Earlier this week I was in a weird position of trying to explain to someone who seemed to be in a good place what the deal was about a headline making Olympic win by an openly trans person, because the person in question is nonbinary, and turns out when the overwhelming majority of exposure most people get to the very concept that trans people exist at all comes exclusively from propaganda that specifically seeks to demonize trans women and makes a conscious effort to hide that trans men and non-binary people even exist because they undermine arguments, people are rather understandably TOTALLY FREAKING LOST when, you know, a nonbinary person wins a gold in the Olympics.
So, yeah, before I get too deep into my 102 rambling here, a football/soccer player from out as nonbinary. Before coming out as nonbinary, what they were mistakenly labeled as by society was a woman, and they were consequently already playing on the women's team before coming out (and indeed had a previous Olympic medal, so all the news organizations leaving out theCanada named Quinn won a gold medal at the Olympics, after having come "openly" from "first openly trans winner" aren't even just forgetting why anyone cares who the hell Caitlyn Jenner is, they're celebrating the wrong win for this SPECIFIC trans athlete). So... at no point were they a man, nor were they considered to have been a man by anyone, nor does any part of this story involve any sort of surgery or HRT. Just, literally someone who was assigned female at birth going "yeah, not actually a woman" and getting paperwork corrected. And then you know, also winning a gold medal at the Olympics, which is generally considered to be a huge deal.
It's a significant thing to celebrate in a basic rights and dignities sense because hey look, an openly trans person getting celebrated for doing an impressive thing, isn't that nice everybody?
And it's something bigots are getting all bent out of shape about because they just have a general genocidal hatred of all trans people and don't ever want to see feel good stories, and they're extra active in shouting about it because, you know, if you've already done all the legwork of convincing the average person that the only trans people who exist are trans women, and your whole purpose on this earth is convincing people that trans women are dangerous monsters who have to be hunted down and killed, you are absolutely going to point at headlines saying "first openly trans athlete wins gold for women's team" and start shouting about how it's proof that those 17' tall razor-fanged hulking trans women have finally begun the invasion and will surely now rise up in force and enslave the rest of society to toil endlessly in the estradiol mines until the end of days. Despite our non-presence.
Oh and their name is just Quinn. They used to have a first name to go with that but it was pretty feminine and rather than change it to something else they just legally deleted the whole thing to go surname only. Which is honestly a pretty rad move, but that's what's up there.
Anyway though yeah I wanted to ramble more broadly about some of the weird intentional language jamming stuff, because I feel like the current big strategy is to focus less on spreading lies like I debunked in this simple primer forever ago:
https://secretgamergirl.tumblr.com/post/186627278145/a-little-fact-checking-primer-on-trans-people and focus on just speaking in such utter gibberish and arguing against weir strawmen that the people who clearly understand they're talking to a murder-minded fascist and want to adopt an opposing position can't actually even work out what the opposing position even really is. One big part of that is how for a while now they've been policing themselves against ever referring to trans women as anything other than just "men" no matter what the context is, and forcing people to decode that and cede them... honestly the entire disingenuous argument as an entry fee to even have it. I genuinely do not understand how that is as effective as it is, because as I've tested and explained plenty, you can shut them down completely by simply not doing all the work for them. If they say "[X thing relevant to trans women] means men will [whatever]" you just respond "nobody here is saying anything about men at all, what the hell are you even talking about?" and then they will just instantly stop posting, presumably having crumbled into dust. Please try this at home.
Other weird language confusing tactics include the whole bit where they carry around signs that say "sex not gender" and "woman = adult human female" which... I mean it's good to recognize these as fascist symbols and handle the people holding them accordingly, but are part of this whole weird mythology they've just invented whole cloth where rather than being completely synonymous terms, "sex" is like, this real ironclad thing they teach you about in like 3rd grade or whatever where either you're male or you're female as per god's holy decree and that's Science, and then "gender" is this weird thing made up by queer Jewish communists in those new women's studies classes or whatever where you have to call people "men" or "women" when you know they're really not and they just have some kind of sick mental delusions or whatever and they really need to be lobotomized.
Now, obviously that is all just weird conspiracy theory BS on their part, but it's all framed like a really hostile reading of this thing trans people are always talking about, and we just... don't? Ever?
Like, the words "sex" and "gender" both kinda predate the English langage, and have been used interchangeably in the sense of talking about being female or whatever for that whole time. Scientists use them interchangeably. Government forms use them interchangeably. The same bigots who fly these banners use them interchangeably when not quoting these specific slogans.
And I don't find it particularly plausible to suggest, as these bigots seem to suggest, that some trans woman got up and stage one day to give a big speech about being some kind of "male woman" or whatever? Like... I too am an adult female human, weird T-shirt lady. Your point?
As best as I am able to tell, some bigot saw some variation on this "genderbread person" image on tumblr like 15 years ago, flew into an utter rage and has never let it go. Fascists get weirdly fixated like that. Like that woman with the red hair and the thick framed glasses they have the one photo of where they caught her mid-word and they've been slapping it on every random thing for like a decade now.
But anyway, the genderbread person sucks? It's a random uncredited image that just kinda started making the rounds forever ago that like, 50/50 odds was either made by some teenager with a slightly better than average grasp on queer stuff to try and explain to someone how being trans isn't just like, "gay but even more so," or it was made by some 4chan troll parodying similar efforts. I guess there's also an outside chance it's originally from some magazine article but I'm not splitting hairs on that vs. some teenager's blog post. In any case it does not actually represent anything it's trying to as someone with a firm grip on what they're talking about would likely try to portray it (nonbinary people don't fit on a slider, asexuality doesn't work out here, etc.) and if I had to guess from how it's categorized, someone might have been really specifically concerned with drawing lines between being gay, trans, and into drag as specific concepts? Very much doubt a trans person is responsible for the whole thing since we kinda don't tend to draw diagrams with big circles pointing at brains and genitalia like that. That's more the MO of the sort of people who hears you're a trans woman and immediately shouts "pre-op or post-op!?" like a total creep, y'know?
But anyway, again, I keep digressing from weird bigot gibberish. Another slogan that I mean, certainly isn't new, but seems to be getting pushed harder than usual lately, is where they shout "there's only two genders!" which, again see first off is weird when you're also shouting "sex not gender!" but like... it's untrue. It's untrue on a lot of levels. But the specific contexts they consistently seem to deploy it in are ones where it's also completely irrelevant to the matter at hand.
Like, bigots will be lobbying for new laws to ban trans women from using public restrooms, and they'll show up shouting "there's only two genders!" and again, there's not, but like, "female" is one of the two you're acknowledging exist, right? Because I'm one of those. I'm a circle floating over an upward pointing triangle, so this is the door I walk through when I have to pee, that's something we should be agreeing on.
Now, granted, a huge part of the propaganda these bigots have is an insistence that I am actually a circle floating over a triangle that's pointed down, and I should walk through the other door, but that Now, granted, a huge part of the propaganda these bigots have is an insistence that I am actually a circle floating over a triangle that's pointed down, and I should walk through the other door, but that one is still the other one of the two genders you acknowledge, right?
It's just kinda the weirdest nonsequiteur. I'll be happy to go to the mat to defend the existence of other genders, because like, I believe in cience and also what I see with my own two eyes and all. If you want to show up and try to argue that like, only one or two of the frogs in this photo is going to end up laying eggs because they're all only male or female, I'll take you to school. Or if you want to deny 19998 of the genders of that one species of fungus, or the genders of any of the kind of a freaking lot of actual human beings I know who are decidedly neither male nor female, we can get into that. But... no what we have, somehow, is a group of people going to huge lengths to completely erase from the public consciousness the fact that nonbinary folks exist, and then showing up with attacks specifically focused on causing harm to trans women (and possibly also harming trans men, who they also pretend don't exist), with big signs saying "there are only two genders."
And like, OK... why do YOU think you're holding that sign? To me it seems counterproductive to ever go busting it out, because then when you go screeching about a nonbinary person winning the Olympics playing on a team that matches up with how they were assigned at birth, it kinda feels like your response to getting exactly what you want is to lie about what you got as an excuse to keep screeching about it, which is just bad optics. And nonbinary people don't need you to get weird laws passed to keep them from using public restrooms that match up with their gender, since nobody has ever designated those anywhere.
So presumably the idea here is that you're creating this weird straw man, where trans women, the only sort of trans people you're willing to acknowledge exist, are insisting that there are... I guess exactly 3 genders? And those 3 genders are "man" "woman" and "trans woman" (from which of course they always drop the space), and then you want a new status quo where you don't acknowledge that third one as its own weird alien thing?
Because uh... speaking as a trans woman, we would also generally like that very much.
I actually am a regular, garden variety woman, who just had the misfortune of being born with an annoying endocrine thing requiring a couple cheap prescriptions and maybe a surgery or two to fix.
And I have the far greater misfortune that the particular terminology for this endochrine thing is I'm supposed to stick an adjective out there which causes fascists to absolutely lose their entire minds and try to murder people while making up the most utterly baffling lies about them.
Funnily enough, there are quite a lot of women who have, fundamentally, the EXACT same set of symptoms, and treat them in the EXACT same way, but aren't considered to be trans, and bigots will generally accept that yeah, those are just women, no need to try to murder them. Except, you know, when they see them when they're having a bad face day and falsely assume they're trans.
But anyway, point is yeah you can quit freaking out about this "third gender" you apparently just made up that nobody's actually calling to have recognized and chill the hell out. But those signs still have to go because again, there's way more than two genders. And in particular, there are living breathing human beings whose genders are neither "male" nor "female," and have to put up with a lot of crap as a result of society failing to acknowledge that. Which if really you bother to actually learn anything about how biology actually works, OR how societies come to be organized, really should not be a difficult concept to wrap your head around at all. It honestly only seems weird and counterintuitive because you had a lot of outright false information info drilled into your head growing up and never questioned any of it.
BUT as for whatfeels like the really important thing to understand, I'm sure, if you're generally uneducated about these things, if you're wondering what it means when you hear that someone is nonbinary/"a they" in terms of: whether they were "born male or female" have had/want some surgery/HRThave or have previously had a penis/vulva/breasts/facial hair/whatever other anatomical feature ... you have not been given any sort of information to help you answer that question.
If you hear someone is nonbinary all you get from that is "this person is not a man nor a woman" and if you hear "this person uses they/them" pronouns" all that means if you call them, you know, them. As opposed to "him" or "her" which you've just been informed would be incorrect guesses. And those aren't even necessarily a matched set.
"Nonbinary" just means "here's all the people who don't fit into one of the two big gender bins that the majority of people will pretty handily sort themselves into." There isn't some third bin they all fit to, it's just a general catch-all for people whose personal gender deal is rare enough not to justify a bin.
There's this popular perception of "nonbinary" as exclusively where someone (like, to the best of my knowledge, Quinn there, with the gold medal) who was assigned female at birth, and at some point said "hey, that female bit? That's wrong. I'm not one of those" without following that up with any really radical wardrobe shifts or going through red tape for years to get doctors to fix some endocrine problem or doing any sort of surgical stuff, and literally all anyone else has to do is just acknowledge "right, not a woman, we got that wrong" and it is WAY to common for people to not only assume that applies to all nonbinary people, but also to skip that last step where you acknowledge they aren't women beyond half-remembering to see "women and non-binary" some days and throwing non-binary people onto "lists of famous women" others but, there's also nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth, and other than clarifying that hey, that was incorrect, not a dude, aren't going to drastically shake anything up. And there's plenty of nonbinary people who WILL sit through the hell of red tape to get things done because their natural hormone balance is screwed up (and not necessarily wanting a balance point around where any of the rest of us generally keep things at that), or surgeries of various sorts to deal with things they do or don't want. All of which again, just comes down to the specific individual person we're actually talking about, and the bulk of which isn't going to be relevant to you even if you DO personally know them.
So, basically the whole point of this thread is just, hey, don't go around making weird out of left field assumptions about nonbinary people. Or ideally, about anyone else.
And the other point of this thread is that bigots have been making the active choice to create a separation between observable reality and the propaganda they spew out that for real it is not even worth the trouble any more to try to decode the gibberish they shout into coherent talking points. You're better off if you take the honestly quite distressingly accurate approach of not even assuming the sounds they make are even supposed to be meaningful words, just loud noises, like the bear from Annihilation.
