Non-Binary, how is that not based on stereotypes.
Tags: Feminity, Gay, Nonbinary Identity, Binary, Masculinity

Really nothing is masculine or feminine except for the sexual biological aspects of the body.

Anthropologists can show that some practice is done by men in one culture and done by women in another culture. There is no real objective basis of classifying activities or cultural practices as masculine or feminine.

What different cultures define as masculine and feminine is real in terms of the ideas of that culture, but it doesn’t have an objective reality.

One example is earrings. In earlier historical times men routinely wore them and they weren’t masculine or feminine in ancient classical times. (Roman). When I was growing up earrings were for women. Then men wore them as some avant garde challenge to gender roles. Then later prominent sports figures started wearing earrings and then it was something big tough men do. I am not sure that the wearing of earrings is not considered masculine or feminine.

So if you don’t think you are John Wayne, it doesn’t mean you are non-binary, it just means you don’t buy into what some particular group thinks masculinity is.

If you are biologically a man but like painting your nails that means you are just a biological man with different ideas of what to do, what looks good, how you would like to be. In fact if you free yourself from presumptions that it is feminine, you probably can come up with a lot of cool ideas of doing nails in ways that might not conform to ideas of what is feminine.

I like to wear what I consider fun shirts and what doesn’t conform to the boring ideas of good taste in our society. They are VERY lively shirts. They have brilliant colors, gold accents, interesting fabrics, florals. When I wear them people sometimes run into objects or are stunned and stop. Am I acting out gender or do I think I am connecting to my feminine side? NO. I am aware of grammers of style, or cultural types of style from the ancient worlds both in the West and in Asia and really don’t like middle class dullness.

I am pre-modern in ideas of style for dress, some of the time. The ideas of feminine and masculine in clothing are just the invention of the last couple of centuries since the French Revolution.

Look at the dress of the aristocrats prior to the French Revolution, they could be the envy of drag queens. The wigs, the high heels, the lace, the whole get up. They weren’t non-binary or transgender. They were often military leaders and considered very masculine in the values of their times. It is that what was considered masculine or feminine then is different what was is thought of as masculine or feminine later.

Now you do have gays who are labeled as feminine or lable themselves as feminine. However, gays being outside a lot of heteronormity are free to disregard the socially constructed ideas of femininity and masculinity and just do what they want. Others might label it as feminine or masculine but that is drawing upon the ideas of what is feminine or masculine in that culture.

On the other hand sometimes gays buy into stereotypes that they are somehow women in men’s bodies or think that gays are supposed to be feminine or something. So these are acting out what is considered feminine in that particular society. In this case they have internalized stereotypes of being gay into how they view themselves and act. This isn’t progressive or advanced, this is being defined by social stereotypes.

These ideas shouldn’t be construed to be a criticism of transvestism where there is a desire to dress in what is considered to be women’s clothing in a specific society. Drag queens are a type of performance which is a burlesque of sex roles in society and show that a lot of what makes up feminity in a society is just a lot of practices to add to sexual dimorphism. This is essay is not a criticism of drag queens either.

These ideas of being non-binary mean having to sit and classify things into masculine, feminine, or neither. We will have to ponder each thing as to if it has a gender. What would algebra be, feminine because it has curves, and geometry masculine, and so on. Maybe we don’t have to sort everything or much of anything into these classifications. Just let them be.

A lot of the ideas of being non-binary are really the recyling of old sex stereotypes into new forms. The danger is that it attempts to fractionate the gay community into all these orientation subtypes which really are just individual variations. If you read a lot of the literature there is ever expanding taxonomony of desire.

Basically, people should consider that they are gay, and individuals are different, and you aren’t this laundry list of sub-types.

Also, it needs to be asked who does this ever expanding taxonomy benefit. Does it serve community needs, or does it serve the needs of those who want to make the gay community an academic object as oppose to socially self-defined object to convert the gay community into case studies as opposed to being a group. That is to reduce the gay community to being specimens on a slide.