Megathread Non-binary genders / Enbies - When Male and Female Aren't Special Enough

[YachieKicchou]

I've come to the conclusion, from the NBs I know online and irl, that they're mostly very narcissistic women who can't admit that they're ugly women, so they claim to be "boys" instead.

Also it's really easy to just call yourself masc-presenting/leaning nonbinary to impress arthoes to get with you. You don't have to put in any effort or change things but it makes everything easier anyways.

 

[goma]

Also it's really easy to just call yourself masc-presenting/leaning nonbinary to impress arthoes to get with you. You don't have to put in any effort or change things but it makes everything easier anyways.

Exactly. An average-looking or ugly woman gets no compliments, but even the ugliest enby will get lavished with ass-kissing compliments, praise, and called "brave" by a niche community. It's really sad.

 

[Spangled Drongo]

Knowing that a lot of these NB types tend to avoid porn altogether (see: anti-shipping culture), I don't think that's always the case. But I can see how in entertainment women aren't always depicted positively, and how they might conflate relating to a character of a different character with wanting to be that gender altogether.

That's where I was trying to go with my comment - overall most mainstream depictions of women tend to show them as hyper sexual, vapid with a bitchy "mean girl" attitude and conventionally beautiful, but the fact pop culture is getting more "sex positive" due to the normalisation of porn and so on does seem to have influenced that. Shrier also mentioned social media and its celebrities as having an influence on the whole view of what makes a woman, a woman and I think that's also got something to do with it. Those girls are often caked in makeup and showing a lot of skin, so combined with what might come up if you google something like "I hate being female" and get results from Tumblr and LGBTQIA+ sites with titles like why you might be non binary it's easy to understand that pop culture has a lot to do with it, combined with low self esteem.

I'm not saying the solution is to go back to Victorian times when women were forced to cover up and be "ladylike", but rather to normalise teaching kids that tastes, personality etc. don't have anything to do with what gender you are, and that it's completely possible to be female without being ditzy and glammed up. Likewise for boys and being aggressive, strong etc. (though the NB identity does seem a lot more common in girls).

 

[mental illness innit luv]

Met another self-proclaimed enby the other day. A friend of a friend. "They" had a face full of makeup, long ass hair, and wore a dress showing ample cleavage, and I think that tells you most of what you need to know. She also claimed to have DID, "mild autism", 17 suicide attempts, and "a lot of trauma", all while demanding verbal trigger warnings. All within a few hours of our very first meeting, mind you. I just politely nodded.

I guess she gets points for going by a vaguely unisex-sounding name, though. At least she tried with that.

 

[howyadoin]

Local enby teaches us about "gender envy", a term that a lot of enbies/trans people have been using lately.

 

[XeXerself]

Local enby teaches us about "gender envy", a term that a lot of enbies/trans people have been using lately.
View attachment 1996065

If trans means not identifying with your birth gender then almost everyone is trans, enbies really don't seem to realize that "agender" is technically the default state for most people because the average person doesn't sit around and obsess over gender identity like they do...

 

[LeeHarveyOslik]

I am not a native speaker so when i first time met the term "enby woman / enby man" i thought at first that it was just a mispronounced word "envy" that made into cirlulation in this distorted form. Something like that "VEWY HAWD" and so on. And i thought that it was something like "person that envies woman" or "person that envies man"

 

[howyadoin]

Imagine showing this to a random person on the street.

 

[Maurice Caine]

Think every tumblr aesthetic from the last 10 years, all being worn at the same time, with a septum ring and a trans flag pin.

"Guys gender is everything and nothing all at once, it both doesnt matter at all and is also the only thing that differentiates me and gives my life any meaning...
...Yeah I'm depressed why do you ask"

This dude looks grunge.

 

[Chocola]

Imagine showing this to a random person on the street.

View attachment 2001656

random person will probably say "oh? that's valid, bless you for educating me kind strangerino "
most eat this shit up without questioning

 

[broadrod31]

How asinine lol

 

[DoubleD]

On the subject of non-binary clothes, this post from Marlowe Lune comes to mind:

I guess this is my life now... — Non-binary Presentation Terms

archived 16 Mar 2021 20:49:41 UTC

archive.li

 

[XeXerself]

View attachment 2002743
How asinine lol

Not to be that guy, but if they're both biological females, then the relationship technically is "lesbian" and likely won't be mistaken for straight unless one happens to pass well, lol.

 

[senpaigender]

Might go against someone else's experience (and I'd love to read what you have to say, if it does): but I swear I have never, ever met an AMAB "enbie". It's always a woman who wants to escape being a woman (and everything society says a woman must be). It seems to me that they also come loaded down with a ton of self-image issues. I used to run with this one "enbie" that was a dark-skinned girl, but always cried about not being as pale as she wanted/literally said looking in the mirror gave her trauma. It's just sad.

There's so much I don't understand, either. If "gender doesn't mean anything" then why are you desperate to go by an enbie/special label? Make it make sense

 

[XeXerself]

Might go against someone else's experience (and I'd love to read what you have to say, if it does): but I swear I have never, ever met an AMAB "enbie". It's always a woman who wants to escape being a woman (and everything society says a woman must be). It seems to me that they also come loaded down with a ton of self-image issues. I used to run with this one "enbie" that was a dark-skinned girl, but always cried about not being as pale as she wanted/literally said looking in the mirror gave her trauma. It's just sad.

They exist, but they come in different forms IME:

• transwoman with "one foot out of the closet" (usually going from "he/him" to "he/they" to "all pronouns" to "they/she" and then just "she/her")
• a "woke" leftist man who wants to escape accountability for being a creep - you can't say that sending unsolicited dick pics is "male behavior" if "they" don't identify as a man!
• gay men who drank the gender juice and/or have trauma associated with manhood (see Jonathan Van Ness)

 

[howyadoin]

Might go against someone else's experience (and I'd love to read what you have to say, if it does): but I swear I have never, ever met an AMAB "enbie".

Same here. I was more accepting of nonbinary people back then and when I was doing some research on them, almost of the sources were AFAB. The AMABs would end up being trans women in the end (see Contrapoints and Riley Dennis)

 

[ShortPoppy]

If trans means not identifying with your birth gender then almost everyone is trans, enbies really don't seem to realize that "agender" is technically the default state for most people because the average person doesn't sit around and obsess over gender identity like they do...

Right. I'd love to know more about what these people are basing their identity on, if they are basing it on anything. Have they even seen those "What gender is your brain" online quizzes? Where you answer a bunch of questions - not about whether you like cars or computer games or sparkly nail polish, but about your thinking patterns, emotional awareness, etc., then you get a score placing you somewhere on a spectrum between 'male' and 'female'.
That's right, a spectrum. A continuous variable, not a discrete one with an integer X number of allowed classifications.
Granted, I don't know how relevant this idea is to current psychology, and yeah, no-one should be shopping for their identity in online quizzes, but it makes a point which I'm going to quote verbatim from another place on the internet I read it from:

Nonbinary people are not a minority. There are over 7 billion of us.

Might go against someone else's experience (and I'd love to read what you have to say, if it does): but I swear I have never, ever met an AMAB "enbie". It's always a woman who wants to escape being a woman (and everything society says a woman must be). It seems to me that they also come loaded down with a ton of self-image issues. I used to run with this one "enbie" that was a dark-skinned girl, but always cried about not being as pale as she wanted/literally said looking in the mirror gave her trauma. It's just sad.

There's so much I don't understand, either. If "gender doesn't mean anything" then why are you desperate to go by an enbie/special label? Make it make sense

I know of one male "non-binary" person in real life, though I've never met him personally. Last year, my workplace started up an online chat channel for casual conversations, the kind most people were missing out on working from home, and under a topic relating to our company's LGBTetc. Pride Group he came out as "Non-Binary". There was talk about the importance of pronous, and a suggestion for everyone to add their pronouns to their email signatures or user profiles or something. (Probably only a few people in the aforesaid LGBT group would actually have done this.)

This pissed me off for several reasons:
a) Pronoun fetishisation is bullshit, and is such a western-hemisphere/first world problem - I bet there aren't many non-binary people in language areas where all pronouns are gender neutral,
b) Why is a grown man so insecure that he needs to identify himself into a special category that everyone needs to be educated about,
c) We're a professional organisation that delivers scientific and technical services, not the kind of artsy hipster corporation that would foster alternative genders,

but most of all,

d) The whole concept of 'non-binary' viscerally offends me. I remember being young and confused and struggling, and relating that struggle directly to being female in a predominantly male environment, and all the sexist rubbish I had to internalise to go to war against my gender/sense of self.
I didn't become 'non-binary' though, because I did have an unshakeable sense that you can't really escape from your problems or your biology by hiding behind an Identity, also gender essentialism is dumb. What will it take these numbskulls to recognise the same.

Sorry for the rant/thanks for listening.

 

[XeXerself]

Right. I'd love to know more about what these people are basing their identity on, if they are basing it on anything. Have they even seen those "What gender is your brain" online quizzes? Where you answer a bunch of questions - not about whether you like cars or computer games or sparkly nail polish, but about your thinking patterns, emotional awareness, etc., then you get a score placing you somewhere on a spectrum between 'male' and 'female'.
That's right, a spectrum. A continuous variable, not a discrete one with an integer X number of allowed classifications.
Granted, I don't know how relevant this idea is to current psychology, and yeah, no-one should be shopping for their identity in online quizzes, but it makes a point which I'm going to quote verbatim from another place on the internet I read it from:

Most (but not all) enbies are tucutes and believe that gender identity is something you "feel" in you, so I doubt they would even entertain such a quiz since the brain sex theory is mostly what transmedicalists swear by. (There are transmedicalists who identify as or support the concept of non-binary, I used to be acquainted with two, but I don't know if they believed they had a "non-binary brain sex" though.)

It is really funny when enby logic gets so casually sexist and gender role-reinforcing that some do loop back into that logic, though. I once stumbled on a comic explaining why "xenogenders" are valid and the reasoning was "gender is stored in the brain so autistic people can have weird gender feelings", which the latter can have some truth to it since most enbies are autistic girls...

 

[Coffee Druid]

They exist, but they come in different forms IME:

• transwoman with "one foot out of the closet" (usually going from "he/him" to "he/they" to "all pronouns" to "they/she" and then just "she/her")
• a "woke" leftist man who wants to escape accountability for being a creep - you can't say that sending unsolicited dick pics is "male behavior" if "they" don't identify as a man!
• gay men who drank the gender juice and/or have trauma associated with manhood (see Jonathan Van Ness)

I know one AMAB enby, a mutual friend of some acquaintances I have. Dude is gay and very much the stereotypical fat bearded bear who's into pup play. Overall very much a man. Came out as enby last year. I think he is definitely the "woke leftist" option, maybe the third. He's dabbled in drag so maybe he just figured he'd run with it and go for more woke points.

Only other enby I know was a punk/alt girl who looks exactly the same as before, just calls herself a gender neutral name now. She had parents who were very woke too (including one who is a witch) so I guess it was inevitable.

 

[admiral]

I guess when you're a giant snake made out of countless other snakes, being non-binary is fair enough.

The wiki still calls him a 'he' though