A Two-Fold Cause: Poor Treatment From Specific NBs

This Essay Is Part 2 of 3 of A Series Of Essays I Am Going To Do On Some Issues Within Queer and Feminist Politics And How Each Represents My Larger Point That People Need To Work At Deconstructing Their Underlying Assumptions Given To Them By Patriarchy & Other Social-Cultural Institutions. 

(Part One Found Here)

A Two-Fold Cause: Poor Treatment From Specific NBs

I’m going to start this essay in a way that is very usually not a particularly good way to frontload any discussion like this; I love non-binary people and I earnestly do not believe I am enbyphobic. The reason I am starting this essay like this at all is because I’m going to be talking about both some poor experiences I’ve had with individual NBs as of recent, as well as voicing some points adjacent to those which are used & are currently being used by very actually enbyphobic people. I do not want anyone to be confused, these lousy experiences with certain NBs is not telling or emblematic of non-binary people as a whole. Nor do I want anything I say here to fuel someone’s hatred for a group of people that I collectively tend to have positive experience with! 

I am a little hesitant to discuss the topics I am going to in this blog from this angle at all, since for those unaware, there is a lot of intra-queer infighting online lately (though it’s mainly contained there, luckily). Lots of people are very quick to use their preconceived notions and presumptions about certain categories of people, as well as their own limited personal experiences, as their sole guideline for all of their takes on any of the important queer-feminist issues as of late. However, this is exactly what I want to discuss in this essay, as well as the other essays in this series. Whilst many enbyphobic Trans-Medicalists are very quick to dismiss the non-binary identity by appealing to sex-essentialism, it is my belief that the NBs I will be discussing here are making the same base mistake, just taken in the opposite direction. 

Morning Wood & The Girls Who Mourn Their Wood:

Okay, sorry for that title, but the joke seemed too good not to make… Anyways, I had a very odd experience recently wherein a non-binary person I met told me that “all men get horny every day”. I was deeply confused by what they meant by this, so I inquired. Turns out, they were talking about morning wood (erections occurring during sleep / waking up). Besides the fact that morning wood doesn’t happen everyday like this person thinks, nor does morning wood equate with horniness (weird rape-ish ideas about consent there) – two beliefs which make me further believe we should be teaching much better sex-education in schools – there are a few other problems here… Namely, morning wood isn’t exclusive to men. 

As a quick trans biology lesson, trans feminine people on estrogen and testosterone-blockers do typically get less morning wood than do cis men, many actually stop getting morning wood altogether as a result of their hormone therapy. However, when this person said “all men”, it’s pretty evident they meant anyone with a penis, The equivalence of manhood and having a penis not broken in their mind. Cis people in particular tend to do this kind of thing often, even self-identified trans-allys. However, coming from an NB talking to a very-out trans woman? I was a bit stunned. 

When I pointed out to this individual that I have a dick, occasionally still get morning wood, and am very much not a man, they hit me with one of the things you’re absolutely never supposed to say to a trans woman; “Oh yeah, I forgot you had a penis” 😐. Trans people of any variety tend to hate this, since we can’t ever “forget” our genitals the way some of those around us supposedly can, but trans women in particular hate being constantly reminded of our penis and thus supposed “maleness” (hence the title, girls who mourn their wood!). In some ways, this reminds me of the way in which white people sometimes have a “colorblindness” to people of color, an inability to recognize the social treatment people with colored skin are likely to experience because of institutional racism. Here, it’s just an inability to recognize, or perhaps rather a propensity to “forget”, about the ways in which trans people are socially treated and defined because of their genitals. 

The basic implication of their “forgetting” is this; “I see you as a woman, and women don’t have penises, so I just imagined you wouldn’t have one”. By “forgetting” our genitals, they only reinforce the dominant conception that the natural state of womanhood is to “not have a penis”. 

Male Socialization & Those Who Allegedly Have It

Another terrible experience I had with an NB individual was one I’d known only to a limited degree online. We would have occasional calls and conversations and one day we got onto the topic of relationships and dating. They revealed to me, however, that they would only date “AFAB” people. I cringed at this, and asked why? They gave me the too-common explanation that transfems are just “too male socialized” for them. That as a result, we act differently than AFABs. 

Arguments about Transfem’s “Male Socialization”, much like those about our apparent “Male Privilege”, are only a way to further reinforce both sex-essentialism and what transfeminist scholar Julia Serano terms “oppositional sexism” (the idea that only men are masculine and only women are feminine) [1]. The irony in this instance is that it does not only misgender the transfems it's used against, but also the NB who said this to me in the first place. To reiterate the “inherent maleness” of myself and my sisters, they have to reiterate their own biology though using “AFAB” in a way that isn’t too distinct to the way that a misogynist might use “female”. 

And to be clear, male socialization is obviously not an absolute phenomena, nor one that largely applies to transfeminine people. As Julia Serano writes on the topic, “If socialization really was an all-powerful force that irreparably shapes who we are, then there would be no trans or queer people, as we would have internalized all the cis-hetero-normative conditioning that we were barraged with as children. If socialization worked like that, there would be no butch lesbians or trans male/masculine people, as they would have all turned out to be perfectly feminine women doting on their cis-het husbands in accordance with patriarchy.” She continues, "If socialization really worked the way that some people imply when they wield ‘male socialization’ against trans female/feminine people, then gender conversion therapy would work every single time. But it doesn’t. In fact, medical professionals largely agree that it is ineffective and unethical. Because socialization doesn’t work like that!” [2]

Anyone who read my previous essay may notice that a very similar thing is happening here to what I described in the second section of that post. In other words, the tendency to label trans people (or certain subsections of trans people) as more  contaminated by “maleness” or masculinity (and thus with aggressiveness). This point about contamination is actually rather important, as Julia Serano writes in another blog; “The case that I’m making here is that, in intra-LGBTQ+-community debates, when people start wielding terms like ‘privilege’ (or ‘socialization’) in non-nuanced ways — and especially when they frame these as perpetual statuses that are impervious to change — the concern they are raising has little (if anything) to do with actual oppression or marginalization. Rather, they are most likely expressing concern about stigma and its imagined ‘contagion.’ In the case of bisexual women, it’s an imagined sexual stigma that signifies their ‘corruption’ at the hands of men. In the case of trans people, it’s that we supposedly ‘are’ men, or are ‘becoming’ men.” [3]

A Two-Fold Cause & Those Who Misgender Themselves 

I have a few more strange experiences with NBs I could describe here, but I won’t, because ultimately I’m much less interested in each bad experience than I am in the current that runs between all of them. My theory is that the phenomenon of a subsection of NB-identified people implicitly misgendering themselves and others comes from two rough misunderstandings. 

Firstly, these NBs in question usually haven’t fully deconstructed the sex-gender divide that people so often reaffirm. There is sometimes a tendency in queer spaces to imagine that gender is fake and socially constructed, but that biological sex is much realer and actual. This ignores the ways in which sex is itself culturally constructed in some part, even “gendered”. There is a physical reality to sex in the form of biology, just as there is a physical reality to gender in the form of clothes, body-language, and – well, sex itself actually. However, each is socially constructed in so far as the way we categorize and interpret each is grounded in socio-cultural developments. This misunderstanding becomes particularly problematic whenever it becomes grounded in bio-essentialism and sexism. 

I said earlier that I think the people I’ve discussed in this blog are making the same mistake that Trans-Medicalists make, this first misunderstanding is exactly the crux of it. TransMeds take this to mean that “to really be trans” you have to transition hormonally / sexually, whereas the NBs being discussed essentially affirm the idea that people are entirely different kinds of creatures because of genitals or “socialization”. (For context, Trans-Medicalists are people who believe that transness is an inherently medical issue fixed through medical transition, they also often exclude non-binary people.)

Secondly, I think there is a tendency among some of these people to see “gender-as-aesthetic”. On the surface level, this could look like Judith Butler’s concept of “gender-performativity”, or “gender-as-performance”. However, an aesthetic and a performance are quite different, although related, concepts. A performance is an action, whereas an aesthetic is only an outward appearance. The result of this is that gender is for these misapprehending NBs a very superficial thing. It does not require a difference in action, only a difference in stylization and appearance. 

To be transparent, unlike most of the other theorists I talk about here, I have never actually read Judith Butler. I can’t even say whether I fully agree with them beyond what my tertiary and secondary sources can tell me about Butler’s ideas. That being said, I find a lot of the criticisms that Butler makes about the gender-sex divide and the nature of gender very compelling, especially in context to the issues I’m tracing in this essay. I will source this neat article that gives a pretty digestible review of Judith Butler’s thoughts on both [4].

Ultimately, in its worst manifestations, both of the misunderstandings discussed here can lead to people who imagine that being non-binary is merely an aesthetic choice that they’re making, but who still fundamentally identify with their sex assigned at birth, ultimately reaffirming cisheteronormative conceptions about both ourselves and others in the process…As with everything discussed in the posts in this essay series, the remedy for these serious misunderstandings is a mixture of education and a social push for people to earnestly deconstruct their preconceived notions and cultural presumptions. A process which betters and benefits not only others, but ourselves too. 

I’d like to reiterate here at the end that this is very seriously “#NotAllEnbys”. In fact, it’s only a very small fraction compared to the many dozens I’ve known. My girlboyfriend, as well as many of my closest friends, are each non-binary themselves. I’ve had no experiences like these described here with them. They’ve also each reacted to the stories recorded here in horror and solidarity!!! These are the people I love.

Thank you for reading once again!