Testimonies

I am still gathering experiences of nonbinary people who were active on the trans Tumblr since around 2013 for their recounting of what was happening with the word "enby". I received 10 responses so far and analyzed them:

anonymous

Summary: "Enby" was only ever used negatively by transmeds who saw all nonbinary people as fakers. The nonbinary community tried to push back against it for a time being by replacing "enby" with "nb".

winwardstar

Summary: "Enby" was always used by people of all ages. The idea that it's infantilizing/meant only for kids came from a group of people who had an overlap with those that claimed you cannot say "queer". This push was rooted in cringe culture and exclusionism. Enbies were bullied out of identifying as enbies.

anonymous

Summary: "Enby" was used by people of all ages as a shortening on "nonbinary", the idea that it's infantilizing came suddenly, possibly in late 2010s.

pngin-lvr

Summary: The respondent had identified as an enby for several years while being an adult, then suddenly a switch happened, and people were claiming the word is infantilizing.

ancientson

Summary: The word "enby" was initially mostly used by nonbinary people who were seen as stereotypical and were okay with it. Transmeds wanted nonbinary people pushed out of trans spaces, so they picked it up as pejorative. It was widely considered infantilizing and feminine. In 2019 or so there appeared a group of nonbinary people who did not identify as trans, and they tried to push the word "enby" onto others. They used transmed rhetoric and denied that the word "enby" existed prior to 2019.

fivekoboldsinacoat

Summary: The trans community was searching for a noun that means something other than man/woman for a long time. The word "enby" appeared during big changes of early 2010s: rise of the word "nonbinary", fall of the word "genderqueer" (as well as some other older terminology indicating gender variance), binarization of the word "transgender". The respondent, as well as some others, felt disheartened towards both "nonbinary" and "enby".

tigerinkangel

Summary: The idea of removing the word "enby" is playing into transmed propaganda. Transmeds hated the word "enby" when it first appeared, because they associated nonbinariness with being childish and cringy, and the contemporary hostility towards it might be connected to resurgence of transmedicalism and subconscious internalization of the transmed rhetoric.

anonymous

Summary: The word "enby" was used by the respondent as an adult at least 10 years ago. Around 2020 something happened and people started pushing back against it as inappropriate for adults.

deadratboys

Summary: Some people did not like the word "enby" when it was first introduced and insisted on using "nb" instead. However, it was an accepted umbrella term for some time.

anonymous

Summary: The respondent identified as genderqueer for years before coming across both words "nonbinary" and "enby" in the 2010s, and found "enby" infantilizing.

Intermediate conclusions

This is still a work in progress and I am still collecting opinions. However, I can make some conclusions from what I already gathered.

It appears that the word "enby" was used by some people regardless of age and was regarded as interchangeable with nonbinary/nb in the beginning of its existence. It was disliked by transmeds, who stereotyped being nonbinary as feminine, cringy, and fake and projected it onto the word, and some other people picked it up from that discourse. It was also disliked by people who preferred an earlier term "genderqueer". Something weird happened at the decade boundary (2010s/2020s), where different groups of people were aggressively insisting on "enby" being a very bad word on one side and a universally applicable word on the other.

Some people raised good points about how "enby" being perceived as childish or infantilizing is connected to transphobic stereotypes about the entire nonbinary experience. I would also like to add to it that trans youth are a very vulnerable group of trans people who frequently end up abandoned both by the cis society and the trans community, and hatred towards some words or other trans culture aspects due to association with trans youth should be examined more thoroughly.

I will continue gathering input for one more day and likely wrap it up tomorrow with part 2.2. Part 3 will be about other terminology derived from "enby" or proposed as synonymous.

Link to part 1.

We call ourselves a community and we are, that's important, but it is not like being a group that routinely meets irl or it's not even like being in a group chat where you routinely talk to the same people and can learn from each other. We are so many, we are so far away, there are so many barriers between us, and especially for people who cant risk coming out, I believe we do need to recognise that the online queer community isn't comparable to other types of communities.

In a community, the community's history and knowledge from elders would be taught to the younger members. We dont have a reliable connection like that, partially because of the danger transphobia poses and partially Because we're so spread out (i mean around the world). I think it's unfair to expect young people who are trying to put words to their experiences and find their own labels to have a degree in queer history. Im not saying it's unimportant to learn that history, of course it is important, but I think some folks apply expectations to the queer community that it simply cant meet.

What also sucked was that for a while non-binary folks tried to fight back against the exorsexism by forcing "nb" to be the "mature/proper" shorting for all non-binary folks which of course was stolen from the black community since it means "non black" and come from them first and, also meant as a young enby I was harassed by both trans meds and enbians for calling myself the "wrong shortening" and "being a transtrender".

This is why now I proudly call myself enby but of course use both enby and enbian as a shorting for all non-binary folks and am disapointed we still have enbian folks trying to frame the term enby itself as a bad term. It's okay if you don't call yourself enby but, just like with the word queer, we shouldn't try and erase it from the wider to community and it's full history.

That's close to what I remember too. I'm thinking about digging into the fuller backstory of "enby" and trying to make a timeline of its use.

I feel like a big part of the pushback against the word "enby" is the idea people have in their heads of an enby as someone young, cheerful, with a xenogender identity, nounself pronouns, and fandom-related hobbies. This image scares them because of the cringe culture, and they're trying to establish the seriousness of their own identities through hurting those they feel like fit the type. And this is not only harmful to the people they end up attacking in the process, but also completely useless for achieving their goal, because you cannot make nonbinariness look proper in the eyes of transphobes. They will finish talking about one archetype of a nonbinary person and move onto another.

We should learn to see value in each other instead and develop a sense of common goals - enbies, and enbans, and nonbins, and unbiern, and those who do not use any specific noun to refer to themselves. We don't have to all like each other's words. There are more important things to consider.

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