Non-binary seems like it could have several non-compatible meanings, so I wanted to list some of those meanings and see if there are any others out there I don’t know.

One way I could think of non-binary is as being a kind of third gender category, like there are men, women, and non-binary people. In this sense of non-binary a butch woman who considers themselves a woman would not be non-binary because they are a woman.

Sometimes non-binary is used like “genderqueer” is sometimes used, as a generic description of anyone who doesn’t fit perfectly in the narrow confines of the binary genders (i.e. men and women). In this sense a butch woman could see themselves as a woman, but also as genderqueer and non-binary, as they do not conform to binary gender norms for women.

Another way non-binary seems to be used (related to genderqueer in its historical context) is as a political term, an identity taken up by otherwise cis-sexual and even cis-gendered people who wish to resist binary gender norms and policing. In this sense even a femme cis-sexual woman might identify as non-binary. Sometimes this political identity label might come with a gender expression that cuts against the gender expectations for the assigned sex at birth, but it doesn’t have to. (I recently met two people whose gender expressions matched their assigned sex at birth but who identified as non-binary in this political sense.)

I was wondering what other meanings of non-binary are out there, and how they are commonly used.

Note: gatekeeping what is “really” non-binary seems pointless to me, since I agree with Wittgenstein that “language is use”.

I know people get heated about policing what a word means (and I am guilty of this myself), but in the interest of inclusion, pluralism, and general cooperation in our community I think we can find a way to communicate with overlapping and different meanings of a shared term.

  • AVincentInSpaceEnglish
    3·
    8 months ago

    OP made several guesses about what the word “nonbinary” meant and asked the community which, if any, were correct. I do not think this is unreasonable, and the handful of times I’ve done it in the past with regard to other topics, it has proven more expedient and much more helpful than asking the community to write a full explanation on their own – both since it takes a lot less time and emotional labor for someone to correct a minor misunderstanding in your five paragraphs than to write five paragraphs of their own, and since people often lack the words to describe their own experience and giving them a rough outline which they can correct and fill in as needed can be helpful.

    OP has explained to you several times that they did not intend to gatekeep who was and wasn’t nonbinary. They were asking the community what did and did not qualify. Something that newcomers to the gender scene often do not understand, especially autistic ones as I strongly suspect OP is, is that there are no hard and fast rules. It’s common for them to try to ask what the rules are. That’s what I did when I first started trying to understand this stuff, and after someone patiently explained to me that anyone who wanted to call themselves nonbinary was and anyone who didn’t, wasn’t, and that the term didn’t have any deeper meaning than that, I understood and was able to better interact with the community, and there were smiles all around. OP made this post in an attempt to educate themself. Attacking OP for making that assumption or using outdated terminology and forcing them to go on the defensive, rather than gently informing them of the truth, helps precisely nobody.