“So you don’t feel like a boy or girl?”
This piece in Esquire is drawing a lot of hilarity on Twitter. It’s a helpful article explaining what “non-binary gender” is for people who have been living in a locked trunk for the past few years. It’s by Sam Escobar, who is non-binary themself (they use “they/them” for their pronouns).
So non-binary.
They (Sam Escobar) start by explaining that people ask them (Sam Escobar) a lot of silly questions once they (Sam Escobar) tell them (the people) they (Sam Escobar) are non-binary. They (the people) even ask them (Sam Escobar) about their (Sam Escobar’s) crotch.
Yes, even in New York. Yes, even among seemingly “progressive” people. And it stems from the fact that most people you meet simply do not know much about non-binary gender identities. It usually goes like this:
“So you don’t feel like a boy or girl?”
“Exactly.”
“But you wear makeup.”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re not a woman.”
“Nah.”
“…Huh.”
I have had this exact conversation at least once a week, every week since coming out publicly in November. It’s not one I mind; it just gets repetitive, and occasionally a little insulting if the conversation leads to questions like, “So you’re just trying to be different?” With trans visibility increasing more quickly than ever, non-binary gender identity is coming into focus, too.
No, it’s not. People like Sam Escobar are yammering about it more, but it’s not coming into focus, because it was never out. It’s a self-flattering fiction that everybody else except the oh so special people like Sam Escobar is binary. Nobody is binary. This idea that the Muggles totally identify with their “assigned gender” while the wizards alone see through all that is just a new way to perform Being Better Than Everyone Else in public.
On Tuesday, The New York Times Magazine published a brief etymology of the words “they” and “them” as pronouns for people who identify as genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, gender-noncomforming, and other genders. The piece is another stride in acknowledging those who do not feel they fit on the current male/female binary—and another piece in the growing conversation surrounding gender in society.
What was that little thing called feminism that had to do with a lot of women saying we don’t feel we fit on the current male/female binary and we don’t much like being expected to do all the domestic work while also working full time thanks very much? Oh that was just some boring thing the boring old Wrong Wave did back around the time of Downton Abbey, and not remotely as hip as what the hip people are doing now.
As someone who identifies with gender-neutral pronouns, I was amped to see the Times bring the discussion onto the radar of readers who may not know there are even people out there who don’t identify as male or female. I’ve been out for four months, but I’ve known I’m not cisgender for the last five or so years (probably longer, if I’m honest, depending on how you interpret some odd childhood habits).
And it goes on like that, filling us in on exactly how special they (Sam Escobar) and their (Sam Escobar’s) friends are and how tragically clueless and conformist everyone else is, especially women.
Can I admit that I find their (Sam’s) narcissism boring? Can I say that I really, truly, honestly don’t care one bit about their (Sam’s) views about, well, anything? Or will saying these things lead to them (the hip, cool, sexyfuntimes, women-deleting intersectional feminist) calling me a murderer?
I certainly think you can. I did my best to pave the way for you.
Not to mention that they (sam escobar) presents as considerably more binary than any of the self identifying afab women I know in real life. Considerably.
[not that that means anything in and of itself – just an observation]
Well quite. We’re always being told how “cis” we are and yet I don’t know any women as “cis” as that.
I think the pronoun policing employed in the OP and in comments here is a tad excessive; they/them is a perfectly acceptable way to refer to an unknown single party in English, and has been for a long time. Pointing to a picture of Sam and saying the moral equivalent of “That right there is a SHE, and SHE knows it, along with everyone else! SHE ain’t foolin’ nobody!” is a certain kind of schadenfreude that might tip into vindictiveness, or even be mistaken for the beginnings of bigotry. I reckon that isn’t what you intended, but it made me cringe, nevertheless.
I get that it’s frustrating to see young people form their own ideas about gender, ideas which seem reactionary and aggressive. I get that it’s disheartening to see people you respect and admire no-platformed, and it’s distressing and angering to be called a bigot or even a murderer simply because you would not mouth the proper mantra when prompted. I get that it’s stomach-churning to see that the Left is *yet again* swerving so strongly on an issue that they’re talking themselves into incoherence and seemingly threatening the very foundations of progress that people like you have built for the last few centuries.
But, in general, I take solace in the fact that the Left has always seemed to do this, and yet the Left has still almost always been on the right side of history. I also take solace in the more general phenomenon that sees young people scoffed and scorned and misunderstood, which in turn inspires those young people scoffing and scorning and misunderstanding older people…until they themselves turn into older people, and then it’s their turn to do the scoffing and the scorning of the younger generation. Elders have been prophesying the end of the world based on the errancy of the youth for as long as there have been young people; some of the oldest written works we have can be summarised as old men pissing and moaning about how the young lack all respect and decency and will surely bring about the collapse of civilisation, if not the end of the world. Every generation of every subculture goes through this. The Stonewall activists and their contemporaries were slandered by older, more established gay culture (along with the deeply homophobic wider society, of course), and they in turn responded with derision and vitriol.
So this storm too shall pass, I expect. In the meantime, I remember that the world I grew up in is still very much one where boys can be beaten up, occasionally beaten to death, for seeming too ‘girly’, as judged by their peers. It’s still one where girls are not allowed to rough-house or play active sports, or in some cases even wear trousers. In other words, the world I grew up in is one in which the gender binary really is enforced by physical and cultural violence. It’s still one where non-gender-conforming people are raped and murdered at phenomenally higher rates than cis people, and where there are many softer forms of discrimination.
It is a shame, though it isn’t surprising, that people who are forced to navigate those dangers then react with such aggression when a reasonable person disagrees with them. The same goes for the hypervigilantes who make up a broad swathe of their allies, though for them I have less empathy, especially the able-bodied white cis men trying to out-ally everyone else by shouting at women.
Though I suppose my own aloofness itself comes from my privileged anonymity–I’ve not spent the last year being barraged by a mob of spittle-flecked shouters for making a thoughtcrime in public, after all. I imagine you’ve earnt a bit of schadenfreude, or even some vindictiveness, over the course of this neverending ordeal.
But it really wouldn’t hurt you to call Sam ‘they’ without the sarcasm of the disambiguating parentheticals, especially as there’s no ambiguity even without them. I know it won’t matter to people like Jason Thibeault, but it matters to people like me, people who like and respect you and feel you’ve been treated atrociously and unfairly. And it matters to people like Sam, whom I’m sure you would not intend any harm if you were to converse with them.
Seth, did you miss the problem in the original of having they refer to *both* Sam and to the people who react to Sam? Although come to think of it, the best solution would have been to skip all pronoun usage in the story.
Samantha,
By ‘original’, I assume you mean the paragraph where Ophelia first employs the parentheticals, as the Esquire article is both written in first person and gives very clear examples of when a singular ‘they’ can be appropriate and unambiguous. On my first reading of the paragraph in question, I didn’t think omitting the parentheticals would have been too confusing…but now that I’ve actually copied and pasted the paragraph and removed the parentheticals, I can see that it was written to be deliberately confusing.
So, yes, I concede that it was ambiguous…but it was written so intentionally, to sharpen the mockery, as if to ridicule the very idea of someone not wanting to be identified as anything other than ‘she’ or ‘he’. Which is, if nothing else, unkind. Of course, Ophelia does not owe Sam (nor anyone else) any kindness, and she certainly doesn’t owe a single thought to my approval.
But the world could use more kindness, and not less.
Seth, you make some fair points. Yes, there was some mockery going on. Again, as discussed in other threads, this riffs on not just the current article but also other, much more turgid and depressingly unreadable, prose produced by people insisting on using they/them/their for both personal and general use within the same sentence and paragraph. Yes, that can be done clearly, although without elegance, but there have been some numbing examples where it has not.
You’re also right that there can be a tendency for the older to shake their heads, and occasionally fists, at the younger. In this case it is more the exasperation that once again the younger set of activists seem to believe that they and only they have had the revelation that the gender binary is a mirage. The exasperation and amusement in my case was sharpened by the view that Sam seems to be confusing gender with how they feel at any given time, rather than identity. Guess what? We all have the experience of some degree of gender fluidity and expression whether we acknowledge it or not. That is also not the same thing as ‘feeling’ which is an emotional state. Again discussed in another recent thread.
I personally have no problem with the way Sam presented in the photo. They look like a very pleasant person who, at that time, has presented very much at the female end of the binary dipole. I suspect Sam would struggle to present equally strongly at the other end. It’s a bit like all those crappy coming of age movies where the ugly duckling at school turns out to be beautiful. Except all they ever do is remove their glasses apply makeup and give them a nice dress….
You are right that I wouldn’t be mean to Sam to their face. I’d say exactly what I’ve said here, plus other stuff. I’d be polite, serious and gently mocking by turn. I’d also happily listen to what they have to say and I’d certainly agree with some things and probably disagree with others.
What so many activists need to do is take their issues and beliefs seriously and themselves less so frankly. It might open themselves up to both having productive conversations and realising they are both reinventing the wheel and putting the wrong size tyre on it simultaneously.
I’m with Seth. It seems a bit excessive and petty to be that harsh and sarcastic about it. Singular they is a perfectly valid pronoun and it’s not really all that confusing to figure out when it’s singular or plural with context most of the time.
But Ophelia raises some good points here. I’ve been frustrated with the assumption that anyone not actively trying to change their sex/gender is “comfortable with” their sex or gender or society’s rules about gender. I think a lot of cisgender people are uncomfortable with their anatomies or the way our society is set up and it’s not really helpful to act like all cis people are a monolith. I often wish that I was just treated like a person and not a gender but I know that I can’t just “opt out” of being read as and treated like a woman.
And I think that’s what a lot of nonbinary people are doing! Most of them I encounter were born female and raised as girls and they saw that the way girls and women are treated isn’t right but is deeply ingrained in our society, so instead of challenging it they went “Not me!”. I think it’s a coping mechanism. Not a particularly effective one but… well, look how hopeless it looks out there for women.
What got to me was the last line:
-“I’ve known I’m not cisgender for the last five or so years (probably longer, if I’m honest, depending on how you interpret some odd childhood habits)”
It is kind of sad. They apparently had trouble as a child conforming to the typical gender norms.
That is sad.
And as Benson says this is not news, this is what feminism concerns itself with, be it second or third wave. Radical feminism, which I understand to be concerned with the private, and not only the public displays of patriarchy, addresses this specifically.
This is how girls are made. They are told and shown what girls are, and they learn to emphasize what conforms, and hide what doesn’t.
The language is clunky to us, maybe because it is new, or maybe because it just is clunky, but what gets to me is that in this instance we have a person who has been hurt and wronged, and what we see is how they act to remedy it.
But, I see it as internalizing the norms. In stead of lashing out and refusing to conform, they try to make a place where they personally do not have to conform.
The lie that is taught is that there are two boxes, one marked male, and one female. What some feminists realise is that you do not put yourself in the box, you are placed there, and they want to burn the boxes. That is a political fight, changing society itself.
What Sam does is to believe that the boxes exist in themselves, and people put themselves in the box that matches who they are. Sam wants to escape the box she was in, and believes she can just climb out of it and roam free.
Is the problem that individualism has won the game. People believe that they make themselves. That their life is shaped by their own desires and capabilities. That the responsibility for your position in life is based solely on the qualities inherent in you? If you can dream it, you can achieve it?
If it is, Sam is set up for failure, because that is not how the world works.
Beckyescalator, well if that’s directed at me I think you missed the point, or maybe you got it and we disagree as to how I should have expressed it. For what it’s worth I always try to be a better person than I am, but not necessarily always a nice person. Sometimes I fail at being God, nice or nasty, depending on what I was aiming for. What I always try hard to do is be fair. If Sam ever wants to have a straight up conversation I’ll guarantee that.
Soren, that seems a valid hypothesis.
Seth @ 5 –
Oh, zing. Good one. But the trouble is, I heard about this article via friends who are every bit as much Young People as Sam Escobar is. This actually is not just disgusting old witches like me, it’s a broad swathe of feminist women.
Also look up “schadenfreude.” You don’t seem to know what it means.
Also…
Why are you telling me this? Do you seriously think I disagree that boys are persecuted for not being Manly enough or that girls are not allowed to do Manly things? Do you seriously think I’m not aware of that? It sometimes seems to me it’s all I talk about. I’m very well aware that this world is one where the gender binary really is enforced by physical and cultural violence; I’ve been subjected to that kind of violence plenty, I assure you. I’m not defending the gender binary. I’m not a fan of the gender binary. That’s the whole fucking point.
And “cis” is not the opposite of non-gender-conforming. It’s the opposite of trans. I’ve been GNC my whole life but that doesn’t stop people calling me “cis,” no matter how many times I explain that I do not “identify with my gender.”
As for the first paragraph – yes that was gratuitous sarcasm. No it’s not a big deal if people want to use non-conforming pronouns. (On the other hand it tends to be self-important to expect people to remember to use special pronouns for people who don’t in fact present as GNC.) But I use gratuitous sarcasm sometimes. I don’t think that’s a big deal either. I was just passive-aggressively pointing out that there are drawbacks to Escobar’s choice of pronoun, mostly for my own amusement. Do I think that was unkind to Sam Escobar? No. Do I think it made a serious contribution to the kindness deficit in the world? No. Do I think I need sarcasm-policing? No. Do I get that not everyone likes my way with sarcasm? Of course.
I have an image of Sam Escobar, pulled over for driving a car in Riyadh, explaining to the Saudi Vice & Virtue squad the concept of non-binary gender, and politely asking them to call Sam Escobar “they”.
Waffly ‘fluidity’ is the velvet glove on the relentless essentialism of the woman-erasing crowd.
Trans people are in no position to be poster-kids for the whole world of people who feel and express their gender and sexual identity outside of medieval standards.
I’m confused. I thought male/female meant the anatomy. And not fitting that binary, though possible, is probably quite rare. I’m willing to wager that the person in the picture who wrote that article fits the binary spot on. Not liking and refusing the societal roles associated is another matter.
And who is he/she/zii/they/it to say pronouns are not hard? To me, having as my first language a language where there are no gendered pronouns, it’s sometimes very hard to get he/she correct. Why would a different 3rd person pronoun be used depending on the contents of the underpants? What evil genius came up with that idea? It only gets more confusing by mixing plural and singular pronouns. That’s just being mean to all foreigners! And English having the status it has, we foreigners pretty much have to use it. Even the general ‘you’ is often confusing.
Breaking your language probably won’t fix your society, young human person!
If this sort of absurd dominance display is deserving of anything but sarcasm I need a better explanation than maybe you misunderstood or boys used to get beat up for being girly.
In the interest of full disclosure it is my opinion that all dominance displays are deserving of sarcasm.
Frankly, I think more mocking and piss-taking is exactly what’s called for. Yes, I do think a lot of otherwise well-meaning people take themselves too goddamned seriously. It’s not merely an annoyance; it informs their political choices.
If everyone would stop treating this self-indulgence as sacrosanct we’d be in a better place. “Gratuitous” sarcasm is in the eye of the beholder. And it’s supposed to sting. That’s the point.