A Polite Melody

Whenever I would think of genderqueer (the term in vogue in my twenties) and nonbinary as positions, I would imagine them as truly heroic. As naming people who are able to exist in a space where others don’t see who you know yourself to be, but you just don’t care. Your sense of yourself is so strong you don’t need to change your body to get other people to see you in a certain way; you just know that other people are wrong and that you’re right and that’s okay. And I thought I could never be strong enough to do that. In my life I had associated it with the most unbearable dysphoria, the most unbearable gap between how I was seeing myself and how other people were seeing me, especially once I had taken on the pronouns he/him but was trying to transition without testosterone. So, I thought of nonbinary as this heroic position for a long time and then, more recently, I’ve begun to have doubts and think, well, maybe that’s not how it feels. 

LISTEN, KADJI. I DO NOT WANT TO BE YOUR NONBINARY HERO. I DO NOT WANT TO BE SEEN AS TRULY HEROIC.

They seem just. Obsessed, with this image of nonbinary people as "brave" for being visibly androgynous?

[J]: [...] But this is the problem because we don’t have an operative, positive account of what’s at stake in nonbinary trans femininity, so it gets filtered through these really superficial lenses. Like, “well, they get treated like shit all the time, but they’re really resolute, plus it’s empowering to have facial hair and wear lipstick,” and I’m like, yes, okay, but tell me more! I want to know. Kadji: Maybe my major question is why there isn’t more of a discourse about all of this? Even an intra-community discourse where questioning people could go online and hear “this is what it means to identify with this as opposed to that, this is what you do.” I don’t know if I should read that as a refusal or— Jules: Or just the impossibility of speaking outside a discourse of gender? Which in some ways, nonbinary is trying to do in a really sophisticated way, but which remains very hard. How can you simultaneously dissent from a system but still maintain its central presumption, which is that gender is a fundamentally important facet of the self? That seems like a really complex tangle that, technically, is not unique to being nonbinary. Even cis women have this problem to some extent, but there’s something really interesting in the nonbinary case that is not being unleashed. How can we understand the phenomenologies attached to different trans identities of this moment and what their claims are on the relationship between the self and the social? It seems like the contemporary taxonomy of gender identity and expression suggests that every identity position is valid so long as it is articulated and can therefore be respected, and in that sense it becomes devoid of content. How do you give an account of yourself in this situation?

This just feels like "I don't get nonbinary people" soaked in fifty-three layers of academic language, all to avoid confronting the fact that nonbinary people are nonbinary in the same way a trans woman is a trans woman. They just cannot help but insist that nonbinary people are "heroic" and "trying to [speak outside the discourse of gender] in a really sophisticated way," like they are truly only able to conceptualize nonbinary identity as a political move and act helpless about their ability to talk to a nonbinary person and take what they say seriously without secretly re-interpreting it as whatever bullshit they want (such as "nonbinary people think they are soooooo much better than us binary people!" looking at you, Jules.)

More exorsexism:

But one of the things you and I have been trying to understand is what’s the historical trajectory here to nonbinary. For a long time, the line between a faggot—a really effeminate gay person, a queen, or even a drag queen—and a trans femme was blurry and there is a lot of cultural anxiety about that slide in Western culture. That you might go all the way, that it might be horrifying and abjecting, or it might be something like the total freedom of feminization or castration, or even bottomhood (to which I laugh, as a femme top). It’s this sort of construct of the gay imaginary. But it also leads to this question: since there’s so little space for nonbinary trans femmes today and there’s a lot of pressure on them to put out something legible, they have to use this taxonomy of “oh, I’m not a man or woman, but I’m definitely not a man”—and then what? I’m always searching for the positive account that comes after “here is what I’m not,” and I’d like to see more cultural space granted to that. If you’re a nobinary trans femme that has a largely aesthetic component to your transition—say, makeup, clothes, and pronouns—what is it that differentiates you positively from the faggot as a gay boy or feminine person who is not a man? I want to underline that there has been precious little oxygen accorded to that, so this is not a criticism of any of these people. Not enough has been granted to them to affirm their desires. And since there is so much pressure in our contemporary taxonomy to separate gender from sexuality, it seems to make the situation even more impossible.

I am just. so confused by her confusion here? Once again, Jules, JUST TALK TO NONBINARY FEMMES ABOUT THIS??????? Why in the WORLD are you having this conversation with a binary trans man. What purpose does this serve except jerking each other off on how much nonbinary people confuse you and seem to have no phenomenological basis for their existence.

[Kadji]: So, I thought, okay, gay male culture has done its best to kill the possibility of faggotry, but here are nonbinary femmes bravely trying to resuscitate it as a living possibility rather than a site of abjection. But as time has gone by, I’ve started to wonder if maybe that’s not what they’re doing, and it’s still unclear to me because of the lack of a space for that kind of discourse, or a refusal to explain themselves in that kind of way. I’m quite surprised, given the amount of space that was devoted in the late 1990s to early 2000s to figuring out the butch/trans man proximity, that there’s still a vacuum for that kind of discourse on the other side. How do you know if you’re a gay man or a trans woman? How do you know if you’re a trans woman or a nonbinary femme? This contributes to my lack of understanding of what a phenomenological position for nonbinary femme might be. Again, I don’t know if that’s what any nonbinary femmes are trying to do, but if that is what some are trying to do, I’m not sure it’s working. As in, I’m not sure that enough people know how to read or respond accordingly to a trans femininity that isn’t either gay effeminacy or trans womanhood.

WHO GIVES A FUCK IF PEOPLE KNOW HOW TO RESPOND TO US. for a lot of nonbinary people its live illegibly but openly or be in the closet forever and want to kill yourself because there is no space for you. I hate to pull the "we have dysphoria" card, but like, WE DO HAVE DYSPHORIA TOO, YOU KNOW? for a lot of nonbinary femmes there is no fucking "project" other than living a life that makes you feel real despite never being given any social reality. They go on to talk about how butches apparently have more cultural legibility, but I do not understand why the "faggot" or femboy or drag queen is not seen as a nonbinary femme equivalent? There is plenty of hostility from cis woman butches towards nonbinary and transmasculine butches. I guess the point is that all of those rely upon the assumption of attraction to men.... but so does butch, and there are gay transmascs who still identify as butch, butch4butch (which for some was a way of being a gay trans men when the option did not seem available) has always been treated negatively, and once again. Why is nonbinary identity being judged around people can get what we are by looking at us?

& then there's the same old bullshit about how transmascs have always had more cultural space and "reasons to transition" (what?), alongside a quote in which she says "and who the fuck in this world is allowed to desire to be a woman?" tell me you know nothing about how misogyny works. People raised as women are expected to desire to be a woman, obligated to do so. I do not know why the fuck people cannot get it in their heads that yes, womanhood is treated as a lesser state of existence, but for those who are expected to fulfill the role of daughtermotherwife, that lesser state is what they are meant to be happy with. They also claim there is "so much more cultural space for mascs, including nonbinary, and there’s so much more history (for butches and non-binary mascs)." Which. Fucking. Where.

ultimately, i think this final part of this interview hits more clearly on what issue they are taking with nonbinary people:

[Kadji] This is a hypothesis, but I do think today’s taxonomies seem more confusing than ever—though perhaps that doesn’t feel true to people who are coming into their genders today. But I believe that they are more confusing than they are helpful to actual queer and trans people. [...] And so, I imagine that today, when there is a huge proliferation of options and the options often overlap or are synonymous without substantial phenomenological accounts to differentiate them, and the pressure to come into a true self has never been greater than it used to be—it seems just flabbergasting and impossible. What I’ve realized is that I believe that the matter of gender is practical and relational. It’s not about who you are inside, it’s more about how you would feel most comfortable in the world. It’s not Who are you? but How do you want to live?  Had that been the discourse when I was coming up, I would have breathed a sigh of relief. I don’t have to figure out who I am on the inside, I just have to figure out how I want to live.

look, i'm a pragmatist and a phenomonologist, i also see gender as being to some degree inherently practical and relational. but as a nonbinary person, i do not have the luxury of living the way that makes me feel fucking comfortable. my feelings of being nonbinary are not abstract, they materially impact me. nonbinary identity is about survival, to me, point blank period. survival comes first, survival is where the term nonbinary/genderqueer/whatever terms we use emerges because it emerges from us no longer being able to live without giving voice to our sense of otherness.

demanding nonbinary provide a phenomenological account that satisfies binary "transsexuals" who define their transsexuality opposed to nonbinary people, using the language of "gender is practical and relational, not who you are inside," maybe i'm being dramatic here when i say this, but its a threat to nonbinary survival. patriarchy makes us illegible and then we are punished i mean critiqued i mean "we're just asking questions!!" for not being legible. because we practice, in Jules' words, "nonbinary idealism" and are all rich white people who are just doing this to be heroic and make ourselves look more #woke than binary transsexuals.

anyways, shoutout to one of the people in the comments who said:

you two talk as though non-binary femmes (heroically, but also for fun) put on some makeup and change their pronouns and thereby become illegible. for my part, i have always felt illegible (how is that for a phenomenology of non-binary gender). most of the answers to your questions here are in your own the text if you begin from the assumption that non-binary people have a genuine experience of their gender as neither men nor women.

^ literally exactly the point. Jules and Kadji are exorsexist and fundamentally do not seem to grasp the idea that nonbinary people feel nonbinary and that feeling nonbinary has a real impact on your life regardless of whether you want it to or not. They literally cannot, or refuse to, see nonbinary gender as functioning the same as their genders, and so treat nonbinary people like a peculiar species of not-quite-trans with mysterious motivations, and not just like normal fucking trans people.