#nonbinaryphobia

This theory has been stewing in the back of my brain, lying in wait like a starved tiger ready to maul once its cage door has rusted open, and Undertale's 10th anniversary is the platinum bolt cutters doing their divine work.

It's going to upset a specific type of UTDR fan, for many others, I believe they will understand. It will sound harebrained, crazy, even potentially delusional; and I don't care anymore. It needs to be said.

Why did Chara hate humanity so much to the point of wanting to destroy them?

Why did Frisk and Chara "fall" into the Underground?

Why did Kris choose to live amongst the Monsters instead of fellow humans?

Let's look at something all of these characters have in common:

They all are canonically referred to by They/They pronouns and gender neutral terms.

What have so many "fans" of Undertale and Deltarune been doing in regards to these 3 characters since the games came out? Literal, actual, real life flesh and blood humans, have been doing?

Misgender them. Deny their respective personhoods. Try to decide their genders for them, trying to base it on how they look or act or how they interact with certain characters.

This is a real life experience for what I'm certain is every nonbinary person on the planet Earth. People trying to decide who nonbinary people are because they themselves cannot understand what it means to be nonbinary, because they don't try to understand, or they simply just won't accept it. It's too different. Too weird. Too freakish. Too monstrous.

We already know that the humans hated the monsters because they Looked Different, Were Weird + Freakish, and did things (like magic) that they couldn't understand and didn't want to understand. They were ignorant and "afraid" of the monsters to the point of being hateful; waging a war against them in order to force them Underground.

They're transphobic, and not the standard binary-trans-transphobic. They're transphobic in the specific type to nonbinary folks. They're exorsexist and enbyphobic.

Think about it: If they present as masc, the fellow humans would say: "Oh so you must be a boy, I will use he/him!". If they present as fem, the humans would go "So you're a girl then? She/her because I saw you in a skirt once". And presenting "neutral" is a whole other can of worms, because what is considered "neutral" gender in a world where gender is widely seen as binary "this-or-that"?? Some nonbinary folks don't even have the means to present traditionally androgynous, so it wouldn't even matter, they get misgendered either way. Humans don't want to do the heavy lifting of deconstructing gender as a construct, that's too HARD.

So they abuse, demonize, belittle, and essentially other these nonbinary children to the point where they would rather live (or die, like Asriel guessed Chara or Frisk was trying to do) with Monsters who would absolutely accept them and DO (and the evidence of this is apparent throughout both games and ALL chapters of Deltarune), because the Human Society saw them as just as Weird, Freakish, and Different that they all must be Monsters too.

Then it makes even more sense why Kris wants to fit in with their monster family so much. They don't want to feel like an "other" anymore in their own family, that they chose, that chose them back.

Chara was from a different and much farther back time. I speculate the abuse they suffered from being Nonbinary and Not Cis or Binary Trans was so bad that the Fall was actually an attempt on their life. Surviving and getting a chance at revenge for all they'd suffered at such a young age, as well as Freeing Their Chosen Family and the Ones Who Had Also Been Othered and forced to hide, OF COURSE they would give their life for that plan. The rage. The hurt. It could all end if they took out the humans.

Transunity believes transmisogyny, transandrophobia and nonbinaryphobia are three arms of the same transphobic oppression and that to resist transphobia, you must believe in the fight to eradicate all three arms of transphobia.

Eliminating transmisogyny will not eliminate transandrophobia and nonbinaryphobia.

Eliminating transandrophobia will not eliminate transmisogyny and nonbinaryphobia.

Eliminating nonbinaryphobia will not eliminate transandrophobia and transmisogyny.

All three must be combated and no trans person should be left behind.

at any rate, the current accepted definition for the term lesbian is inherently bisexual! everyone says it means “attraction to women and nonbinary ppl” (which is nb-phobic outright ANYWAYS by lumping ALL nonbinary ppl with women -- this is what ppl are criticizing when they say we’re treated as “women-lite”) so if youre not being a nb-phobic asshat, you then have to acknowledge that woman and nonbinary are different genders, thereby making lesbianism a fundamentally bisexual identity as it includes to attraction to two or more genders. 

like think critically for a moment. what about a bigender lesbian who feels like they are both a man and a woman? do you personally get to decide, do you personally get to have the authority, to choose which identity of theirs to suppress in order to cram them into one specific neat little box? whichever way you try to pigeonhole them, youre promoting gender binarism, which is nb-phobic. trying to cut up and divide ppl’s identities like nations erecting borders is dehumanizing. 

another aspect of this issue ive noticed is that almost every single person ive met who self-identifies as a bi or mspec lesbian is trans or nonbinary. they often have complicated relationships to gender and sexuality that sweeping statements like “lesbians cant like men!!!” end up erasing their experiences. ive seen ppl claim its a term used by cis women to describe sleeping with trans women and i cant stress enough how in all the reading and research ive done on bi lesbianism that ive never once seen that cited as a definition or something having been done in practice. its literally just ignorant teenagers or young adults in their early 20s who know nothing about their community’s culture or history talking straight out of their asses. and if there are ppl who do this, theyre extreme outliers and its disingenous to act like mspec lesbians would defend such a level of transphobia when, again, most mspec lesbians are transgender themselves and are well aware that this division occured bcus of terfs.

read queer history yall. for the love of whatever you consider sacred and holy in this world pls fucking read queer history. dont get all of your information off of social media, random unsourced carrds made by teenagers who obviously dont make an effort to learn about their own community, and bad faith internet debaters who make conclusions drawn off what amounts to nothing more than “vibes” essentially. these people have really big loud mouths, but theyre simply wrong. material history will never agree with them. 

throughout history, bi and lesbian have more or less meant and were treated as the same thing, including both women who exclusively were attracted to other women AS WELL AS women who were attracted to both women and men.

My parents have now both expressed contempt for the idea of nonbinary identity due to my aunt calling her newborn baby a 'they'

I'm never gonna get out of this gender closet, man. Even though my dad could perhaps come around to the idea of me being NB over the course of a few years, as he supports me being gay and supports trans rights (though would still be somewhat uncomfy for his own kid to be under the trans umbrella, entirely bc of the homophobic environment he was raised in still somewhat hampering him), my mom would never accept it. She's far too Catholic.

And so this whole 'theybie' situation just makes it all the more uncomfortable. Just. Goddamn it. Sorry for the vent but I wanted to just jot down these frustrations somewhere rq.