Do "Binary Trans Women" Even Exist? The Politics of Gender Conformity

Comments · 1K

• LI

  @lily_lxndr · 4 years ago · pinned

  There's an easter egg in the title cards that literally nobody has picked up on and it's driving me crazy

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• TM

  @TM-qt2ze · 5 years ago

  I remember one occasion where Kat Blaque said she is always perceived as "radical" for being black and trans. The idea of "conservative" transness it's quite racially charged.

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• FL

  @flamingo6828 · 5 years ago

  Your discussion regarding binary trans women still ending up living a nonbinary experience, brought up a memory, relating to the trans-masc community. There's several black trans-masc tik tokers I follow, because they make interesting commentary about gender that I rarely see others make. And one of them was retelling an incident where he was part of this trans-masc discord and had made a chat for other black trans-mascs to join and talk about their experience. And he had asked if even though they're not women, do they still identify with womanhood on some level? A lot of them agreed, and this was because they still felt a strong connection to black womanhood and the experiences gained from misogyny, because white womanhood is already set as the binary, so that connection they had still felt like a part of their nonbinary/trans identity. And apparently some white trans mascs were reading the chat Convo, and called them out, saying they weren't really trans if they felt that way. This was interesting to me, because I felt very similarly, but with indigenous womanhood contrasting the masculine gender I feel, but I wouldn't have been able to put that feeling into words until he had told that story. Which I think this type of nonbinary experience how very separate and "queer" it feels to have a gender separate from white culture's definitions.

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• SP

  @Spookybluelights · 5 years ago (edited)

  As someone who is often sorted into the “binary transwoman” box, I am always baffled that the people for whom this sort of thing matters have such a difficult time wrapping around the idea that my <b>personal</b> choice to “assimilate” does not exclude me from <b>politically</b> supporting and fighting for the rights and means for anyone to transition however they chose. It makes talking about these kinds of things in online spaces so frustrating.

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• RY

  @ryn2844 · 5 years ago (edited)

  &apos;A counterculture to a counterculture sometimes ends up looking exactly like the culture we&apos;re in&apos; <br><br>Okay yeah that line hit hard, but probably differently than you&apos;d expect. <br><br>I&apos;m asexual, in the &apos;I&apos;m not ever going to have sex ever&apos; way. There&apos;s a part of the ace community that could be analogous to what you would call the nonmedicalized nonbinary side. That side is very loud about &apos;you can still be ace if you like sex&apos;, and that is true, but sometimes they take that so far that they&apos;ll repathologize people like me, glorifying sex, saying that I have to try it first, or that my sex-repulsion is a mental health issue that I should fix by desensitizing myself. <br><br>And then I get framed as the conservative or the &apos;negative stereotype of asexuality&apos; for existing the way I do, while I&apos;m still just trying to get my right to not ever have partnered sex respected, which was the point of the ace community in the first place. I feel very erased and villified and pushed out of the ace community because of this. It is honestly traumatizing to have people within the ace community effectively tell me that I&apos;m an unacceptable human being for not ever wanting sex. <br><br>So yeah, I think that helps me understand the feelings you&apos;re having about the nonmedicalized nonbinary part of the trans community.

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• BE

  @beth-hx6bm · 5 years ago

  I always hated this image of non binary as exclusively being, let’s face it, white, afab and androgynous. That’s the image that’s been cultivated and every stereotype ends up doing my head in because it completely contradicts my experiences as a bigender genderfluid person and the experiences of the non binary people around me. We aren’t this monolith that companies want us to be, I think you really nailed the head with that. Companies want us to be a singular entity to market to us, the cooperate validation reminds me a lot of girlboss girl power capitalist feminism. It’s almost the exact same shit repackaged for a different audience

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• M3

  @M3rcaptan · 5 years ago

  This is…. So important. The truth is, seeing nonbinary people as “non-medicalized” hurts us. A LOT. I remember searching youtube for some nonbinary (medical) transition options, and literally the first result was a psychologist telling nonbinary people that they shouldn’t transition because it’s a “SeRiOuS dEcIsIoN” and that we should be content with switching pronouns and presentation. Which is literally the opposite of what I want. I know that with the body that’s “ideal” for me, I’d probably still be seen as a man. And I don’t care. <br><br>A lot of discussion of being nonbinary is confined to pronouns, the details of our identity and how we want to be perceived. But that’s to me the least important bit. And I feel like it’s such a useless discourse. What matters to me is the fact that I don’t even know if the transition that I’d want would be seen as “gender affirming” by insurance companies. And this, I’m sure, is not just a problem nonbinary trans people experience. <br><br>There’s this weird idea that nonbinary people’s political demand is to “just be seen” and for society to have an identity X-ray vision. That’s not what I want. What I want is full bodily autonomy without barriers of medical gatekeeping, and capitalism. What I want is a world that you need not even be trans to modify your body in gendered ways. I want a world where cis women are be able to get girld*cks too, if they want! I want complete bodily autonomy and the decoupling of our access to our needs to some identity label.

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• GA

  @gabrielladias420 · 5 years ago

  Not gonna lie, I feared this video was going to be shallow and dismissive of &quot;either side&quot; of this struggle. Not only was it not, it also went where almost no analysis of transness goes on the surface layer of &quot;trans youtube&quot; - race and nationality. Being a brazilian trans woman who makes practically no effort to pass beyond hormones - in fact dresses very androgynously on purpose - and yet is consistently and infallibly read as a woman, I feel like my own experience was taken into account in the making of this video. Subbed

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• SU

  @SulMatul · 5 years ago

  This reminds me so much of being kicked out of a “radical” queer space because I was trying to pass - which was deemed as Inherently Trans/Enby/Queerphobic to do<br><br>It’s such a bizarre cultural divide and it helps no one when we tear one another down. Thank you, this video is super important

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• EL

  @eliebelkin6273 · 5 years ago

  Two main thoughts, I think: 1. It&apos;s weird to me how much of this narrative is taken directly from conservatives (sometimes conservative trans women, like Blair White, but also often conservative cis people interested in sectioning off the trans community). The notion of the privileged, thin, passing binary trans women was never a representation of the majority of the community, it was an image created specifically to juxtapose against trans people regardless of identity and force them to conform. &quot;Transtrenders&quot; and &quot;real trans people&quot; have never been meaningful categories mapping cleanly along identity lines, and there&apos;s not really any reason to adopt a classification scheme created by people who&apos;s primary political interest is taking away our (and I mean <b>all</b> trans people) rights. <br><br>2. It seems to me like for a lot of people this &quot;non-binary trans person&quot; is supposed to represent a freedom from the kind of idealized images that identifying as a trans woman is supposed to come packaged with, but the act of position these two groups against each other requires making a lot of assumptions about the identity and life of both, not just &quot;binary trans women.&quot; I talked about this a bit under another comment but in my experience the &quot;non-binary trans person&quot; here is often assumed to be AFAB and trans masc, to identify as lesbian, and so on. I mean &quot;women and non-binary&quot; as a phrase has already kind of become a meme because of how many spaces for &quot;women and non-binary people&quot; have no interest in allowing or representing AMAB non-binary people that aren&apos;t willing to identify with womanhood, which is something I&apos;ve experienced first hand as an AMAB non-binary person who doesn&apos;t present as or identify as a woman. Just as the opposition between binary and non-binary trans people makes a lot of implicit assumptions about the identity and experiences of &quot;binary trans women,&quot; it comes packaged with a very specific image of a &quot;non-binary trans person&quot; that I can&apos;t say I really feel represented by.

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• CH

  @chelseajupiter2103 · 5 years ago

  The unfortunate thing about gender being a social construct is that it is constructed... socially... And, as a fat trans woman who identified as genderqueer for a decade before deciding I wanted to pursue medical transition and live as a woman, I am regularly and consistently gendered in a way that excludes me from womanhood. I take up too much space to be a woman. I&apos;ve always been astounded by how ignored size is when people discuss gender. This isn&apos;t a critique of your video, just a commentary on my experience.

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• TR

  @troopersjp · 4 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAXFn22q8Ac&amp;t=673">11:13</a> &quot;The term binary trans people is sometimes used as a stand in for conservatives or assimilationists.&quot; &quot;To be privileged is to be politically inferior, and to be repressed is to be virtuous.&quot; <br>I&apos;m finally watching this. Excellent work. I suppose the main thing I&apos;d want to say about the term &quot;binary trans.&quot; I am a transexual man. (Note: One &quot;s&quot; following the radical manifesto written by Sandy Stone). Many nonbinary people have called me a binary trans person. But I reject the term binary trans person as having anything to do with me. Why? Because I do not believe that gender is a binary. As I have going back to the trans conversations of the 1990s, I view gender as a spectrum not a binary. I may exist on one of the poles of that spectrum, but that doesn&apos;t make me binary. I can&apos;t be binary, because there is no binary. Other trans people deciding my identity is binary trans man, imposes upon me the idea that I support and believe in the truth of gender as a binary (which then makes me seen as the enemy of good and forward thinking trans people). But I don&apos;t, and I don&apos;t appreciate being framed that way by people I think of as being a fellow travelers. <br><br>On the topic of intersectionality regarding race, one of the usual attacks on trans men is that trans men only transition in order to get male privilege. And of course it is better to be a trans man than it is to be a woman. But...I am black. Transitioning into black manhood did not make my life safer. It isn&apos;t great to be a black man under white supremacy. <br><br>I once got to see Les Feinberg talk to a bunch of 1990s Genderqueers, who were disdainful of transexuals (what today would be framed as nonbinary vs. binary trans people). Les Feinberg, who was genderqueer, said to the group, &quot;If you are going to fight that gender is a spectrum, then you must also defend the poles.&quot; That was a very important moment for me as a person who identified as on the poles...but 100% on the same spectrum as my genderqueer comrades. To fight for all of us on the spectrum, those on the ends and the middle, and then only to have those folks in the middle turn around and push me into the same camp, not as them, but as our collective oppressors...that...is very hurtful. Anyhow...I am a transexual man, but I do not support the notion of rigid binaries, and that includes the new binary/nonbinary binary.

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