I can see how that happens in the brain, but I don't understand non-binary at all. I don't understand how the brain can decide "nah, I'm not either". I don't judge, and you can be whatever you want or need to be, but I don't understand it.
I dont understand it or gender fluid either
My ignorant understanding is they dont identify with social norms of traditional man or woman, but there is nothing concrete about those and thankfully the old school gender norms are going away (even if slowly)
Welcome to the absolute clusterfuck that is Gender Identity. If you think it's hard wrapping your head around it as a concept from the outside, just imagine the fun you could be having trying to navigate the abyss from the inside!
What
we're I'm going to try and do here is functionally take philosophical works, psychological studies and matters of human existence and distill them into a forum post that is easy to understand. And to do that... I'm probably going to write a fucking novel here. And I'm
still going to fail. And even if I somehow don't, this is not the end of it - this is just one single trans woman's experience and understanding and explanation. I need to be very up front about that. This is basically like asking someone to understand the life experience of a Black man in Harlem in the 1960's. We can be told the stories, we can empathize and sympathize, we can "get it" - but we cannot
know. And, I must stress, that that is absolutely fine.
Further: I am not a doctor, psychologist, or expert for or of anything. Do not take anything here as sound advice in and of itself. If something in here resonates, please seek resources to consult with a trained professional. I'm also not a lawyer, if that's somehow relevant!
Anyway, hold on to your butts. This will probably be going to strange places.
Before we can start, we have to first establish some ground rules. The first is that, very unfortunately, societal norms and concepts are inexorably interwoven into
Gender Identity. Try as you might, if you pull one thread this entire ball of yarn is moving with it. Hobbies, interests, career paths, emotional responses, styles and types of clothing - it's
all in here somewhere. Baked into us by everything around us since infancy.
To start small: A tomboy, for example, is not a trans man. Tomboys generally lack interests in the qualities that society has settled upon, in
this time period, that a feminine person "should" hold. But a tomboy is only a trans man if they feel that their body is not "correct." This is known as
Gender Dysphoria, and that is the very specific phenomenon that your outer casing (your body) does not reflect your self-perception, your cognition, your soul. That is, you look into a mirror and expect to see some attributes, but those attributes are not there. Not only not there, but entirely different and wrong ones are in their place. This is
similar to, but all together different from,
Body Dysmorphic Disorder - which can be a contributing factor to something like anorexia. In this example a person will look at the mirror and see fat where no such fat actually exists; their perception is skewed in some way.
The difference is that Body Dysmorphic Disorder is a fault within the mind. Sources outside of the individual's mind can analyze the physical body and determine that what the person believes is not some combination of healthy, realistic and possible. Gender Dysphoria is a fault of the
body, insofar that the mind, the heart, the soul is "right" and it is truly the body that is wrong. No outside source can analyze this intangible inner presence and gauge that
its perceptions are flawed. Robust medical practices are employed to tease out things that the individual may not consciously be aware of, but it is not necessarily definitive. We are not our bodies, is the easiest way to explain this. You chop your arm off and you're still you, right? But if you could somehow remove the "me" from my body, I would be dead. So there is no cure; you can not fix what is not broken.
All you can do is treat the body, alter the body, to better match this perception. To treat the uneasiness, the anxiety, the depression, the mental strain - to help the person trapped within become comfortable. It's not a one-size fits all glove. Some individuals don't require much assistance to reach a place of equilibrium, others may go their entire lives and not fully achieve it. Obstacles placed in front of them in the forms of legislation, medical regulations and price do not help.
The concepts of "Man" and "Woman" are not
necessarily immutable facts. This is different from, say, a male organism and a female organism conceiving an offspring. We use the two interchangeably and conflate the meanings, and that may be a function of language not adapting quickly enough, but they are distinct. It's complicated, and even more so if Religion gets involved. However, two men - a cis Man and a trans Man -
can conceive a child together.
The concepts we have are ultimately a complex nexus of characteristics that we have labeled to make sense of the universe. The exact number of characteristics required, and what some of those characteristics even are, have and will continue to shift and change across time. Whenever a seemingly immutable fact is presented, such that a Man is a person with 1 X Chromosone and 1 Y Chromosone, the universe laughs at our feeble attempts to dictate what
it can be. So we have scenarios like
Swyer Syndrome (XY Female) and
Chapelle Syndrome (XX Male), and even the "limit" on the number of chromosones is more of a guideline at best. XXY, XYY and XXYY are all also documented. The universe does not care.
As our collective understanding has grown, we have found that gender is not an On/Off light switch. It's a spectrum; a dimmer switch. There are many points along this spectrum that a person may find themselves, and that position is not necessarily permanently fixed. In this context you can set arbitrary markers and somewhat napkin math out how everything works. If, for example, the 20% at the end of one side of the spectrum is "Man," and a person's self-perception stays between 0% and 20%, then we (really: they) may safely say that this person is a Man. Likewise for Woman, on the 100% to 80% end.
Non-Binary, or Enby (phonetically "NB"), are simply people that do not fit within the boundaries of either Man or Woman. They can be near the middle and may choose to appear androgynistic, which can mean they have traits generally associated with both
or they can present having traits not (strongly) associated with either. They can also lean more towards one end or another, anywhere between 21% and 49% for Man or 79% and 51% for Woman to continue the visualization, but their perception does not fully adhere to it. As someone that is not herself Enby, I do not
know, but I can imagine scenarios upon which our X-Y axis scale is also outdated and does not factor in the possible existence of a Z-axis.
With this baseline in consideration, it is now easy to understand Gender-Fluid. These individuals simply do not have an anchored position for their perception. It will, under no control of the individual, shimmy and slide along the spectrum over periods of time. They will sometimes be Man, sometimes be Woman, sometimes be Neither and at others Both. The exact period will vary from person to person, and may not be steady or predictable. Their perception may linger in spots for long periods of time, or may even semi-permanently anchor. They aren't specifically Enby simply because of this uncertainty.
There are additional considerations for all of the above, of course. If you begin to enter the world of inner monologues and especially
Compartmentalization, for example, you may find that individuals belonging to these groups have multiple inner "voices." Marina has mentioned this previously, but it is
not to be confused with
Dissociative Identity Disorder. There are not competing personas, per se, but rather multiple strands of a singular personality acting in concert - and not all of those strands are
necessarily of the same Gender Identity or otherwise fully in sync.
Another facet may be neurodivergence. Not necessarily the spectrum, though
perhaps, but rather the simple act of perceiving the world in a way that differs from society's norm. There are many reported cases and instances of remarkable individuals that can "see" music, or those that can hear musical melodies and instantly replay them. It is perhaps not too much of a stretch, then, that some individuals simply do not approach the various aspects of Gender Identity in a traditional manner. Be that my younger self seeing Man as a job title, or something even more abstract.
Either way, I hope this mountain of words makes some amount of sense and helps to point you in a helpful direction.
), but I've literally never encountered a situation where I'm needing to be aware of this. And only rarely see any of them out in the wild, though that's always YMMV.
