I just saw someone on Facebook say: "Other men are so bad, it made me realize I'm non-binary."
I goggled.
People have been questioning my manhood practically since infancy. When I say "people", I mean a broad cross-section from total strangers up to and including my closest family members. It goes one of two ways: either I'm a butt-puncher or I'm a girl. My parents leaned towards butt-puncher. My uncle always called me a little girl. The schoolyards were pretty evenly split.
So masculinity, sexuality and the relationship between the two...I've put a lot of thought into this over my life.
And I do feel like (many/most) men are....bad. I see misogyny and other toxic behaviour daily, almost always emanating from someone who fancies himself not just male but the epitome of Masculine Manly Maleness. Shut up, hole. I'm gonna rape you til you like it. Behold my balls. Smell this chest hair. SMELL IT!
Every single woman I know has been victimized more than once by a man who saw her as nothing more than a receptacle. You hear "any pussy will do" enough times -- once was once too many -- and you realize that yes, many men see women as walking genitalia. I'm sure there are women who think of men the same way....but I've yet to find a woman who considered herself a connoisseur of dick pics.
Oddly, being called gay and being called a girl feel pretty similar if you're a guy. You're being lessened, that goes without saying. Dismissed, nullified or at least minimized. An interesting example: our soon-to-be-departing Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. I've seen him called gay quite frequently; I've seen him called "Justine" even more frequently. These are people with FUCK TRUDEAU signs...maybe we ought to be questioning their sexuality, what do you say? Even more interesting to me is the objectification of the Prime Minister (cue Jeremy Hotz: "it even SOUNDS like a cut of beef!" He's dismissed as a pretty head of hair, or -- memorably -- "The Sisterhood of the Travelling Socks". Notice how feminine these insults are. A lack of substance is supposedly, somehow, feminine.
Put 83 men and 17 women in a room and the men will say the numbers are even. Put 66 men and 33 women in a room and the men will say the female presence is overwhelming. Men routinely overestimate both how many words women speak and how much time they spend speaking...by three hundred percent. Yes, I think it's fair to say the misogyny is deeply entrenched.
_______
I had enough people insisting I was gay that I had to experiment and determine I'm not. But I have never once questioned my gender no matter how many times I was called a little girl or told to "man up". I'm a man, yes I am (and I can't help but love you so). I've often said, truthfully, that I despise my gender and wish I was anything else...while always knowing that I am, in fact, a male human being. Just not a conventional one. It occurs to me I should ask the several tomboys among my female friends if people saying they are too masculine makes them want to up the masculinity at all.
Many years ago, back in my Price Chopper days, I was witness to something impossible.
Danone was one of the three (at the time) yogurt companies we stocked. Danone had two lines: a full fat line called Creamy and a low-fat version called Silhouette. One of them was produced in Montréal; the other in a suburb of Toronto. So there's no possible way I could be holding a Danone Creamy cup with a Silhouette lid firmly in place.
Guess what I was holding.
I think about that mislabelled yogurt cup every time I consider trans and nonbinary identity. Yoplait or Astro didn't put that Silhouette lid on the Creamy cup. People are complicated.
A quick lesson for those who may feel otherwise:
You can be born appearing female, but have a 5-alpha reductase deficiency and grow a penis at age twelve.
You can be born male with X and Y chromosomes, but your body is insensitive to androgens, and you appear female.
You can be born legally male with an X and Y chromosome, and have a penis and testes AND a uterus and fallopian tubes.
You can be born legally male with an X and Y chromosome but missing the SRY gene, and you'll appear female.
You can be born legally female with two X chromosomes, but one of the Xs has an SRY gene which gives you a male body.
You can be born with both XX AND XY chromosomes
I think someone's gender is not dependant on the actions and behaviours of any other person or group of people. I believe people know what they are on the inside, whether or not their outsides match. But having always known myself, I may be wrong about that. I can see how that might be.
One of my friends uses she/they pronouns. Another, a trans man, uses he/they.The hullabaloo over pronouns is yet another case of people taking things too damn literally. "They is plural!" shout the bigots who insist they're simply grammar purists. Ask your friendly neighbourhood English major: singular "they" predates singular "you".
"Okay, sure, but that's for ambiguous cases where the gender is unknown."
How is that any different from looking at somebody and being unsure what gender they are? Can ambiguity be claimed? (You bet your flippin' Bic, it can.)
"It's just one person!"
"I contain multitudes..."
I can see how in a different world I might have decided to use different pronouns. I, too, contain multitudes, and some of the mes don't get voiced often. But I've never wanted to alter my body in any way, much less to appear more feminine. And hell, in some ways I am your quintessential guy. Just ask me to find the big thing staring me in the face in the fridge.
The other thing that bothers me about "other men are so bad, it made me realize I'm non-binary"...it feels like a way to dodge accountability for any "so bad" behaviours. If I'm non-binary, I can't possibly be behaving like a stereotypical man, can I? It feels like a cop-out.
Why can't we just let people be who they are? Let's widen the definitions of male and female so that rigid gender roles and expectations go away. Let's leave room for the in-betweens. And let's be true to ourselves. How hard is that really?
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