand trans people now, I think, just not the nuances about daily living, and social challenges.
But enbies, not yet
Well, considering that “transgender” and “non-binary” are both umbrella terms describy a great variety of experiences, it would be hard. NB even lies ousidet of the classical concepts of gender (at least in the cultures inheriting from the biggest colonial empires). So it’s hard to undertand all who are under these umbrellas.
I am not able to properly communicate how I experience my own non binarity. I just, for as long I can remember thinking about my gender, have undertood myself as mostly a man but with fractions of me that were not a man. (three gender in toal) But how to make it understandable to someone that doesn’t share the same experience ? I genuinely don’t know. Even more complicated, even though I have a dominant gender (man), it is mostly linked to my body. I think my main gender would very easily switch if my body magically switched to be mainly female or mainly asexual. (Beware the polysemy, i’m not talking about the asexual orientation.) I guess I do not feel that connected to the notion of gender itself.
For the daily struggle, well… Let’s just say I’m quite lucky I pass well as a white cishet monoromantic man, and don’t suffer from gender dysphoria to my knowledge. And although I currently hae no IRL community to discuss with freely about this kind of experience, that’s mainly because of social difficulties unrelated to my queerness.
All that, though, is the individual experience of a single enby. It cannot and must not be generalized in any way.
Would I be able to understand the experience of another enby ? Maybe, maybe not, it will depend on said experience. Same thing means I don’t fully understand transgender experiences. I understand what transgender people manage to communicate, and I learn from that. But since I don’t share their experiences, some aspects will always elude me. Still the same thing with the cisgender experience. I easily understand what can be externally observed, because the society I live in is built around cisgender people with traditionnal roman catholic christian gender roles.
The good thing is : fully understanding someone is not a necessary condition to fully accept and fully respect them. (But it is a contributing factor.)
Yeah same
:(
Saaame :(
tfw the form shouldn’t exist
As a demigirl I like when I can pick multiple options. I usually go girl, transgender, non-binary, and other:“demigirl”.
Ugh same :(
