As lesbians, gays and bisexuals we applaud @BoyGeorge for saying what many people think and few say. At the #lgballiance we don’t “have” pronouns. Telling people “your pronouns” is telling them how they have to see you. https://t.co/8YudKbYa8a
— LGB Alliance (@AllianceLGB) January 7, 2020
Rebecca Reilly-Cooper writes (Aeon article below):
“And here we have an irony about some people insisting that they and a handful of their fellow gender revolutionaries are non-binary: in doing so, they create a false binary between those who conform to the gender norms associated with their sex, and those who do not. In reality, everybody is non-binary. We all actively participate in some gender norms, passively acquiesce with others, and positively rail against others still. So to call oneself non-binary is in fact to create a new false binary. It also often seems to involve, at least implicitly, placing oneself on the more complex and interesting side of that binary, enabling the non-binary person to claim to be both misunderstood and politically oppressed by the binary cisgender people.”
This piece by @boodleoops had a profound influence on the way I think about "gender" nearly 3 years ago. It's an extremely important essay, and it grows more and more relevant with each passing day. I can't recommend it more highly. https://t.co/udrgGk9YCW
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) January 11, 2020
One Comment for “Onboard the Nonbinary Bandwagon”
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Well, if you can make adults use “they” as your pronouns, that certainly must feel empowering!
Did you bother to ask any non-binary adults before you issued this snark?
I can’t say that I know anyone personally who uses they/them, but I do frequently interact on line with a Microsoft employee who does, and nobody who participates in that forum (it is a Microsoft Insider forum related to the Chromium-based browser that Microsoft will be introducing later this month with about 5,000 participants) seems to think anything of it.
So why is it an issue for conservative homosexuals how someone else self-describes in terms of gender identity?
Conservative homosexuals seem to be treating the idea that there are but two genders, male and female as God created them according to Genesis, as dogma, and insisting that everyone has to shoehorn themselves into one or the other. I don’t get it. You act like you’ve turned into church ladies.
In response to your snark, it seems to me that self-describing as they/them (and by doing so openly identifying as non-binary) could be both freeing and empowering for someone who is non-binary in the same way that many of us found that coming out as gay/lesbian years ago found that doing so was both freeing and empowering.
But it also seems to me that we should let non-binary people speak for themselves rather than dismissing them out-of-hand, as you seem to be doing.