i saw a post the other day that said something like "if you identify as the gender you were assigned at birth, you are cis and shouldn't be allowed to call yourself trans" which i'm sure sounds reasonable if you don't know any, say, bigender people
Bigender people are non-binary, not trans
you are doing the same kind of "declaring what someone else's gender means" that this post is about, and also doing another thing that i was getting annoyed about just yesterday. so, first of all: if a bigender person identifies as cis, or trans, or cis and trans, then they are cis, or trans, or cis and trans, respectively. if they identify as neither, they are neither; if they identify as non-binary, they are non-binary. whichever ones they don't identify as, they aren't.
second of all, while some people use "non-binary" as a dumping ground to put all edge cases regardless of whether they want to be there or not, so far as i can tell the majority of people use "non-binary" to mean "a third gender, which uses they/them by default". if a bigender person is male and female, and uses he/him and she/her pronouns but not they/them pronouns, calling her "non-binary" when he doesn't want you to is functionally inaccurate! if someone says "i am both male and female" and your reaction is to go "got it, i'm putting you in the neither category," you have messed up. i do also know at least one agender person who uses he/she pronouns; you can't derive someone's gender from their pronouns. but you have to respect people's understanding of their own identities!
as a side note to my second point: if you are a programmer reading this post and going "but 'both' is just as non-binary as 'neither'!" i am going to need you to recognize that when there is colloquial usage of terms that also happen to be programming terms, the colloquial usage is the one that matters in day-to-day life.
we have GOT to stop litigating whether certain demographics count as trans. if someone identifies as trans, they are trans. full stop. you can't weasel your way out of respecting someone's identity just because it's not as straightforward and clear cut as you'd like.
so as a person who feels very strongly that "both" is a kind of "not-the-binary", i don't think that's a programming thing at all? like, i'm not thinking in those terms when i do gender theory. it might be a math thing, but it could also be a generation thing, or a regional thing, or... who knows.
and i think we're at risk of having one of those things where all the prescriptivist answers are wrong, because there are people out there who say "non-binary" and mean "both". and i think at this point we're sorta fucked because we don't have a way to distinguish which of several usages we intend, and it's not obvious to me that "popularity contest" is the best way to resolve that, or if it were, who would win. it's an ambiguous usage at this point, which is. great. but honestly it's fine as long as people don't assume that the particular variant they're used to is the only one.
total agreement on the underlying question, though. i think... like, it'd be really confusing to me if someone who had transitioned identified as "cis", but i'm not actually super motivated to try to stop them? so i think the right answer is "people will self-identify however they want and in general you don't need to understand why they identify that way".
I think we just need to apply the common-sense principle of language: when using language, you are expected to make reasonable efforts to make yourself understood, taking context into account; and the person you're communicating with is in turn expected to make reasonable efforts to understand you, also taking context into account. That means if you're in a context where you can expect people to understand the words "cis" or "trans" to mean particular things, you're both entitled to use them in that way, and required to not use them in any other way. So blanket statements like "Bigender people are non-binary, not trans" may be right or wrong depending on context.
i mean, in principle i sort of agree, but in this specific case, i'm genuinely totally stumped, i've never seen any usage under which that statement would be even coherent. i guess... if you assume that all trans people are in some significant way transitioning, and no bigender people are, mayyyyybe? but that doesn't seem likely.
"Bigender people are non-binary, not trans" falls apart completely when you consider nonbinary a subset of transgender.
I’m agender nonbinary. I identify as trans. My experiences with my own identity and the struggle to be recognised as myself align closer to a binary trans person than a binary cis person, but that literally isn’t necessary because I just am not cis. That’s enough.
“Tomatoes are fruit” I’m with you, this is a true and useful description “tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables” categorically false.
