A lot of alone time to reflect on their identity
Hello and welcome to Pseuds’ Corner. Our guest today is a self-obsessed young person who would like to explain to us how special xir is.
Carla Hernando, 26, never quite felt like they fit into a particular gender. Then, when Covid-19 took hold in March 2020, they got a lot of alone time to reflect on their identity. The journey continued during Pride Month that June, when Hernando found both an article and a documentary on non-binary gender identities, by Time Out Barcelona, further opening their mind to possibilities beyond the gender binary of ‘woman’ or ‘man’.
I hope they also read up on non-human identities, to open their mind to possibilities beyond the human-chimpanzee binary.
“[Spain] is way behind in terms of gender,” believes the Barcelona-based Hernando, who uses both they/them and she/her pronouns. “I did not know what non-binary meant. I just had felt completely different my entire life.” But the more education they got about the range of possibilities outside the gender binary of ‘woman’ or ‘man’, the more they felt they related.
It’s so exciting that Hernando uses both. I wonder how the BBC knew when to use “they/them” and when to use “she/her.” Maybe they (the BBC, that is) asked them (Hernando, that is) each time? That must have taken a lot of asking, if so.
That experience was the gateway to another discovery: the term ‘gender fluid’. Hernando felt it was an even more apt descriptor for their gender identity.
“One day I wake up and feel more feminine, and maybe I want to wear a crop top and put earrings on. And then there’s times in which I’m like, I need my [chest] binder [to minimise the appearance of my breasts], because I’m not feeling it,” they say. The lived experience of gender fluidity – wearing a binder one day and more feminine outfit the next – is what ultimately helped Hernando discover that the term applied to them.
Deep. Deep deep deep stuff. Profound. Life-altering. Trippy.
Gender fluidity has grown even more visible as celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Ruby Rose and Cara Delevingne embrace it in the public eye. The term is hard to pin down precisely, since it describes such a vast array of people and experiences, say experts.
“Experts”? Who and what might they be?
Come on. The term “is hard to pin down precisely” because it’s such bullshit and also because it’s so obvious. It’s NOT REMARKABLE that people feel like wearing one kind of clothes one day and a different kind another day. It’s not remarkable and it’s most certainly not A Sign of a mysterious exciting complicated new understanding of female and male.
There are of course many more paragraphs of this piffle, which I’m not going to read because what I’ve seen so far makes clear how stupid it all is.
I would like to wait until I hear directly from a board-certified genderfluidologist before accepting anything they says. They’re the real experts.
When I first saw this using “they” in the paragraph about Spain was confusing due to the fact that my brain wanted to associate the pronoun with the people of Spain and not to a self-obsessed woman.
I’ve heard that in Spanish, you refer to a non-binary man as “no binario” and and a non-binary woman as “no binaria”.
Maybe I don’t get it because I haven’t had my genderfluid topped up at my last checkup.
There’s a quote I’m blanking on right now, but I think I’ve seen it here before so I’m sure someone will remember it, to the effect of how yes, we are all unique individuals, but there is also a limit to our distinctiveness.
A lot of us have a tendency to think of ourselves as special snowflakes who can’t fit neatly into the little boxes that society likes to slot people in. To an extent, we’re right! Boxes, labels, categories are often simplifications, precisely because life is complicated and we sometimes need an imprecise but useful shorthand. If a political topic comes up, and I ask you what your politics are, I understand that hardly anyone has 100% standard “liberal” or “conservative” (or leftist or libertarian or whatever other categories you want to add) across the board on every issue. Most of us deviate on a few issues here and there — the liberal who can’t stand teachers’ unions, the conservative who hates guns. But if you answer that question with a five-minute digression on how you don’t like political labels because you don’t fit neatly into a category, I’m probably going to mentally check out and excuse myself from the conversation as soon as possible.
That’s how this stuff all reads to me. Hardly anyone conforms to 100% of a single gender’s stereotypes. (It may be impossible, as sometimes those stereotypes conflict.) Those deviations don’t make you special or interesting, and droning on about them actually makes you very boring.
Different to what, or who? Carla has I am sure met many people, but has only ever lived her own life. What she seems to mean is she felt like an outsider, or a weirdo, or a loner, or a loser.
…Welcome to being a teenager, Carla! Many of us went through the same uncertainties in those socially dynamic times, especially those of use more interested in books than sport. You aren’t special.
Genderists keep telling use gender identity is something fundamental and deep, yet time and time again it comes down to matching or mismatching social expectations placed on each sex. Here we have a prime example: to crop top or not to crop top, that is the question.
Yeah, that’s a pretty good sign that the term has no real meaning. It means so many different things it turns out not to mean anything in particular.
Could it be not a single quote but a recurring theme? I know I say it a lot, precisely because I developed a bad habit as a child of thinking I was Special or Interesting in some nebulous way, and I’ve been trying to correct myself ever since.
#3
lol
May as well pick up a liter of blinker fluid while you’re there!
OB,
You’re probably right that it’s hardly a unique theme (ironic given the subject matter). But there was a specific quote I was thinking of, and it turns out it’s from a novel, The Manticore by Robertson Davies. It’s a dialogue between the protagonist (plain type) and his psychiatrist (italics):
It’s those last couple of sentences I was thinking of.
A quote that comes to my mind by John S. Hall:
As for me, I didn’t wear earrings to work yesterday, though I do most days. Does that mean I was not a woman yesterday? How enlightening! I must be genderfluid!
Ah I should read that then. I love Robertson Davies’s Salterton Trilogy. I’ve been hesitant about the Deptford trilogy because I’m wary of magic realism.
The Deptford Trilogy was a treat to read. I’m not Canadian, but I felt like one reading it.
You could pull from Monty Python:
The Deptford Trilogy is great.
I’m not sure it really qualifies as magic realism; there’s nothing that happens in it that doesn’t have a perfectly mundane, non-supernatural explanation. Davies is playing a lot with the idea that myths are constantly playing out even in the lives of ordinary people, but that’s really just all a matter of interpretation. For example, in Fifth Business, the narrator comes to think of another character as being a saint, but the alleged miracles are highly debatable to say the least, and the few people he shares that notion with react with at best a mild “it’s fine if you believe that.”
It is a more serious tone than the Salterton Trilogy, which I consider more fun than thought-provoking. The Cornish Trilogy is pretty good also, even though much of the commentary on art goes over my head.
Ohh I had a misimpression then. That settles it; must read.