Meeting Orwell in the break room
Another one who claims to be both femme and afab but also non-binary – or did claim, since this is from 2014, and with any luck there has been some maturing since.
So, what with being called out for being fake and a pretender by both myself and others, I sometimes get the desire to prove myself as non-binary. Especially since I am someone who was both assigned female and birth, and presents as largely female.
I did go through a phase where I tried to present as androgynous. I failed hopelessly at it. Why? Two reasons.
1. I’m a 34DD. Let that sink in. Try to hide that under a binder. It doesn’t work. A sports bra flattens them down a bit, but they’re there, and they’re always going to show.
2. I’m a feminine person. I just am. I like pretty earrings and make-up, which is something about me that has nothing to do with my gender identity, but when paired with an afab (assigned female at birth) body, distinctly marks me as female. I didn’t like having to give up being pretty, wearing make-up, wearing clothes and accessories that weren’t all bland muted colours.
So why the perceived need to “prove myself as non-binary”? Why all this struggle over a superfluous label? Why not just get on with life? Why not rejoice in the greater freedom women have to wear all different sorts of clothes (while still if you like working to make it so that men have more of that freedom too) and just be a woman with a varied wardrobe?
The truth is, you can’t win at being androgynous. Not unless you’re willing to give up your own personal style to fit into society’s incredibly narrow and limited idea of what androgyny is. So fuck it.
Hm. I’m not sure society has any idea, narrow or broad, of what androgyny is. I’m not sure society thinks about it enough to have an idea of it. It’s not a mass-popular subject.
Yeah, I wear make-up, and earrings and breasts. You know who else does? Drag queens who still identify as male. And that’s the real point here: gender identity and gender presentation are two completely different things. I am a non-binary person who presents as female because it fits with my style, and because it’s convenient for me, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am non-binary.
What fact? What fact is that, exactly? What fact are you talking about? How do you know it?
I don’t think there is such a fact. I think there are lots of facts of the type “X doesn’t like to be confined by silly arbitrary rules about what women / men can wear” but few if any facts of the type “this person who was assigned female at birth and presents as largely female is non-binary.” What this blogger is calling a fact is actually a decision – and that’s fine, people can decide to be non-binary or gender nonconforming or whatever they like, but a decision to be something doesn’t always translate to a fact that one is that something. It’s a complicated verb, that one – Bill Clinton wasn’t only ducking and weaving when he pointed out that “is” can mean different things. The blogger is non-binary if she / they wants to be, but that’s all for her / them to decide, it’s not a separate fact that can’t be changed by external reality.
Or to put it another way, it’s not clear what the blogger means by “I am a non-binary person who presents as female” when all these labels seem to depend so very heavily on getting confirmation from others. It’s also not clear what the point is.
I go to work every day as a female. I’m read as female, and I introduce myself as a female, and it’s fine. Then I come home and I take off my costume. I go back to being myself. But the breasts won’t come off. I go online and present myself as non-binary –
Ahhh yes, now I know where we are. Of course you do. Online is like that. I present myself as non-grumpy, non-boring, non-sullen, non-all sorts of things that show up in meat space but don’t online. Don’t we all. And that’s just it: we all do, to varying degrees. It’s not a new discovery of Today’s Kids that what the world sees does not perfectly match up with our sense of ourselves. It’s a newish or intensified discovery of everyone who lives partly online, one that people just didn’t have a medium to make before the internet. Maybe a few people did – I bet George Orwell felt a difference between the self who wrote the essays and the one who had colleagues at the BBC.
So that’s how it is – we all go back to being ourselves. It’s not so much non-binary as non-public or non-social or non-external.
Notice:
“I wear makeup, and earrings, and breasts.”
That’s not nothing. That’s telling. And it’s sad.
So this woman has discovered that she wears different faces in different situations, none of which feel comfortable or truly representative of who she is?
How very.
38DDD here. I get mistaken for a guy easily enough. Oddly, people pay more attention to body language than body shape, it seems. And once you STOP taking up as little space as possible, lowering your voice, lowering your gaze, and trying to be small– you’re no longer feminine, no matter what you wear.
You present as non-grumpy?
They seem to be using the term non binary to mean identifying as a person.
I too identify as a person. Always have. Never been treated as one, because I am a female person, and female bit has been trumping the person bit all my life.
I should add that I am treated as a person on the interwebs most of the time because I switched from using my name to the name of my house.
I can almost understand this. When I was younger, I was a fan of metal and glam and the “femme” guys in my favorite bands. (Always paired with the most sexist videos and lyrics, of course.) I wanted to look like them — glamorous, but without the trappings of femaleness. I did the makeup and the big hair, but in no way thought I was doing something subversive with gender. I still looked like a girl; people still reacted to me as though I was a girl. Whatever I thought of myself didn’t change that.
Blood Knight @ 4 – well, no, now you mention it, I don’t really. I did hesitate over that one.
I often wonder whether the rise of the internet has fueled identity politics, because online identities are free of the pressing material concerns you face in the real world: you get to be Neo in the Matrix to a certain degree. Of course, this only works if you’re rich enough to spend enough time online to form said identity, but the class privilege behind contemporary identity politics has been pointed out by many.
Narcissism and self hatred and objectification rolled into one.
She regards her own body as something to ‘wear?’ Why does her dissatisfaction with constraint HAVE to be shoehorned into Heavily Constrained terms like ‘non-binary?’
She’s 180° from an important insight, there. Instead of realizing that what she’s calling “female” is a performance, that women are just ourselves, she’s decided that not performing femme every minute of the day makes her “non-binary.” In other words, she thinks being a woman is inherently a performance, and instead of working to change the sexist expectations that underlie such performance, she chooses to disavow her womanhood.
Such feminist. Very revolution.
Emily – I have had the same thought. The internet allows the communication that encourages people to identify as a group. There are pros and cons to identity politics. It is effective for getting things done.
I’ve often wondered if the internet has contributed a lot to people identifying as non-binary. On the internet you can be anything and some say that part of the appeal is not having a body. Many women go gender-neutral online to avoid harrassment.
I’ve never bothered hiding that I was female and use feminine usernames (Myrhinne is a stock name for a woman in ancient Greek comedy). I’ve become increasingly careful about identifying information but have no problem with generalities (e.g. that I’m white, married, British, bisexual etc.) However, lately I feel a desire to stop. I’m sick of the identity politics and would rather debate without revealing anything about myself. I don’t want to be shouted down for being privileged and I don’t want to waive my-non-privileged statuses just to make a point.