Don’t confuse the levels
A headline:
27% of California adolescents say they are viewed as gender nonconforming, study finds
Hmm. How good are adolescents at sussing out what other people think of them? Adults aren’t all that good at it, even with experience and learning; I don’t think it’s the kind of thing adolescents are better at.
“The data show that more than one in four California youth express their gender in ways that go against the dominant stereotypes,” said lead author Bianca D.M. Wilson, the Rabbi Barbara Zacky Senior Scholar of Public Policy at the Williams Institute.
But that’s a different claim. The claim in the headline is twice-meta – it’s a claim about 1 )what people say 2)other people think. It’s not a claim about how people express their gender.
Gender nonconforming refers to people whose behaviors and appearance defy the dominant cultural and societal stereotypes of their gender. The health interview survey measured gender expression by asking adolescents how they thought people at school viewed their physical expressions of femininity and masculinity. Youth who reported that people at school saw them as equally masculine and feminine were categorized as “androgynous.” Girls who thought they were seen as mostly or very masculine and boys who thought they were seen as mostly or very feminine were categorized as “highly gender nonconforming.”
There again: they’re confusing levels. Asking adolescents 1)how they thought 2)people at school viewed their physical expressions of femininity and masculinity is twice meta again. It’s not a question about how in fact the adolescents “express their gender.” Doing a thing is one level; how people see it is a second; what people say about what people see is a third. If you mush them all together you get mush.
Anyway. I’m still looking forward to the time when everyone realizes that “the dominant cultural and societal stereotypes of their gender” are surplus baggage and just throws them all out instead of trying to label either conformity to them or rebellion against them.
Back in my high school days (mid 70’s to 1980), I didn’t drive,didn’t like sports, avoided gym, sang in the choir, didn’t really date. Got called “fag” occasionally; still do. Obviously I was “seen” by some others as different from what I was “supposed” to be. It didn’t help with the jocks that I had good marks, either. I guess “male” is supposed to also code for “stupid” (or, to be more charitable, unconcerned with good grades).I wasn’t trying to rebel against anything (sadly, I misspent my misspent youth), I was just doing what I was interested in and not doing what I wasn’t interested in. I don’t know how I would have answered a survey like this at the time. My policing was pretty mild, but still unpleasant. I would have preferred not to have been the subject of occasional verbal abuse and harassment, but I never wanted to “fit in” better: I just wanted assholes to stop being assholes. I don’t think (or at least I hope) I was not a policing asshole to anyone else in turn. I hope my memory’s selective internal editor has not sanitized shittiness on my part. It probably has, though…
Still don’t drive, still not interested in sports, don’t drink beer, I’m vegetarian.( Married, though, to a wonderful woman who loves me just as I am.) So I’ve been mostly “gender-nonconforming” for a goodly amount of time. But I’m still just me. Don’t know what it feels like to be anything but me. I now know that I get to avoid all of the shit that women have to put up with all the time (see any and all posts about everyday sexism, ever), though I do still get a bit of homophobic abuse for, I guess, not being as “manly” as I should be, whatever that is, though even this is less than it used to be as I am now older, grey and balded. Perhaps the standards are relaxed for older, out-of the running, no longer competing, non-threatening males? Dunno. I know the price I pay for being me is really very cheap compared to what a lot of people, particularly women, have to pay. Every day.
Although there’s one sense in which I like the twice-meta-y way they framed the question: I like that it gets at how gender’s got lots to do with how you’re perceived by others, and isn’t just purely about how you feel inside.
But then they went and made a mush of the results, so.
I have a male friend who has, for years now, painted his nails and occasionally wears long skirts. He’s otherwise fairly conventionally ‘manly’ in appearance, hobbies, and he’s romantically interested in women. Today he’d probably be labeled some variant of ‘nonconforming’ or ‘nonbinary’ but he’s never described himself that way and we never thought of him like that; he’s just a guy who thinks skirts are comfortable, so he does what he wants. I really don’t see what we gain by adding more labels to the mix rather than just saying ‘forget the labels, do what you want’.
‘I never wanted to “fit in” better: I just wanted assholes to stop being assholes’ That’s pretty much the size of it, isn’t it? We shouldn’t have to change ourselves to accommodate the assholes; it’s the assholes who need to change, or at least go be assholes somewhere else.
You has-beens are still trying to do away with the concept of behavioural boxes in which we need to fit? How very second wave of you! Here in 2017, new and improved feminism is all about inventing more boxes; dozens of bespoke genders suitable for the woke.
It seems that ‘non-binary’ is just another category to impose on individuals. Butch girls and femme boys are still girls and boys. They are just demonstrations of how much ridiculous baggage is imposed on people according to their XX/XY status. And anyone can be butchy/femmy in different combinations, in different venues, without having to schedule surgery.
Having been ‘fag bashed’ as kid, like so many other straight men, doesn’t make me non-male or non-heterosexual. This is an instance of ‘what others perceive’ but who can control what goes on in some people’s heads?
I had long hair as a young man. Heard “fag!” yelled at me from cars many times.
I don’t think my long hair said or revealed anything about my gender. Yes, long hair is considered “feminine” in our society (except when it isn’t), but so what? I was 100% male, regardless. Everybody is a unique blend of attributes that have been arbitrarily sorted into Masculine and Feminine.
“Nonbinary” just means “better than you normies.”
It’s fun to figure out which box you fit in! If you’re clever enough, you can even create your very own brand new box that’s just as special as you are! Then you can perfect your Personal Style ™️so that it reflects your True Self. ™️