Origin myth

So now you want to know all about Katje Van Loon, right? Obviously. You’re in luck, because the BBC explained about her exactly one year ago, on that previous International Non-Binary Day.

Ten years ago, Katje van Loon wrote a blog post calling for the creation of International Non-Binary Day on 14 July – exactly half way between International Women’s Day and International Men’s Day. Katje tells BBC gender and identity correspondent, Megha Mohan, why it is important that the day has become a reality.

Well thank fuck the BBC has a gender and identity correspondent, or we might never know about these things.

Katje explains all:

My grandmother had just died and I was at her apartment organising her things. Trying to distract myself after a while, I fell into an online rabbit hole and stumbled to the Wikipedia page for gender identities. It was here that I first read the definition of “non-binary”. In those paragraphs, I learned about people who do not follow binary gender norms, people who feel they exist in an intermediate space outside the definitions of male and female.

It was 2012. Until that day she was unaware of people who don’t follow gender norms?

In some ways I was like my mother. People called my mother a “handsome” woman, which I realised much later was designed to be an insult referring to her perceived lack of femininity.

She was a single woman, a lawyer and educator. She wasn’t like the other mothers from school. She would be as comfortable fixing things around the house as she was while teaching her students, or caring for me.

I was like her in my embrace of non-traditional gender roles. But unlike her I existed somewhere else. It wasn’t just that I didn’t feel “girly”, or was taller, and larger and less feminine. It was more than that: the label “woman” just didn’t fit me.

Because of course she’s more special and interesting than her mother. Obviously. We all are.

As an older millennial, I grew up online. In chat rooms, I found communities of people who talked about sexuality, and came out as bisexual at the age of 14.

Ah yes. Artymorty was just talking about the growing up online aspect this morning:

It’s easy to see how this is fueled in part by the increasing amount of time we spend online. Young people growing up are so focused on their digital lives, they’re beginning to find their actual bodies frightening and alien. Or if not quite frightening and alien, at least inconvenient and wrong.

Behold Katje Van Loon.

Amusingly she’s grown up since then.

Now, things have changed in my life. I’m more comfortable in myself. It matters less to me when people call me a woman or use the “she/her” pronouns. I used to be really in favour of having a third gender marker on IDs like passports or driver’s licences like they have in Argentina, Australia and India – and are proposing in South Africa. But now I’m not so sure. Do I want gender-minority data collected somewhere that is easily accessible for governments? Definitely not. I don’t have faith in bureaucracies. I can see why it may be important for some people in certain countries, but not for me.

Please notify the BBC and the Human Rights Campaign.

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